Guild Wars 2

Lots of people in the lfg are giving away access to a cleared instance, so that can give you the overwhelming majority of lore.

Then just watch Wp’s video for the rest of it
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ixilaIk5pCM&t=2118s

Chris McSwag.4683:

draxynnic.3719:

while GW2 raids were explicitly designed with the expectation that anyone planning to go all the way through would have full Ascended. Furthermore, playing in elite areas in GW1, with the possible exceptions of the Factions zones, pretty much felt just like you were playing anywhere else except that the enemies were harder. GW2 raids, however, are quite different to anywhere else: you need a larger group, there’s a greater focus on encounter mechanics, you have enrage counters and DPS checks calibrated so that you need to play almost perfectly, and so on.

Max level gear is easy to get for anyone that plays somewhat frequently or has been playing for a while. You could lose your way to an almost full armor set in pvp, LS3 maps are easy farms for trinkets/backpacks and T4 fractals reward ascended equipment somewhat frequently(I have 12 sets, crafted only one).
Even with that in mind, ascended is in no way a requirement for raids apart from requirements that GROUP COMMANDERS may impose on others. The enrage timers are pretty generous once you get mechanics down, especially in the new wing, and there is no need whatsoever to play perfectly either (Near perfect play typically leaves you with 50-60% of the timers left)

Suggesting that people play high-tier fractals to get ascended armour is a catch-22 and you know it. You don’t survive at those tiers without having a lot of agony resistance. Sure, it can help you diversify once you’ve got your first set, but it’s not a viable method of getting the first set. You also need to play 74 fractals just to get your personal reward scale up high enough. That’s a significant amount of time where Guild Wars 2 was advertised as a game where you don’t have to grind in order to prepare to have fun.

“Losing your way to Ascended”… well, I haven’t done the maths to calculate how many games it takes to get to the season cap, but even if you win every game it’s a significant time investment, noting again that Guild Wars 2 was advertised as a game where you can just have fun rather than spending your time grinding in order to prepare to have fun. I actually enjoy sPvP, but I didn’t have the time to go all the way to hit the cap of Ascended shards, nor the inclination to keep playing when I was on a losing streak (believe me, losing your way to anything isn’t exactly fun). Pity the person who tries that route when they DON’T enjoy PvP… and the poor sods who do and end up with them in their team.

Trinkets and backpacks… yeah, they’re reasonably accessible.

As for the assertion that you don’t need it, because good groups get through with time to spare…

Yes, but good luck finding a group of 9 players at that level who are willing to spend their time carrying your inexperienced kitten.

The sort of teams that you’re likely to get as an inexperienced raider are exactly the teams that need every advantage they can get.

People are having a go at having a ‘story mode’, but you know what? Even putting the story aside, I’d rather have a training mode then spend hours banging my head against the initial or mid phases just to earn the opportunity to practice the final phase. I think a more forgiving mode would be useful for training, since it would grant an opportunity to practice against the whole boss rather than being a case of having to master one phase just to get the opportunity to practice against the next.

I’ve seen a couple of people suggesting that people would just cheese the easier mode, but in response to that, I repeat:

Most people suggesting a story mode would be happy with the story mode having no rewards at all, and just be there for the experience.

(Although it would probably be reasonable for a story mode to allow the achievements that you can get out of a cleared instance)

What would be the kittening point of playing it more than once apart from training if the rewards are nonexistent or no better than what you can get through casual PvE roaming?

draxynnic.3719:

As for the assertion that you don’t need it, because good groups get through with time to spare…

Yes, but good luck finding a group of 9 players at that level who are willing to spend their time carrying your inexperienced kitten.

…particularly since I just noticed you explicitly saying in another thread that they shouldn’t have to. Oh, the irony:

Chris McSwag.4683:

Scykosix.7836:

Elbritil.3817:

this is the same thing as in reality with jobs: experience needed, but as an entrant, u dont have any. u need a job to get experience, but job needs it… try to find groups without restriction

I dont know what experience you are describing. You get the experience you need after 15 LI. However people demand 150 some even 200, but most of the time its not below 100.
Please dont compare it with REAL jobs. You spam 1 2 3 to kill a scripted mob.

The experience you need for what? To get efficient kills? Or just to kill it sometime?
It takes time to learn encounters and optimise rotations to the point where you get smooth kills 9/10 times and the 150LI groups want just that, smooth kills. They dont want people that know mechanics but frequently fail them(very common in sub 100 groups) or people that do ok dps, but not good.

There are of course exceptions, but a high LI count does in general mean more experience and higher skill. Why should experienced groups be forced to carry less experienced or even bad players? Entitlement is real

I agree, incidentally, they shouldn’t have to. But you can’t have it both ways – if you can’t expect experienced groups to carry inexperienced raiders, then you just can’t expect inexperienced raiders to find an experienced group to carry them.

I watched some play through videos, of Samarog and Deimos as well as the cinematics that show us Saul’s lore. Honestly, those little snippets with Saul are far more interesting than the LS3 episodes I’ve completed thus far.

Also, it’s a real shame to design such utterly epic and fantastic kittening bosses and not make sure that everyone has reasonable chance of beating ‘em. That ’Queensdale 2.0’ kittenshow that is the new map is just….god-kittened inadequate man. They’re really starting to treating non-raiders like the proverbial red-headed stepchildren.

ANet doesn’t care. They could easily release a cleared personal instance of the raid at the time of release, or a few weeks after so people aren’t begging for clears, or when the raid eventually becomes dead.

That’s the worst part. When the raid clears die down, all this lore becomes next to impossible to access for some let alone now when it’s active. Especially in a game like GW2 where the gear scaling doesn’t make it soloable over time.

Same with the dungeons and fractals. I get why some content is group based, but the story should be easily accessible to all even if that access comes in the future, and NOT in poorly summarized text blobs from an NPC or something. As well, there’s Youtube and the Wiki, but honestly, there’s a HUGE different getting the lore that way and in-game where you’re running around a cleared instance or an “easy mode” or something.

MMO stories are hard enough to follow as it is, fragmenting it with barriers is just… bad design.

draxynnic.3719:

draxynnic.3719:

As for the assertion that you don’t need it, because good groups get through with time to spare…

Yes, but good luck finding a group of 9 players at that level who are willing to spend their time carrying your inexperienced kitten.

…particularly since I just noticed you explicitly saying in another thread that they shouldn’t have to. Oh, the irony:

Chris McSwag.4683:

Scykosix.7836:

Elbritil.3817:

this is the same thing as in reality with jobs: experience needed, but as an entrant, u dont have any. u need a job to get experience, but job needs it… try to find groups without restriction

I dont know what experience you are describing. You get the experience you need after 15 LI. However people demand 150 some even 200, but most of the time its not below 100.
Please dont compare it with REAL jobs. You spam 1 2 3 to kill a scripted mob.

The experience you need for what? To get efficient kills? Or just to kill it sometime?
It takes time to learn encounters and optimise rotations to the point where you get smooth kills 9/10 times and the 150LI groups want just that, smooth kills. They dont want people that know mechanics but frequently fail them(very common in sub 100 groups) or people that do ok dps, but not good.

There are of course exceptions, but a high LI count does in general mean more experience and higher skill. Why should experienced groups be forced to carry less experienced or even bad players? Entitlement is real

I agree, incidentally, they shouldn’t have to. But you can’t have it both ways – if you can’t expect experienced groups to carry inexperienced raiders, then you just can’t expect inexperienced raiders to find an experienced group to carry them.

GW2 has no mandatory grind, i.e. no gear treadmill. No grind philosophy doesnt mean getting everything at once, and i merely gave a bunch of suggestions on how to gear up apart from crafting (whcih given AB multi mapping would be an easy alternative as well). It’s still ENDGAME content (so is fractals t4), so why should it be easy for someone new to the game?

You’re kinda missing the points in my posts completely. Im not saying all groups will have 50% of the enrage timer left upon kill(I’d estimate this to be 1-2% of groups), I’m opposing your claim that you need to play perfect to beat the encounters – which you do not.

You shouldnt try to find 9 experienced players to carry you, you should find players to learn with. Will you die alot? Will it take a significant amount of time? Will it require you to step up your game? Yes to all three, but its the same journey most raiders have done – its not like people magically became raid experts

Jahroots.6791:

Also, it’s a real shame to design such utterly epic and fantastic kittening bosses and not make sure that everyone has reasonable chance of beating ’em.

This might just be a stretch but maybe just maybe these bosses are so epic and fantastic is because they are a real challenge to face and not the current incarnation difficulty level of Chak Gerent in TD for instance.

Imagine seeing Samarog sweep you with a giant spear, and the damage that shows up indicates a Skritt in Dry Top hits harder. You lose so much immersion when the boss isn’t as threatening as its appearance. Why do you think the Mouth of Mordremoth fight is disliked so much compared to the triple boss coordination before it? It’s almost ironic really, well-designed and epic encounters cannot be weak to fight.

ButterPeanut.9746:

Wing 4 lore is NOT important lore. It has no effect on any of the gw2 story of the past and LS going forward.

Wing 4 lore is a wrap up from GW1, nothing more. You may like that story, but it doesn’t make it important to gw2.

Not important lore? Did you not play gw1?
Its like reading a book with the ending ripped out of the book or watching a film with deleted end scene and sharing it only with small group of people that probably dont care about that part in the first place.
That lore from the new wing may lead into something in the living world same way w3 did.

As somebody that clears raids weekly and is not in favor of multiple easier training modes. I still think lore fanatics have a valid complain. Some of the best story telling is not available to a majority of interested people and it sucks balls for them. A story mode would definitely improve their situation.

At the same time the reason raids are so succesful as a story telling tool is the fact that bosses are a real threat hence offering immersive story content. Is the time and effort spend at creating a pale version of the real thing that does not offer a whole lot more than a cleared instance which will be played through once or twice by a small subset of the population really worth it?

I think it is worth it but I can imagine Arenanet decidinh the opposite.

Sykper.6583:

This might just be a stretch but maybe just maybe these bosses are so epic and fantastic is because they are a real challenge to face and not the current incarnation difficulty level of Chak Gerent in TD for instance.

Imagine seeing Samarog sweep you with a giant spear, and the damage that shows up indicates a Skritt in Dry Top hits harder. You lose so much immersion when the boss isn’t as threatening as its appearance. Why do you think the Mouth of Mordremoth fight is disliked so much compared to the triple boss coordination before it? It’s almost ironic really, well-designed and epic encounters cannot be weak to fight.

Ehhhh. There’s a lot of truth to that, but when I’m in an RPG I like to think of my characters as unstoppable juggernauts of kitten-kicking. So I expect a bit of a challenge, but I’m the hero here so there’s never any real doubt that I’m gonna win in the end.

Of course, I’m not an unreasonable man. I wouldn’t expect open world accessibility in a raid, just something more like T3 – T4 fractals accessible.

There is a massive gap between “You won’t beat this unless you spend a couple hours wiping repeatedly while you try to memorize a bunch of stuff and time everything perfectly” and “Pay attention cause this guy will kick your kitten if you’re sloppy.”

But as is, I’m probably gonna have to suck it up and give raiding one more go. This stuff looks waaaay too cool not to experience firsthand.

DutchRiders.2871:

As somebody that clears raids weekly and is not in favor of multiple easier training modes. I still think lore fanatics have a valid complain. Some of the best story telling is not available to a majority of interested people and it sucks balls for them. A story mode would definitely improve their situation.

At the same time the reason raids are so succesful as a story telling tool is the fact that bosses are a real threat hence offering immersive story content. Is the time and effort spend at creating a pale version of the real thing that does not offer a whole lot more than a cleared instance which will be played through once or twice by a small subset of the population really worth it?

I think it is worth it but I can imagine Arenanet decidinh the opposite.

in the new raid tell me which part of the best storytelling is locked exactly?

Scykosix.7836:

ButterPeanut.9746:

Wing 4 lore is NOT important lore. It has no effect on any of the gw2 story of the past and LS going forward.

Wing 4 lore is a wrap up from GW1, nothing more. You may like that story, but it doesn’t make it important to gw2.

Not important lore? Did you not play gw1?
Its like reading a book with the ending ripped out of the book or watching a film with deleted end scene and sharing it only with small group of people that probably dont care about that part in the first place.
That lore from the new wing may lead into something in the living world same way w3 did.

the events of w3 did not lead to the explosion of the bloodstone, also the guy says its not importand lore for gw2 which tbh is true

zealex.9410:

DutchRiders.2871:

As somebody that clears raids weekly and is not in favor of multiple easier training modes. I still think lore fanatics have a valid complain. Some of the best story telling is not available to a majority of interested people and it sucks balls for them. A story mode would definitely improve their situation.

At the same time the reason raids are so succesful as a story telling tool is the fact that bosses are a real threat hence offering immersive story content. Is the time and effort spend at creating a pale version of the real thing that does not offer a whole lot more than a cleared instance which will be played through once or twice by a small subset of the population really worth it?

I think it is worth it but I can imagine Arenanet decidinh the opposite.

in the new raid tell me which part of the best storytelling is locked exactly?

I would guess Glenna’s one liners as you progress through the wing as well as the shackled prisoner’s one liners in the final encounter. The rest is easily accessible by entering a cleared instance, apart from immersion of course(though one could argue immersion would be gone in ez mode anyway, just look at Zhaitan)

Jahroots.6791:

But as is, I’m probably gonna have to suck it up and give raiding one more go. This stuff looks waaaay too cool not to experience firsthand.

That’s the spirit!

It might be difficult as guilds are likely still making the guides for these encounters so that the general public can get involved with the strats. However I will say that the first three encounters of the new wing are more friendly as long as you are yourself fairly capable at knowing where to stand and when to dodge.

Deimos will be a true test of your mettle, he’s a hard one!

Sykper.6583:

Jahroots.6791:

But as is, I’m probably gonna have to suck it up and give raiding one more go. This stuff looks waaaay too cool not to experience firsthand.

That’s the spirit!

It might be difficult as guilds are likely still making the guides for these encounters so that the general public can get involved with the strats. However I will say that the first three encounters of the new wing are more friendly as long as you are yourself fairly capable at knowing where to stand and when to dodge.

Deimos will be a true test of your mettle, he’s a hard one!

HYPE \0/ (yes my head is this big)

Chris McSwag.4683:

GW2 has no mandatory grind, i.e. no gear treadmill. No grind philosophy doesnt mean getting everything at once, and i merely gave a bunch of suggestions on how to gear up apart from crafting (whcih given AB multi mapping would be an easy alternative as well). It’s still ENDGAME content (so is fractals t4), so why should it be easy for someone new to the game?

You’re kinda missing the points in my posts completely. Im not saying all groups will have 50% of the enrage timer left upon kill(I’d estimate this to be 1-2% of groups), I’m opposing your claim that you need to play perfect to beat the encounters – which you do not.

You shouldnt try to find 9 experienced players to carry you, you should find players to learn with. Will you die alot? Will it take a significant amount of time? Will it require you to step up your game? Yes to all three, but its the same journey most raiders have done – its not like people magically became raid experts

Tried that. When I talked about banging my head against the initial or mid phase just to earn an opportunity to practice against the final phase, I wasn’t speaking theoretically. In fact, I was part of a guild group in the first weekend VG was open.

It was a sufficiently unpleasant experience that I told my guild that I’d consider subbing in when a regular can’t make it, but I would not be a regular. Partly because I have things outside of GW2 such that I couldn’t really commit to raiding every week at a specific time anyway, but largely because I simply don’t have enough free time to throw hours of my entertainment and relaxation time away on something that’s neither entertaining nor relaxing. I don’t know if you consider if fun spending hours eating dirt trying to get through an 8-minute fight that became repetitive hours ago, but I certainly don’t!

Now if there was an easier mode – call it story mode, training mode, whatever you like – maybe I, and others, wouldn’t have had such a bad first impression, and there’d be more people raiding now rather than complaining about raiding. An easy mode/hard mode split has been a successful model since it was introduced in Guild Wars 1, and I really don’t see a good reason not to use it here.

I’m not a new player – I’ve been around from the beginning of both games. However, I get bored by repetition quickly, and a large part of my interest in the franchise has been the idea – one that has been steadily eroded, the introduction of Ascended being GW2’s first big backlash that lead to the promise that Ascended would only ever be really relevant for fractals – that you can get in and play on a level playing field without having to spend hours in gear grind. Guess what! Getting to high level fractals is repeating the same content for loot – gear grind (fractals were originally introduced as a microcosm of the game for the players who DO like gear grind). AB multiloot is gear grind. Having access to ascended through PvP is a welcome alternative, but if you get to the point where you’re ‘losing your way to Ascended’ then this is gear grind, not to mention obnoxious to the people who actually want to progress in the league that end up with you on their team.

(For the record, I have got a few kills since while substituting. However, this doesn’t change my opinion. Nor does it change my observation that it doesn’t matter if experienced teams can clear the bosses with enough margin that they don’t need Ascended gear when those experienced teams generally don’t accept players who don’t have their raiding experience. You start out needing every advantage you can get – it’s when you’ve built up experience that you can start doing things like getting kills in greens to show you can.)

draxynnic.3719:

Chris McSwag.4683:

GW2 has no mandatory grind, i.e. no gear treadmill. No grind philosophy doesnt mean getting everything at once, and i merely gave a bunch of suggestions on how to gear up apart from crafting (whcih given AB multi mapping would be an easy alternative as well). It’s still ENDGAME content (so is fractals t4), so why should it be easy for someone new to the game?

You’re kinda missing the points in my posts completely. Im not saying all groups will have 50% of the enrage timer left upon kill(I’d estimate this to be 1-2% of groups), I’m opposing your claim that you need to play perfect to beat the encounters – which you do not.

You shouldnt try to find 9 experienced players to carry you, you should find players to learn with. Will you die alot? Will it take a significant amount of time? Will it require you to step up your game? Yes to all three, but its the same journey most raiders have done – its not like people magically became raid experts

Tried that. When I talked about banging my head against the initial or mid phase just to earn an opportunity to practice against the final phase, I wasn’t speaking theoretically. In fact, I was part of a guild group in the first weekend VG was open.

It was a sufficiently unpleasant experience that I told my guild that I’d consider subbing in when a regular can’t make it, but I would not be a regular. Partly because I have things outside of GW2 such that I couldn’t really commit to raiding every week at a specific time anyway, but largely because I simply don’t have enough free time to throw hours of my entertainment and relaxation time away on something that’s neither entertaining nor relaxing. I don’t know if you consider if fun spending hours eating dirt trying to get through an 8-minute fight that became repetitive hours ago, but I certainly don’t!

Now if there was an easier mode – call it story mode, training mode, whatever you like – maybe I, and others, wouldn’t have had such a bad first impression, and there’d be more people raiding now rather than complaining about raiding. An easy mode/hard mode split has been a successful model since it was introduced in Guild Wars 1, and I really don’t see a good reason not to use it here.

I’m not a new player – I’ve been around from the beginning of both games. However, I get bored by repetition quickly, and a large part of my interest in the franchise has been the idea – one that has been steadily eroded, the introduction of Ascended being GW2’s first big backlash that lead to the promise that Ascended would only ever be really relevant for fractals – that you can get in and play on a level playing field without having to spend hours in gear grind. Guess what! Getting to high level fractals is repeating the same content for loot – gear grind (fractals were originally introduced as a microcosm of the game for the players who DO like gear grind). AB multiloot is gear grind. Having access to ascended through PvP is a welcome alternative, but if you get to the point where you’re ‘losing your way to Ascended’ then this is gear grind, not to mention obnoxious to the people who actually want to progress in the league that end up with you on their team.

(For the record, I have got a few kills since while substituting. However, this doesn’t change my opinion. Nor does it change my observation that it doesn’t matter if experienced teams can clear the bosses with enough margin that they don’t need Ascended gear when those experienced teams generally don’t accept players who don’t have their raiding experience. You start out needing every advantage you can get – it’s when you’ve built up experience that you can start doing things like getting kills in greens to show you can.)

loot =/= gear ill leave this here oh and also do you know why the zhaitan fight was so bad ? it was because it was faceroll easy to.the point where its sad.The “amazing” lore raids have is becaise you get invested to the story through the challenging content its not that the challenging content block you from getting that lore it makes it even better…say u want raids to be another zhaitan fight?

draxynnic.3719:

Tried that. When I talked about banging my head against the initial or mid phase just to earn an opportunity to practice against the final phase, I wasn’t speaking theoretically. In fact, I was part of a guild group in the first weekend VG was open.

It was a sufficiently unpleasant experience that I told my guild that I’d consider subbing in when a regular can’t make it, but I would not be a regular. Partly because I have things outside of GW2 such that I couldn’t really commit to raiding every week at a specific time anyway, but largely because I simply don’t have enough free time to throw hours of my entertainment and relaxation time away on something that’s neither entertaining nor relaxing. I don’t know if you consider if fun spending hours eating dirt trying to get through an 8-minute fight that became repetitive hours ago, but I certainly don’t!

I read this argument time and time again. Maybe it wasn’t the right guild for you? I’m part of a raiding guild and nobody cares if you don’t want to raid 1 or 2 weeks in a row. Real life > raid. If you write down your name in the raid planer and you can’t make it that evening, nobody hates you for that if you say something, even if it is on time for the raid to start as long as you message someone. Life happens and that is fine.
This is not a problem with raids but with yourself and your social environment.

draxynnic.3719:

Tried that…

This must be one of the worst posts in this thread. You tried VG on the very first week it came out, when noone had any idea of composition and tactics and you thought it was annoying it was difficult? Well obviously it’s gonna be difficult then isn’kitten

Secondly, if you hate dieing and wiping and spending a long time on a boss to progress, raiding will never be content truly for you and no training mode is ever going to change that. Having to try again and again and not be afraid to fail is a necessity for raid. Getting ascended trinkets and weapons is pretty easy and exo armor is fine, for beginners aswell.

Guild wars 2 has almost no gear grind, ascended is easy to get and its the top level. Every game forces you to progress skills or gear a tiny bit. You can jump in to GW2 and have fun without a gear grind, raids just ask for a bit more planning. 1% of the game requires this, where 99% of the game you can wear whatever you want. So saying how GW2 betrayed it’s promises and “you cant go in the game and just have fun anymore” is crazy.

Your last words about how PvP and AB multiloot are gear grinds just makes no sense. You literally can use white gear to play PvP? The fact that you can get nice rewards but have to play a fair bit for it isn’t a grind, it’s common sense. AB multiloot is a farm, noone forces you to do it. Your entire post is just crazy.

A question to everyone opposing the idea of an easier mode, call it story mode, training mode, easy mode, whatever you like…

Let’s say that ArenaNet did introduce one, with the minimum amount of extra work to make it happen. So they’d need something to allow people to choose this mode (a reverse challenge mote, say) possibly disable some features, and perhaps scale down the numbers, comparable to the difference between doing the Domain of Anguish in normal mode rather than Hard Mode. They also make it so that all the exclusive rewards for raids currently are still exclusive to completing the raids at the current level of difficulty.

How would you be disadvantaged by this?

loot =/= gear ill leave this here

(Weird, the forum lost the quote identifier…)

Chris.McSwag suggested it as an option (albeit an obsolete one) in an earlier post. The connection is clear. Loot -> Wealth -> Resources for crafting Ascended. Present examples could include, for instance, Silverwastes farming and Cursed Shore event farming.

oh and also do you know why the zhaitan fight was so bad ? it was because it was faceroll easy to.the point where its sad.The “amazing” lore raids have is becaise you get invested to the story through the challenging content its not that the challenging content block you from getting that lore it makes it even better…say u want raids to be another zhaitan fight?

Not sure if this is a false dilemma, strawman, or both, but it certainly bears no relevance to what people are asking for. There’s a broad range of challenge between the current raids and pressing 2 to win. I’d expect the proposed ‘easy mode raids’ to be no easier than taking on Lupicus with exotic gear using the builds available at the time. Still hard enough to make for an epic fight, but a little more forgiving. As I said in a previous post, just removing the enrage timers, DPS checks, and inability to res defeated players would make a big difference in accessibility while still being fairly challenging: it would allow players to go in with more defensive gear and work their way through it slowly rather than the current environment where the majority of participants need to be in berserker/viper/sinister just to have a chance.

Baseleader.4128:

This must be one of the worst posts in this thread. You tried VG on the very first week it came out, when noone had any idea of composition and tactics and you thought it was annoying it was difficult? Well obviously it’s gonna be difficult then isn’kitten

Secondly, if you hate dieing and wiping and spending a long time on a boss to progress, raiding will never be content truly for you and no training mode is ever going to change that. Having to try again and again and not be afraid to fail is a necessity for raid. Getting ascended trinkets and weapons is pretty easy and exo armor is fine, for beginners aswell.

First weekend, not first day. People knew the mechanics by then, and IIRC, there was at least one person in the group who had done it before. It’s probably not too unreflective of what a typical group of first-time raiders would achieve without having a significant backbone of experienced raiders to prop them up. You’ll note that I have played since, and got a few kills in the process, but that was with a core of more experienced raiders.

The problem with the current system for practicing is that you don’t even get to see a given phase until you’ve beaten the phase before. So you spend an hour learning the first phase, and then you need to deal with the second. Spend an hour and a half mastering that (including time spent repeating phase 1, possibly including the odd fail because you still haven’t quite mastered it), and then you earn the right to fail on phase 3. And so on. Oh, and if you happen to be the one who messes up and gets defeated in an early phase, you don’t get to practice the later phases in that run at all.

Now, let’s consider the proposed alternative of a ‘training mode’ whereby you don’t have the enrage timer, can res defeated allies, and so on. You’ll probably still fail the first few times. Then you start succeeding, but it’s slow and required a few revivals. Then you can start practicing the whole thing. You have less people getting defeated, you get faster, you can start switching out defensive gear for glass cannon gear. Eventually, you get to the point where you’re ready to pit yourselves against the real thing – but you have measurable progress along the way, rather than feeling like you’re hitting your head against a brick wall and when that finally breaks, there’s just another brick wall behind it.

This is pretty much exactly the process that people went through to take explorable dungeons from something that was hard to something that was speed-run as a matter of routine. Experienced raiders are already running raids as a matter of routine, so the end result is something that people can get to anyway. This is simply a matter of lowering the barrier to get started.

Guild wars 2 has almost no gear grind, ascended is easy to get and its the top level. Every game forces you to progress skills or gear a tiny bit. You can jump in to GW2 and have fun without a gear grind, raids just ask for a bit more planning. 1% of the game requires this, where 99% of the game you can wear whatever you want. So saying how GW2 betrayed it’s promises and “you cant go in the game and just have fun anymore” is crazy.

A full set of Ascended armour is over 500 gold just for the insignias and deldrimor ingots/damask/elonian leather, let alone all the other materials that go into it, and that’s assuming you already have 500 crafting and the recipes. That’s a big investment for someone who doesn’t enjoy farming… and in a raiding context, you might need to do it again if you want to switch to a profession with a different armour type for any reason.

I’m sure now there’s someone out there getting ready to jump in with “But you can get everything you need in X hours at Y farming spot!” – but that’s missing the point. For someone who doesn’t enjoy farming, that’s X hours of preparing to have fun instead of having fun – and the pre-release advertising for GW2 was as a game where you didn’t have to do that. At all:

ArenaNet

So if you love MMORPGs, you should check out Guild Wars 2. But if you hate traditional MMORPGs, then you should really check out Guild Wars 2. Because, like Guild Wars before it, GW2 doesn’t fall into the traps of traditional MMORPGs. It doesn’t suck your life away and force you onto a grinding treadmill; it doesn’t make you spend hours preparing to have fun rather than just having fun; and of course, it doesn’t have a monthly fee.

Emphasis mine.

draxynnic.3719:

As I said in a previous post, just removing the enrage timers, DPS checks, and inability to res defeated players would make a big difference in accessibility while still being fairly challenging: it would allow players to go in with more defensive gear and work their way through it slowly rather than the current environment where the majority of participants need to be in berserker/viper/sinister just to have a chance.

Hi,
Can you please give a specific example of all those “Enrage timers” and “DPS checks” that are stopping you from progress with your defensive gear? I can’t think of anything apart from Gorseval (and even there, you still can).

I can’t believe that “Ascended is hard to get” is even an argument again. ><

Gorseval is one. VG and Gorseval both have, or at least had (it’s been a while) timers that you had to beat them by or they’ll start doing massively increased damage with their attacks – 8 minutes and 6 minutes respectfully, IIRC.

And… that argument’s going to come up for as long as ArenaNet generates content that is balanced on the assumption that players have Ascended. (Yes, you can beat raid bosses with lesser gear… but they told us when they were in development that they’re balanced for players in Ascended.)

draxynnic.3719:

Gorseval is one. VG and Gorseval both have, or at least had (it’s been a while) timers that you had to beat them by or they’ll start doing massively increased damage with their attacks – 8 minutes and 6 minutes respectfully, IIRC.

And… that argument’s going to come up for as long as ArenaNet generates content that is balanced on the assumption that players have Ascended. (Yes, you can beat raid bosses with lesser gear… but they told us when they were in development that they’re balanced for players in Ascended.)

Yes, (nearly) all bosses have timers that increase their damage when they are over, how does it prevent you from beating them with your defensive build?
If you know you are going to deal with more damage, why not go more defensive?
How did VG enrage prevent you from killing him? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DSuAsm2Kv9M
Is there any other example than Gorseval?

The balance in the game is terrible, they can tell us it’s balanced around Ascended gear but it’s clearly isn’t.
Exotics are more than enough, but there is absolutely no reason to not have at least Ascended Weapons/Trinkets, both can be achieved without any grind from Laurels, LS3 maps, Achievements, ~2 days of daily fractals, Open world drops, etc’.
No issue with all/most Armor being exotic & also no reason to not at least try and slowly work towards it by doing Fractals once a while, or using your Magnetide Shards.

Generally speaking, the damage increase from an enrage timer is such that the enrage timer running out pretty much becomes a case of a race to finish it off before it finishes you off.

Although a pack of healing tempests on the VG is certainly an amusing option, I suspect that’s not an option that will work for every boss.

Apart from examples other than Gorseval… Maybe? I’ve only had the opportunity to face VG, Gorseval, and Wing 3 up to but not including Keep Construct.

Regarding being balanced around Ascended: Well, they obviously don’t mean that you need to have both Ascended and to play perfectly to win… the better you play, the less optimal gear you can get away with. It’s also worth noting that the earlier bosses of each wing are generally scaled lower than the later ones. I interpret that as them being designed to have their intended difficulty for players in full Ascended.

(Which they kind of have to be, so that there’s endgame content which avoids being trivialised by higher-tier gear. However, it shows that the people who called slippery slope when Ascended was first introduced were justified: we now have a gear tier which requires a significant expenditure to reach and which is becoming the expected standard for content.)

PS Now that I’ve given answers to your questions, mind answering mine?

draxynnic.3719:

we now have a gear tier which requires a significant expenditure to reach and which is becoming the expected standard for content.)

You have to be fair: The introduction of ascended armor took place in 2013 starting with trinkets that were easily obtainable at that time and also nowadays.
Almost exactly 2 years of time passed by between the introduction of armor and weapons and the release of the first raid. Additionally, when they announced the first wing they told players that ascended would be needed to beat the final boss (which wasn’t correct as we all know today) and everybody got enough time (a month or so) to achieve masteries and of course the gear.
So long term players have been prepared very well by Anet. I know it’s a different thing for beginners but hey, that’s something nearly all games have in common.
And even with that, I’ve only seen a few groups kicking out players, many others had no problem with exotics + asc trinkets because in most of the groups nobody is perfect with dps rotations.
Heck, the overwhelming majority isn’t even gearchecking at all.
On average the damage difference is just a background noise and it’s definitely not the case that exotic armor on 2-4 players is a fatal reason for multiple wipes – mechanics >>>>> gear!
Today, it has never been easier to acquire ascended gear, while back then it took me months to gear my first character. So, complaining about ascended is not serious if you really really really want to raid.

draxynnic.3719:

Generally speaking, the damage increase from an enrage timer is such that the enrage timer running out pretty much becomes a case of a race to finish it off before it finishes you off.

Although a pack of healing tempests on the VG is certainly an amusing option, I suspect that’s not an option that will work for every boss.

Apart from examples other than Gorseval… Maybe? I’ve only had the opportunity to face VG, Gorseval, and Wing 3 up to but not including Keep Construct.

Regarding being balanced around Ascended: Well, they obviously don’t mean that you need to have both Ascended and to play perfectly to win… the better you play, the less optimal gear you can get away with. It’s also worth noting that the earlier bosses of each wing are generally scaled lower than the later ones. I interpret that as them being designed to have their intended difficulty for players in full Ascended.

(Which they kind of have to be, so that there’s endgame content which avoids being trivialised by higher-tier gear. However, it shows that the people who called slippery slope when Ascended was first introduced were justified: we now have a gear tier which requires a significant expenditure to reach and which is becoming the expected standard for content.)

Anet released a statement saying that Ascended gear is recommended and not required, which implies that it wasn’t balanced around Ascended gear, just because you interpret something as being different doesn’t change the facts that they were definitely not balanced around Ascended gear, otherwise you wouldn’t have people Low manning every boss up till the new wing, as well as people clearing bosses in All greens, yes it takes more skill to do those things but those also show that the Stats/Gear are not mandatory to be Ascended, Anet has made the bosses more mechanic centric vs stat centric, which emphasizes on player/group knowledge and skill.

There is only one Type of Content that makes Ascended mandatory and that is Fractals, you don’t need Ascended gear for anything else in game and nothing else is designed/balanced around Ascended gear.

And since there is no gear treadmill in this game( treadmill referring to a never ending climb) the Raids are not trivialized by Ascended, and Ascended is not much of an expenditure, with having multiple ways to acquire, through crafting, Raiding, Fractals, Pvp( the easiest and fastest way to get Ascended gear to date takes maybe two-four days of PvP to get 5/6 pieces of armor or 3/6 armor and 2 weapons) as well as getting them as random drops in every game Type from open world bosses to Fractals and Raids as well as PvP and wvw.

draxynnic.3719:

Generally speaking, the damage increase from an enrage timer is such that the enrage timer running out pretty much becomes a case of a race to finish it off before it finishes you off.

Although a pack of healing tempests on the VG is certainly an amusing option, I suspect that’s not an option that will work for every boss.

Apart from examples other than Gorseval… Maybe? I’ve only had the opportunity to face VG, Gorseval, and Wing 3 up to but not including Keep Construct.

Regarding being balanced around Ascended: Well, they obviously don’t mean that you need to have both Ascended and to play perfectly to win… the better you play, the less optimal gear you can get away with. It’s also worth noting that the earlier bosses of each wing are generally scaled lower than the later ones. I interpret that as them being designed to have their intended difficulty for players in full Ascended.

(Which they kind of have to be, so that there’s endgame content which avoids being trivialised by higher-tier gear. However, it shows that the people who called slippery slope when Ascended was first introduced were justified: we now have a gear tier which requires a significant expenditure to reach and which is becoming the expected standard for content.)

PS Now that I’ve given answers to your questions, mind answering mine?

Answered in order of your paragraphs.
1. Why does it become the case? if you play defensive, it won’t finish you off.

2. Every boss? maybe not. Most of them? You tell me:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k3ZYjeG3YTA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bEcVtSo0-H8

3. If you have no knowledge of other bosses & their enrage mechanics, please stop posting about how they limit you from completing raids.

4. I don’t see anything here that contradicts the fact that Ascended is not mandatory.
While the last bosses of each wing can be considered the hardest, they all also have the most generous timers.

Lastly, for your question: In a perfect world where resources are unlimited, I wouldn’t mind (even though I believe that it won’t do any help for those who want to learn raiding).
This is not a perfect world though, doing what you suggested could extent the period between Raids from 8 months to eternity.

draxynnic.3719:

A question to everyone opposing the idea of an easier mode, call it story mode, training mode, easy mode, whatever you like…

Let’s say that ArenaNet did introduce one, with the minimum amount of extra work to make it happen. So they’d need something to allow people to choose this mode (a reverse challenge mote, say) possibly disable some features, and perhaps scale down the numbers, comparable to the difference between doing the Domain of Anguish in normal mode rather than Hard Mode. They also make it so that all the exclusive rewards for raids currently are still exclusive to completing the raids at the current level of difficulty.

How would you be disadvantaged by this?

loot =/= gear ill leave this here

(Weird, the forum lost the quote identifier…)

Chris.McSwag suggested it as an option (albeit an obsolete one) in an earlier post. The connection is clear. Loot -> Wealth -> Resources for crafting Ascended. Present examples could include, for instance, Silverwastes farming and Cursed Shore event farming.

oh and also do you know why the zhaitan fight was so bad ? it was because it was faceroll easy to.the point where its sad.The “amazing” lore raids have is becaise you get invested to the story through the challenging content its not that the challenging content block you from getting that lore it makes it even better…say u want raids to be another zhaitan fight?

Not sure if this is a false dilemma, strawman, or both, but it certainly bears no relevance to what people are asking for. There’s a broad range of challenge between the current raids and pressing 2 to win. I’d expect the proposed ‘easy mode raids’ to be no easier than taking on Lupicus with exotic gear using the builds available at the time. Still hard enough to make for an epic fight, but a little more forgiving. As I said in a previous post, just removing the enrage timers, DPS checks, and inability to res defeated players would make a big difference in accessibility while still being fairly challenging: it would allow players to go in with more defensive gear and work their way through it slowly rather than the current environment where the majority of participants need to be in berserker/viper/sinister just to have a chance.

But they’ve already done this…instead of calling it “story mode”, or “easy mode”, its called “Bastion of the Penitent”.

How does this hurt the raiders who want that challenge? Well, the game mode that is supposed to be the challenging content that they enjoy, is no longer challenging. In addition, the “challenge motes” have no incentive to be completed more than one time.

The incentive to do the challenge more more than once is provided by wanting additional challenge. If that’s not enough for you, then challenge was never really what you were looking for.

Sarda.5918:

The incentive to do the challenge more more than once is provided by wanting additional challenge. If that’s not enough for you, then challenge was never really what you were looking for.

This is a ridiculous notion. A person is allowed to both crave challenge and want to make progress working towards in-game goals at the same time. Spoilers: This is why Fractal 100CM and regular raids are done regularly by players; they’re rewarding and challenging! The idea that people should do the challenge mode strictly for the challenge is absurd. Beating it once that way is enough; after that the challenge loses novelty and the increased rewards from regular mode should encourage future play.

Sarda.5918:

The incentive to do the challenge more more than once is provided by wanting additional challenge. If that’s not enough for you, then challenge was never really what you were looking for.

That is such a silly argument and one that I see a lot. This same logic applies to everything in the entire game, yet it only gets mentioned for raiders.

1. Everything with decent replayable value has some kind of in game reward. If raiders are “only allowed to do challenge mote repeatedly because they want the challenge and deserve no additional incentive to do so”, then you can remove 100% of all map currencies. 100% of all rewards for story. 100% of all rewards for PvP, WvW, etc. 100% of all achievements that require multiple attempts on something (i.e. AB “Golden”). You only play the new maps and story because “Lake Doric is so pretty I just want to spend all of my time there looking at the flowers and kill White Mantle because they are mean!”. No! Of course not. This would not happen because nobody would replay the content! Maps like BF would be even more empty, and you could argue that BF is the most rewarding content in the game! (Easy access to “Legendary” trinkets). Why is it so bad for a raider to ask for a small reward for their time spent doing something that is more challenging than the standard?

2. There are instances all over the game where if you are “better” at something, you get slight additional rewards for doing so. Look at Dry Top and the Silverwastes. By this logic you remove all incentive to push for a top level map. No additional rewards. We just like doing well on the maps because “Mordrem are bad!”. Nightmare Challenge mote has a few unique rewards as well. PvP seasons you have incentive to keep winning and part of the last reward (i.e. the gold and some shards) is repeatable. Why is raiding any different? The personality, skill set, and play style of a raider is SOO much closer to that of a high level PvP player than some casual 1-2hr per week general PvE player. Why is that the comparison we make? Because they fight mobs instead of players? No, compare raids and their reward schemes against other skilled players across the game, not other casual players in the same content realm.

3. It is good for ANET! I’m sure they spent tons of time working on the challenge motes for these raids. Hell, I would be willing to bet they spent more time on the CMs than the regular ones. Why spend all that time and give players a reason to do it once? Also, this would generally strive for players to improve their game play. Players improving is also good for ANET. It gives them more design flexibility in the future.

4. Your statement is fine and dandy for a solo player. I do things solo “just because they are hard” all the time. However, when you are talking about convincing 9 other people as well, that argument loses its value.

5. Its good for players because it means ANET can effectively deliver “challenging content” to a wider audience. With no additional incentive to repeat the CMs, all they’ve done is nerf raids for the audience that likes them and they are still “too scary” for the audience that doesn’t.

6. It delivers a more interactive raiding experience. For instance, maybe you are a guild that is recruiting. As you are training the new raider, maybe you spend a week or two focusing on the normal motes. You don’t feel like you are losing out on rewards as much because you know its unrealistic for this particular group to try the CMs with a new player. However, over time maybe you bring that new player into the CMs and the veterans are still rewarded and encouraged to help!

I could keep going…

Right now you can have the reward, or you can have the reward and the challenge. Everyone wins. What you are asking to have is that nobody gets the reward unless they do the challenge. That’s called elitism.

Sarda.5918:

Right now you can have the reward, or you can have the reward and the challenge. Everyone wins. What you are asking to have is that nobody gets the reward unless they do the challenge. That’s called elitism.

How is that what I said at all? The normal mode rewards can stay. All we are asking for is very small incentives to do CM weekly. Something like 5g and a 5% increase chance for the skins would suffice.

There is this concept in this community that giving good players rewards for being good is a bad thing. Next time you out perform you co-workers, think about how it would feel if your boss says “here is some extra work to challenge you that we aren’t giving anyone else, but you aren’t going to be compensated in anyway for it”

I listed multiple examples above of how this is already done successfully in GW2 yet for raids it’s “elitist” (said with negative connotation).

Sarda.5918:

Right now you can have the reward, or you can have the reward and the challenge. Everyone wins. What you are asking to have is that nobody gets the reward unless they do the challenge. That’s called elitism.

You really need to get out of this mindset that giving rewards to those taking on bigger challenges is a bad thing. It’s mind-blowing that you can make such a statement with a straight face, since what you are asking for is by effect, the removal of extra effort for extra rewards.

You have a misunderstanding of what Elitism is, because if what you described was the case, every single piece of content that provided above the average rewards when the content was only slightly harder than the open world would be elitist. Dungeons, Group Events, all of it gone because someone somewhere can’t do it, which makes everyone who can elitist and thus do not need things like champion bags for completing it.

Does the lore in the raid advance the story? i.e., would there be a potential gap in my understanding of the story if I didn’t do the raid?

LucosTheDutch.4819:

Nah, ideally, all raid content would have:

1. Lots of references to GW1 lore and tying GW1 lore to GW2 lore.
2. Lots of connections and tie-ins to the GW2 stories, preferably showcasing integral parts of the story.

I know this is just wishful thinking and Anet would never do this because the entitled crybabies would lose their mind, but wouldn’t it be awesome if Lazarus, Primordus and/or Jormag would be really difficult raid bosses? Yes, yes it would, it would be very awesome. But it would upset the entitled crybabies too much, and since a large portion of the GW2 community are entitled crybabies, Anet would never do this. But one can dream, right?

Ideally, all content would have lots of references and tie-ins with GW1 because the characters and lore of those games were amazing.

I don’t consider players who bought and continue to support the games as ‘entitled’ though. What, you think people need to earn the right to have good content by…. showing skill and dedication like the raiding community? That’s ridiculous. All players deserve skill appropriate content of the same quality as the last raid release. It’s probably not going to happen, but the mindset that hardcore gamers (or any other ‘subset’) are somehow superior is borderline toxic, imo.

I would be pretty happy if the fractal team took the initiative to repurpose bits of raid wings into new fractals so that it could be completed as five man content. The Deimos fight would make a pretty cool fractal. As someone who has only had 3-4 raiding sessions and a grand total of 2 LI, the logistics surrounding raids is the only aspect of the argument that I can sympathise with from people who dislike raids as they currently are. But I don’t have much sympathy for those wanting an easy mode. Especially considering consensus is that the first 2-3 bosses of the new wing are easier than other wings already.

The lore exposition within the new raid can be found on YouTube or within a cleared instance (which people are happy to open for free if you ask politely in the aerodrome). The only thing you’d miss are the boss fights themselves, which begs the question, why would you waste significant amounts of development time creating a new mode for raids to satisfy people who are opposed to the inherent core philosophy of the game type (10 man, challenging group content)?

As for story, sometimes you require challenge for the story notes to be the most impactful. There are some stories where you appreciate the narrative more because you earned your progress in it. Immersion and all that. As long as the story for raids aren’t necessary to understand the main story arc, and are self contained story arcs, I don’t see the problem.

If the story in the raid is more interesting than the main one, then that’s on the team working the main story to up their game. Not on the raid team to make their stories worse or less interesting.

CrustyBot.3564:

As for story, sometimes you require challenge for the story notes to be the most impactful. There are some stories where you appreciate the narrative more because you earned your progress in it. Immersion and all that. As long as the story for raids aren’t necessary to understand the main story arc, and are self contained story arcs, I don’t see the problem.

If the story in the raid is more interesting than the main one, then that’s on the team working the main story to up their game. Not on the raid team to make their stories worse or less interesting.

All of this.

Sykper.6583:

CrustyBot.3564:

As for story, sometimes you require challenge for the story notes to be the most impactful. There are some stories where you appreciate the narrative more because you earned your progress in it. Immersion and all that. As long as the story for raids aren’t necessary to understand the main story arc, and are self contained story arcs, I don’t see the problem.

If the story in the raid is more interesting than the main one, then that’s on the team working the main story to up their game. Not on the raid team to make their stories worse or less interesting.

All of this.

If anyone were advocating taking any of that away from people, it would actually make sense.

The one thing I can promise you doesn’t impact how the story is told is something that is taking place in a completely different instance with different people than the one you are in.

Yes, the difficulty can add to the epic feelings you get while going through raids – but, for people with professions/playstyles that don’t necessarily conform to the balance point the developers decided upon, that difficulty point is in a different place than it is for you. They will still get a feeling of accomplishment, albeit lesser than the one you do – and that accomplishment – that feeling of being the hero (regardless of difficulty) that is definitely part of the story told through this particular medium.

Blaeys.3102:

Sykper.6583:

CrustyBot.3564:

As for story, sometimes you require challenge for the story notes to be the most impactful. There are some stories where you appreciate the narrative more because you earned your progress in it. Immersion and all that. As long as the story for raids aren’t necessary to understand the main story arc, and are self contained story arcs, I don’t see the problem.

If the story in the raid is more interesting than the main one, then that’s on the team working the main story to up their game. Not on the raid team to make their stories worse or less interesting.

All of this.

The one thing I can promise you doesn’t impact how the story is told is something that is taking place in a completely different instance with different people than the one you are in.

It absolutely does. That’s what I believe the underlying statement has been all along, the real discussion taking place here. There’s a disagreement where you believe that setting up encounters in an easier ‘story’ mode that anyone can do, does not take away the impact and immersion of the encounter in question. I believe it does, the mere existence of a story-mode Deimos would utterly decimate the immersion those who attempt him in the normal-mode have against him. It turns it mechanical, almost systematic like what happened with WoW and in part FF14.

It’s not just something selfish I am describing here, it’s a factor of ascertaining the extent of which the evil we face is a threat. It’s why I continue to bring up the prospect that no one remembers the fights they breezed through, but the ones they struggled with. I would rather there be pure difficult encounters in this game that is memorable for being difficult only, than turned difficult on a dial and reduced to just numbers.

And I don’t believe I’ll ever convince you otherwise of what I mean by this. Nor will I expect you to make me believe that story-mode hasn’t ruined other raiding MMOs by making them into systems instead. I will say this and I believe you will agree with me, the raid releases are slow, it’s already hard enough to release just a single difficulty wing without previous raids breaking (W1/W3 bosses have changed). Beyond the merits of the discourse we have right now, I don’t think we should even consider multiple difficulties/instances given how much more time might need to be spent with the next release.

Do you agree with that?

Blaeys.3102:

Yes, the difficulty can add to the epic feelings you get while going through raids – but, for people with professions/playstyles that don’t necessarily conform to the balance point the developers decided upon, that difficulty point is in a different place than it is for you.

Defensive builds are always inferior to offensive builds, in raids you have normally healers, there are zero reasons to play a defensive build outside of the kiter at Deimos.
The classes are pretty close together with the exceptions of Elementalist and Necromancer.

Sykper.6583:

Blaeys.3102:

Sykper.6583:

CrustyBot.3564:

As for story, sometimes you require challenge for the story notes to be the most impactful. There are some stories where you appreciate the narrative more because you earned your progress in it. Immersion and all that. As long as the story for raids aren’t necessary to understand the main story arc, and are self contained story arcs, I don’t see the problem.

If the story in the raid is more interesting than the main one, then that’s on the team working the main story to up their game. Not on the raid team to make their stories worse or less interesting.

All of this.

The one thing I can promise you doesn’t impact how the story is told is something that is taking place in a completely different instance with different people than the one you are in.

It absolutely does. That’s what I believe the underlying statement has been all along, the real discussion taking place here. There’s a disagreement where you believe that setting up encounters in an easier ‘story’ mode that anyone can do, does not take away the impact and immersion of the encounter in question. I believe it does, the mere existence of a story-mode Deimos would utterly decimate the immersion those who attempt him in the normal-mode have against him. It turns it mechanical, almost systematic like what happened with WoW and in part FF14.

It’s not just something selfish I am describing here, it’s a factor of ascertaining the extent of which the evil we face is a threat. It’s why I continue to bring up the prospect that no one remembers the fights they breezed through, but the ones they struggled with. I would rather there be pure difficult encounters in this game that is memorable for being difficult only, than turned difficult on a dial and reduced to just numbers.

And I don’t believe I’ll ever convince you otherwise of what I mean by this. Nor will I expect you to make me believe that story-mode hasn’t ruined other raiding MMOs by making them into systems instead. I will say this and I believe you will agree with me, the raid releases are slow, it’s already hard enough to release just a single difficulty wing without previous raids breaking (W1/W3 bosses have changed). Beyond the merits of the discourse we have right now, I don’t think we should even consider multiple difficulties/instances given how much more time might need to be spent with the next release.

Do you agree with that?

I think that, given the lukewarm reception the challenge motes in BoTP have received from raiders, the energy behind them would have been better spent making the current challenge motes the baseline difficulty and incorporating story motes or modes to improve accessibility.

I agree that we will likely not convince each other of the other’s point of view, but consider this. Right now, based on the difficulty of BoTP, which is too low for those who raid steady and still too high for those just looking for the story, they are obviously pulling their punches in developing the fights – probably to find more of a middle ground and up the number of people raiding. Wouldn’t you rather they give you real raid fights with truly challenging mechanics across the board and then deal with the accessibility issue in a completely separate instance/mode (or via a story mote, as I recommend above)?

It really does seem like all sides would benefit from that kind of solution.

Blaeys.3102:

Sykper.6583:

Blaeys.3102:

Sykper.6583:

CrustyBot.3564:

As for story, sometimes you require challenge for the story notes to be the most impactful. There are some stories where you appreciate the narrative more because you earned your progress in it. Immersion and all that. As long as the story for raids aren’t necessary to understand the main story arc, and are self contained story arcs, I don’t see the problem.

If the story in the raid is more interesting than the main one, then that’s on the team working the main story to up their game. Not on the raid team to make their stories worse or less interesting.

All of this.

The one thing I can promise you doesn’t impact how the story is told is something that is taking place in a completely different instance with different people than the one you are in.

It absolutely does. That’s what I believe the underlying statement has been all along, the real discussion taking place here. There’s a disagreement where you believe that setting up encounters in an easier ‘story’ mode that anyone can do, does not take away the impact and immersion of the encounter in question. I believe it does, the mere existence of a story-mode Deimos would utterly decimate the immersion those who attempt him in the normal-mode have against him. It turns it mechanical, almost systematic like what happened with WoW and in part FF14.

It’s not just something selfish I am describing here, it’s a factor of ascertaining the extent of which the evil we face is a threat. It’s why I continue to bring up the prospect that no one remembers the fights they breezed through, but the ones they struggled with. I would rather there be pure difficult encounters in this game that is memorable for being difficult only, than turned difficult on a dial and reduced to just numbers.

And I don’t believe I’ll ever convince you otherwise of what I mean by this. Nor will I expect you to make me believe that story-mode hasn’t ruined other raiding MMOs by making them into systems instead. I will say this and I believe you will agree with me, the raid releases are slow, it’s already hard enough to release just a single difficulty wing without previous raids breaking (W1/W3 bosses have changed). Beyond the merits of the discourse we have right now, I don’t think we should even consider multiple difficulties/instances given how much more time might need to be spent with the next release.

Do you agree with that?

I think that, given the lukewarm reception the challenge motes in BoTP have received from raiders, the energy behind them would have been better spent making the current challenge motes the baseline difficulty and incorporating story motes or modes to improve accessibility.

I agree that we will likely not convince each other of the other’s point of view, but consider this. Right now, based on the difficulty of BoTP, which is too low for those who raid steady and still too high for those just looking for the story, they are obviously pulling their punches in developing the fights – probably to find more of a middle ground and up the number of people raiding. Wouldn’t you rather they give you real raid fights with truly challenging mechanics across the board and then deal with the accessibility issue in a completely separate instance/mode (or via a story mote, as I recommend above)?

It really does seem like all sides would benefit from that kind of solution.

The problem is still the subjective nature of that question. I would argue the first 3 bosses are easy enough for people who just want to do it for story. I don’t think it’s unreasonable for a person to spend just as long on the encounters as they would doing the whole LS episode ( a few hours minimum). One could argue they delivered story mode and then delivered challenge motes with no incentive to repeat them

Well screw it, no point in me arguing a point for a game I feel passionate about, obviously the devs don’t care and the community is toxic to change.

Just re upped my account and will start doing World Quests to get this games version of a Power Great Sword Reaper ready for 5 mans and later Raids, where there is more than one viable tank and where Reapers aka Death Knights have a place in the META.

Get a clue ANet and some day my money might come back your way.

http://us.battle.net/wow/en/character/proudmoore/Oldirtbeard/simple

Miellyn.6847:

Rune.4231:

Been playing Guild Wars since GW1 launch and Saul’s story was one of the bigger mysteries in the series. Having this locked in raids with no story/easy mode to experience that lore it is really messed up. Entering a cleared instance, as I see many people suggest, isn’t a great solution because that isn’t a long-term solution. In a year, it may be very hard to find a cleared instance. Even now I’m told it can be hard to find one unless you play during specific hours.

Self-contained stories that start and end in a raid would have been fine with me personally, but that’s clearly not the way they plan on doing raids so having a story/easy mode is a must in my opinion.

But this is a self-contained story in GW2.

Show Spoiler

hide spoiler

The White Mantle in GW2 has nothing to do with the White Mantle in GW1, it is just the name. Caudecus just took the name for his organisation because of the stories from the past. If you would have paid attention in the last story instance you would know this and you wouldn’t complain. The only people who know Saul D’Alessio are GW1 players.

Caudecus isn’t the leader in case you actually paid attention. He was one of the upper tier members, but he was actually recruited by devoted members of the White Mantle.

Caudecus instead used them and undermined them to stop Lazarus’s full revival, which would pose a rival against his plans to use this radical religious organization for his own secular purposes.

Matthias, Xera, and the Head Confessor were all true believers and practicing descendants of the White Mantle.

Oldirtbeard.9834:

Well screw it, no point in me arguing a point for a game I feel passionate about, obviously the devs don’t care and the community is toxic to change.

Just re upped my account and will start doing World Quests to get this games version of a Power Great Sword Reaper ready for 5 mans and later Raids, where there is more than one viable tank and where Reapers aka Death Knights have a place in the META.

Get a clue ANet and some day my money might come back your way.

http://us.battle.net/wow/en/character/proudmoore/Oldirtbeard/simple

There is more than one viable tank class but you won’t see it in PUGs as they try to optimize the group composition because you don’t know the players. Mesmers sacrifice less than other classes while tanking thats why they are optimal. viable != optimal.

There are rumors about the balance patch. If those rumors are true it will definitely change the meta.

Miellyn.6847:

Oldirtbeard.9834:

Well screw it, no point in me arguing a point for a game I feel passionate about, obviously the devs don’t care and the community is toxic to change.

Just re upped my account and will start doing World Quests to get this games version of a Power Great Sword Reaper ready for 5 mans and later Raids, where there is more than one viable tank and where Reapers aka Death Knights have a place in the META.

Get a clue ANet and some day my money might come back your way.

http://us.battle.net/wow/en/character/proudmoore/Oldirtbeard/simple

There is more than one viable tank class but you won’t see it in PUGs as they try to optimize the group composition because you don’t know the players. Mesmers sacrifice less than other classes while tanking thats why they are optimal. viable != optimal.

There are rumors about the balance patch. If those rumors are true it will definitely change the meta.

I would love to see said rumors.

Zenith.7301:

Miellyn.6847:

Rune.4231:

Been playing Guild Wars since GW1 launch and Saul’s story was one of the bigger mysteries in the series. Having this locked in raids with no story/easy mode to experience that lore it is really messed up. Entering a cleared instance, as I see many people suggest, isn’t a great solution because that isn’t a long-term solution. In a year, it may be very hard to find a cleared instance. Even now I’m told it can be hard to find one unless you play during specific hours.

Self-contained stories that start and end in a raid would have been fine with me personally, but that’s clearly not the way they plan on doing raids so having a story/easy mode is a must in my opinion.

But this is a self-contained story in GW2.

Show Spoiler

hide spoiler

The White Mantle in GW2 has nothing to do with the White Mantle in GW1, it is just the name. Caudecus just took the name for his organisation because of the stories from the past. If you would have paid attention in the last story instance you would know this and you wouldn’t complain. The only people who know Saul D’Alessio are GW1 players.

Caudecus isn’t the leader in case you actually paid attention. He was one of the upper tier members, but he was actually recruited by devoted members of the White Mantle.

Caudecus instead used them and undermined them to stop Lazarus’s full revival, which would pose a rival against his plans to use this radical religious organization for his own secular purposes.

Matthias, Xera, and the Head Confessor were all true believers and practicing descendants of the White Mantle.

There are only two Confessors known in GW2, Esthel which dies during the human personal story and Caudecus. He is the leader of the White Mantle during most of the story line of GW2.

I probably meant Inquisitor, basically the lady Caudecus is at odds with in the journals.