Guild Wars 2

As it stands now, there is debate between whether or not these raids are “casual friendly”, there is effectively broken content (fractals/Dungeons), and classes who are not currently viable (thief).

What I want from Raids, is not for the current wing to be changed, at all, but rather more effective progression model that includes Raiding as a part of that progression and not only the absolute end-game.

What I mean is, the current Raid Wing is, in my opinion, actually fine as-is. However, future Raids should not be similar to the current. Some Raids actually need to be harder than currently, and some need to be easier. Both need apart of the progression model that ultimately leads to legendary armor.

The problem currently is that there is a large gap in progression between the step below Raids (fractals), especially so since Fractals were essentially nerfed with extremely rare ascended drops. With some Raids being easier, the rewards from these can be adjust to be specifically that needed step-up from what fractals currently are. These easier Raids can provide ascended weapon and, at most perhaps, ascended gloves/boots. This being the next step up from fractal prepare players, gear-wise, for the current iteration of Raiding.

Correct me if I’m wrong here, but legendary armor can not be obtained through the Spirit Vale alone. That where harder difficulty Raids come in. Its these that would end up being the final requirements for Legendary armor. This should be what the current Raid Wing should prepare players for.

This is essentially difficulty scaling fractals, why not do the exact same? The thing is, personally I’m actually not fond of the exact model of scaling that fractals use. Because the same monsters/npcs are used from scale 1-100, new attack mechanics/themes aren’t added. Even with each encounter progressively getting harder, the only added “mechanics” are just debuffs which are just passively countered instead of being actual new attacks/ that a player has to learn to actively deal with.

With this progression model of: Dungeons providing exotic gear to prepare for fractals, which provide ascended trinkets to prepare for lower difficulty Raids, which provide weapons to prepare for current Raids, which provide ascended armor to deal with higher difficulty Raids which reward legendary armor…a clear line of progression is made and actually allows for both the exclusivity of legendary armor, while including more people the actual type of challenge that Raids are.

This provides a solution to one of the problems that Raids have, which the large gap in progression between Raids and fractals.

-please ignore any spelling/grammar mistakes i may have made

Glad i checked the forum…almost doubled posted…

I’m not sure I really agree with what you’re saying. Ascended armor is currently not at all required to defeat the current three bosses, nor do I think that it is at all possible to tune an encounter around the ~2% stat increase ascended armor provides. Good execution of mechanics/dodges/rotations will always be way more important than having around 50 extra points in stats total across all your gear. Ascended weapons and trinkets are both extremely helpful – if not necessary – in killing these bosses (especially the later two) as they provide much larger stat increases than ascended armor (to a degree where fights can actually be effectively tuned around them). The current system for acquiring ascended weapons and trinkets is not at all tied to the raids – though by wiping on VG for a few weeks, you can very cheaply acquire ascended weapons (and armor pieces should you want them).

Anet released raids to satisfy a not insignificant portion of the community who has been calling for more challenging content for three years now. The content they released to satisfy this demand (raids, obviously :P) is currently doing an excellent job and the players who had been calling for more of a challenge are extremely happy with the current implementation and difficulties. What you see on these forums is not at all reflective of the opinions of this group of people as most of them tend to avoid it here due to the high levels of negativity (which I’m not saying your post is at all). Satisfied players tend to be silent players.

For Anet to put development time into easier raids would be unfair to the players who are waiting for more hard content. GW2 is filled with easy content. The entire point of raids is to provide a challenge to the top tier of players. That means, and this is something that Anet understands, that the lower tiers of players are probably going to have a very hard time with raids and not find them as fun. Anet identified a subset of the player-base who was completely lacking content they enjoyed, decided they wanted their game to satisfy those people too, and designed content that they could enjoy. If people want easier content, the solution is not to implement easier raids, it’s to implement other types of content that players find easier (dungeons, fractals, meta-events, personal story, achievements/collections, etc.) It’s the job of the raid team to design hard content to release in a timely manner to keep the top tier of players happy. It is not also their job to design medium-difficulty content for everyone else. That’s the job of other teams. I would be very upset/disappointed if the next wing of Spirit Vale was much easier than the current and I had to wait several months beyond that wing for the third wing that would challenge me again.

I think the issue is less that the raid is currently too difficult (for a variety of reasons, some not due to the actual difficulty of the raid) for many players, I think it’s the complete lack of a learning curve.

In the game at this moment, there is no real learning curve up to the mechanical difficulty of raid content as neither dungeons nor fractals have bosses that require the same level of execution.

I don’t think the raids should be lowered in difficulty; I do think that new instanced group content needs to be added that helps with that learning curve such as new fractals or dungeons with similarly difficult and varied mechanics but in a much more forgiving and LFG-supported environment.

Honestly, I think just the fact that groups are able to kill these bosses proves that there is currently ample room to master your profession in the game currently. The learning curve in the raids is more about learning specific boss fights, rather than learning how to play your class. Once you’ve mastered the fight, it becomes trivial, but the next fight still starts out quite difficult, even though you already have your profession mastered.

(PvP and WvW are already really good places to practice mechanics!)

UnbentMars.9126:

I think the issue is less that the raid is currently too difficult (for a variety of reasons, some not due to the actual difficulty of the raid) for many players, I think it’s the complete lack of a learning curve.

In the game at this moment, there is no real learning curve up to the mechanical difficulty of raid content as neither dungeons nor fractals have bosses that require the same level of execution.

I don’t think the raids should be lowered in difficulty; I do think that new instanced group content needs to be added that helps with that learning curve such as new fractals or dungeons with similarly difficult and varied mechanics but in a much more forgiving and LFG-supported environment.

Actually players who were in speed running guilds have experienced a bit of mechanical difficulty and there were fractal bosses that required high level of execution. The difference was that people have ran the same content over and over so that the execution most of the time went flawlessly, but there were lots of coordination before such demonstration of mastery of gw2 combat system in pve. Even before the HoT, good players were already sought out and recruited because it was easy to distinguish player performance based on those runs.

If you track down the guilds that have cleared the raid wing so far, almost all of them were speedrunning dungeon/fractal guilds. Basically if people were actually good and took interest in gw2 combat system in pve, they had very smooth transition to raid community. Its these people that contributed to toxic pug environment such as pinging gears that they don’t have, enforcing “play however I want” attitude in other people’s LFG, and crying out elitism for using meta builds/tactics and they are obviously shunned in raids now.

Raid difficulty is fine as it is, ping/connection issue is something that is out of our hands, and for those who can’t seem to find people, either make your own LFG/Guild, join a guild, or take a look at yourselves to see if you are qualified to raid as you think you are.

softblackcarbon.1537:

Honestly, I think just the fact that groups are able to kill these bosses proves that there is currently ample room to master your profession in the game currently. The learning curve in the raids is more about learning specific boss fights, rather than learning how to play your class. Once you’ve mastered the fight, it becomes trivial, but the next fight still starts out quite difficult, even though you already have your profession mastered.

(PvP and WvW are already really good places to practice mechanics!)

To be fair, the mechanics present in PvP and WvW are vastly different than the ones present in raids. Players behave in manners very different from the way PvE creatures do.

And ample opportunity differs between people. I happen to be in favor of low barriers to entry and right now the barrier of success is fairly steep so I’d love to see some more opportunities for players to increase their skills in progressively more challenging content.

Also I want more dungeons and Fractals, and they are good ways to add such content

TheFamster.7806:

UnbentMars.9126:

I think the issue is less that the raid is currently too difficult (for a variety of reasons, some not due to the actual difficulty of the raid) for many players, I think it’s the complete lack of a learning curve.

In the game at this moment, there is no real learning curve up to the mechanical difficulty of raid content as neither dungeons nor fractals have bosses that require the same level of execution.

I don’t think the raids should be lowered in difficulty; I do think that new instanced group content needs to be added that helps with that learning curve such as new fractals or dungeons with similarly difficult and varied mechanics but in a much more forgiving and LFG-supported environment.

Actually players who were in speed running guilds have experienced a bit of mechanical difficulty and there were fractal bosses that required high level of execution. The difference was that people have ran the same content over and over so that the execution most of the time went flawlessly, but there were lots of coordination before such demonstration of mastery of gw2 combat system in pve. Even before the HoT, good players were already sought out and recruited because it was easy to distinguish player performance based on those runs.

If you track down the guilds that have cleared the raid wing so far, almost all of them were speedrunning dungeon/fractal guilds. Basically if people were actually good and took interest in gw2 combat system in pve, they had very smooth transition to raid community. Its these people that contributed to toxic pug environment such as pinging gears that they don’t have, enforcing “play however I want” attitude in other people’s LFG, and crying out elitism for using meta builds/tactics and they are obviously shunned in raids now.

Raid difficulty is fine as it is, ping/connection issue is something that is out of our hands, and for those who can’t seem to find people, either make your own LFG/Guild, join a guild, or take a look at yourselves to see if you are qualified to raid as you think you are.

If you actually read my comment instead of giving a knee-jerk response, you’ll see that I said I DON’T want raids to be easier, I want there to be more opportunities to get to that level that are purposefully there for that reason.

I agree, current raid fine as is difficulty & mechanic wise. Lore though, man all they did was throw bosses in a row. REskinned bosses at that.
So next raid wing I wouldn’t mind if they just gave a little effort in the story department, or am I the only one that doesn’t want to see a pink Tequatl?

UnbentMars.9126:

To be fair, the mechanics present in PvP and WvW are vastly different than the ones present in raids. Players behave in manners very different from the way PvE creatures do.

And ample opportunity differs between people. I happen to be in favor of low barriers to entry and right now the barrier of success is fairly steep so I’d love to see some more opportunities for players to increase their skills in progressively more challenging content.

Also I want more dungeons and Fractals, and they are good ways to add such content

It’s definitely true that you need to play differently in PvP and WvW than you do in PvE, but the mechanics aren’t all that different. You need to predict abilities and dodge them (definitely harder against players), you need to place your skills well to predict movement. You need to use your skills at the correct time (and you need to know how and when to use all of your abilities). Players are just frankly harder to fight than bosses because bosses are so predictable. I’m not saying that you should play PvP for a month and then expect to waltz into raids and beat all three bosses immediately because your mechanics are good. I’m just saying, if you’re having problems with like, basic keybinding and skill using, PvP will train you to do that better quite quickly as good mechanics are a large factor in success. Spamming 1 against the Shatterer won’t.

The barrier to entry right now in raids is like, have exotic gear (obviously it’s better to have ascended trinkets – easy to get – and weapons – slightly harder to get, but armor is unnecessary). I’d consider that a pretty low barrier to entry as I’ve been using the same exotic gear for the past three years (I’ve upgraded to ascended since then, but again, it’s so unnecessary). The only other barrier is how much practice you’re willing to put in. Like I said, these bosses aren’t at all difficult once you learn that particular fight (that’s true for really any raid boss). You just need to put the time in to master the specific mechanics for each boss and you’ll never have a problem again. The problem isn’t that there’s not enough room in the game to practice mechanics. The problem is that people aren’t willing to put a lot of time into practicing a specific boss. Once that happens, there’s no longer a problem.

For example, my group downed VG this week after two attempts (our first attempt was the first pull of the week and we were all just not warmed up XD) with one or two people who had never downed VG before and had only had an hour or two of experience with the fight. However, because so many of us had put in the work several weeks ago to master the fight, we executed (essentially) flawlessly and didn’t have any trouble “carrying” the people who hadn’t done it before. (Granted those people were also playing quite well. When you’re in a group that is executing well, it’s much easier to quickly reach the same level as the other players in the group as you really only need to focus on your own game and can trust that no one else is going to be making mistakes.)

DresdenAllblack.1249:

I agree, current raid fine as is difficulty & mechanic wise. Lore though, man all they did was throw bosses in a row. REskinned bosses at that.
So next raid wing I wouldn’t mind if they just gave a little effort in the story department, or am I the only one that doesn’t want to see a pink Tequatl?

1. The bosses are quite pretty and unique. The fights are mechanically interesting, and the whole instance is gorgeous.

2. Did you just miss all of the lore in the instance? They’ve set up quite the mystery that I’m sure will get revealed over the next two wings. WoodenPotatoes did a great video detailing the lore of the instance. Check it out if you want: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CkJ9LiR2Hh0