Guild Wars 2

Everyone I know has lost interest in raiding. My guild tried the raid twice. First night we had 15-20 that wanted to get in on it. Failed for about 3 hours and quit. The next night we had a hard time getting 10 just to get started. Failed for 2 hours or so and quit. None of us have been back since. We never beat the first boss so we never saw any loot. Doesn’t really feel like we are losing anything because we never really gained anything in the first place. I guess the thought is to have one, maybe two, easy bosses that 10 people can get together and go beat without the super tryhard. Just to get people interested in 10 man, see the loot, kill a boss, whatever. Even in WoW there were raids that 10 people could pug in junk gear and kill stuff.

The vale guardian is considered easy now.

Oh. I haven’t been in there in weeks. Might see if people are interested in trying again.

If you’ve been having trouble I would suggest looking for some video guides on youtube, try and get people to research their class and get the strongest raiding build sorted. Raiding takes a bit of research and planning to get the most out of it, good luck if you try again.

If you’re in a guild where people are giving up after the first few wipes….

Then you probably should look for a more serious raiding guild, if you want to raid.

Not trying to be rude here, but there is a large casual audience who would rather be carried than experience failure and learn from it.

Huge.5891:

Oh. I haven’t been in there in weeks. Might see if people are interested in trying again.

Yup, a lot of strategies around the web now. Also, as another player said, try to find yourself people that actually care to improve, or are not ignorant enough to know that they have to change the way they play to do well in the raid [proper builds, mechanics , etc].

My guild is big and very casual, we have 20ish people interested in raiding. First week we tried hard and failed hard, after that we went separately and killed the bosses with random groups. Now when all are experienced, more or less we are able to kill the VG without a problem.
I’m sure that if we kept playing together we would of done it as guild, just needed to push more.

Raids have not been made for casual players with a casual attitude. They were made for people who are willing to spend tens of hours on a single boss fight learning it, improving and eventually defeating it.

Considering that you can pretty much pug any of the three bosses, and even get The Eternal title, the raid bosses are far from impossible as you make them out to be.

Getting 10 guildies have become a major problem for me. It’s just too much.

Bambu.4270:

Getting 10 guildies have become a major problem for me. It’s just too much.

5 guilds, friends list, other peoples friends list, pugs, there are a lot of ways to fill a 10 person party pretty quick

Bambu.4270:

Getting 10 guildies have become a major problem for me. It’s just too much.

10 people is doable, in other games you need 20-40 people for raids.

Having the same issue but for the opposite reason. We clear the bosses the first day shard cap the next, and then no one wants to run it for the enjoyment of it : (

Crysto.7089:

Having the same issue but for the opposite reason. We clear the bosses the first day shard cap the next, and then no one wants to run it for the enjoyment of it : (

Same, had to work tuesday, now I’m stuck trying to clear with pugs to cap shards.

Lol.

I wonder why? The general consensus is, or at least I thought it is, that raids are both challenging and exciting, with a reward only being a side effect? Not so exciting and rewarding anymore?

The funny thing is, pretty much everyone who brought up this argument some months ago knew that he was spewing out garbage to build the tracks for the hype train for raids.

Your sig says it all in fact Wasabi :

Raid 1 Wing 1 cleared – waiting on the next wing

And that’s what raiding has become, players who didn’t do it and players who don’t care for it after many tries and fails, and on the other hand those that did manage to finish the first wing and are waiting for a new wing.

Very few run it for ‘fun’ or ‘rewards’. Most just want to tick it off their list to do and move on. I said it at the start, give it a few months and raiding will die a slow death for all but the most dedicated and bored ones. Kinda like how fractals used to be.

Seems like none in the guild i’m in are even talking about raids anymore, that’s how interested ppl really are. It’s great for the ones that wanted a ‘challenge’ (for however long that was the case) but for the other 97% of the player population, it’s meaningless.

Raids were not built for the general population and no one is expecting the majority of the players to continue playing them. It was even stated in the official statement.

Having said that, it is not like you need l33t skilz to beat it… geez

The shards/boss loots are the only incentive nowadays. Now that Anet implemented the shard drop rate “fix” it’s more of a drag. So, I’ll just settle on my boss loots and even more slowly accumulate my shards. Cba to run the content over and over again since right now the vendor doesn’t offer anything special other than neat skins and ascended boxes (which are now more conveniently obtained from Fractals again).

But yeah, we had the same drop in interest in my guild as well. Raids were being all talked about, and people were genuinely interested in going at first. Though you should see our interest level now. We were so overwhelmed with people wanting to go yesterday we had to post “LF3m” in guild chat yesterday to fill the squad!! (Coming from a guild that’s just shy of 500 members).

Only the one percenters still care, which is the only reason why that time sink is even there.

DresdenAllblack.1249:

Only the one percenters still care, which is the only reason why that time sink is even there.

That’s the problem with ANet, commit to the one percenters instead of the general population.

easier to find people or jump into group on monday after reset.. so this is probably the best time to do raids if you are new.. and learn through the hardway if you dont have a dedicated team xD

rchu.8945:

DresdenAllblack.1249:

Only the one percenters still care, which is the only reason why that time sink is even there.

That’s the problem with ANet, commit to the one percenters instead of the general population.

Commit? Hell, I did not know the only thing HoT brought was raiding. kitten, I want my money back!
Also, I heard that Anet will only be developing raids for the rest of their lives! That PvP update that made tons of people PvP for leagues surely must’ve been an anomaly, probably some raid-intended code that was so buggy it turned into a massive ranked PvP thing. kitten they suck at coding!
No honey, this game has casual players, most of them being either on a tight schedule or lacking skill, and other players, the ones you would call no lifers, the ones that either are good at playing the game, or that simply have more time to spend in it than you do. Either way, since this game has absolutely no challenging content, Anet threw in raids. Which, to be honest, are only challenging for the casual community, since the good players had no diffuculty issues with running them. So if we’re to be real, poor “tryhards” didn’t even get some hard content. So wheres the bullkitten commitment you were talking about?

Sthenith.5196:

Your sig says it all in fact Wasabi :

Raid 1 Wing 1 cleared – waiting on the next wing

And that’s what raiding has become, players who didn’t do it and players who don’t care for it after many tries and fails, and on the other hand those that did manage to finish the first wing and are waiting for a new wing.

Very few run it for ‘fun’ or ‘rewards’. Most just want to tick it off their list to do and move on. I said it at the start, give it a few months and raiding will die a slow death for all but the most dedicated and bored ones. Kinda like how fractals used to be.

Seems like none in the guild i’m in are even talking about raids anymore, that’s how interested ppl really are. It’s great for the ones that wanted a ‘challenge’ (for however long that was the case) but for the other 97% of the player population, it’s meaningless.

^Pretty much what this guys says here

I did try the raid during beta and felt it had potential
Then on live my guildies and me decided to just have a experience of it and it was ok

The when i looked at the loot i wasn’t really happy, wanted to see how the legendary armor looks and there wasn’t any detail given apart from an ugly armor pic from the raid blog. I didn’t make twilight becuase it has the capability of switching stats on the go just saying.

If you take “The carrot on the stick” scenario there is no carrot for me and it seems its the same with my friends and guildies . Nobody i know cares about gw2 raids anymore

lol @ all the qq from the casual scrubs who got teary eyed and quit VG after they couldn’t kill it in 5 attempts.

VG used to be seen as the holy grail which only one or two guilds could kill, now its basically a trash mob in the instance. Its not that difficult to find a group who can do it. I kill it all the time just for fun, because its a fun fight.

Raids are certainly harder than any other PVE content in the game. It requires high coordination and individual performance, especially when you get to a boss like Sabetha. Thats definitely not for everyone, and thats perfectly okay. But don’t qq on the forums about it and then report people when they disagree with you.

People don’t wanna take dire reaper in raids and playing berserker reve is just too easy.

But… someone in another thread said raids are fun…

Are you not entertained?

This seems a similar pattern to the 12 man missions in Factions. Lots of people requesting missions with a larger party size. Plenty of hype. ANET releases them. People figure out how to do them. Then interest starts dropping.

Sure, it seems to be gong faster here, but there are some reasons for that:
– Access 12 man missions in factions required someone from the alliance that “owned” the capital cities to ferry you in. So it took longer for most players to get access to them.
– Guild Wars 1 was built around 8 man parties where you needed specific roles to be filled. GW2 was designed for 5 man parties where grabbing the first 4 other people who want to do the same thing as you is usually sufficient. So I’d expect GW2 to have a higher portion of people who dislike having to fill specific roles in a party. So the portion of the GW2 population who decides that forming the 10 man parties isn’t worth it will likely climb faster.
– Rewards. The big rewards of the 12 man missions were tradeable. If you didn’t want them, you could sell them to players who did for quite a bit. So the rare drops were always valuable to anyone who received them.

I don’t want to pug raids, especially with how there is no LFG dedicated to raids AND the LFG is 5 man, not 10 man.

I also don’t have 10 friends that play GW2.

Hence, I will not do raids for the foreseeable future, probably ever. Maybe if they fix their raid-lfg crap I will attempt it…

I guess this is what you get when you try to server something a bit more challenging to a casual crowd. Rather than slowing down and go over that speed bump, lets all just stop and turn around.

Keiel.7489:

I guess this is what you get when you try to server something a bit more challenging to a casual crowd. Rather than slowing down and go over that speed bump, lets all just stop and turn around.

There are two challenges for raids:
1 – The raid itself.
2 – Organising a raid group.

It’s the second one that has put me off raids.

Keiel.7489:

I guess this is what you get when you try to server something a bit more challenging to a casual crowd. Rather than slowing down and go over that speed bump, lets all just stop and turn around.

Are you really, honestly surprised by that? We´re not talking about penicilin, shelter, electricity, bread, water or to get more casual a car here, we are talking about a computer game.

I wonder what portion of the GW2 playerbase really care about raids. I know that if I wanted to do raids, I’d have never picked up GW2. Instead, I’d be playing an MMO that already has several raids in-game.

I can recommend Guild Wars 1. Pretty great “Raids” there. (maybe a bit sarcasm & some shed tears)

“Honestly though Raids are just glorified dungeons.” (read this somewhere)

It’s the same situation like at GW2 release. Once a proper tool to gather people is in place, every mechanic is abused and therefor the encounter simplified and builds are “set in stone” for optimal constellations it will be/already is a “walk in the park” like dungeons. Yes – i said the d work.

That being said for me it’s Snoring’s point 2. The lfg is a mess. A simple Raid Tab with the 3 boss names would have suffice – coded & tested & approved in a day.

But Raids can’t be pugged..right?

The whole “eternal” title stuff puzzles me though..since you can get it after literally the first kill and it’s not even up to you to get it.
Are Raids more about the journey than 100/1000’s of flawless kills?
Guess there is nothing else people can show their “exp” with but that’s another story.

“I wonder what portion of the GW2 playerbase really care about raids.”

Not even people that cared about raids when they came out care anymore.. escpecially cause of all these lovly timegates and loot being looked and available through token grind.

Good guilds do the Raid(wing) in 30-60 minutes and are done for the whole week already. That’s not keeping a group of people together for a long time. And some of “these people” play for multiple hours a day/week. Then again new Raid(wings) won’t do the trick cause they will just repeat the scenario over and over till there are 7+ Wings (?) so they are somewhat saturated with content.

Fractals/Dungeons could have filled the gap but not in their current state.

Then again instead of expanding the “instanced content” A-Net decided to nullify old content to boost newer one. A totally valid choice from the development perspective of course. I prefer the just as simple “new content → rewards too good to be true” system and then adapting it down till everything is “balanced out”.

They really (really..) don’t want another Guild Wars 1 i guess.

Oh my – I drifted into the depths of off-topic-land.
Please forgive me. :P

raid has surely turned people to elitist. i have guildie who doesn’t want to play with us anymore because we failed raid few times. not hard core enough for him….

The raids got….boring.

VG is about as exciting as NASCAR with all our running in circles.
Gorsy is a DPS race….don’t forget about the eggs.

Sabetha is about the only exciting fight for me but only because you have so many things going on at once, and each team member needs to be on their toes due to the random assigning of bombs, cannons, Flame wall, etc. It’s a really fun fight, and I wish the devs had made the other fights as multi-sided as they did with this one.

Other than that though…what else is there to do? Teach other players? Grind Shards til our thumbs fall off? Solo Vale Guardian?

azizul.8469:

raid has surely turned people to elitist. i have guildie who doesn’t want to play with us anymore because we failed raid few times. not hard core enough for him….

Sadly, I’ve run into the opposite problem where too many guildies have walked away from the raids because we wiped too many times, and they consider themselves too noob to go. “Burdening the team” and whatnot.

VG and Gorseval are incredible fights, IMO. I love them a ton for different reasons. The combat mobility required, the tells, the stress, the escalating mechanics, etc. These are all things that make me enjoy the fights a lot.

What people forget is that Magnetite Shards are not designed to be the way you acquire all items. The intent is for you to get awarded them via RNG, but the currency is there to prevent people with terrible luck from never getting the items. It’s not intended to be profitable (weekly timegate); you do raids for the exclusive rewards and the challenge. If neither of those things interest you, then why are you putting yourself through the trouble?

I do raids multiple times a week with my guild. We bring different classes every time based on who is available, and based on who makes what mistakes every run is a different experience. It’s dynamic and exciting, we win and we lose, and ultimately we have a blast. I’m trying new builds that have never before been worth their salt in PvE and finding success with them. Raids have provided us a meaningful and challenging experience to have together, and as far as my experience with the content goes they’ve been a success I cannot be happier with.

Rising Dusk.2408:

What people forget is that Magnetite Shards are not designed to be the way you acquire all items. The intent is for you to get awarded them via RNG, but the currency is there to prevent people with terrible luck from never getting the items. It’s not intended to be profitable (weekly timegate); you do raids for the exclusive rewards and the challenge.

I don’t believe anyone forgot this aside from the developers themselves. Why are the unique rewards so ungodly rare when there’s several of them to go around ?

Don’t get me started on unobtainable rewards that are only RNG based….Trinkets.

I still do not see why we need bags that contain blues and greens to begin with when we could just as easily replace said reward with an optional select the champ garbage or the bonus currency. Thus allowing people to opt out of even more RNG and let them reasonably work toward obtaining the unique shiny.

Can minis be removed from drop tables after they’ve already been acquired? I dislike watching a weekly chance at unique drops disappear for something i already have and isn’t useful the more of them you hide in a bank.

The raid loot kinda sucks. My friend 22 insights no mini, no asc and no ghostly infusions. I think he just uninstalled after raiding at raid reset last nite. gg

TexZero.7910:

I don’t believe anyone forgot this aside from the developers themselves. Why are the unique rewards so ungodly rare when there’s several of them to go around ?

If you looted one of them every time, the sellable items would quickly lose any value they have, the non-sellable ones would quickly become vendor/salvage trash, and players would complain anyway. Look at what happened to ascended rings with Fractals. The entire point of RNG loot is that when you do get something shiny you get excited. If you got something shiny every time it wouldn’t be exciting.. or shiny.

TexZero.7910:

Don’t get me started on unobtainable rewards that are only RNG based….Trinkets.

This will be fixed. I can assure you of that.

TexZero.7910:

I still do not see why we need bags that contain blues and greens to begin with when we could just as easily replace said reward with an optional select the champ garbage or the bonus currency. Thus allowing people to opt out of even more RNG and let them reasonably work toward obtaining the unique shiny.

Because magnetite shards are not intended to be used like that. They’re a backup means to get items outside the intended RNG. It would be nonsensical to let people opt out of the RNG to just build more of the currency; it goes against the very premise of the reward scheme.

SlyDevil.3952:

Can minis be removed from drop tables after they’ve already been acquired?

I actually believe they will find a use for the extra minis, so don’t delete them if you’ve got them.

fishball.7204:

The raid loot kinda sucks. My friend 22 insights no mini, no asc and no ghostly infusions. I think he just uninstalled after raiding at raid reset last nite. gg

Add all the reward you get from raid dude. You can get around 20-30 gold per hours with a decent group. Not counting any huge drop like an infusions.

Rising Dusk.2408:

SlyDevil.3952:

Can minis be removed from drop tables after they’ve already been acquired?

I actually believe they will find a use for the extra minis, so don’t delete them if you’ve got them.

I doudt it. I would love it, but I doudt it. Look at black lion chest. They still have account bound mini that you get useless double of and it’s been years.

Thaddeus.4891:

fishball.7204:

The raid loot kinda sucks. My friend 22 insights no mini, no asc and no ghostly infusions. I think he just uninstalled after raiding at raid reset last nite. gg

Add all the reward you get from raid dude. You can get around 20-30 gold per hours with a decent group. Not counting any huge drop like an infusions.

Pretty much nobody I raid with gives a hoot about the gold from raids and just want interesting/unique loot drops. 4g + a rare maybe an exotic is hardly enticing loot.

fishball.7204:

The raid loot kinda sucks. My friend 22 insights no mini, no asc and no ghostly infusions. I think he just uninstalled after raiding at raid reset last nite. gg

Spent about 2 hours going through the whole raid again last night. Best loot? A Gorsy Mini. What was last week’s amazing prize? A Green Guard Mini. The only real awesome loot I’ve personally gotten from the Wing since its release was a neat Healer’s ring (Asc “select your stats”). Other than than just showered in junk items that I had no use for other than salvaging. But hey, I’m almost at 500 shards and can buy stuff! It only took me a couple months, but I’ll be able to buy everything I want in a couple years, right?

Rising Dusk.2408:

If you looted one of them every time, the sellable items would quickly lose any value they have, the non-sellable ones would quickly become vendor/salvage trash, and players would complain anyway. Look at what happened to ascended rings with Fractals. The entire point of RNG loot is that when you do get something shiny you get excited. If you got something shiny every time it wouldn’t be exciting.. or shiny.

I get that they’re wanting to prevent the whole bank/bag slots full of Ascended rings, but consider the resources we had during the initial release of Ascended rings vs what we have now. Once you got the rings you wanted from RNG you just let them stock pile because there was nothing else we could do with them. On top of that we had Pristine Relics introduced which after time ensured we got the ring we wanted (similar to the intent with shards). The big difference? There were 4 tiers worth of Fractal dailies that could potentially reward you with rings. The odds were moderately high at that. Furthermore, you could repeat those same 4 tiers everyday thus you’d end up with 28 chances a week at getting a ring. So sure, months/years of this reward system being in play it’s no wonder players had enough rings to make collages in their Inventory bags with all the extra rings they had.

Nowadays you can at least salvage rings for Matrixies which have a handful of uses. The potential loot from Raids are not just rings. If we get an armor or weapon we now have the resources to transmute the item to the stats we want.

The frustrating part is that we’re locked out of rewards by two things. For one, there’s a weekly time gate on the rewards. Second, the skill check limits the number of people who will realistically have a shot at the rewards, well, at least in the immediate future. I can agree that the sellable rewards should be limited to preserve their value, but I don’t think that players are being compensated fairly for the amount of time and effort that they’ve put into/are continuing to put into the raids. If that’s the intended design? Great, the raids are going exactly as intended. Though the participation in raids is going to continue to diminish since the “wow” factor has worn off. Just look at dungeons. They were fun, plenty of people ran them, and the rewards were good both monetarily and xp-wise. Nowadays the content’s rewards/compensation got nerfed so hard to the floor that the participation level has plummeted.

My suggestion would be, in the topic of maintaining interest in the raids, loosen up the timegate on the rewards or at least make the rewards more generous. Otherwise, if “clearing the content is part of the reward” is an honest statement I don’t see the interest level rising until the next wing is released. Those same folks that are in it for the challenge are some of the same folks that enjoy speedrunning and/or low-manning content that was design for appropriate team sizes.

But yeah, last night was once again boring (add an extra hint of frustrating due to bugged Chrono’s). Then we got to Sabetha, and it was fun again.

Edit: When I mention rewards I’m talking about the unique drops/skins. Gold is easily obtained from other content so I wouldn’t say that would revive interest in the content unless it was something outrageous.

Rising Dusk.2408:

If you looted one of them every time, the sellable items would quickly lose any value they have, the non-sellable ones would quickly become vendor/salvage trash, and players would complain anyway. Look at what happened to ascended rings with Fractals. The entire point of RNG loot is that when you do get something shiny you get excited. If you got something shiny every time it wouldn’t be exciting.. or shiny.

Because magnetite shards are not intended to be used like that. They’re a backup means to get items outside the intended RNG. It would be nonsensical to let people opt out of the RNG to just build more of the currency; it goes against the very premise of the reward scheme.

I get that having shiney loot every time is bad, however so is having an exotic and and a rare and oh yeah here’s champ bags full of garbage.

Raids are designed from the ground up as being harder content, the rewards should reflect that. It should allow those people who put in the time to feel like they are still being rewarded decently. I don’t need champ bags filled with bloodstone dust. I would much rather just see a random ascended material (spiritwood/deldrimor steel / Elonian Leather/Damask) instead of 6 bags of junk and 48 bags of recycle for luck.

This allows raiders to work toward building other sets for alts or other play styles. A much more reasonable approach.

Additionally, if magnetite shards are as you say… not meant to be supplemental reward to help those with less than desirable RNG then even in their current state they are not doing that. Granted wing 1 of many, but even for a wing 1 the shards are on the low side and do not give people who have garbage RNG any hope for getting those rewards in any meaningful time.

I’m not ok with having viper/zealot trinkets available only through rng drop with minimal chance. It’s horrible enough that sinister trinkets are gated behind LS2 and players can’t get it unless they have the episodes unlocked, but this really sucks. No argument about “shiny” and bullkitten like that will change this: BiS – or, well, any kind of unique stat combo – gear shouldn’t be so heavily rng-based.
No, I don’t give a kitten if in wow it worked like that and people were fine with it. It’s borked.

fishball.7204:

Pretty much nobody I raid with gives a hoot about the gold from raids and just want interesting/unique loot drops. 4g + a rare maybe an exotic is hardly enticing loot.

It’s already better than 20 hours of WvW.

Thaddeus.4891:

fishball.7204:

The raid loot kinda sucks. My friend 22 insights no mini, no asc and no ghostly infusions. I think he just uninstalled after raiding at raid reset last nite. gg

Add all the reward you get from raid dude. You can get around 20-30 gold per hours with a decent group. Not counting any huge drop like an infusions.

Wow 20-30g once a week :O meanwhile you can do the wintersday jumppuzzle for about the same reward endlessly

perry.9645:

Thaddeus.4891:

fishball.7204:

The raid loot kinda sucks. My friend 22 insights no mini, no asc and no ghostly infusions. I think he just uninstalled after raiding at raid reset last nite. gg

Add all the reward you get from raid dude. You can get around 20-30 gold per hours with a decent group. Not counting any huge drop like an infusions.

Wow 20-30g once a week :O meanwhile you can do the wintersday jumppuzzle for about the same reward endlessly

Even better, give me a pickaxe and a sickle so I can harvest nodes to continue that gold/hour rate once Wintersday ends.

savacli.8172:

perry.9645:

Thaddeus.4891:

fishball.7204:

The raid loot kinda sucks. My friend 22 insights no mini, no asc and no ghostly infusions. I think he just uninstalled after raiding at raid reset last nite. gg

Add all the reward you get from raid dude. You can get around 20-30 gold per hours with a decent group. Not counting any huge drop like an infusions.

Wow 20-30g once a week :O meanwhile you can do the wintersday jumppuzzle for about the same reward endlessly

Even better, give me a pickaxe and a sickle so I can harvest nodes to continue that gold/hour rate once Wintersday ends.

So your point is that Raid reward isn’t worth a kitten if it’s not what like 30+gold per hours?? Wtf.

Thaddeus.4891:

savacli.8172:

perry.9645:

Thaddeus.4891:

fishball.7204:

The raid loot kinda sucks. My friend 22 insights no mini, no asc and no ghostly infusions. I think he just uninstalled after raiding at raid reset last nite. gg

Add all the reward you get from raid dude. You can get around 20-30 gold per hours with a decent group. Not counting any huge drop like an infusions.

Wow 20-30g once a week :O meanwhile you can do the wintersday jumppuzzle for about the same reward endlessly

Even better, give me a pickaxe and a sickle so I can harvest nodes to continue that gold/hour rate once Wintersday ends.

So your point is that Raid reward isn’t worth a kitten if it’s not what like 30+gold per week?? Wtf.

ftfy