Guild Wars 2

Heibi.4251:

The problem with the people who claim this is unneeded, a stupid idea, or simply say learn to play, is that such a mode would not affect you in the least. You would still have your precious hard mode. Remember, you don’t have to play the easy mode – just like you tell everyone who doesn’t like the current raid that they have other modes of play. So get off your elitist high tower. Players who go through the easier mode will learn to do the raid and may actually come out of it ready to do the harder mode.

I, for one, still haven’t been in a successful group. But I’ll probably keep trying.

Wrong, it would waste dev time and I would feal cheated if this “easy” mode gave any unique rewards.

randomguy.1283:

runeblade.7514:

Either Raids gets a difficulty setting or Raids doesn’t get lore anymore.

I do not want to risk being spoiled because I can’t find a group. I want to experience the lore for myself, not have reddit tell me what happened.

Then do raids the way they are now.

Okay, find me a raid group. I am sick and tired of looking for them.

No, don’t tell me how to find them. You find them for me and I’ll change my mind. I already tried every single possible suggestion to find them. You cannot think up a way for me to have myself find a raid group that I already tried. I did find some, but the group falls apart really quickly just at VG, I don’t consider them a group. Find me a group that can finish Spirit Vale and I’ll change my mind.

randomguy.1283:

Heibi.4251:

The problem with the people who claim this is unneeded, a stupid idea, or simply say learn to play, is that such a mode would not affect you in the least. You would still have your precious hard mode. Remember, you don’t have to play the easy mode – just like you tell everyone who doesn’t like the current raid that they have other modes of play. So get off your elitist high tower. Players who go through the easier mode will learn to do the raid and may actually come out of it ready to do the harder mode.

I, for one, still haven’t been in a successful group. But I’ll probably keep trying.

Wrong, it would waste dev time and I would feal cheated if this “easy” mode gave any unique rewards.

I rather that you feel cheated, so that I can play raids. I paid for the game, I deserve the experience.

runeblade.7514:

randomguy.1283:

runeblade.7514:

Either Raids gets a difficulty setting or Raids doesn’t get lore anymore.

I do not want to risk being spoiled because I can’t find a group. I want to experience the lore for myself, not have reddit tell me what happened.

Then do raids the way they are now.

Okay, find me a raid group. I am sick and tired of looking for them.

No, don’t tell me how to find them. You find them for me and I’ll change my mind. I already tried every single possible suggestion to find them. You cannot think up a way for me to have myself find a raid group that I already tried. I did find some, but the group falls apart really quickly just at VG, I don’t consider them a group. Find me a group that can finish Spirit Vale and I’ll change my mind.

Fine, I’m forming one now get online, I will carry you through this raid if I have to.

runeblade.7514:

randomguy.1283:

Heibi.4251:

The problem with the people who claim this is unneeded, a stupid idea, or simply say learn to play, is that such a mode would not affect you in the least. You would still have your precious hard mode. Remember, you don’t have to play the easy mode – just like you tell everyone who doesn’t like the current raid that they have other modes of play. So get off your elitist high tower. Players who go through the easier mode will learn to do the raid and may actually come out of it ready to do the harder mode.

I, for one, still haven’t been in a successful group. But I’ll probably keep trying.

Wrong, it would waste dev time and I would feal cheated if this “easy” mode gave any unique rewards.

I rather that you feel cheated, so that I can play raids. I paid for the game, I deserve the experience.

As I mentioned earlier, I an FINE with easy mode IF they just don’t get the rewards, you can still play your easy mode raids that way.

There are attacks that deal “your hit points” in damage… it’s not 100 damage, it’s not 1000 damage, it’s X where X is your current hit points. You cannot reduce their damage or they stop being 1-hit KO attacks, for obvious reasons. You are saying everything as if it’s the easiest thing to tweak some numbers but what you still don’t understand is the mechanic aspect of the fight. Remove the mechanic and you remove the fight itself, it’s that simple.

If there is an attack that deals “all the hit points,” then perhaps it could be changed to “(all the hitpoints – 10% of the hitpoints).” Or it could just be replaced with a flat damage amount equivalent to an expected average hit points, which would be enough to down most characters but not all. In some cases the current effect is “automatically Defeats the character,” that could be changed to “automatically Downs the character.” These are all effects that exist already on other attacks, so copy-pasting them from one to the other should not be a huge lift. They would not have to write a completely new effect here.

And for Vale Guardian you get all the training you need fighting the trash mobs before the boss.

If that were true then nobody who reaches the boss would fail to pass him on the first try. That may have been your experience with it, I don’t know, but it has not been mine.

And besides, if her attack wasn’t 1-shotting people it wouldn’t be so easy to avoid. It could be a rapid fire flame thrower like Sure Shot Samus for example, or a flame version of Frost that applies burning instead of chill, or cripple or whatever.

Then it would be an entirely different thing, and learning to avoid it would teach you nothing about avoiding the Hard Mode attack. No, that’s not what I want to see. I want the exact same attacks with the exact same timing, just with a reduced penalty for failure. The goal is not to make it equally challenging, just in a different way, the goal IS to actually reduce the challenge. If it ends up being equally hard, just using more generic attacks, then what’s the point?

I will ask about this, and if we’re prepared to say something official, one of us will do so. But it’s counterproductive to have a discussion head down the path of misinformation and what seems to be a growing error in assumption. With all due respect, unless you’re a developer for GW2 you are not qualified to make a statement about the time needed, difficulty involved, or feasibility of such a feature.

Well thank you for taking the time to respond, and if more ANet devs were doing so we wouldn’t have to speculate nearly as much. I still do not believe it would take a significant amount of time to produce, at least not along the lines I’ve been discussing, but we’ll see if and when an answer comes.

Difficulty does not have to come from multiple modes or instances. GW2 has a really good system already in place – the gold/silver/bronze system we see in open world. In the case of the Vale Guardian, it might be as simple as

8 minute kill = gold (full rewards)

10 minute kill – silver (access to minis and standard ascended chests via) vendor

more than 10 minute kill = bronze (no access to vendor – just a champ box like any other world kill).

I like the concept well enough, but it would still need work. The silver and bronze wins would still need to include some small amount of the full rewards, not just completely different rewards, such that getting 3-4 Bronze (with weekly lockout) would be equal to getting one Gold, and also it needs to take into account that the primary difficulty in most of these fights is not just “beating it in time”, but rather “surviving to the finish line at all.” Just having a more open timer on the current encounters would help, but would not be sufficient to making it accessible to most of the players currently alienated by the raids.

Raids are perfectly accessible to everyone right now.

randomguy.1283:

Raids are perfectly accessible to everyone right now.

Except for the people that can’t access it because no good groups would add them.

runeblade.7514:

randomguy.1283:

Raids are perfectly accessible to everyone right now.

Except for the people that can’t access it because no good groups would add them.

I’ll add you.

I’ve said this before, I’ve tried to create teaching groups in lfg and mostly get people who are just bored and are experienced with raids, It seems to me the number of people trying to find a group in your situation, is actually rather small I think.

runeblade.7514:

Okay, find me a raid group. I am sick and tired of looking for them.

They will be making it easier to find Raid groups by making the LFG tool a better tool for everyone. Right now getting a Raid group is hard, of course it is, before the Raids were released the devs said “OUR RAIDS ARE NOT FOR PUGS”. Remember that? That’s why someone at Anet thought “let’s not put Raids on the LFG, because players will go with their friends and guildies”, obviously they were mistaken.

Take your guild team in there, Raids are THE best content for community building, the BEST content for players to bond and learn how to play together as a team. Of course, only if done with friends and guildies, if done with pugs they are maybe the exact opposite.

It would be like a puzzlebook with two identical puzzles where one has half the solution filled in. Or at least that’s the problem in concept. You can not say that you can just ignore the half filled in puzzle. Because anyone would be tempted by using that one to solve the harder one. It’s simple psychology why that is different. Just saying that it’s different than just one mode. This doesn’t auto rule out any easy mode, but it would definitely be something they would need to discuss.

But to borrow your analogy, it would be like those two puzzle books, but you’ve already finished the puzzle before you even see the half-finished one. The half-finished one isn’t spoiling anything for you, you’re done, you know it’s a duck, the half-finished book is there for people that can’t solve the puzzle themselves. And if they then use the easier one to solve the harder, then that’s great, because that means they can be around to make it easier to find groups to solve it later, when people who’ve already solved it enough times have gotten bored and moved on.

No development is negligible.

Ok, so if a developer got on and said "You know, I could probably knock this together in about five minutes (which even I think would be unlikely, but just for the purpose of example), you would not consider that time spent “negligible?” I think any idea should be considered, and that they should weigh the costs and the benefits. Every idea has some amount of benefit, and every idea has a certain cost.

I continue to believe that this idea, or something similar, would benefit tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of their players to varying degrees. I also believe that it could be accomplished, along these lines, with relatively minimal effort, a few hours of work per raid. Even if it took a few weeks out of a few developers (likely pulled from outside the core raid team), I feel that would be well worth it.

You just grasped that out of nowhere. I could say “But it takes a month!”, but I won’t because I at least know that I don’t know that.

I’m basing it on reasonable expectations based on the parameters in question. I know what I am asking for here, which is for them to take tools that are already in use in other parts of the game (such as Fractals) and apply them to raids. Nothing I’ve suggested would involve writing new code from scratch, it would all be adapting existing code for new purposes, and ideally they designed the system in a way that is modular enough to not make this difficult. The tuning would take some time, but most of the time involved would be from those outside the actual development staff, in the testers, and it is much easier to tune something down than to tune it up, because the tolerances don’t need to be nearly so tight. If they over or undertune it then there is relatively little consequence to that, and they can always go back in and tweak it again.

Which may or may not happen. It would change how raids will feel on a very fundamental level, alters the perception of raids and adds alot of unfocussed content. That’s basically all I’m saying. It might be better to request good PvE content in general. It was a mere suggestion.

And my point is that it’s not “better” or “worse,” it’s something else entirely. Something else entirely is fine, but it’s not a substitution for what I’m asking for here. Getting both would be nice, but just getting the substitution would not resolve the problem I’m expressing with raids.

In a nutshell no rewards. This should be acceptable.

Nope.

All of that said, you can get decent shards (slowly) if you bang your head against bosses each week. If you change perspective, tell yourself “I want to get shards and success doesn’t matter,” and join learner pug raids, you will accumulate them slowly. Been raiding since Spirit Vale released and have 500 now after all of our head banging.

I’m sorry, I just do not enjoy the “head banging” experience AT ALL. It is not an activity that I want to spend any time on in the game if it can be helped, surely not more than a few hours in total. My goal here is not merely to train up for hard mode, although others can certainly use it for that purpose, it is rather to bypass hard mode entirely, because hard mode, in its current form, will NEVER be something I will enjoy doing. The high stakes just push it outside the zone where I could ever possibly be comfortable with it, no matter how much I train, no matter how perfect my team is.

So any suggestion that involves “you get nothing, but maybe it would help you do the existing raids” is just a non-starter with me, if they added that mode, I might play through it once, but I would never touch it again, whereas a genuine easy mode raid, whcih offered repeatable rewards that would allow me to progress towards things like Legendary Armor at a much slower pace than Hard Mode raiding, that is something that I would not only try, but would ENJOY doing on a regular basis.

For now, players like you and players who are trying to jump into raids with no experience suffer, but Anet currently has no plans for casual raids, nor 5 man raids (which would be closer to my suggestion for “easy” raids).

And that’s why I’m asking for something different. For the record, a five-man version of the existing raids does not interest me in the least. Acquiring five extra people is not the problem I’m having with it. The actual content would need to change to have less points of insta-failure for it to make any difference to me. If they want to add five-man, that wouldn’t bother me, but wouldn’t help me either, and it seems like a LOT more work than what I’m suggesting, since they would have to change several of the core mechanics to require less “fodder.”

2.) don’t raid and wait to see if they implement easy mode raids someday

Yes, duh.

but considering they have already discussed easy modes and have yet to put anyone on the task, I would guess that it is more difficult (or they just aren’t willing to sacrifice the necessary developer because they want him/her elsewhere).

Or they just took the ideological stance that they did not want to have an easier mode, at least at first. They make numerous decisions within ANet based on their personal tastes, the whole “eSports” thing, for example. I’m hoping that they change their minds for the good of the game.

Maybe I missed but, what kinds of rewards did you intend drop in this easymode raid? Certainly nothing equivalent to the regular version, which in that case would make me question the whole point of it.

From the bullet point in the first first post of this thread:
3. Rewards. The easy mode raids would have a weekly lockout just like the hard mode, ideally not a shared one so that people could do both. Anything that drops from the hard mode could drop from easy mode, but at a much lower rate, perhaps 10-20% of the existing rates, meaning that on average an easy mode raider would need to complete the raid around 5-10 more times to get any drop reward than on hard mode (and keeping in mind that hard mode raiders could be doing both, giving them a bonus roll for the rare loot each week).

Current Spirit Vale bosses award 10, 14, and 18 shards respectively, 8 shards for the combat content in the maps, and up to 6 shards per failed attempt. My recommendation is that the easy mode versions would offer at least 3, 5, and 7 shards respectively, none for the non-boss portions, and none for a failed attempt. Ideally it would be a few more than that, up to 50% of the existing reward, but this would be enough. And again, players willing and able to do the hard mode could get these on top of their existing rewards.

I rather that you feel cheated, so that I can play raids. I paid for the game, I deserve the experience.

Agreed. If randomguy’s happiness can only come at the expense of other players NOT having the things they want, then I don’t particularly care about his happiness.

As I mentioned earlier, I an FINE with easy mode IF they just don’t get the rewards, you can still play your easy mode raids that way.

But why would anyone want to do that more than once?

“But why would anyone want to do that more than once”

Then WHY DO YOU WANT THE EASY MODE if it isn’t for rewards. IF you want easy mode just for rewards, then you DON’T WANT EASY MODE. YOU are the selfish entitled person I am talking about when I mention them. I hate being called the toxic person when it is clearly YOU who is making this community toxic. Please, the purpose of an easy mode raid should be to help people have FUN, not GIVE THEM REWARDS. /rant

disclaimer: I’ve tried to discuss these things politely but I really can’t take the entitlement from some people anymore, sorry.

Gaile Gray.6029:

Ohoni.6057:

Here’s one reason: The developers have limited time and resources.

Yeah, we’ve covered this one. The time and resources it would take to implement something like this would be negligible, not remotely enough to counterbalance the benefits it would bring.

At this point, I need to interject. I am familiar with the process of changing to a multi-modality system of game presentation, having written about it long ago, when I was a journalist writing about another company and another game. For that game, too, players said “No big deal.” And they were absolutely wrong. They said, “Just tweak a few stats, lower a few spawns, and voila, you’ve got it!” No, that’s not how it worked. And that’s not how I think it would work for Guild Wars 2.

I will ask about this, and if we’re prepared to say something official, one of us will do so. But it’s counterproductive to have a discussion head down the path of misinformation and what seems to be a growing error in assumption. With all due respect, unless you’re a developer for GW2 you are not qualified to make a statement about the time needed, difficulty involved, or feasibility of such a feature.

You’re welcome to discuss the situation, and we appreciate that you want to do that. We welcome the conversation! But please participate by sharing what you’d like to see, and why, and don’t be misled by individual, external assumptions about the feasibility or practicality of such a request.

Thanks for the response Gaile!

I’ve made clear what it is that I want. I do want the rewards, I’ve made that clear. I don’t just want the rewards, but they are obviously a necessary component. If they did make an easy mode with no rewards, I would play it through once, just to experience it, but I would see no reason to go back. I’m not the type to re-watch movies or TV shows deliberately.

If it offered the rewards though, again, a much smaller amount than the current raid offers, then that would be reason enough for me to get back in there and do it again on a weekly basis, as I do guild missions. I would have fun doing it too.

The purpose of an easy mode is to help people have fun, and rewards are part of that fun, feeling that the time and effort you put in will be fairly rewarded.

Ohoni.6057:

If there is an attack that deals “all the hit points,” then perhaps it could be changed to “(all the hitpoints – 10% of the hitpoints).”

Then, what I’ve always been saying, it’s NOT the same fight anymore. Part of the Boss is their main attacks that cause wipes, remove that and it’s not the same boss anymore. It’s that simple. If the boss attacks were actually doing damage you could say “let’s reduce the damage” and be done with it, but the fights are about mechanics and not as much about numbers. And mechanical fights > numbers fights anyway.

If that were true then nobody who reaches the boss would fail to pass him on the first try. That may have been your experience with it, I don’t know, but it has not been mine.

You get training for most of the mechanics you’ll have to deal with, but you still have to deal with all of them at once (plus some more) while fighting the actual boss. The fight with the Vale Guardian itself is a training until the last phase as the difficulty goes up with each phase as more mechanics are added after each phase

If it ends up being equally hard, just using more generic attacks, then what’s the point?

Of course it won’t be equally hard since those “new” attacks won’t 1-shot players if they do a mistake, which is the point of “easy mode”.

And above all, if they actually put some effort in “easy mode” and not just tweak some numbers, they could actually make it for example 5-man content instead of 10-man content (not Fractals since you didn’t like that) which would go a huge way in making it more accessible. You are so focused on having the exact same tells for the attacks, but different mechanics, think more outside of the box. You just want it NOW, in order to get the raid rewards NOW but an “easy mode” for the Raids can be something much much better.

And who knows maybe we will also get a “hard mode” too for those who find the current Raid too easy (if there is anyone anyway)

They will be making it easier to find Raid groups by making the LFG tool a better tool for everyone.

That will be nice, but I don’t see it making a huge difference. I mean, you can already find raid groups on LFG, they’re just in the general sections instead of in their own sections. It’s a little more hassle to find them, so UI change will be nice, but I do not think any UI changes will actually increase the number or quality of PUGs available. It is no solution to the problems being discussed here.

Take your guild team in there, Raids are THE best content for community building, the BEST content for players to bond and learn how to play together as a team. Of course, only if done with friends and guildies, if done with pugs they are maybe the exact opposite.

My guild tried to run with about a team and a half for the first few weeks, nightly at first, then weekly, but we haven’t really bothered for the past few weeks because we never got anywhere. I can’t blame that entirely on raids, there were some other factors at play, but raiding did almost cause the entire guild to implode one night when the guild leader got upset with some people insisting that we had to use TS, and started kicking people out. It settled down though.

• Just change all regular mobs to be actual regular mobs.
• Change all bosses to be veterans.
• No achievement progression.
• No rewards.

There’s the version for easy mode.

Should Anet do something like this? No.
Should players learn how to do raids as they are now? Yes.

TexZero.7910:

Again though, all the “walls” exist not just for new players but for everyone.

People who are willing to raid, will overcome those walls.

The wall is too high for me. Way too high for the amount of effort I put into looking for a competent group.

Ohoni.6057:

I also believe that it could be accomplished, along these lines, with relatively minimal effort, a few hours of work per raid.

I’m not really sure why you keep saying this when you had someone from ArenaNet respond with this statement: (Link)

Gaile Gray.6029:

With all due respect, unless you’re a developer for GW2 you are not qualified to make a statement about the time needed, difficulty involved, or feasibility of such a feature.

You’re welcome to discuss the situation, and we appreciate that you want to do that. We welcome the conversation! But please participate by sharing what you’d like to see, and why, and don’t be misled by individual, external assumptions about the feasibility or practicality of such a request.

Ohoni.6057:

They will be making it easier to find Raid groups by making the LFG tool a better tool for everyone.

That will be nice, but I don’t see it making a huge difference. I mean, you can already find raid groups on LFG, they’re just in the general sections instead of in their own sections. It’s a little more hassle to find them, so UI change will be nice, but I do not think any UI changes will actually increase the number or quality of PUGs available. It is no solution to the problems being discussed here.

But some of the problem may be that the casuals that are more forgiving don’t want to sift through the endless other things in the LFG to find the raid group to PUG with. Especially with the speed at which that can move during prime time.

It’s not a complete solution, but it is definitely part of the solution.

It makes finding a group easier. And if they do add in easy mode, it would make it a lot easier if there was a Hard Raid tab and a Easy Raid tab under the Raid category. Wouldn’kitten So you don’t have Easy radiers trying to get into Hard raids thinking they’re easy raids or vice versa. That’s just asking for the whole speed clear vs smell the roses thing to come to raids. Not that it won’t, but having them split will help lower the ones that aren’t paying attention to what group they’re joining.

But some of the problem may be that the casuals that are more forgiving don’t want to sift through the endless other things in the LFG to find the raid group to PUG with.

I think any player too casual to sift through the LFG to find a group are probably too casual to be of much use in the current raids either. It’s probably a helpful sifting mechanism and maybe when they do improve the LFG raiders will be like “change it back, some real idiots are finding us now!”

Seriously though, I think improving the LFG tool is a good thing in its own way, I just don’t think it’ll make anything better when it comes to those who want an easier difficulty setting. It’ll really be more useful for open world maps, finding people doing HP trains or specific metas.

I also don’t think they would have to split easy/hard in the LFG tool, although that might be nice. I mean they would be completely different modes, so it wouldn’t be like dungeon “speed clear” it would be more like people advertising “CoF P1-2,” if someone joins up and says “so are we doing path 3?,” well that’s on them.

I’m not really sure why you keep saying this when you had someone from ArenaNet respond with this statement: (Link)

Gaile Gray.6029:

With all due respect, unless you’re a developer for GW2 you are not qualified to make a statement about the time needed, difficulty involved, or feasibility of such a feature.

Gaile said she doesn’t know either, but she’s looking to find out. I can’t wait for an official response, but in the meantime I still think my assumptions are safe ones, given what we know from the outside.

I think there was certainly ways of making easy mode that would be very time-consuming and complicated, like ’doc’s suggestion that they offer completely remade mechanics to offer a completely different gameplay experience, but my proposal on the matter was deliberately designed to involve only the most minimal changes possible to achieve the desired result.

@Rednik

First, I will apologize. It’s been a long time since someone actually backed up their argument with some factual data, something tangible. Most of the time there is simply anecdotal points being made without much substance.

That being said, let me go on to your other points first before addressing the chart.

Class mechanics =/= a superior raid. It’s an unusual point to make, and I have to question why you would correlate class rotation which absolutely existed in Vanilla and BC with WotLK. Yes rotations changed, some got bigger (Warlock WotLK was bigger), but some shortened (Warrior), abilities were made obsolete as well (I miss enslaving the demon in the 1st Gruul’s Lair encounter). I do not see how those are relevant to the quality of the raids.

I thought I didn’t need to touch on Ulduar (One of my top 3 favorites) and IC, those were acceptable raids, a quality I expected across all of WotLK. But when half the raids in WotLK fall very short, how do you expect players to trust you on the next expansion?

With concern to your point about LFG being popular, it was a convenient tool, no questions needed. And it did a great job forming groups…and that’s it. It streamlined the dungeon process, and gave players an excuse to simply be complete ****** to one another. The ‘Waiting and Chatting’ aspect you seem to dislike, please feel free to say otherwise, actually allowed you to get to know your party members, it made each dungeon run memorable. LFG devoided you of player interaction, which is why I call it a curse. If WotLK had a LFG tool like GW2 where you didn’t automatically get ported to the instance without slowly forming the party first, talking, chatting, etc…WotLK would have been a bit more bearable.

NOW as for your chart. It has a lot of data, and your original argument was that WotLK was the most successful expansion. Let’s take a look at that then, we can clearly see that between WotLK launch and the start of Cata, WotLK did gain and reach the peak of subscribers. If we were going on the assumption that the highest amount of subscribers indicated the best expansion, you would be correct.

I must disagree however, the vast majority of that 12ish million subscribers came from Vanilla and BC. WotLK added only about 1.5 million subs (Q3 08 to Q4 10). Vanilla naturally was the most popular with close to 7 million as it approached Q1 07, where BC had about 3.5 million up till WotLK. Why did WotLK not attract as many as its predecessor expansion? It’s possible there was competition, and it’s also likely that when you have about 10+ million subs it is already quite difficult to amass more given how many MMO players are out there.

Here’s where it gets interesting. Notice that the very start of Cata there was a sudden decline. That’s unusual, because expansions have always actually increased active members. You advertise, you get the hype going, and the playerbase spikes on launch. So why was there such a noticable decline within the first quarter of Cata? There was no feasible way the playerbase would have hated the expansion in a few months, not with leveling, finding the newest raids and content.

That friend, was because as I said before concerning the quality of the WotLK raids, player trust in Blizzard dropped, and many players LEFT after WotLK was over. The poor decisions made in WotLK caused a wound that wouldn’t heal for WoW. Not even if you put Pandas in.

Ohoni.6057:

All of that said, you can get decent shards (slowly) if you bang your head against bosses each week. If you change perspective, tell yourself “I want to get shards and success doesn’t matter,” and join learner pug raids, you will accumulate them slowly. Been raiding since Spirit Vale released and have 500 now after all of our head banging.

I’m sorry, I just do not enjoy the “head banging” experience AT ALL. It is not an activity that I want to spend any time on in the game if it can be helped, surely not more than a few hours in total. My goal here is not merely to train up for hard mode, although others can certainly use it for that purpose, it is rather to bypass hard mode entirely, because hard mode, in its current form, will NEVER be something I will enjoy doing. The high stakes just push it outside the zone where I could ever possibly be comfortable with it, no matter how much I train, no matter how perfect my team is.

So any suggestion that involves “you get nothing, but maybe it would help you do the existing raids” is just a non-starter with me, if they added that mode, I might play through it once, but I would never touch it again, whereas a genuine easy mode raid, whcih offered repeatable rewards that would allow me to progress towards things like Legendary Armor at a much slower pace than Hard Mode raiding, that is something that I would not only try, but would ENJOY doing on a regular basis.

Ignoring everything else since its been addressed…

To me, it was head banging because I was actually trying to progress with my group.

If you have no desire for progression, but still want that armor and need shards for it, I don’t see how “I want to get shards and success doesn’t matter" doesn’t really work for you. You enter a raid knowing you won’t succeed, but who cares when you’re working towards your armor? If getting shards in this way equals (in your words) “progression towards things like Legendary Armor at a much slower pace…” well, that’s how you work it during this time where you just can’t have what you want.

If you look at things differently, it may help you get through this time where easy raids aren’t a thing. If you’re just committed to hating everything about raids as they currently are, that’s perfectly fine (as I said, a lot of guildies who didn’t like it stopped raiding and even set GW2 aside for now) & I’ll stop replying.

If you have no desire for progression, but still want that armor and need shards for it, I don’t see how “I want to get shards and success doesn’t matter" doesn’t really work for you.

But that’s not why I play games. If there were just a “press button, get Magnetite” option, I wouldn’t like that either. I play games to have fun. Banging my head against a wall is not fun. Playing the raids in a way that would result in few if any wipes does seem like the sort of thing that I would enjoy. If that’s not the sort of thing that you wouldn’t enjoy, then nobody is asking you to participate, but please don’t try to tell me what sort of experiences I should be enjoying, it just doesn’t work like that, it’s never worked like that.

As things are now, I prefer to wait it out, none of the currently available ways of participating in raiding at all appeal to me, which is why I’m asking that they do better.

runeblade.7514:

I rather that you feel cheated, so that I can play raids. I paid for the game, I deserve the experience.

Unless you’re being ironic, this is the worst argument I keep seeing whenever there’s any discussion about content that isn’t rest-your-head-on-the-keyboard-napping easy. You paid for the game, yes. You may feel entitled to experience everything it has to offer. But unless you’re willing to put in the needed resources, you don’t deserve anything.

A game designed around ‘everybody who has paid for this deserves to see everything’ couldn’t offer ANY challenge whatsoever. For every person saying ‘this is too hard’, there will be plenty others saying ’it’s perfectly fine’ and no matter how easy you make things, there will always be someone saying ’it’s still too hard for me, I demand it easier’.

General open world PvE has gotten to a point where you need to be disabled or gimping yourself on purpose to reach a point where you couldn’t progress, I say. HoT maps are slightly different, because they actually require you to pay attention to your screen (which is apparently also too hard for too many players, so they’ll nerf it just how they nerfed Orr back then). The vast majority of the game is already so easy that you can experience it without having to dedicate a huge amount of time or try to improve. Why do people flip their kitten because for once there’s somewhat challenging group content?

‘The story is gated behind it’ – well, watch a video on YouTube or join someone’s cleared instance. The bosses add precisely nothing to the story other than their model. Every bit of story is told through the NPCs and scattered notes you find, and all of that is accessible without ever looking at a boss if you really want to.

I still don’t to Triple Trouble, because I feel even with successful groups the required effort, time and stress simply isn’t worth the trash drops or the measly few achievements you can get. When Tequatl was changed back then and maps kept failing it to no end, I simply didn’t do it for the same reasons.
Anything I cannot do solo that requires time and effort (finding people, organising, etc.) I’m not willing to spend I simply don’t do. Why do people feel entitled to everything these days?

Adding an easy mode wouldn’t be worth the time or effort of the developers, and unless you make it a literal faceroll with bosses that have 1 HP just so people can run through it, people will still complain about it being too hard or simply not worth it.

I get that you are frustrated because there hasn’t been any content and won’t be for a long time. And honestly, without raids I wouldn’t log in for more than the dailies lately. But if you’re starved for content, get mad a the ANet management that apparently has no clue how to coordinate or pool resources, which has been evident in the past with bugfixes that get cancelled with the following update, fixes that take ages to come, their overestimating and going back on their statements when they realize they said or promised too much and so on.

But flipping it because a small team of people is pushing out content you aren’t willing to participate in for whatever reason, that’s on you.

Ohoni.6057:

But some of the problem may be that the casuals that are more forgiving don’t want to sift through the endless other things in the LFG to find the raid group to PUG with.

I think any player too casual to sift through the LFG to find a group are probably too casual to be of much use in the current raids either. It’s probably a helpful sifting mechanism and maybe when they do improve the LFG raiders will be like “change it back, some real idiots are finding us now!”

Seriously though, I think improving the LFG tool is a good thing in its own way, I just don’t think it’ll make anything better when it comes to those who want an easier difficulty setting. It’ll really be more useful for open world maps, finding people doing HP trains or specific metas.

I also don’t think they would have to split easy/hard in the LFG tool, although that might be nice. I mean they would be completely different modes, so it wouldn’t be like dungeon “speed clear” it would be more like people advertising “CoF P1-2,” if someone joins up and says “so are we doing path 3?,” well that’s on them.

The casual that doesn’t want to spend too long finding a group might get discouraged around reset time due to the number of groups being formed in the general area. Especially if the groups towards the top are wanting more hard core players than they are.

But no, the LFG change in and of itself will not make things drastically easier. And will increase the number of players trying raids to a small degree.

And given the difficulty difference, I think it would be more around if they didn’t split up the Fractal difficulty. Swamp 12 is much easier than Swamp 79. If there wasn’t a split and someone said Swamp LF experienced.

Short of TA Aetherblade path, the different dungeon paths are equivalent to each other. CoE P1 is in the same range of difficulty as CoE P2.

Players never had issues with difficulty scaling or forming teams or wait times or players dropping out of pug raids… in City of Heroes. Not sure why other mmos haven’t figured things out yet.

runeblade.7514:

The wall is too high for me. Way too high for the amount of effort I put into looking for a competent group.

20minutes on the LFG during off hours?

I looked at a group of 2 players looking for gors/sab today. Made my weekly raid on the lfg menu, finished SV, killed sloth, then looked at the same 2 players sitting on the lfg waiting for someone to invite them, while there were other players on the LFG menu also looking for the same bosses.

Just walk around the wall.

Gaile Gray.6029:

Ohoni.6057:

Here’s one reason: The developers have limited time and resources.

Yeah, we’ve covered this one. The time and resources it would take to implement something like this would be negligible, not remotely enough to counterbalance the benefits it would bring.

At this point, I need to interject. I am familiar with the process of changing to a multi-modality system of game presentation, having written about it long ago, when I was a journalist writing about another company and another game. For that game, too, players said “No big deal.” And they were absolutely wrong. They said, “Just tweak a few stats, lower a few spawns, and voila, you’ve got it!” No, that’s not how it worked. And that’s not how I think it would work for Guild Wars 2.

I will ask about this, and if we’re prepared to say something official, one of us will do so. But it’s counterproductive to have a discussion head down the path of misinformation and what seems to be a growing error in assumption. With all due respect, unless you’re a developer for GW2 you are not qualified to make a statement about the time needed, difficulty involved, or feasibility of such a feature.

You’re welcome to discuss the situation, and we appreciate that you want to do that. We welcome the conversation! But please participate by sharing what you’d like to see, and why, and don’t be misled by individual, external assumptions about the feasibility or practicality of such a request.

I actually do understand the difficulties this would create. But the issue at hand here is ANeT created something for a small percentage of the GW2 players. They ignored the rest and pandered to the few, who, as we see here and other posts about this, respond with pure venom to anyone suggesting anything that intrudes on their world.

I have played GW since GW1 beta and have never seen such elitism play out so blatantly. ANeT’s silence on the issue and refusal to address the 90% speaks in a much louder volume than anything else. All we see is us suggesting something and the players who have succeeded telling us to go learn to play better. It saddens me to see a two tier system created. The elites who have been successful even demanding payment to allow lesser skilled players success at the raids. Almost as bad as gold sellers. Not to mention locking new legendary armor behind the the raid. The question is “Why?”.

A game designed around ‘everybody who has paid for this deserves to see everything’ couldn’t offer ANY challenge whatsoever. For every person saying ‘this is too hard’, there will be plenty others saying ’it’s perfectly fine’ and no matter how easy you make things, there will always be someone saying ’it’s still too hard for me, I demand it easier’.

That’s why most games offer difficulty modes. They allow every player to experience everything. If you like and are capable of high challenge, they can set a challenge mode that only a tiny handful can pass. If you lack that skill, there is an easier mode that almost anyone can manage. That way, there is no content that is not “for” everybody, it all depends on whether you prefer the high stakes challenge aspect, or the low stakes “ride.”

I wouldn’t go so far as to say that every player is “entitled” to every experience, especially given how triggering that word is to some people, but I do think it is in the game’s best interests to provide as many fun experiences as they can to as many people. If Person A has fun just from doing a certain type of content, and Person B can only have fun if Person A is kept locked out of it, then maybe Person A’s fun has more priority than Person B, and B should learn to have fun without it coming at other people’s expense?

Why do people flip their kitten because for once there’s somewhat challenging group content?

Because they’d like to be able to enjoy that content too. Hard content is fine, if it’s truly optional. The more things you tie into that content without providing an alternative, stuff like special loot, or story elements, or unique environments, the more reasonable it is for people to want to be a part of that.

And given the difficulty difference, I think it would be more around if they didn’t split up the Fractal difficulty. Swamp 12 is much easier than Swamp 79. If there wasn’t a split and someone said Swamp LF experienced.

Short of TA Aetherblade path, the different dungeon paths are equivalent to each other. CoE P1 is in the same range of difficulty as CoE P2.

Well, like I said, I don’t think it would be essential to have a UI split between easy and hard, a split between individual wings would probably be more useful. For easy and hard, it would just be as simple as “Gorseval, Easy,” and players could find the one they wanted easily enough. If they want to add one, I don’t think it would hurt anything, I just don’t see it as necessary.

Heibi.4251:

Gaile Gray.6029:

Ohoni.6057:

Here’s one reason: The developers have limited time and resources.

Yeah, we’ve covered this one. The time and resources it would take to implement something like this would be negligible, not remotely enough to counterbalance the benefits it would bring.

At this point, I need to interject. I am familiar with the process of changing to a multi-modality system of game presentation, having written about it long ago, when I was a journalist writing about another company and another game. For that game, too, players said “No big deal.” And they were absolutely wrong. They said, “Just tweak a few stats, lower a few spawns, and voila, you’ve got it!” No, that’s not how it worked. And that’s not how I think it would work for Guild Wars 2.

I will ask about this, and if we’re prepared to say something official, one of us will do so. But it’s counterproductive to have a discussion head down the path of misinformation and what seems to be a growing error in assumption. With all due respect, unless you’re a developer for GW2 you are not qualified to make a statement about the time needed, difficulty involved, or feasibility of such a feature.

You’re welcome to discuss the situation, and we appreciate that you want to do that. We welcome the conversation! But please participate by sharing what you’d like to see, and why, and don’t be misled by individual, external assumptions about the feasibility or practicality of such a request.

I actually do understand the difficulties this would create. But the issue at hand here is ANeT created something for a small percentage of the GW2 players. They ignored the rest and pandered to the few, who, as we see here and other posts about this, respond with pure venom to anyone suggesting anything that intrudes on their world.

I have played GW since GW1 beta and have never seen such elitism play out so blatantly. ANeT’s silence on the issue and refusal to address the 90% speaks in a much louder volume than anything else.

They didn’t ignore the rest, their release plan is just off at the moment. You aren’t 90% of the community, more like 20% at best even if only 10% raids (even after LFR only 30% ever saw a raid in WoW, and the people above LFR didn’t increase at all). Most people don’t care about raids and will never set a foot in there even with an easy mode.

If you never saw such ‘elitism’ you never played the deep, urgoz’s warren or the domain of anguish as they were ‘current’ content in their respective expansion and not after they were faceroll with introducing the PvE-Skills. If you never played them at that time you aren’t the target audience for raids anyway. (and the raid wings are fast compared to those 3 dungeons, so time is no argument there)

All we see is us suggesting something and the players who have succeeded telling us to go learn to play better. It saddens me to see a two tier system created. The elites who have been successful even demanding payment to allow lesser skilled players success at the raids. Almost as bad as gold sellers. Not to mention locking new legendary armor behind the the raid. The question is “Why?”.

There are many counter arguments against an easy mode and yet you try to play them down. Nobody forces you to buy a raid run, if you do so it’s your own decision.

It’s sad that a two tier system is created? You are the one who wants that two tier system, with introduction of an easy mode.

Legendary armor is in no way neccesary to play the game and I can only think of one specific build (heal druid) which can really use it, all other classes/builds needs to change the runes with their stats/builds and ascended armor is way cheaper in the long run. It is just a skin with a different item color.

Ohoni.6057:

A game designed around ‘everybody who has paid for this deserves to see everything’ couldn’t offer ANY challenge whatsoever. For every person saying ‘this is too hard’, there will be plenty others saying ’it’s perfectly fine’ and no matter how easy you make things, there will always be someone saying ’it’s still too hard for me, I demand it easier’.

That’s why most games offer difficulty modes. They allow every player to experience everything. If you like and are capable of high challenge, they can set a challenge mode that only a tiny handful can pass. If you lack that skill, there is an easier mode that almost anyone can manage. That way, there is no content that is not “for” everybody, it all depends on whether you prefer the high stakes challenge aspect, or the low stakes “ride.”

I wouldn’t go so far as to say that every player is “entitled” to every experience, especially given how triggering that word is to some people, but I do think it is in the game’s best interests to provide as many fun experiences as they can to as many people. If Person A has fun just from doing a certain type of content, and Person B can only have fun if Person A is kept locked out of it, then maybe Person A’s fun has more priority than Person B, and B should learn to have fun without it coming at other people’s expense?

Why do people flip their kitten because for once there’s somewhat challenging group content?

Because they’d like to be able to enjoy that content too. Hard content is fine, if it’s truly optional. The more things you tie into that content without providing an alternative, stuff like special loot, or story elements, or unique environments, the more reasonable it is for people to want to be a part of that.

And again it is only about loot. Just say it for once, you just want the shinies other gets with less effort.

If you only want to experience the content you don’t need the loot.
If you need the loot as an incentive to do that content you don’t want to experience it.

Most people don’t care about raids and will never set a foot in there even with an easy mode.

I don’t think that’s true. I think most people don’t care about raids as they currently are, because they have no interest in the various dramas involved, but I think that if players had some expectation that they would be able to pass the raid on their first night, most people would give it a shot, and they would at least double or triple the number of regular raiders overnight.

It’s sad that a two tier system is created? You are the one who wants that two tier system, with introduction of an easy mode.

Well, the problem is when the two tiers are “in,” and “out,” rather than “one version of the experience,” and “an equally fun version of the experience.”

So yeah, my opinion hasn’t changed.

Ohoni.6057:

Most people don’t care about raids and will never set a foot in there even with an easy mode.

I don’t think that’s true. I think most people don’t care about raids as they currently are, because they have no interest in the various dramas involved, but I think that if players had some expectation that they would be able to pass the raid on their first night, most people would give it a shot, and they would at least double or triple the number of regular raiders overnight.

A better LFG system would also increase the number of raiders overnight without splitting the community into 2 parts. And no most people don’t care about raids or dungeons at all anymore unless you can enter them via an automated system like LFD/LFR in WoW.

It’s sad that a two tier system is created? You are the one who wants that two tier system, with introduction of an easy mode.

Well, the problem is when the two tiers are “in,” and “out,” rather than “one version of the experience,” and “an equally fun version of the experience.”

You can’t create an ‘equally fun version of the experience’. Everybody defines fun in their own way and if you change anything at a raid boss it is not the same experience anymore.

If attacks deal less damage to the point you can mostly ignore it, you alter the entire strategy for completing the fight. Thats also the reason an easy mode won’t work as a practise mode. If you can ignore attacks people will do it and have to relearn the entire fight when they can’t do this anymore in normal mode. If you still have to avoid the same abilities as in the normal mode there is no point in creating a different mode.

And again it is only about loot. Just say it for once, you just want the shinies other gets with less effort.

And again, that’s not my position, but you’re welcome to express whatever position you like.

If you only want to experience the content you don’t need the loot.
If you need the loot as an incentive to do that content you don’t want to experience it.

Hmm. I’ve tried that argument with raiders in the past, and they always argue up and down that it is not true. In the past I’ve argued that Legendary armor should be available through content outside the raids, to which raiders responded “but then nobody would ever do raids!” To this I replied “well if no one would do the raids without the loot, then why have raids in the first place?” To this they replied “because we have fun doing them!” It tends to go in a circle from there.

I think it’s fair that content provide meaningful rewards, so long as those rewards are not excluded from others who want them. I do believe that the rewards currently gifted to raiders have a value to them, and I would like to be able to earn those rewards. If they were just handed to me, I would take them, but that alone would not satisfy my interest in the raids.

I DO want to experience the story for myself, and I DO want to experience the fight mechanics, I just definitely do not want the “hang your head against the wall failing until you succeed” aspect of it. I know full well that some players love this part, and I suggest nothing that would take that away from them, I would just prefer to play a version without this element, in which they do not need to participate at all.

Randomguy was kind enough to let me into a raid group tonight, and we skipped to Gorseval and spent about three hours trying to take him down. The people were great, everyone was trying their best, we got past the bit with the spirits once. It was an interesting experience, but about the same as I’d had fighting Vale Guardian before, we’d get so far, wipe, and repeat, over and over and over again. I just do not enjoy that. Others might, that’s fine, but I do not. I hate repetition, I hate having to redo portions that I feel I’ve done right in the past, I like pitons, “ok, I’ve gotten this far, now I never have to do that bit again.”

I like that when I get something right, it sticks, and I can move on to the next thing without having to repeat the part I did right the last time. That’s why I like some jumping puzzles over others. The JPs I love are the ones where there are plenty of “nets,” where you do a difficult series of jumps, and then if you pass that far, and then try another difficult series but fall, you start at a point beyond the first jumps, you never have to do that first series again unless you leave and come back. The JPs I hate are the ones where you have to make dozens of jumps in a row, and if you mess up any of them then you have to start pretty much from the beginning again, redoing the portions you’ve done right over and over and over. There is just no joy in that for me.

So yes, I would still prefer an easier version. A version with all the same moving parts, but with lower stakes and lower bars.

A version where you need less DPS overall to hit the required milestones, tuned for most players having a substandard build.

A version where the World Eater auto-downs players caught by it, but not auto-defeats them, allowing them to be recovered afterwards (but not easily if more people are hit than not).

A version where the spirits coming towards him are either lower in HP or slower moving, so that players can either DPS each one down faster, or require less direct CCing to keep them back. Or perhaps leave them alone, but make it so that if they do reach him, instead of auto-wiping the party, it would just have a negative penalty, one that would make the next part harder, but not impossible, such as restoring a portion of his HP, or just triggering a standard World Eater that players would have to rush to escape and would slow overall DPS.

Players would still want to avoid that penalty, but if they mess it up, it doesn’t make the entire encounter unrecoverable.

I’m well aware that some players don’t want or need these changes, and they don’t have to play the mode that includes them, but I think there are plenty of players who would benefit from them.

I was pondering a way to make different difficulty settings without compromising the current encounters in any way, keep “easy mode” as proper training for new players, allow new players to experience the raid story and give them access to some of the rewards.

The funny thing is that the Raid already has a system in place for all that. Here is how it could work with an example:

Vale Guardian has 3 distinct phases, I won’t count the split phases for this, so it’s like this: Phase 1 → Split → Phase 2 → Split → Phase 3

Each Phase has all the mechanics of the previous one but with a few tweaks and additions, and the last Phase is usually super chaotic. So here is the idea:

An “Elite” difficulty will be as we know the encounter today. A “Veteran” difficulty will have only 2 Phases, Phase 1 → Split → Phase 2 and maybe an “Easy” difficulty will have just the first Phase (I say “maybe” because I think Phase 1 is very very easy).

The idea is, you go to the lower difficulty, master it, then move higher up to the next difficulty until you reach Elite and finish the “main” boss. Although in a way it’s the same how it works now, it will offer players some progress and allow them to experience the story and the instance itself without the need for a full kill. As a potential addition they could make a “Champion” and “Legendary” difficulty with even harder Phases, these new Phases will replace the other ones, as having more than three would make the encounter very tiring. In effect, the “champion” difficulty will start at Phase 2, then add an extra Phase 4, and “Legendary” difficulty will start on Phase 3 and add 2 new Phases, 4 and 5.

As for rewards? Magnetite Shards are the easiest to calculate, since you already get shards if you fail, the easier modes could give shards equal to those you get on a failure. So the “easy” difficulty will give the same amount as if you wiped in Phase 2 of the original Raid. For the rest of the rewards I’m unsure, because to my knowledge we still don’t know where we’ll use the Legendary Insights for example, I doubt they are just supposed to show off how many time you finished a Raid boss, that would be dumb. The Eternal title and achievement will probably be achievable in the Elite and above difficulty.

Disclaimer:
I do NOT think any of this is needed NOW. The Raids are doing their job at the moment keeping the Raiders happy and busy, but thinking ahead, there will come a time that a new difficulty setting might be needed, this is mostly for THAT time and not for right now. Think of the future.

Ohoni.6057:

And again it is only about loot. Just say it for once, you just want the shinies other gets with less effort.

And again, that’s not my position, but you’re welcome to express whatever position you like.

If you only want to experience the content you don’t need the loot.
If you need the loot as an incentive to do that content you don’t want to experience it.

Hmm. I’ve tried that argument with raiders in the past, and they always argue up and down that it is not true. In the past I’ve argued that Legendary armor should be available through content outside the raids, to which raiders responded “but then nobody would ever do raids!” To this I replied “well if no one would do the raids without the loot, then why have raids in the first place?” To this they replied “because we have fun doing them!” It tends to go in a circle from there.

I think it’s fair that content provide meaningful rewards, so long as those rewards are not excluded from others who want them. I do believe that the rewards currently gifted to raiders have a value to them, and I would like to be able to earn those rewards. If they were just handed to me, I would take them, but that alone would not satisfy my interest in the raids.

I DO want to experience the story for myself, and I DO want to experience the fight mechanics, I just definitely do not want the “hang your head against the wall failing until you succeed” aspect of it. I know full well that some players love this part, and I suggest nothing that would take that away from them, I would just prefer to play a version without this element, in which they do not need to participate at all.

Randomguy was kind enough to let me into a raid group tonight, and we skipped to Gorseval and spent about three hours trying to take him down. The people were great, everyone was trying their best, we got past the bit with the spirits once. It was an interesting experience, but about the same as I’d had fighting Vale Guardian before, we’d get so far, wipe, and repeat, over and over and over again. I just do not enjoy that. Others might, that’s fine, but I do not. I hate repetition, I hate having to redo portions that I feel I’ve done right in the past, I like pitons, “ok, I’ve gotten this far, now I never have to do that bit again.”

I like that when I get something right, it sticks, and I can move on to the next thing without having to repeat the part I did right the last time. That’s why I like some jumping puzzles over others. The JPs I love are the ones where there are plenty of “nets,” where you do a difficult series of jumps, and then if you pass that far, and then try another difficult series but fall, you start at a point beyond the first jumps, you never have to do that first series again unless you leave and come back. The JPs I hate are the ones where you have to make dozens of jumps in a row, and if you mess up any of them then you have to start pretty much from the beginning again, redoing the portions you’ve done right over and over and over. There is just no joy in that for me.

So yes, I would still prefer an easier version. A version with all the same moving parts, but with lower stakes and lower bars.

A version where you need less DPS overall to hit the required milestones, tuned for most players having a substandard build.

A version where the World Eater auto-downs players caught by it, but not auto-defeats them, allowing them to be recovered afterwards (but not easily if more people are hit than not).

A version where the spirits coming towards him are either lower in HP or slower moving, so that players can either DPS each one down faster, or require less direct CCing to keep them back. Or perhaps leave them alone, but make it so that if they do reach him, instead of auto-wiping the party, it would just have a negative penalty, one that would make the next part harder, but not impossible, such as restoring a portion of his HP, or just triggering a standard World Eater that players would have to rush to escape and would slow overall DPS.

Players would still want to avoid that penalty, but if they mess it up, it doesn’t make the entire encounter unrecoverable.

I’m well aware that some players don’t want or need these changes, and they don’t have to play the mode that includes them, but I think there are plenty of players who would benefit from them.

I don’t care about legendary armor at all, for me it is just an expensive skin (I said it in the other thread, i can only think of heal druid as the only build that benefits from it without changing the rune). They can offer a different set of legendary armor outside the raid, but with a different skin. Most people complaining about the armor won’t finish it anyway.

The World Eater change wouldn’t help at all. You still wipe if you fail to kill the souls and the occassions where someone fails to jump and stays on the plattform are pretty rare. Most people fall down and die anyway.

A better LFG system would also increase the number of raiders overnight without splitting the community into 2 parts.

I really don’t think it could. Maybe by a very small amount, but not nearly as much as actually releasing the easy mode. The problem isn’t finding groups, people can find groups easily enough. The problem is that once you have the group together, the raid itself is too hard.

And no most people don’t care about raids or dungeons at all anymore unless you can enter them via an automated system like LFD/LFR in WoW.

I don’t think that’s true. I think there’s low interest in raids right now because most players accept that they are much too frustrating in their current form. I think there’s low interest in dungeons right now because nothing has changed about them in about two years, and most people have most of the rewards they care to get from them, so the only reason left is to grind gold, and they aren’t an efficient way of doing that.

I’m not saying that raids or dungeons will ever be GW2’s number one draw, but I do think that if they released an easy mode raid, one that players felt confident about completing in a short period of time, then many more people would be playing it. And if they released a new dungeon, with new mechanics and rewards, then I think players would play it for a while before getting bored and moving to the next thing.

You can’t create an ‘equally fun version of the experience’. Everybode defines fun in their own way and if you change anything at a raid boss it is not the same experience anymore.

True, but my point is to take the version now, which is currently fun for those who like one sort of experience, and take out the bits that are known to frustrate most players, so that it becomes fun for those players as well. Fun is subjective, but the devs try to make every part of the game fun whenever possible. My point is, I don’t want some “non-experience” version of the raid, one that does not contain any actual gameplay. That does not interest me any more than the current hard mode version does. What I want is something in the middle, something of equivalent challenge to other content in the game, where I’m meant to pay attention, meant to react and move around the field, just one where messing up once or twice will not result in having to start from scratch.

If attacks deal less damage to the point you can mostly ignore it, you alter the entire strategy for completing the fight.

True, and that’s probably why nobody is asking for that.

What is being asked for is that attacks that will wipe the entire party if they land be toned down to be more recoverable. It would always be preferred that players avoid these attacks, it would be a setback if they land, but not a setback that is impossible to recover from. It would not be wise to ignore them.

If you can ignore attacks people will do it and have to relearn the entire fight when they can’t do this anymore in normal mode.

Again, that is ENTIRELY up to the players. It can do both.

If Team A is a “casual speedrun” team, or whatever the terminology becomes, then maybe they do use peak efficiency tactics to play it completely differently than the hard mode. That scenario would be hard to avoid. A player who has mastered this mode would need to relearn everything when (or IF) he moves to hard mode. That’s his right, there’s nothing wrong with that. He would still have a slight edge over complete newbs though, since even if he ignored most of what was going on and the “proper” way of mitigating it, he would still at least become familiar with the sequence of events, the tells that the boss makes before attacking, things like that.

If Team B is a “training” team, using the easy mode to learn how to complete the hard mode, then they would have put in the VERY basic research of learning how hard mode is meant to work. They would know what the proper hard mode tactics are, and would go through those motions even when they are not strictly necessary. They would be using the mode as a teaching tool, one in which they could still keep track of their failures, without it completely re-setting the encounter each time. If, for example, Gorseval’s World Eater attack would auto-down players rather than auto-defeating them, they would know that, and would know that if players did get downed, then they messed that up and would have to do better in the real thing, but if they were trying to get the spirits portion down, then they wouldn’t have to start over, they could just continue on to the portion they were really struggling with and practice that one instead.

Again, they could not just jump into hard mode and expect to win on the first try, but if they were earnestly practicing in easy mode as if it were hard mode, then they will have developed most of the skills they need to have a head start.

maddoctor.2738:

I was pondering a way to make different difficulty settings without compromising the current encounters in any way, keep “easy mode” as proper training for new players, allow new players to experience the raid story and give them access to some of the rewards.

The funny thing is that the Raid already has a system in place for all that. Here is how it could work with an example:

Vale Guardian has 3 distinct phases, I won’t count the split phases for this, so it’s like this: Phase 1 -> Split -> Phase 2 -> Split -> Phase 3

Each Phase has all the mechanics of the previous one but with a few tweaks and additions, and the last Phase is usually super chaotic. So here is the idea:

An “Elite” difficulty will be as we know the encounter today. A “Veteran” difficulty will have only 2 Phases, Phase 1 -> Split -> Phase 2 and maybe an “Easy” difficulty will have just the first Phase (I say “maybe” because I think Phase 1 is very very easy).

The idea is, you go to the lower difficulty, master it, then move higher up to the next difficulty until you reach Elite and finish the “main” boss. Although in a way it’s the same how it works now, it will offer players some progress and allow them to experience the story and the instance itself without the need for a full kill. As a potential addition they could make a “Champion” and “Legendary” difficulty with even harder Phases, these new Phases will replace the other ones, as having more than three would make the encounter very tiring. In effect, the “champion” difficulty will start at Phase 2, then add an extra Phase 4, and “Legendary” difficulty will start on Phase 3 and add 2 new Phases, 4 and 5.

As for rewards? Magnetite Shards are the easiest to calculate, since you already get shards if you fail, the easier modes could give shards equal to those you get on a failure. So the “easy” difficulty will give the same amount as if you wiped in Phase 2 of the original Raid. For the rest of the rewards I’m unsure, because to my knowledge we still don’t know where we’ll use the Legendary Insights for example, I doubt they are just supposed to show off how many time you finished a Raid boss, that would be dumb. The Eternal title and achievement will probably be achievable in the Elite and above difficulty.

Disclaimer:
I do NOT think any of this is needed NOW. The Raids are doing their job at the moment keeping the Raiders happy and busy, but thinking ahead, there will come a time that a new difficulty setting might be needed, this is mostly for THAT time and not for right now. Think of the future.

Legendary Insights are used during the crafting process for the legendary armor, they lose their value once wing 3 is released (or people want to see parts of the legendary armor….).

As for the difficulty settings, they amplify what i said about practice mode. These changes don’t prepare anyone for higher difficulties and people have to relearn the entire fight. And if you can earn shards in the lower difficulties people will play the highest one only once and cap the shards in lower difficulties. It gets harder to find people for raids further into the week. If you don’t want to kill PUGs you have to strip all rewards except for the lootbags and gold/EP.

Each Phase has all the mechanics of the previous one but with a few tweaks and additions, and the last Phase is usually super chaotic. So here is the idea:

An “Elite” difficulty will be as we know the encounter today. A “Veteran” difficulty will have only 2 Phases, Phase 1 ? Split ? Phase 2 and maybe an “Easy” difficulty will have just the first Phase (I say “maybe” because I think Phase 1 is very very easy).

I don’t know that this is really necessary. Really if they were going to pare it down to a single phase, I’d actually want it to be the final “chaotic” phase, since that has all the mechanics going on. I just don’t want to have to keep repeating the first two phases every time something goes wrong. It’s the repetition of the easier bits that is most frustrating.

And I still do think that there is benefit to adding them now, because the people who would enjoy this sort of content are in the game right now, not playing raids because they don’t like the current difficulty. There’s no reason to keep them waiting. This has nothing to do with raiders getting tired of the content, since they wouldn’t be the target audience of the easy mode anyways.

And if you can earn shards in the lower difficulties people will play the highest one only once and cap the shards in lower difficulties.

But how would this not apply to the current game? For one thing, the easier modes should have the same weekly lockouts as the harder, but currently if you want to “farm shards” then you can just get a boss to the second phase and then wipe and repeat. How would this be different than just farming the “phase one only” version of the boss in terms of shard farming? I mean, obviously there’s the psychological distinctions and ability to progress through the map, but it wouldn’t give any undue advantage that isn’t already available.

I don’t think every single part in the game needs an easy or hard mode attached to it just to please the biggest amount of players.

In an MMO this would just take too much developing time.

Plus I like to explore the game in its intended shape and form, regardless of whether this takes a long while or not. If that means I don’t get all the rewards that’s fine. There’s no way I would be able to anyway, thus some exclusive rewards for those who pass the challenges is totally okay with me. They would have something to show for their accomplishments without feeling cheated when someone just does some easy mode.

Ohoni.6057:

And if you can earn shards in the lower difficulties people will play the highest one only once and cap the shards in lower difficulties.

But how would this not apply to the current game? For one thing, the easier modes should have the same weekly lockouts as the harder, but currently if you want to “farm shards” then you can just get a boss to the second phase and then wipe and repeat. How would this be different than just farming the “phase one only” version of the boss in terms of shard farming? I mean, obviously there’s the psychological distinctions and ability to progress through the map, but it wouldn’t give any undue advantage that isn’t already available.

It is faster to cap shards with boss kills and you have to find a specific group that just wipes over and over for the cap, which are pretty rare to non-existant. If you get more shards/h for kills in lower difficulties than in higher modes you remove players from the pool. Same as if you offer the same rewards with lower droprates.
Yes, there are many players who only play for rewards and they will move to lower difficulties, making it harder for people who want the challenge but don’t have a own raid group.

Miellyn.6847:

Legendary Insights are used during the crafting process for the legendary armor, they lose their value once wing 3 is released (or people want to see parts of the legendary armor….).

I know. But we don’t know how many we’ll need for a complete set. I’ve always said that any kind of change to the Raids should happen AFTER Wing 3 is released anyway. So we get the full picture.

As for the difficulty settings, they amplify what i said about practice mode. These changes don’t prepare anyone for higher difficulties and people have to relearn the entire fight. And if you can earn shards in the lower difficulties people will play the highest one only once and cap the shards in lower difficulties. It gets harder to find people for raids further into the week. If you don’t want to kill PUGs you have to strip all rewards except for the lootbags and gold/EP.

Mastering Phase 1 is essential in beating Phase 2. Mastering Phase 2 is essential in beating Phase 3. In a sense if you can’t beat Phase 1, trying Phase 2 is suicide. So they DO prepare players for higher difficulties, you don’t have to relearn the entire fight, just the tweaks of the next Phase, it’s not like the Phases are completely different.

As for the shards, to my knowledge the only way to re-run a Raid is to by finding someone to open a clean instance for you. That’s hardly convinient for weekly Shard capping.

Ohoni.6057:

I don’t know that this is really necessary. Really if they were going to pare it down to a single phase, I’d actually want it to be the final “chaotic” phase, since that has all the mechanics going on. I just don’t want to have to keep repeating the first two phases every time something goes wrong. It’s the repetition of the easier bits that is most frustrating.

The idea is to keep the fight the same and use the Phases as “difficulty”, which is already in the game and fairly balanced. I don’t think starting at the final phase is a very good idea because the earlier Phases teach you the next ones. Each Phase is a progress from the previous one and sometimes they help with set-up too. For example at Gorseval we got the Orbs spawning in Phase 2, miss-management of Orbs in Phase 2 will lead to a much harder Phase 3, and so on.

And I still do think that there is benefit to adding them now, because the people who would enjoy this sort of content are in the game right now, not playing raids because they don’t like the current difficulty. There’s no reason to keep them waiting. This has nothing to do with raiders getting tired of the content, since they wouldn’t be the target audience of the easy mode anyways.

This all comes down to how difficult it would be to implement AND maintain. If they use the Phase difficulty it would probably be much easier to do but do keep in mind that if they go the multiple difficulty route every Raid they release from then on would need to have those extra difficulties, meaning each Raid wing will take an extra time to be finished and ready.

maddoctor.2738:

I was pondering a way to make different difficulty settings without compromising the current encounters in any way, keep “easy mode” as proper training for new players, allow new players to experience the raid story and give them access to some of the rewards.

The funny thing is that the Raid already has a system in place for all that. Here is how it could work with an example:

Vale Guardian has 3 distinct phases, I won’t count the split phases for this, so it’s like this: Phase 1 -> Split -> Phase 2 -> Split -> Phase 3

Each Phase has all the mechanics of the previous one but with a few tweaks and additions, and the last Phase is usually super chaotic. So here is the idea:

An “Elite” difficulty will be as we know the encounter today. A “Veteran” difficulty will have only 2 Phases, Phase 1 -> Split -> Phase 2 and maybe an “Easy” difficulty will have just the first Phase (I say “maybe” because I think Phase 1 is very very easy).

The idea is, you go to the lower difficulty, master it, then move higher up to the next difficulty until you reach Elite and finish the “main” boss. Although in a way it’s the same how it works now, it will offer players some progress and allow them to experience the story and the instance itself without the need for a full kill. As a potential addition they could make a “Champion” and “Legendary” difficulty with even harder Phases, these new Phases will replace the other ones, as having more than three would make the encounter very tiring. In effect, the “champion” difficulty will start at Phase 2, then add an extra Phase 4, and “Legendary” difficulty will start on Phase 3 and add 2 new Phases, 4 and 5.

As for rewards? Magnetite Shards are the easiest to calculate, since you already get shards if you fail, the easier modes could give shards equal to those you get on a failure. So the “easy” difficulty will give the same amount as if you wiped in Phase 2 of the original Raid. For the rest of the rewards I’m unsure, because to my knowledge we still don’t know where we’ll use the Legendary Insights for example, I doubt they are just supposed to show off how many time you finished a Raid boss, that would be dumb. The Eternal title and achievement will probably be achievable in the Elite and above difficulty.

Disclaimer:
I do NOT think any of this is needed NOW. The Raids are doing their job at the moment keeping the Raiders happy and busy, but thinking ahead, there will come a time that a new difficulty setting might be needed, this is mostly for THAT time and not for right now. Think of the future.

Oh hey, I actually like this idea. Finally someone who can actually offer a sensible solution.

The only problem I see with this is that it requires all boss to have some kind of “phases”. Slothasor doesn’t really have any phases however, do you have any idea what to do there?

maddoctor.2738:

Miellyn.6847:

Legendary Insights are used during the crafting process for the legendary armor, they lose their value once wing 3 is released (or people want to see parts of the legendary armor….).

I know. But we don’t know how many we’ll need for a complete set. I’ve always said that any kind of change to the Raids should happen AFTER Wing 3 is released anyway. So we get the full picture.

As for the difficulty settings, they amplify what i said about practice mode. These changes don’t prepare anyone for higher difficulties and people have to relearn the entire fight. And if you can earn shards in the lower difficulties people will play the highest one only once and cap the shards in lower difficulties. It gets harder to find people for raids further into the week. If you don’t want to kill PUGs you have to strip all rewards except for the lootbags and gold/EP.

Mastering Phase 1 is essential in beating Phase 2. Mastering Phase 2 is essential in beating Phase 3. In a sense if you can’t beat Phase 1, trying Phase 2 is suicide. So they DO prepare players for higher difficulties, you don’t have to relearn the entire fight, just the tweaks of the next Phase, it’s not like the Phases are completely different.

As for the shards, to my knowledge the only way to re-run a Raid is to by finding someone to open a clean instance for you. That’s hardly convinient for weekly Shard capping.

Ohoni.6057:

I don’t know that this is really necessary. Really if they were going to pare it down to a single phase, I’d actually want it to be the final “chaotic” phase, since that has all the mechanics going on. I just don’t want to have to keep repeating the first two phases every time something goes wrong. It’s the repetition of the easier bits that is most frustrating.

The idea is to keep the fight the same and use the Phases as “difficulty”, which is already in the game and fairly balanced. I don’t think starting at the final phase is a very good idea because the earlier Phases teach you the next ones. Each Phase is a progress from the previous one and sometimes they help with set-up too. For example at Gorseval we got the Orbs spawning in Phase 2, miss-management of Orbs in Phase 2 will lead to a much harder Phase 3, and so on.

And I still do think that there is benefit to adding them now, because the people who would enjoy this sort of content are in the game right now, not playing raids because they don’t like the current difficulty. There’s no reason to keep them waiting. This has nothing to do with raiders getting tired of the content, since they wouldn’t be the target audience of the easy mode anyways.

This all comes down to how difficult it would be to implement AND maintain. If they use the Phase difficulty it would probably be much easier to do but do keep in mind that if they go the multiple difficulty route every Raid they release from then on would need to have those extra difficulties, meaning each Raid wing will take an extra time to be finished and ready.

Phase 1 only does nothing, as the split changes the fight significantly.
You can also play phase 2 with only 2 intersections and minimal movement which is completly different from phase 3.
And you have to increase the health massivly or the fight will be much shorter, also a huge difference.

It is faster to cap shards with boss kills and you have to find a specific group that just wipes over and over for the cap, which are pretty rare to non-existant.

But my point is, beating easy mode bosses, with lower rewards, would not be faster than losing hard mode bosses for pity shards, or at least not by much. In terms of time and effort they would be fairly equivalent. I’m just not seeing a reason why players who are capable of beating hard mode would ever choose not to as much as they can. This would be an alternative for those that can’t beat hard mode in their current state.

Yes, there are many players who only play for rewards and they will move to lower difficulties, making it harder for people who want the challenge but don’t have a own raid group.

Well, forgive me for being blunt, but so what? If there are players who, as you suggest, only play for the rewards and don’t care about the challenge, then why shouldn’t they be able to play the version that is more fun for them? Because it makes it harder for other people? How selfish is that, that the challenge seekers would want to hold the non-seekers hostage, just to make their own queue times lower. This strikes me the same as the argument in PvP where diamond-class players are fine with uneven match-ups because they want easy punching bags all the way up to the top ranks. Works great for them, who cares about the people on the losing side of the equation?

The idea is to keep the fight the same and use the Phases as “difficulty”, which is already in the game and fairly balanced. I don’t think starting at the final phase is a very good idea because the earlier Phases teach you the next ones.

Yes, but the problem is that it causes burnout. I did Gorseval for the first time tonight, and got as far as the bit with the black orbs. It didn’t take us long at all to get to the first “break the wall and glide” portion, I feel that by now I’m about as good as I’m ever going to get at just that much of the fight, and yet we had to repeat that part another dozen or so times as we kept failing at later stages. And sometimes someone, maybe me, would fail in some way at that early portion too, even though we’d succeeded at it most of the time. Around and around in circles. I’d much prefer to just skip to the last part, and just do that bit without having to repeat the earlier bits. To me, repetition is hell.

This all comes down to how difficult it would be to implement AND maintain. If they use the Phase difficulty it would probably be much easier to do but do keep in mind that if they go the multiple difficulty route every Raid they release from then on would need to have those extra difficulties, meaning each Raid wing will take an extra time to be finished and ready.

Honestly, I’m pretty sure that your proposed system would be much harder to implement than mine. On one hand, it seems easier “oh, just chop out one phase and run it independently,” but that’s actually changing the entire timing and dynamics of the fight, they’d probably have to do a whole lot from scratch, and it sounds like accessing it would be complicated on their end. My proposal leaves all the core functions intact, it just reduces how impactful each is. Aside from slight “affix” replacements on some of the abilities that auto kill you, it would just be scaling things back a little bit. I mean, maybe you’re right and your way would be easier, it all depends on how their systems are structured, but I seriously doubt it.

As for the release timing, look, I don’t expect them to release the easy modes simultaneously to the hard modes. I get that “world first” types take them very seriously, and I don’t want to incentivize them to practice in easy mode first and then move to hard mode, I do see how that could cause more harm than good to the scene. But I do think a couple of months is a perfectly reasonable window for that sort of thing.

I think now is a perfectly good time to release a Spirit Vale easy mode, and that a Salvation Pass one could launch simultaneously with Wing 3. Give the vanguard enough time to struggle through hard mode “properly,” but then let the peasants in too once they’d already gotten the lay of the land. Maybe even make the release conditional on at least a few groups having passed it, just in case they release an especially hard raid that even after a few months nobody has cleared.