Guild Wars 2

I thought this was one hell of a coincidence that people get to the the endboss of the raid in the first 15mins of release, get booted from server, then anet deactivates raids, which were specifically advertised as the ‘main event’ for the weekend. I haven’t preordered the game and i’m glad I held off, watching some of those people on twitch who I know have barely put like 10minutes into the game each week get to the endboss in such a short timeframe has made me wonder who is this supposed hardcore crowd that anet is targetting?

-If raids are following this same line of unblockable, condi immune, physical immune trend then we NEED to have ways to save builds, having to change out entire traitlines, gear sigils and runes is so tedious

-People already attempting to trio the raid, as someone that enjoys the 5 man dungeon format I’d prefer if the devs would stop pretending that we are going to see more build diversity because of the 10 man format when clearly this isn’t necessary, more people does not equal more engaging content, see any of the open world stuff. When ‘Challenging group content’ was announced I was seriously hoping for a dungeon revamp, new dungeons and a hardmode version of them, all in 5 man format.

-Gimmick mechanics like undodgeable are not challenging, the guy on the stream said specifically, “you won’t be able to dodge your way out of everything” why the hell is blocking treated any differentely both are active ways of mitigating damage it just so happens the block can scale with duration, traits and 2 guard can rotate 100% block uptime which is kittening stupid.

-Unavoidable damage needs to go like maybe there’s a cult out there that specifically worships the agony mechanic if you can even call it that, unavoidable damage is something on this forum have been complaining about for ages and seeing it come back again on this very first raid is just hilarious to be honest it just proves no one reads this garbage forum.

What the hell does unavoidable damage even do for the game? The people I was talking to said to me they got to the endboss very shortly after release, these are people I consider to be the top players, they will always be the top players and giving fanservice to PHIW’s just because they don’t like buzzwords like zerk or meta is why I wonder who is raids being developed for?

TLDR 10 man is a kittenty organization concept, The good players will always be good players no matter how much you nerf their metagame it will evolve. The same kittenty mechanics that people have been complaining about for years return once again in “Challening Group Content”

It’s the first boss, not the endboss, it didn’t even get killed, and “unavoidable damage” is so you can actually have to deal with different mechanics. You are showing a lack of understanding on multiple levels.

Yeah, having seen the first boss it looks underwhelming. They hyped it up as super challenging and so far it seems not the case. They were saying the later bosses in the raid were harder. My question is how much?

INB4 "this is just a beta everything’s going to change, kitten please we’re 3 weeks from release, I’ve played enough beta’s to know when something is a stresstest the game and what we see today won’t change much upon release, their will be minor bugfixes and maybe some scaling of numbers but this is the ‘final form’, you are only deluding yourself if you think otherwise.

When anet actually acknowledged they didn’t know what was capable with their combat system and acknowledged that a meta existed, I thought we would be getting something much much more.

Eulolia.2467:

It’s the first boss, not the endboss, it didn’t even get killed, and “unavoidable damage” is so you can actually have to deal with different mechanics. You are showing a lack of understanding on multiple levels.

It would have been killed by now, incase you forgot people got booted as soon as they inevitably wiped as it would take at least one wipe to learn the mechanics. Some of those players were even using full dps builds.

Unavoidable damage is something that people even on this forum have shown great distaste for, it shows nothing about a player and I see it as fanservice to certain players who don’t like when others play with squishier builds, because maybe those players aren’t good enough to play with that gear themselves so why should this other player be more efficient than them? If I can solo lupicus on my berserker elementalist in a few minutes, but another player can solo lupicus in 30mins while going afk because he is using a cleric build or something that has so much passive regen it is carrying him/her through the encounter I can see why the latter would be upset.
So adding 1k damage tick every now and then and suddenly this is what? challenging? you just forced the berserker player to build around an unavoidable gimmick. If someone sacrifices all survivability to clear an encounter faster and they can do it, why else do you think they add this bullkitten?

Agony resistance acted as sort of a gate for fractals, if you weren’t willing to invest x time to buy infusions and x amount of gold into your gear for cosmetics rewards like fractal weapons then yeah you don’t get to do it, it worked in a way but it shows nothing about how good or how bad a player is, especially when the highest level fractal is literally x chance to take agony damage every now and then, unavoidable. It worked in a different way.

Oh my…

Unavoidable damage in necessary to diversify builds. You either need someone to soak unavoidable damage or you need to heal through it. If all damage is avoidable you might as well give everyone 1 HP and remove Toughness, Vitality and Healing Power from the game. Every MMO who’s had decent raid content has unavoidable damage.

Thanks for the update Paul. I know you can’t pin down an exact ETA, but can you share a ballpark estimate? Just something rough…an hour? later tonight? tomorrow?

The raids are preeeeetty much the only reason I’m playing this beta, so I’m just trying to plan my weekend and whether I should just keep sitting here refreshing the forums, lol.

Evapor.6849:

..

You’re basically saying it’s bad because you don’t (immediately) like it. Raiding would be pretty dull if all you had to was damage the boss while using dodges to stay alive. I mean one lupi is good but you don’t want every boss to be lupi. Having to find a balance between damage and survivability is a challenge for high end content, without it you might as well remove all survivability, defensive support and healing abilities from the game.

As far as overall difficulty is concerned, come back when you’ve killed it? Then you’ll be able to give proper feedback on how it needs to be tuned before launch.

Pandabro.8743:

Oh my…

Unavoidable damage in necessary to diversify builds. You either need someone to soak unavoidable damage or you need to heal through it. If all damage is avoidable you might as well give everyone 1 HP and remove Toughness, Vitality and Healing Power from the game. Every MMO who’s had decent raid content has unavoidable damage.

This is an action mmo not a trinity tab target. If the only way to get people to use different gear is by using an annoying mechanic that people don’t like then there’s a problem with the game. The unavoidable damage literally comes from nowhere it’s just a huge kittening aoe around the boss there isn’t even an animation just a stupid ticker on every player, It’s an afterthought and it shows.

Paul Ella.2037:

dlonie.6547:

Thanks for the update Paul. I know you can’t pin down an exact ETA, but can you share a ballpark estimate? Just something rough…an hour? later tonight? tomorrow?

So I could share with you the top of my head math I do as a producer, but at any point this can become null and void because we find something else and it would bore you to tears.

I can say we are working on this right now and aiming to get this fixed tonight. Believe me, I want the fix out as soon as possible so we can get you all back into raids ASAP.

Thanks for the heads-up Paul, it’s appreciated.

Cool, I’ll keep checking in then.

I know I wouldn’t want to spend my Friday night at work fixing bugs — thanks guys.

3 patches have been released over the past 8 hours. It doesnt matter how many updates/patches you put out, if they dont solve the problem. The game just breaks even more.

Novamatrix.2569:

3 patches have been released over the past 8 hours. It doesnt matter how many updates/patches you put out, if they dont solve the problem. The game just breaks even more.

Ever tried coding? Ever tried a big project? Ever tried it on a 22gb file? It ain’t easy, give them time. Honestly this is what beta is for. That’s the downside of linking beta and the live server, messes can cross over, but overall as salty as I am at them for a lot of things, this is something to be expected, give it time. I will say I hope they extend the beta time a bit if they can’t get things working smoothly quickly. Though tbh I wish they would just leave the beta stuff open for a while

Novamatrix.2569:

3 patches have been released over the past 8 hours. It doesnt matter how many updates/patches you put out, if they dont solve the problem. The game just breaks even more.

So….what’s your point? That they should stop trying? :-?

If ArenaNet links a Beta to the Live environment and something goes wrong (which will happen in a beta) players are outraged. If a Beta is not linked to the Live environment players claim they cannot test properly and are outraged. Good luck solving that issue.

After reading two topics on the forum in the last few minutes I again realise that I should probably not start the day with browsing this forum (or any game forum). I don’t like salt in my tea.

Rose Solane.1027:

If ArenaNet links a Beta to the Live environment and something goes wrong (which will happen in a beta) players are outraged. If a Beta is not linked to the Live environment players claim they cannot test properly and are outraged. Good luck solving that issue.

After reading two topics on the forum in the last few minutes I again realise that I should probably not start the day with browsing this forum (or any game forum). I don’t like salt in my tea.

I prefer Ginger and Honey in my tea nice little kick from the ginger and sweetness from the honey.

Wait? am I on topic? I like tea.

Paul Ella.2037:

We want the metrics from players actually playing the event – kind of hard to do that if we turn them off.

You will then all have the opportunity to help us gather the metric we need to provide the level of challenge you expect.

I’ve posted this before but I didnt get an answer:

• 1 – What would you say is the expected percentage (%) of players that will be able to complete the raids you’ve designed? The first wing at least.
• 2 – Are you allowed to share that %?

I remember Josh Foreman shared with us the % of players expected to complete SAB W2 tribulation for example.

We can give you more meaningful feedback about the difficulty if we know the level of difficulty that is supposed to be.

Evapor.6849:

-If raids are following this same line of unblockable, condi immune, physical immune trend then we NEED to have ways to save builds, having to change out entire traitlines, gear sigils and runes is so tedious

Unblockable is fine as long as it’s fairly weak (To keep constant pressure on the raid’s HP so sustaining yourself is always important) or completely avoidable by other means (The raid boss has an AE mechanic that does less damage when players stack inside of it, this is good design).

I don’t think there was any condi immunity; as for physical immunity; I’m pretty sure the red guardian was meant to be defeated in a different way than just throwing a torrent of conditions on top of him. These trash mobs are meant to teach mechanics, and burning him down with conditions takes way to long if you have to repeat it during the boss fight which has an 8 minute timer.

Don’t disagree that build saving would be nice though.

Evapor.6849:

-People already attempting to trio the raid, as someone that enjoys the 5 man dungeon format I’d prefer if the devs would stop pretending that we are going to see more build diversity because of the 10 man format when clearly this isn’t necessary, more people does not equal more engaging content, see any of the open world stuff. When ‘Challenging group content’ was announced I was seriously hoping for a dungeon revamp, new dungeons and a hardmode version of them, all in 5 man format.

The trash was not hard; but I can say with utter confidence that 3-manning the actual boss is impossible.

And of course more players doesn’t mean harder content; but the game has a problem of have a 5 player buff cap. Positioning isn’t a problem when you can buff everyone in the group in one spot. 10 players fixes this problem somewhat by at least forcing the larger group to split; and then the boss himself has mechanics which force players to spread out (Seekers, and melee displacement) and stack for specific mechanics (the earlier mentioned AE mechanic)

Evapor.6849:

-Gimmick mechanics like undodgeable are not challenging, the guy on the stream said specifically, “you won’t be able to dodge your way out of everything” why the hell is blocking treated any differentely both are active ways of mitigating damage it just so happens the block can scale with duration, traits and 2 guard can rotate 100% block uptime which is kittening stupid.

100% block up time? Are you sure about that? I’m sure a group that has more time in the raid today could attempt that if they felt like it, but I honestly don’t think that’s feasible at all.

Undodgable mechanics are great as long as they have alternative ways of avoiding or mitigating the damage; not everyone has access to block, but everyone has dodge; probably a large factor in that design choice for anything undodgable but blockable.

Evapor.6849:

-Unavoidable damage needs to go like maybe there’s a cult out there that specifically worships the agony mechanic if you can even call it that, unavoidable damage is something on this forum have been complaining about for ages and seeing it come back again on this very first raid is just hilarious to be honest it just proves no one reads this garbage forum.

The unavoidable damage mechanic seems to only be there to keep the raid pressured and mindful of it’s survivability; not to kill you like agony does if you lack the gear. As far as I can see, this mechanic is necessary. It keeps healing important throughout the entire fight and forces people to use their own healing if they feel threatened. This works with the AE mechanic I talked about earlier. You want to keep the groups HP high, against the ticking damage so that when it’s time to spread the damage around from the AE, you can take your shot. Otherwise, this mechanic would be non-threatening.

Evapor.6849:

What the hell does unavoidable damage even do for the game? The people I was talking to said to me they got to the endboss very shortly after release, these are people I consider to be the top players, they will always be the top players and giving fanservice to PHIW’s just because they don’t like buzzwords like zerk or meta is why I wonder who is raids being developed for?

Oh? You consider me a top player then? Flattering, but that trash wasn’t meant to be hard; I just got a group faster than everyone else that didn’t get as far as me before squads were yanked.

And for the record; berzerker stats are still usable; but there is theory crafting to be done with what could be considered the most efficient comp. Is it 3 support 1 control and 6 zerkers? Or maybe 2 support 1 control and 7 zerk/knight hybrids. We’ll be seeing people talk about what the most effective comp is soon; there is a balance to be struck. I do however think that going into the raid with nothing but zerkers will be either near impossible or impossible; probably not worth the trouble when you could trade 3 of those zerkers for support; have less of them go down and get an overall dps increase for the total raid.

Evapor.6849:

TLDR 10 man is a kittenty organization concept, The good players will always be good players no matter how much you nerf their metagame it will evolve. The same kittenty mechanics that people have been complaining about for years return once again in “Challening Group Content”

Yeah; the meta will have to find a different footing in these raids. There’s going to be a power balance of “How many damage builds can we bring while staying alive”.

From the sounds of it; you either just did the trash mobs, or you watched someone else clear the trash and formed this opinion without taking note of what those mobs were actually doing and the mechanics at work. Your opinion is a bit premature and everything you’ve criticized you criticized within a vacuum without considering how they effect each other.

For example “Unavoidable damage is bad because I think it’s bad” doesn’t even take the chance to think about how constant ticking damage like that effects other mechanics; you compare it to agony when agony is meant for checking gear while the damage here is for completely different purposes.

Adapt or leave GW2. I dunno what else to say.

It’s just for the casuals to justify their silly nomad gear.
Don’t worry, the meta will prevail. Maybe a few water field blasts here and there.

Obviously it’s not challenging, especially when challenge means gimmicky puzzle mechanics.