Guild Wars 2

Proposal Overview
Potential Raid Mechanics Part 2: Area Effects and Re-enforcements.

Goal of Proposal
To add some interesting area restrictions/ effects

Proposal Functionality

Area effects: Applied upon entry to the raid: Not random and could basically be taken from the list of fractal instabilities.
Some quirky versions could be : Huntsmans bane/Weaponsmiths bane/Artificers bane (weapons from that crafting class can’t be used in the dungeon)
“Diversity is key” 5% damage reduction for each person of the same class in your sub-party (the 5 man standard party).

Re-enforcements:
This is a mechanic in which if you don’t clear the way to the boss (I.E kill the trash) it can spawn additional mobs during the fight. Additional mechanics could be added , like an optional event to blow an airship out of the sky. If you don’t it fires on you during a later stage.
A lose lose choice could be an option too. You must choose to either blow up the tanks or the infantry whichever you choose the other appears later.

Associated Risks:
There will obviously be raid favourites once players figure out one is easier than the other (like how gloves is taken out before jetpack by most groups in the molten duo).

Chris Whiteside.6102:

- Accessibility.
- Playing to the strengths of existing GW2 core functionality.

The rewards should be less RNG oriented, and more token oriented with large goals and also smaller / lower cost items when you have completed the large goals.

I’d like to start off by saying TTS’ suggestion for more tools to help organisers have control to open and close maps is a great one and I’m %100 behind it. In the following post ill expand on the idea of ‘more tools’ into aspects of the UI that I feel are lacking. I also want to quickly self-plug two other posts I made on similar topics. Here and Here

Proposal Overview – More UI assistance for organisers + Metaevent Information
I personally feel the UI doesn’t assist players enough with the more technical detail’s of the ‘mega-organised’ events. We need to UI to give us more information in a concise and clear manner. How many players are on each wurm ‘stack’? What is the role of these players? Is amber Wurm burning right now? How many turrets are manned at Tequatl? How many are defending the Vigil Megalaser?

Proposal 1 functionality – Expand Squad Functionality
The commander’s need advanced functionality to designate roles to players that all players map-wide can see. Think of WoW-style raid icons. For GW2, im thinking of a buffs commanders can apply, (self-removable by the player if they want of course) so players can see “Ok, this guy is a Condition Dealer and he kills husks”. “This guy is the turreter”. We can restrict this ability to players only within the commanders squad. Also, put the number of players in the squad inside the commander pin icon. This number is readable by all players not just the commander.

Additionaly, think of commander placeable in-game markers, for example, to show players where to stand or where to put their damage. There are currently basic map markers but in-world markers would be so much more useful and immediately apparent. Green arrow – Move here. Red arrow – Attack here. I think WvW commanders should be excited about this. These icons would be visible and contrasting enough to stand out amongst a large group of players.

Proposal 2 functionality – Event specific information
Make the meta-event widget much more useful and give players more context of whats happening. Turn the wurms healthbars red when they are in their burn phase. Keep an active and dynamic count of the current turrets manned in the Tequatl meta-event UI so players know this is important. If it is pivotal to the success of the event, it should be in the UI.

Associated Risks
More UI clutter can make the game feel even more confusing and daunting to players who don’t know the ‘raid icon’ meta. This is somewhat mitigated by the fact only members of the squad can see this additional clutter. Those that joined the squad in the first place would be assumed to be invested enough to want to learn this aspect of the game.
Adding aditional information to the meta-event UI causes the same ‘information overload’ problem. The trick would be to do it subtly but smartly. Changing healthbars to red when burning. Showing the running count of players manning turrets. The running count of players present inside each Tequatl Battery Defence event circle. Things like this help players alot to understand the bigger picture around them.

Kahrgan.7401:

Chris Whiteside.6102:

- Accessibility.
- Playing to the strengths of existing GW2 core functionality.

The rewards should be less RNG oriented, and more token oriented with large goals and also smaller / lower cost items when you have completed the large goals.

I would rather see having rewards that you sure you will get for completing, but you only get that the first time.

Then some RNG drops of unique items that only drop in there. (one or two) and that should be something that people would really want to have.

Tokens is yet another currency so not a big fan of that especially not as main thing. However if you get some tokens while doing it as a side thing (secondary) that helps you to get a armor set that fits with that content that would be fine.

If however the tokens will be the main thing and just a currency, you are creating yet another currency grind and we really already have more then enough (read: to much) of that in GW2.

Proposal Overview
Potential Raid Mechanics Part 3: Death has a consequence

Goal of Proposal
You may remember this one from GW1

Proposal Functionality
Dying gives a stacking de buff, could be -5% Health/Damage that could stack to -30%.

This is to prevent a party eventually zerging a boss down from dumb luck and to encourage players to stay alive,

The debuff is removed each time you make it to a new checkpoint (from my Resurrection proposal). This is an intractable option (so that a player with no debuffs at this point can come back later when they need it)

Associated Risks:
A bad group will just get even worse due to the frequent deaths which is what happened in GW1 so I don’t really see it as a downside, others may not share that
sentiment however.

Thats all of my stuff for now, I will still be replying for the next hour or so if I see anything interesting or that I disagree with,

Hi, I am Nike, the leader of Death and Taxes [DnT]. Our guild has an 11 year history of being at the forefront of MMO raiding and end game content. Our GW2 branch is well known for producing quality PVE guides and setting dungeon speed run records. In my humble opinion, I feel that I have a good idea of what the dungeon/fractal community in GW2 wants when it comes to raiding, challenging content and worthy rewards.

Proposal Overview

A suggested implementation of instanced raiding within guild wars 2.

Goal of Proposal

To implement instanced raiding which provides a sense of progression and achievement without compromising the unique attributes that make combat in Guild Wars 2 different than standard MMO genre games.

Proposal Functionality

This will be long-ish. Pack a lunch.

Accessibility Raid instances will be activated through the current Guild Mission system. When someone with mission control activates the raid portal in the open world, the first players in the guild to interact with the portal are transported to the raid instance. Activating a Guild Raid should cost some amount of Guild Merits, but not an excessive amount. Players should be encouraged to make multiple attempts per week, but discouraged from making hundreds of bad attempts. 1 to 5 Merits to activate seems like a compromise.

Size Raids will have a fixed player scale of 8-15. Any smaller than 8 is hardly worth of being called a raid, any larger than 16 some of the nuance of the unique combat system is lost due to particle effects and decreased mechanical complexity.

There will be no waypoints, and no ability to resurrect in case of a full party wipe. If you wipe players will be returned to the open world. Players can hard res each other as normal in cases of a partial wipe.

Raid Description Raid instances will be large zones, similar in size to an entire explorable dungeon or one of the main cities (Lions Arch, Divinity’s Reach etc). Players will spawn in a central area and can move outward in any desired direction, as the instances will be open ended. There will be 6 sub-quests throughout the instances in different areas of the zone and can be done in any order. Each quest will have unique goals and challenging sub-bosses. As an example of the suggested difficulty, I would cite Lupicus as an example of the baseline easiest difficulty and complexity of these subbosses. Each quest will have Raid Reward Chest (detailed below) upon completion.

Upon completion of the sub-quests, the end boss will spawn in the original central area. This boss will be extremely mechanically challenging and tuned to a level of difficulty that would commensurate with challenging raid bosses in other games in the genre. A good example of modern raid design difficulty would be Ohmna from Wildstar Genetic Archives or Nightmare Brontes from SWTOR Dread Fortress.
To be blunt, the end boss, like the ones mentioned above, will be especially mechanically challenging and guilds should not have the expectation to defeat the boss (or even get to the boss as the sub bosses will be challenging) until they have significant practice. Defeating the end boss of the raid will spawn a Glorious Raid Reward Chest.

The trash mobs in the raid should be somewhat challenging, akin to the Arah Elites. They should roam in in packs with paths that cross so players must be careful not to over-aggro. The trash packs should be mixed professions designed to have complimentary skill sets.

Part 2

Rewards

Trash mobs – In addition to the normal loot table for elite mobs, the trash have a good chance to drop a unique unrefined t7 mat (ore). The unrefined t7 mats are tradeable and have a relatively high vendor price.
Subbosses – In addition to normal legendary mob loot table, the sub-bosses will include a crafting recipe for unique ascended armor and weapon pieces and refined (ingot) versions of the t7 mats. Additionally they will have a rare chance to drop a weapon or armor box for the unique pieces.
End Boss – In addition to normal legendary mob loot table, the end boss will drop multiple pieces of the t7 refined mats and a chest containing either one of the unique ascended weapons or one of the armor pieces. Additionally, defeating the end boss will spawn the crafter who will allow players with sufficient resources to craft the armor or weapons. Ideally, the rewards would be balanced to provide the materials to craft at least one weapon or armor piece per full clear in addition to the piece for defeating the end boss.

Defeating the final boss will unlock an achievement title. Clearing the raid in under a set time (tuned to be moderately challenging to an experienced team but still forgiving of mistakes will unlock another title.

Example Raid An example raid would be “The Cleansing of Arah” where players would spawn in the Lupicus room and could move outward to through any of the 5 doors. There will be subquests in different areas of the dungeon, each with the sub boss. Upon completion of 6 sub quests the end boss will spawn in the Lupicus room, or a portal to the Lair of Zhaitan (hint, hint) will open there and the end boss will be combated.

Devata.6589:

Kahrgan.7401:

Chris Whiteside.6102:

- Accessibility.
- Playing to the strengths of existing GW2 core functionality.

The rewards should be less RNG oriented, and more token oriented with large goals and also smaller / lower cost items when you have completed the large goals.

I would rather see having rewards that you sure you will get for completing, but you only get that only the first time.

Then some RNG drops of unique items that only drop in there. (one or two) and something that people would really want to have.

Tokens is yet another currency so not a big fan of that especially not as main thing. However if you get some tokens while doing it as a side thing (secondary) that helps you to get a set to go with that content that would be fine.

If however the tokens will be the main thing and just a currency you are creating yet another currency grind and we really already have more then enough (read to much) of that in GW2.

I agree with Devata here, I think raid rewards should follow a pass/fail format for the main rewards with some RNG ones thrown in for replayability.

I don’t believe that a party who can’t advance past X point should have access to all the rewards offered by the content no matter how many times they bash their head against it unsuccessfully.

Proposal Overview

Whatever other characteristics the ANet take on raids might have, there should be a normal and a hard mode.

Goal of Proposal

Engaging content that works for everyone, with no one left out.

Proposal Functionality

Hard mode should consist of mob difficulty sufficient to challenge players with above average to high skill with Ascended gear. Normal mode should be tuned for players of average skill with Exotic gear. Rewards for hard mode should consist of increased coin and increased chances for rare drops. There should be exclusive items for each raid, and hard mode should allow a higher drop chance for these items.

Associated Risks

Raiding is about both harder content and rewards. The biggest risk to this proposal is player rejection of reward discrepancy between the two modes. A secondary issue is ANet having to change its prior stance about “no hard mode” in GW2.

Proposal Overview
dungeon-specific buffs determine roles

Goal of Proposal
Scaling seems to be a big issue. A lot of guilds want to bring tons of players into raids. Giving people certain roles via a buff-system would help scaling e.g. the bosses health.

Proposal Functionality
In the entrance-area of a dungeon there are 5 golden-glowing weapon bundles. If you pick up one of these your current weapon-set(s) will become golden glowing. Only golden-glowing weapons can hurt the boss directly.

Players without that weapon-bundle have different roles. Kill trash, kite certain enemy-types, control them, etc etc.

You can drop that bundle at any time you want, leaving it for others to pick up. The bundles ensure that only 5 players can hurt the boss at any given time. The spawns of the trash-enemies depends on the number of players in the instance.

This suggestion is an offspring of the 3-parallel-path suggestion I posted earlier.

Associated Risks

Players would likely want to do damage on the boss other than supporting only. Having players who don’t want to drop the weapon-bundle could be handled with conditions which do damage the more damage you’ve done with the bundle.

I’m not a member of DnT, but Nike’s thoughts above are very reasonable and I think meet my expectations of what a raid should be in GW2.

Hello everyone, I’m Evee from Relics of Orr (both the guild and the podcast). In the past I’ve been quite vocal about my support for bringing raids into GW2 and I’d like to share my ideas here as to how this could be achieved. Please note that this is a bit of a long post so a lot of people are posting while I type this so if I’m cutting in between a reply I’m sorry but such is the nature of the beast with a forum thread like this.

I should probably also mention that I do come from a long history of raiding in other games (including WoW) and think it’s important that people know that so they have some insight into my particular perspective as a former World First raider in several AAA MMO’s

Proposal Overview

To not only introduce raiding as a fun system for the majority of players to enjoy but implement it in such a way that it is healthy during the entire lifetime of GW2

Goal of Proposal

To fill the current lack of challenging but fun content for large groups of friends that is consistently rewarding.

Proposal Functionality

Raiding has been a long standing tradition in MMO’s for quite some time. That I can remember; all the way back to Everquest in fact; before the move forward to instances that was popularized by WoW.

Guild Wars already has in place a system reminiscent of EQ with it’s world bosses. However, most players nowadays look for more of a WoW-esque platform when they think of raiding. So in the in an effort to be as direct as possible I’ll now go into the features and implementation of raiding I think should exist in GW2 in order to set it apart from an old, well-known system that I think GW2 should take some lessons/influence from but should in no way try to reproduce (as so many others have tried)

Size: Finding the right size for a raid is the most crucial part when looking at designing. It determines the amount of logistics needed by the players as well as what kind of commitment and audience will actually go into the new content. To small of a number and many won’t consider it a “real raid” too many and participation becomes too much of a scheduling nightmare among large groups of people. Additionally having a set size is important in how the raids are designed for balance purposes; making an engaging boss fight for 10 people is very different than making one for 40. With that said I think a happy medium of size and convenience would be a raid size of 15 people. Large enough to have multiples of multiple professions while also being small enough to not deter the more casual players which are numerous in GW2 (which I would like to emphasize to everyone should be given every opportunity to be able to enjoy this content)

(continued in my next post)

Rewards: Once a raid size has been established this is the most important thing to consider. Rewards can and will determine who will actually attempt the content as well as how long they are willing to repeat it. One of the biggest current complaints of fractals is the lack of rewards for the time and difficulty they present. Raids by their very nature should be more challenging than even this content and I think it is very important that the rewards they actually give (not only OFFER) is reflective of their investment. The highest quality equipment should be the baseline at this level of play (currently and hopefully forevermore ascended). GW2 however is about more than just what numbers are on your equipment (thankfully) so unique visual rewards in the way of weapons, armor, and outfits would be a compelling way to get players to run the content. In order to give this content a healthy lifespan however these kinds rewards cannot simply be given away all at once. Implementing a system similar to the existing dungeon tokens would be my suggestion for these particular rewards, a good short term goal. As for long term introducing gold, rare materials, and a long term synthesis track (more on this in a second) will give players incentive to run the content repeatedly.

Synthesis Track: As I mentioned in the last bit a good long term goal for raiding would be a Synthesis Track. A hybrid system of the current PvP track reward system and the Mystic Forge, this system will give raiders a long term goal that can evolve as the game does. Using materials that can be obtained from all aspects of the game the player will be able to spend “Raid Experience” to synthesize these materials into new items giving access to difficult to obtain items that span the entire game (i.e precursors, exotic/ascended runes, ascended armor/weapons)

Lastly (at least for now) the most crucial thing for raiding to become a health part of GW2. I believe that the raids MUST be instanced for the groups entering them. Large open world content is difficult to coordinate and is subject the outside influence that most raiders quite simply do not want to put up with.

I’ve probably already run out of space so I’ll throw this out there and start talking about boss design (which Anet is already very good at as shown by recent living story updates) if it comes up in the discussion later.

To me this would be a Total waste of time……

I propose you fix the broken parts of the game before you add more to Break…..

hybrid.5027:

Example Raid An example raid would be “The Cleansing of Arah” where players would spawn in the Lupicus room and could move outward to through any of the 5 doors. There will be subquests in different areas of the dungeon, each with the sub boss. Upon completion of 6 sub quests the end boss will spawn in the Lupicus room, or a portal to the Lair of Zhaitan (hint, hint) will open there and the end boss will be combated.

I like your proposal, it reminds me a bit of the queens gauntlet. Players could place themselves where they think would fit most / their appropriate difficulty, which would work great for closed groups as well, I imagine.

In this case a end-boss would spawn in the centre after you’ve defeated all the other sub-bosses.

What if there are more than one possible end-bosses. If you’re fast, a very hard boss spawns (with a unique version of the skins that drop from the normal-version). This would encourage players to do the instance again, become faster and unlock the elite-boss… so no need for a hardmode.

So yeah, as someone who did raid and raid leading for some years in that game (no need to mention the name) I’ll drop my thoughts in if you don’t mind.
Enjoy some anecdotes after my 2 cents.

I had my share of raiding in my time as you can guess, so I am rather glad that there are none here for the time being. No Tequila and the 3 headed do not qualify for that in my book. But if things are rolling that way let me give you some thoughts about what can go wrong when designing a raid (encounter).

So what definition of raid would I not want to see?
The one with gear treadmill. Beat raid x to get access and gear required for raid y, ad infinitum.
The one that requires you to have a certain lineup to even try it.
The one that needs people with positioning knowledge and movement skill, so you can actually find people to raid with you.
The one requiring you to chew through 15 min off so called tactics.
The one where key functions of the fights are placed on one or two people.
The one where you can’t take more than x meele, because fight mechanics.

Just from the top of my mind. I suppose the CDI will support you with more, or just ask other game developers for some pros / cons.

Story time: Just for shaking heads, laughs, and maybe weeping a tear
Baron Geddon, hearing the server wide known legendary “and if your fish vomit or your cat is on fire.. MOVE OVER THERE”. Suffice to say from that day on the tactic-description contained “..your girlfriend tells you we are pregnant..”.
Nefarian. The instant GG that was the Shaman Class Call. He summoned a forest of windfury totems that if proccing allowed him to hit 3 times instead of once. Did i mention the other factions special class caused him to go invulnerable for some seconds? Note that there was no enrage timer on that one.
Trash mobs AQ40 before the princess, I almost died laughing as our choleric melee-leader spit rage on teamspeak because they were kicked around all the time (A mechanic of that mob and not a bunch of LB #4 spamming rangers mind you).
Attuning new raid members for Hyjal and BT, going for Kael’s vial that day. Yeah shockingly back in the day you had to fulfill some long quest chains to be allowed inside some raids. Of course you cannot expect from people to do some work beforehand so we are porting them around the whole world until we stand before the raid boss. Next up would be knowing what the boss we have to beat actually does. Naturally they didn’t inform themselves beforehand. After listening to 15 min of boss explanation we wipe on the second advisor because they didn’t listen. Obviously the term “spread” was too hard to understand.
Illidan, guild first kill. 24 man. Because our Main Tank didn’t feel like it that day.
Naxxramas 2.0 Kael’Thuzad, everyone down exept for a lonely bear tank. “You know, they won’t kill me but i could use some help.” Watch in awe as he shapeshifts pulls off a combat rezz tanking Kael and the 4 adds just to realize that the cooldown for the aoe iceblock on non-primary aggro targets should be up long ago. See 2 iceblocks and have a good laugh as you respawn to wipe the floor with Kael for good.
Anub’Arak 50 trys left 25 man hero, first pull of the night. The guild officers are betting on who will cause the first wipe. The hunter won. Hugging the adds butt so the don’t shadowstep and instagib his sorry kitten didn’t work because they were in his deadzone. Good thing he should shoot Anub’ anyway while the melee cleave the adds.
Some purple dragon 25 man hero, I receive a stacking debuff that when dispelled anihilated everything within a certain raidus depending on the amount of stacks. As usual I run out of the camp and start counting on Teamspeak. There never was a dispell but boy the fire covered the whole arena.
10 man hero spine of deathwing. try #100something. He does his first barrel roll and there fly 2 dps that had nothing else to do than stand on the safe spot.
Several occasions. “Where is x? You know we cannot do this without fear ward right?”
Several occasions. “Do we have to take bob with us? We had some problems. I don’t want to raid with him.” Yay couples.
Of course there are good memories too. Watching Cripp in High Warlord Gear wrecking things. Receiving a beating by the 4 horseman. Standing before M’uru pre nerf comes to mind. Finally beating Mimir hero and advancing to Algalon. Seeing Ragnaros grow Legs. The general chit chat babbling and laughing with the core of the guild over the years. Finally having full BIS gear. Consoling a warlock that after 6 months still not a single Class Robe dropped. The first BZZZZZZZZZT as you encountered C’Thun. And many more.

Finally, just because it’s true:

i will post my reward idea here before i will get to the other stuff:

Boss Reward Idea

Proposal Overview

Create a unique looking weapon and armor skin set for each profession.
The raid armor and weapon skins should be looking somewhat specialised for each profession and most important, they should make you look like a kittening boss.

Once you use a raid set skin for a weapon or armor piece, this piece of gear will unlock a new slot similar to infusion slots. Lets call them style infusion slots. You can socket every weapon and armor piece with a +10 style infusion max.
Each boss in the raid has a loot table with specific armor and weapon skin pieces.
The end boss drops a +1 style infusion each time you kill him. You can add up the style infusions, so if your chest piece has a +2 style infusion, you can add a +1 style infusion to make it a +3 style infusion.

What will the style infusions do? The style infusions will give each weapon and armor piece a special effect. A glowing effect, a fire effect, whatever.
Depending on the size of the style infusions, this effect will increase.
For example a piece with a +5 style infusion will only “glow” half as much as a piece with a +10 style infusion.

Goal of Proposal

A unique weapon and armor set which shows that you have really beaten the content would be the perfect reward and make players feel rewarded and excited.
The infusions will give you a long term reason to visit the raid besides that the raid is being fun and challenging and therefore eliminate the need for RNG based drops.

hybrid.5027:

Accessibility Raid instances will be activated through the current Guild Mission system. When someone with mission control activates the raid portal in the open world, the first players in the guild to interact with the portal are transported to the raid instance. Activating a Guild Raid should cost some amount of Guild Merits, but not an excessive amount. Players should be encouraged to make multiple attempts per week, but discouraged from making hundreds of bad attempts. 1 to 5 Merits to activate seems like a compromise.

There will be no waypoints, and no ability to resurrect in case of a full party wipe. If you wipe players will be returned to the open world. Players can hard res each other as normal in cases of a partial wipe.

I think it would be a mistake to implement this sort of system in terms of accessibility. There is already to much incentive in the game the join a single large guild and basically ignore the rest of the community as well as for large guild to try and hoard their members as much as possible (as seen in the rise of 100% mandatory rep). While there should be some sort of entrance barrier to keep those obviously not prepared for out of it, I think i should play off of already similar content in the way of explorable dungeons. My suggestion, you have to complete all the dungeon paths in order to enter any raid, additionally every piece of gear you have equipped must be exotic when you enter (once your inside you can switch as you please but that’s your prerogative at that point)

Second NO entry fee. This discourages inexperienced players from entering and punishes those trying to learn a new system. While I do agree there should not be multitudes of waypoints a simple rez checkpoint systems (like fractals) is enough “punishment” for failing. Being put into the open world is too much for the majority of players and while it may be compelling to you as a the leader of DnT it will deter more players than welcome.

A nice medium for accessibility and difficulty would be to have the usual raid setup for those who want to participate but for those seeking a bit more of a challenge they can optionally sacrifice some kind of resource (gold, rare mats, tokens, really anything) as a sort of wager that they will succeed. If they go through the raid without wiping then they not only get what they paid in back but an exponential amount more as they continue without dying. This will also be a good way to incentivise players to return to the content once it is on “farm” as a way to gain more wealth/resources.

Reading the purposal from DnT as a casual player makes me want to practice hard to complete raids. I do feel that raids shouldn’t be cleared in one day (Though it is possible.) It takes time and I love the idea of the sub-quest system and unique skins.

I am strongly opposed to the raids being only activated through means that only a guild could have. It should not only be accessible with any kind of guild currency. The raids should be able to be put together through chat or LFG tool if wanted. The overall difficulty will likely be too difficult to complete, but some of it would be possible.

+1 to be separate from guild currency or mandatory guild activation.

Proposal Overview
totally crazy idea: Champions of the Mists

3 parties enter a raid. Your party looks normal to you, the other 2 parties’ characters look like ghosts (to your team only). Each party can only take down 1 of 3 health-bars of their enemies.

Goal of Proposal

• Having high amounts of effect-clutter.
• You can focus on your team instead of 14 other players.
• allows for new interesting mechanics (e.g. ghosts can walk through walls, hurt enemies only they can see,…)
• easier to design scaling

Proposal Functionality

Ghosts effects are greatly reduced for your party. You see no aoes of them and projectiles are minimum visibility.

Currently it can be a bit difficult to allow multiple roles in combat. Everybody in a zerg sees the same problems as the players around them and because of no “holy trinity” players mostly zerg down a common foe.

Imagine that your group has a bit of a different reality than the other group next to you. You see a pathway whereas another group sees a wall. The other group appears as ghosts to you, and you can see them going through a wall to find that hidden lever which opens the big gate in the room.

Imagine a boss which goes down once his health is depleted but starts to regenerate because of his other health-bars are still above 20%.

You might also see enemies the other groups can’t see. Some of them don’t follow you back around a corner but get even stronger when you leave their sight, bombarding huge areas with aoe.

Associated Risks

Players might find this idea too gimmicky.

Proposal
To play to ANET’s current strengths and show that you incorporate the existing living world concept into open world raiding without sacrificing GW2 and it’s current player base

Goal
To fill the gap and provide hard content that requires a good deal or coordination without locking players into a gear grind and to give group play a place to thrive

Proposal Functionality
By utilizing the already created squad interface I think Anet has the ability to put a new spin on raiding. When the term raiding comes up most people think of Rift or WoW. This is great and all but I would like to see a new spin put in place instead of hammering out the same old same old as this has been one of Anet’s greatest assets: the ability to take something that’s be done and turn it into something new and fantastic.

The Open World
With world bosses like Teq and Wurm players were at one point forced to up their game and got a taste of what I like to call non-traditional raiding -> coordination and planning were actually involved. I’d like to see Dev’s take that one step further and implement a raid UI using the current Squad System.

• up the level of squad members to a max of 150
• give the squad commander the ability to see his squad – health, class (see ESO warframes addon)
• allow the squad commander to kick and add people to squad by right click
  Once commanders have the tools available to control the group the possibilities could be endless

Keep Raids in the open world. Allow anyone to interact and travel through but have a system set up in place so that players must be in a Raid group with a minimum of 10 players and the Raid Leader must talk to an npc in order to gain any loot/progress from the area, or do damage to the bosses or mobs, or interact with the puzzles etc. This will still give the world the feeling it’s changing without the chance for some random person to troll or ruin hours of set up. It also has the bonus of still being a place that non raiders can explore or check out without having to fight to get a spot in a raid group.

Raids could then be set to scale based on the number of people in a raid – 10 being min to a max or 150 for things like say wurm

Loot
I like the idea of the pvp reward tracks and I think they could work nicely in a raid scenario provided the loot is worth the time and effort put into each raid. Different tracks could award different things and all loot should be of use to a raider but SHOULD NOT be a gear grind or things that would be a block for new players learning to raid.

General Questions

• What is Anet’s definition of a raid?
• Are we limited to just one type of raid or is is possible to have a mix? -> WoW type raids (guilds), GW1 adventure Zones (want so bad), GW2 open world (Teq/Wurm)

Alrighty, I blew the 200 word limit lol. if you want me to expand on anything let me know

~Soren

For Accessibility I think there are 2 scenarios nobody likes to be in for Raids:

1. You don’t have enough people to do this Raid

2. There are too many people in this raid and you don’t get to come in.

Which is mostly while I’m an advocate of multiple Raid sizes with some scaling to try and make the numbers in-between be “possible” even if it increases difficultly.

Also the LFG Tool should be used in some fashion is you want to Raid and can’t find the numbers/group. Can we all agree on that?

Chris, can you provide a baseline definition of “raid”? What exactly is the intention behind creating “raid” content that cannot already be expressed in terms of existing dungeons or fractals? Is it about creating another category of content that is gated to guilds?

Chris Whiteside.6102:

A few have asked what we should start with. To re-iterate we should start by discussing what raiding could be in GW2 with the foundation based on the core pillars of our game.

So think about accessibility, how our combat works, how our progression works, and so on.

Thanks,

Chris

One of the core pillars: the end-game starts at lv.1. I’m against any entry-barriers for raids. Getting there in a natural way would be as lv.80 content to me, as soon as someone leaves the “tutorial” (imho 1-80). Why would you lock out a good player who started playing GW2 yesterday? Why would the “dungeon-master” achievement be any indication of being a good player?

GW2’s combat shines with combos. Everyone can spam skills, but combos require a minimal amount of knowledge. Having too big groups trivializes combo-fields since random activations happen often. This is why all of my suggestions were about having small groups of 5 players playing (in different ways) next to each other. (I suggested non-intersecting paths, buffs for limiting damage and ghosts for limiting effect-clutter and visibility of combos). I don’t think we should have 15 people in the same area at the same time since zerging becomes mindless quite fast.

If combos would play an important role in enemy-encounters other than having small supportive benefits, this would make combat more interesting imho.

Conski Deshan.2057:

Before I go into suggestions on how I would like raids implemented I wanted to post some links that may give people who have never done any form of raid a brief tutorial of traditional ones.

Those links? I’m instantly a fan of you.
I was just going to suggest the Log Horizon explanation of how a raid works.

Based on my liking of dotHack universe, and the descriptions of systems from LH, this is the base of what I suggest:

Overview
I don’t know what is the approach we want to give to Raids in the game, be it expanding on the idea of dungeons, or expanding on the idea of world bosses, or maybe both. But I see raids as an instance where a group of at least 20 players work together to reach a Boss at the end, beat it, and get the reward for doing so.

How to enter the Raid, and structure of the zone

• It should offer two modes: Mercenary and Guild mode
• In mercenary mode, you work for a NPC, and you can join the raid in mercenary mode through the LFG tool, which will pair you with other people, and scale the content properly.
• In Guild mode, your guild can start the instance of the raid, and everyone in your guild can enter it. The system should scale the content properly.
• A raid should require at least 16 players, and the maximum limit of participation, should be related to the amount of players that can be on the same map.
• The differences between mercenary and guild mode, should offer interesting options. The player should feel compelled to do both modes, not making guild mode easier, nor making mercenary mode more efficient. (or the opposite)

About the zone

• I picture raids taking place in dungeon like instances. Similar to a “tower of trials”, “eternal tower” or “tower of druaga”. Where you should explore various levels of the same dungeon, beat sub-bosses, in order to reach the final raid boss that guards the big chest of loot.
• The zones, large enough, could be designed to be completed on more than one play session. This means, the system should allow players to resume an instance, if the group has to leave.
  Smaller guilds could benefit from this, by doing raid content on a slower pace, but being able to complete it.
• I can’t stress enough how much I would like to see huge, complicated mazes, non linear, that encourage exploration, that are dangerous and that require preparation.

About the content, the difficulty and the rewards

Content

• Raids should feel like fractals, on a scale of world bosses, with less people involved.
• This is a good chance to shake the metagame. With features that changes common rules of the game, for example: “inside of the raid instance, you never leave combat”, this change alone would mean that being able to heal becomes valuable, because it speeds up the progression (you wouldn’t have to stop so often to wait for cooldowns of self healing skills in order to be able to keep advancing).
• I want to see hordes of monsters, with interesting mechanics, pairing it with terrain mechanics too: lava and water shouldn’t be the only terrain modifications we can experience.

Difficulty

• I want to see something different from “stack” or “zerg”. Content should encourage to organize small units among the group, to create intelligent formations for the correct usage of skills, etc.
• I would like to see some randomization included, some enemies could differ between sessions or instances, making it interesting each time you visit the raid.
• Numbers shouldn’t be a factor of difficulty. Of course, the instance should scale, but this shouldn’t mean that you wouldn’t want more players than a certain number, or less. Content should remain interesting and rewarding for different amounts of players.

Rewards

• This is the hard part. No RNG means devaluated rewards, RNG means we get only greens and blues. Reward tracks are a good way to fight against this problem. Imagine if a reward track was more specific, instead of just rewarding you for repeating content, you need to fulfill certain tasks (with options) in order to advance in the track. This will discourage skipping events/enemies, and will encourage exploration. Also, RNG can be a good thing, when it determines what you get, instead of “if you get”. Talking about valuable items, of course.
• Integrate rewards with other systems in the game. I want outfits, minis, finishers, dyes, skins, tokens, home instance upgrades, trophies, utility items, consumables, boosters, etc.

This is great! I have really been looking forward to this.

Proposal

A tiered raiding system

GW2 has always struck me as a very inclusion-oriented game. Fractals are a great example. You don’t need AR to start doing them but if you want to do them at the highest level of difficulty, it’s a must. I see raiding taking a similar approach. Gear-gating should have an absolute zero bar for entry, but let a similar AR style approach be implemented for Raids in that, the harder the tier of difficulty for the raid you are doing should mean more of the AR type mechanic you need to continue upping the difficulty. This makes it so everyone can see the content and people that want a greater challenge also get their wish.

If it’s guild raids, then I think that a big bulk of the rewards should be upgrades to the Guild Hall cosmetically(if it’s ever implemented).

I will think about how I would like content for this set up in a later post.

On Accessibility:
-Not linked to guilds
-Instanced
-Anyone can attempt it after a small once off gate (so that you don’t run in completely unprepared)
-I’m considering if a story mode might work (anyone can see the content then but the rewards are only for the explorable).

On Combat
-Mechanically complex (outlined in my raid mechanic proposal)
-Physically complex (fights shouldn’t be automatically become easy once you understand the mechanics.)
-No health bags please, bashing at something for 20 minutes is not fun or proving anything.

On Progression
-This is one point I won’t budge on, The rewards from raids should be both gotten only from raids and by the person themselves. This is about testing your own abilities, there are no short-cuts/easy mode/buying/tokens or alternative means. This is not about excluding people, its about having rewards that mean something and is actually a reward/trophy and not a participation reward.
-My earlier rewards proposal outlines a non-RNG system that increasingly rewards the player the further into a raid they make it, that I believe is fair.
-I recommend a rewardless(gold only) story mode for raids so that players who want to view the content can, but the rewards for the challenge mode maintain their meaning.

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Leablo.2651:

Chris, can you provide a baseline definition of “raid”? What exactly is the intention behind creating “raid” content that cannot already be expressed in terms of existing dungeons or fractals? Is it about creating another category of content that is gated to guilds?

Here you go:

‘…instanced co-operative group based ‘challenging’ content…’

Chris

This seems to conflict with the title of the thread, which implies “instanced co-operative guild based ‘challenging’ content…”

I would just like clarification on that.

First off, I’m sorry, that I totally lost the pace with Part 2, but I had some kind of burnout and felt ttoally overwhelmed by the shear amount of fast made posts in Part 2, that it felt kind of impossible to summarize all of it fast enough.

So as a general proposal, before I participate here I just want to say, that it would be for upcoming summary work very awesome, if futurous CDI threads could make every now and then some “BREAKS” to give the Devs (or those people that do Summaries for the Devs) some time to summarize the most important things, before the discussion gets continued and the Threads end up again fast in like 30+ page threads, which aren’t clear anymore and where people lose very fast the oversight about all the things which have been already suggested and what hasn’t, because of people simply not being willing to read first so many pages (or even summaries) to see, if the things they have in mind, have been suggested most likely already countless of times before of them.

I even tried to make a very concise summary style this time and even with that I was not fast enough in the first Part to keep the pace with how fast the thread growed to a huge monster, cause of people making alot of times the same suggestions like countless other people before of them, which naturally blows up these kinds of threads quickly alot bigger, than it is neccessary.

What do you think about it, if for example every around 5 pages gets done a short break (Dev closes temporarely the Thread), until the last 5 pages have been summarized and actualized in a Summary Thread and then reopens the Thread again.
Summarizing 5 pages is quickly done within one day or two, butz it would slow down a bit the speed of growth of the CDI threads so that people also use that time to review, what has been already suggested.

So much for now as my personal general Feedback so far.

AnthonyOrdon.3926:

Is it possible, then, to just scale objectives along with the player counts? Perhaps. But it seems that would equate to just making many tiers of the content which, to me, sounds like a good way to diminish the total amount of content we could build. What do you guys think?

I think it depends on what objectives we’re talking about. As I mentioned previously I can see higher player count objectives being scaled down easily (like the amount of spears/kegs/colors you need in triple trouble) but I definitely see why designing a compelling boss that’s able to be taken on by 10-150 would be impossible.

I think primarily Raid content should have a set player count that the content is designed for but as a secondary objective, scaling should still be present when possible so lower player counts can still attempt the content.

Like say as a designer, I want to design a scenario where the group has to split 3 different ways and cooperate to succeed. I could still design the Raid in a way mostly catering to a 15 man group split into 5 man teams but it should still be possible for a 10 man group to beat it with a 4-3-3 split if the monsters downscale a bit even if it makes the content a bit harder.

Proposal Overview
Platforming/Environmental Hazards should be a strong element in any “raid.”

Goal of Proposal
Currently, jumping puzzles are a mostly isolated part of gameplay which is underutilized in content that also contains challenging combat encounters. Adding challenging jumping puzzle-like segments intertwined with other kinds of gameplay would go a long way towards showing full mastery of the game’s mechanics and ultimately give a much more rewarding experience.

Proposal Functionality
While minor platforming elements do find their way into dungeons and fractals, these are no where near the difficulty that they should be for an elite adventure. The precision jumping needed for the tribulation mode of the Super Adventure Box gave us a taste of how difficult and rewarding the platforming elements of this game can be and they have yet to be implemented into the “real” game. Combining this with “real” combat encounters would make for a challenging and engaging adventure that tests an aspect of your game mastery not yet found in other content.

An Example
Eternal Battlegrounds jumping puzzles.
Here the main opponents are other players, but with AI foes introduced, it would be the perfect example with a few tweaks.
-Progress through the substages (ruby, emerald, saphire sanctums) to retrieve 3 keys.
-Ascend the Obsidian Sanctum covered in traps, large jumping segments, and challenging encounters
-Use your three keys to open the way to the pinnacle of the sanctum where an EPIC BOSS ENCOUNTER* awaits.
-BONUS: Once groups became comfortable, they could split into 3 groups to each retrieve 1 key while inexperienced groups could stick together and get them 1 at a time.

• EPIC BOSS ENCOUNTER
  Tribulation mode SAB jumping WHILE fighting Lupicus WHILE dodging the laser grid from CoE WHILE avoiding the wind mechanic from personal story priory where you have to time your running when you see the wind stop blowing the flag WHILE Liadri spams AoE and clones hunt you down

Associated Risks
-Alienate players with poor jumping skills
-“This isn’t Mario its a MMO”
-Potentially frustrating if you happen to mess up a jump and have to start all the way over (checkpoints placed strategically would help to mitigate this)

Guild Raids

Raids should be instanced content, and would ideally be an entire map like Underworld, Fissure of Woe, Domain of Anguish. This could be only open for a set number of days, or it could stay open until the guild finishes it or resets it themselves, or there could be fail mechanics (like when quests failed in UW or FoW) that close the raid. If we had guild halls when this is implemented could be a portal from the guild hall, otherwise the guild can make a portal themselves in open world only for guild members.

We have been asking for Underworld and friends to be added back since launch, this is a great way to add those areas and areas like it back. They can have similar functionality, and large guilds could even cover multiple areas at once. The format of those old areas would actually mesh well with the GW2 event system, giving you a good starting point. If the raid is an entire map it really FEELS like a raid, like something bigger than just a dungeon path.

AnthonyOrdon.3926:

On scaling: it is true that we have a certain amount of “magic” scaling in the game, commonly seen in dynamic events. The intent of that system is to keep difficulty consistent across a variety of player counts. The sticking point for myself on raids and scaling is that while we can scale enemies, it is far more difficult to meaningfully scale objectives.

To elaborate, in a 10-player raid, each player is responsible for approximately 1/10 of challenge. As you add players, that challenge share diminishes, so in a 20-player raid, the individual role is about half as important as it would have been with 10 players (challenges of coordination aside).

Of course, group content is rarely so singular and for a good reason. If we have 3 objectives, we divide the focus of the group and your ownership of a 20-player challenge goes from 1/20 to 1/6ish.

Is it possible, then, to just scale objectives along with the player counts? Perhaps. But it seems that would equate to just making many tiers of the content which, to me, sounds like a good way to diminish the total amount of content we could build. What do you guys think?

I think its best to scale with multiple objectives, Multiple objectives will increase the life of the instance, as well as assure that more people can play and yet matter.
let say you got an instance.
It has 5 different objectives/paths. Bonus is handed out if you complete one of the objectives.
The more objectives you complete at the same time, you get a bonus to rewards

This will allow people to scale the difficulty a lot and create a great variety.

• people can choose to have more or less players on a single objective
• small groups can still complete it
• skilled organized groups try to complete multiple objectives.
• since the bonus is for a random objective, many people will vary their play.

essentially i think the replay value will be high, it can scale better to 5-25 players. Difficulty can be adjusted by the team, how many they take per path, etc. Highly replayable, varied (you can be on different paths)

I would also make it so that other players progress can effect the other paths, and some paths can meet up. Lets say if they defeat X boss before team 2 gets there the conditions or map is different somewhere else. etc.

Think of a dynamic dungeon

Proposal Overview
Open world raid maps
Open world raid bosses are great but I think players miss the crawl.

Proposal Functionality
Everything in my proposal steals from systems already in place except for one and that’s how waypoints are used. I’ll get to that in a second.
The big idea is that there are full non instanced maps that are dedicated to raiding. These maps would have broad linier paths that lead to boss fights of increasing difficulty. The basic format would be a map with three major paths; let’s call them upper, middle and lower.

So the beginning of the map would be solo-able but once you pass a certain point everything is balanced for a group of five a little further a group of 10 further still a group of 25. Events will still scale from there but the assumption is you have at least 25 players with you.

Dynamic Events – So again at the beginning of the zone you also find npc groups that have some interest in exploring this new territory; let’s say each of the orders are there. There are three Orders and three paths. Which Order gets what path is decided by some kind of event. Let’s say that it was decided that the Priory is going down the upper path. This will spawn a series of dynamic events as the players help them though the zone. Think of these events like an escort on steroids. Your setting up base camps and defending them, doing reconnaissance, trying to turn the natives into allies, creating and defending supply chains, attacking entrenched enemies, and generally pushing the front line forward.

If it were the Whispers it would be a different set of events. If the Priory had taken the middle path a different set of events would ensue. Bottom line 3 npc groups x 3 paths equal 9 unique dynamic event arches but that’s not all there would also be a line of dynamic events that occur in absence of the npc group so there are 3 more series of events one for each path. This last group should be considered “hard mode” because the players are doing it without the support of npcs. Players could control the advancement of the npc group to get the most out of a path by first doing the events without support then bringing up the front to complete a new group of events in the same area.
Bosses – Bosses are spawned by events. Some events spawn multiple bosses on timers so if you have a large group you can split and try to take on both or focus on one and let the other run amok and destroy the base you help the vigil set up. I’m not going to go into boss fight mechanics because others have really great ideas. I do want to see enemy healers though.

Waypoints – Waypoints are only available to players fighting in the surrounding area. So you get a certain buff by fighting in the 10 man zone of the upper path that allows you to use the wps in that area. The buff would be limited duration but it’s easily refreshed just by doing stuff in the zone. The idea is to keep the numbers of players down. For this type of content people should be rewarded for the crawl as much as the boss fights.

Associated Risks
Open world content breeds zergs. I’m hoping between multiple paths, multiple boss pops, and restricted waypoints the numbers will be kept down. But I would love to hear from other people ideas on managing player numbers in an open world environment.

I think people may be overestimating the amount of people they’ll have available for a raid, I saw one person even suggesting 150 people as a cap. I would say smaller sizes may make more sense (10,15,20)
-Your contribution in the team is more important (as Anthony outlined)
-It is less of a logistical nightmare “ok we have a 5 minute window where we have 40 people online and free to actually do something”. There was a perfect article I found a while back (can’t find the link now) that stated the biggest challenge for any of the 40 man raids they’d done in other games was actually getting the people on-line at the correct time and having replacements ready should one need to drop out.

I like the idea of 150 man battlefield style things but maybe it should be considered as a separate concept “Battlegrounds” or something along the like that are pitched battles against the dragons forces.

Baltzenger.2467:

Conski Deshan.2057:

Before I go into suggestions on how I would like raids implemented I wanted to post some links that may give people who have never done any form of raid a brief tutorial of traditional ones.

Those links? I’m instantly a fan of you.
I was just going to suggest the Log Horizon explanation of how a raid works.

Based on my liking of dotHack universe, and the descriptions of systems from LH, this is the base of what I suggest:

Hah thanks, I’d love if the games general implementation went towards Log Horizons direction. It’s what I base most of my suggestions/Ideas around that and .Hack/ SAO

Guild Raids: Mobs,Bosses, and puzzles

Over the last year you guys have shown great progress in expanding content. The aetherpath was a step in the right direction, it just needs some tweaks. The new enemies since Wurm was added have also been a huge leap forward in livening up content, especially with how several boss mobs are mobile and how the mordrem have different strengths and weaknesses. These things give you guys great material to make raids that didn’t exist at launch.

Mobs
Trash mobs and any boss spawned mobs should be varied like the mordrem, especially how some are much more vulnerable to condition damage. This is a great way to shake up the pure damage meta, and give condition specs a real role in new organized content. Also, the AI really needs to be smarter, one of the biggest reasons many people consider dungeons a joke now (I just want to be blunt, not offend anyone) is that the AI will stupidly follow people around a corner and stand there piled up and not move. Give us smarter AI.

Bosses
Make bosses in raids like Tequatl, make them structures. 99% of the problems that arise from dungeon bosses come from creative ways of bursting them down almost instantly and all these are a direct result of critical damage. You will save yourselves so much time balance-wise by just making bosses in raids structures. To compensate that, since some classes really rely on critical hits for most of their damage, bosses should have adds that those players can deal with in some way, allowing them to still be useful without being forced to use a trap, environmental weapon, or whatever else the bosses mechanics might have.
Give bosses phases. Lupi is one of the best designed bosses in the game, we need more bosses like that. Whether it is burn phases and phases to remove some sort of armor or just phases like Lupi, give them phases. The burning effigy, as another example, has this interesting mechanic of getting regen stacks from the crystals, but its just too easy to simply outdamage the regen so no one needs to destroy them. Add more things like that but make sure we can’t just bypass it.

Puzzles
Make raids more than just mowing through trash mobs to race to the next boss. You guys did a good thing with the puzzles in the aether path, they just needed some tweaking. The ooze puzzle for example, its major flaw is the ooze mobs that spawn attack from range, creating a reliance on reflects to do the material since it makes it a lot easier. Other than that its actually a good puzzle with moderate difficulty.

I’d just like to mention a few things:

1. Please don’t ever put an important part of the story like Victory or Death into a group/raid dungeon again. It was really annoying after being able to solo the entire personal story.

2. If you have to do so, add a “cinematic” version of the dungeon that’s soloable – without any actual rewards, other than seeing the content and being able to finish the story quests, for those of us who would like to do that.

3. This is pretty much the only game out there without the “standard” mmo formula, and I feel that is its biggest strength. Many tried to copy WoW and all failed, so please keep following your own path.

Whatever you do, I trust you will do the right thing.

AnthonyOrdon.3926:

On scaling: it is true that we have a certain amount of “magic” scaling in the game, commonly seen in dynamic events. The intent of that system is to keep difficulty consistent across a variety of player counts. The sticking point for myself on raids and scaling is that while we can scale enemies, it is far more difficult to meaningfully scale objectives.

To elaborate, in a 10-player raid, each player is responsible for approximately 1/10 of challenge. As you add players, that challenge share diminishes, so in a 20-player raid, the individual role is about half as important as it would have been with 10 players (challenges of coordination aside).

Of course, group content is rarely so singular and for a good reason. If we have 3 objectives, we divide the focus of the group and your ownership of a 20-player challenge goes from 1/20 to 1/6ish.

Is it possible, then, to just scale objectives along with the player counts? Perhaps. But it seems that would equate to just making many tiers of the content which, to me, sounds like a good way to diminish the total amount of content we could build. What do you guys think?

I would vastly prefer a fixed group size. It’s easier to design encounters since you dont have to worry about scaling issues. Plus, in a relatively smaller group size 6-15ish you can avoid particle effects hell obscuring the fights and that would allow you to make more nuanced mechanics.

AnthonyOrdon.3926:

On scaling: it is true that we have a certain amount of “magic” scaling in the game, commonly seen in dynamic events. The intent of that system is to keep difficulty consistent across a variety of player counts. The sticking point for myself on raids and scaling is that while we can scale enemies, it is far more difficult to meaningfully scale objectives.

To elaborate, in a 10-player raid, each player is responsible for approximately 1/10 of challenge. As you add players, that challenge share diminishes, so in a 20-player raid, the individual role is about half as important as it would have been with 10 players (challenges of coordination aside).

Of course, group content is rarely so singular and for a good reason. If we have 3 objectives, we divide the focus of the group and your ownership of a 20-player challenge goes from 1/20 to 1/6ish.

Is it possible, then, to just scale objectives along with the player counts? Perhaps. But it seems that would equate to just making many tiers of the content which, to me, sounds like a good way to diminish the total amount of content we could build. What do you guys think?

Have you ever thought of adding other high value targets as part of your scaling scheme? For example a few more vets or elites is not going to change the dynamics of an event with a zerg of players but a healer or summoner or some kind of high damage berserker might. You would need awareness to know that these guys showed up and also coordination to know who fights what. I’m actually surprised that players haven’t had to do something like plates and scouts on main target/ scholars on adds.

Difficulty scaling

When the instance is opened allow them to select easy/medium/hard/expert.

Easy would decrease all mob levels by 2.
Medium would be no change.
Hard would increase all mob levels by 2.
Expert would increase all mob levels by 4.

If there are objectives the materials needed for those would be adjusted by 10% per level.
If you have to clear X mobs, easy would have X – 10%, hard would have X + 10%, etc.

To avoid scaling, why not have multiple raids of different sizes?

A raid for 10 people, another for 25, another for 50?

Raid Rewards

Give us unique skins, armor and weapons. Take your time with them too, make them really look tied to the raid content This would be a great way to add new legendaries too, you can have some themed to the raids. If you go that route there should be a guaranteed way to eventually get a precursor, whether straight from a token system or a series of forge recipes that use items from the raid.

TPenny.5071:

GUILD WARS 2 RAIDS

Raids in Guild Wars 2 are completely different to that in other MMORPGs. There is no “Holy Trinity” so encounter mechanics have to be tailored to everyone helping each other.
We wanted raids to differ from the world boss content therefore each raid will have a portal in the zone the raid is situated.

---

UNLOCKING RAIDS & ACCESSABILITY

Raids in Guildwars2 are a guild activity.
We decided to do this to encourage a higher level of communication and organisation between players so you can take on this increased challenge and promote competition between guilds.

• New guild upgrades category: RAID
  1. Research Raid (Mordremoth’s Lair) Unlock – 10000 Influence over 1 week
  2. Research Raid (Tower of the Dead) Unlock – 20000 Influence over 1 week

• This is the one time research to unlock the raid.

• Guild Raid (Mordremoth’s Lair) 3 days – 200 Influence.
  (This opens the raid instance for 3 days for your guild.)

• The Instance area is only accessible to guild the members while the guild buff is activated.

---

PEOPLE, CAPACITY & SCALING

There are small guilds and there are big guilds, each community of players varies in size and we can cater for both with instance scaling. Like any open world encounter it scales to the amount of players in the event, your guild instance will dynamically scale to the players inside.

• Only guild members can access this instance.

• 10 person minimum and content scales up to the map capacity of 150 people.

• While encounters inside the raid are in progress it will not scale down, so don’t die!

---

RAID CONTENT: BOSSES

Raid content in Guildwars2 is hard.
Unlike most world bosses each encounter will be uniquely tailored to challenge your skill as a team and an individual.

• Hard boss fights with multiple phases.

• Unique roles for individual players such as; kiting, pressure plates, jumping puzzles, cannon firing, etc.

• Each boss has at least one attack that ignores agis and downstate to instantly kill you. Beware!

• If a boss is rooted to the ground there will be a reason for it.
  (no more dragons standing still.)

RAID CONTENT: ENCOUNTERS

Events and regular foes throughout the raid instance are interesting and unique mini encounters no longer trash in which you skip or run past.

• All foes will no longer leash to their origin, they will now pursue relentlessly until you or they are killed.

• Some creatures can sense you through stealth, so hiding won’t work!

• Loot table with; unique and rare drops, raid currency, mystic forge components and mini pets.

---

PROGRESSION

There is no gear treadmill in Guildwars2 so content is gated by how well you can work as a team and navigate the mechanics of the encounter. To progress in this new raid environment you must overcome each challenge as it comes.

• As content gets harder you must get better and you are rewarded for your effort.

• As new raid content is released the older raids will be rebalanced to make it more accessible

• The currency based rewards are high while the content is at its newest.

---

REWARDS

Unique armour and weapon skins, achievements and titles
Rest TBA

Nice idea and a great challenge. Would be great fun for experienced players.
But schaling here should really be made good to not make the thing to hard if casual players would like to try.
I myself would love it.

Proposal Overview
Guild Fractals – going back to Tyria’s Living World challenges with your guild.

Goal of Proposal
Reuse and polish already existing content that’s already tailored towards large groups of players. Also, this would give us the ability to re-enact those large open world events from season 1.

Proposal Functionality
In existing PvE, you can use the Fractals of the Mists to revisit specific events in Tyria’s history. Some content, that already had been in the game, was brought back through the fractals. Also, since season 2, the story journal gives us the ability to go back in our own story line. What we can’t do until now, is to revisit the massive open world events that vastly shaped the world we now see our characters in.

So I’m suggesting you could bring back

• The Boss Blitz
• The Tower of Nightmares
• The Twisted Marionette
• The Siege of Lions Arch (evacuation and offensive)

Especially the last two are challenges for numbers of more than 50 players, something that’s pretty hard to achieve with the “traditional” dungeon-like concept of a raid.

I already suggested this before and in the original thread I also talked about possible costs and rewards. In short, my idea was to replace the event-specific rewards with a new currency for raids. You can find the original thread here.

Associated Risks
While big guilds might be happy to finally face such big challenges “on their own”, this might lead to guilds to stay out of such big open world events in the future and wait for them to be available as a guild fractal. The replacement of event-specific rewards with a general currency (and therefor making specific rewards only available when the event takes place in the open world) could mitigate this.

Also, as a player, you’d need to be in a big guild to revisit these events. Solving this would be a very nice use case for guild alliances.

Please I just want to say this one thing, make the content challenging by interesting fight mechanics. For the love of all that is holy do NOT adapt this into a “dodge or one shot” type encounters as this is one of the major things killing good content in the game.

In many other various games the raiding had well thought out fight mechanics driven by class roles, etc. – Its ok to do things this way, I understand you guys want to be “different” from other games, nothing wrong with that but it still doesnt mean you cant carry over similarities in content.

Make the content rewarding. I can tell you that if you produce a nice raid with interesting fight mechanics that gives 2g at the end people will rage. Look at long term time/reward investments – Most dungeons in the game have paths that get zero love simply because of this. This game already has plenty of currencies but think about long term progression, such as tokens that can be earned once/twice weekly and then traded in for something prestigious.