Guild Wars 2

Before launch I said raids couldn’t work.
I thought they’d become massive zergfests, like champion mobs in meta chains.

While my mind hasnt changed about that, after killing Tequatl I’ve been wondering, with the lack of trinity, could roles still work?

In the sunless fight there are people on the tanks, people killing the monsters attacking the people on the tank, people attacking the adds, people attacking the bone wall, but really none of this is a requirement.

The fight isn’t really structured which is understandable, can’t really expect 50 people to flawlessly cooperate. What, though, if arenanet actually forced this?

What if you NEEDED to kill the bone walls, what if you NEEDED to protect the cannons?

Could actual structured 20 man raids work?

It would be nice if they gave the option to groups to enter a “phased” zone of the world boss so the guild can kill it on its own, without having random people show up… there the combat could be a bit harder (they could force the mechanic a bit more) and the group could have a lot more synchronisation… a bit like a mini-raid….

kinda like a “story area” but for guilds…. and that is repeatable once a day maybe?

I think it could be doable! Raids would just have to be structured based on GW2 gameplay. There might not be designated tanks and healers but there can still be, as you said, designated roles for monstrous bosses/encounters.

Don’t think there’s ever any reason to make a big target instanced in GW2.

I wonder if there’s a bunch of dynamic event chains we never yet see that might spawn raid-type targets, waiting for us to discover them. Certainly something they could add as we go, too.

I think it could work., even when seeing the shadow behemoth or whatever in queensdale at low levels, it was a classic raid boss type, i.e. boss summons portals with adds, kill portals so adds stop/kill adds, then attack boss, repeat.

This showed me that raid bosses could work, just require cool strategies, etc.

They need dungeons that take more than 5 people.
For a supposedly social game, it doesn’t feel very social.

krandill.4918:

kinda like a “story area” but for guilds…. and that is repeatable once a day maybe?

That’s a neat idea.

To expand on it – even 5-man content that isn’t necessarily a dunegon but a chain of quests/events would be interesting.

and the advantage of raids vs. the open map system we have now would be?

No raids please. I find it refreshing that this game has stepped away from that tired old model. Invariably, raids marginalize the rest of an mmo. Let’s keep this game moving in new directions without rehashing exclusionist content.

God, just get over raids already.

Yes they could work, the bigger world events are basically raids with less trash anyway.

Bloodtau.4672:

They need dungeons that take more than 5 people.
For a supposedly social game, it doesn’t feel very social.

I agree, for the wonderful scaling this game offers depending on how many people are present in the area, I’m surprised they haven’t added a dungeon scaling yet to cater to both small 5-man parties up to 20-man parties (random number, I’m sure ArenaNet would have a more suitable number if scaling was implemented) for those who have a bigger crowd of friends who want to stick together.

I don’t understand why a handful of people are anti larger dungeons in this game, using reasons like “it promotes elitism” to back up their disdain for larger-sized dungeon scaling when this game is tailored to not promote elitism that is acquired through gear (and vertical progression, something GW2 doesn’t really cater to) that makes your character better than someone who does 5-man of the same dungeon. Players would still be equal with no loot/badge advantage from playing in a larger group assuming scaled dungeons were balanced 100% in a perfect world.

Balanced dungeon scaling would encourage friends overall to play together no matter if they have a smaller group of friends or a larger group, and not force friends to have to “choose” who they want to bring in the petite 5-man size, leaving other friends behind to pug, get frustrated they weren’t chosen for this small group, or find a game elsewhere where they can play with all of their friends at once.

Yes, raids could work. After BWE 3 (I think) there was a big argument on the GBTV forums about wether this would even be possible and I was convinced that it was. Having some game design background myself I actually wrote up a full raid encounter using the GW2 combat and game mechanics. No one was able to shoot it down.

The big question becomes wether Arenanet would be interested in doing such a thing, and should they. Well obviously no one can know the answer to the first. But yes I think they should. As long as they approach it in the same way raids were approached in say DAOC. The key to avoid is making Raids feel like “endgame” which is pretty much against the whole point of Guild Wars 2. But raids are a content alot of people love, not because they are endgame but because people like the challenge. The mistake that raid forward games like RIFT and WoW make is that raids are almost required to see the conclusion to the main parts of the lore and to get the best gear. As long as A-Net avoids those two problems and designs the raids solely to be content for people who like raiding (and alot of people do) then I can’t see any viable reason why they shouldn’t do it. And from a personal standpoint I think they will eventually add raids. I have faith that they will do it right.

If anyone is interested in seeing that raid encounter I can probably find it, but its longish and I didn’t want to go looking for it if no one cared to see it.

I think they could but is it really necessary.

The explorables in GW2 are really pretty hard. Players have to coordinate combo attacks and really be on the ball. They really need to know how to play their class to its strengths. It take’s time. It takes skill. It takes practice. This is all that raids really are. The hardest content in a game that takes the most work to conquer.

In games that have a more static combat concept, the only way to make it much more complex is to require more people to step in. Have more phases in an encounter, that sort of thing. I am not sure GW2 really needs that given that the encounters are already pretty tough because of the nature of combat. Further, the more people you get the more harder it becomes to coordinate. That doesn’t so much challenge your playing skills as it does challenge your organizational skills.

So if explorables are one aspect of “endgame” which I think they are, just not limited to end game, then all they really need to so be the kind of hard that requires a team to step it up a noticeable notch. On the other hand, to quench the desire for something big, there are world bosses out there. Those are not limited by the number of people that would be allowed into an instance.

Also, if you have 10 or 20 person dungeons where do you put them? arena has already said they don’t want the game to change dramatically at 80. Would you want to have a 20 man lvl 40 instance? That would be interesting but the problem would be again getting 20 people together to do it. Yes it could be done but to what goal over the 5 mans? better loot? This game doesn’t have loot progression. More complex? as mentioned above there are other ways to do that. Ways that probably better test peoples skills anyway.

I just don’t see raids happening. I think the world bosses in GW2 are meant to fill the big group desire gap.

Viking.1950:

I think they could but is it really necessary.

The explorables in GW2 are really pretty hard. Players have to coordinate combo attacks and really be on the ball. They really need to know how to play their class to its strengths. It take’s time. It takes skill. It takes practice. This is all that raids really are. The hardest content in a game that takes the most work to conquer.

In games that have a more static combat concept, the only way to make it much more complex is to require more people to step in. Have more phases in an encounter, that sort of thing. I am not sure GW2 really needs that given that the encounters are already pretty tough because of the nature of combat. Further, the more people you get the more harder it becomes to coordinate. That doesn’t so much challenge your playing skills as it does challenge your organizational skills.

So if explorables are one aspect of “endgame” which I think they are, just not limited to end game, then all they really need to so be the kind of hard that requires a team to step it up a noticeable notch. On the other hand, to quench the desire for something big, there are world bosses out there. Those are not limited by the number of people that would be allowed into an instance.

Also, if you have 10 or 20 person dungeons where do you put them? arena has already said they don’t want the game to change dramatically at 80. Would you want to have a 20 man lvl 40 instance? That would be interesting but the problem would be again getting 20 people together to do it. Yes it could be done but to what goal over the 5 mans? better loot? This game doesn’t have loot progression. More complex? as mentioned above there are other ways to do that. Ways that probably better test peoples skills anyway.

I just don’t see raids happening. I think the world bosses in GW2 are meant to fill the big group desire gap.

In short yes.

Raids are different. Because of the fact that they are larger groups they utilize different types of mechanics that you simply can’t cover in 5 mans.

World bosses such as Claw and Shatterer are raids but because they are open world you can’t really design them the same way. You COULD but it would lead to a lot of frustration.

As I said before. Its really more a matter of why not. Alot of players like raids for the challenge. And 5 mans and open world raids are not the same as instanced raiding, no matter what some may feel. Its just not.

As for the question you had about low level raids. I say yes! As far as I know raids have always been for max level players and I always wondered why. I mean a good encounter designer should be able to make an encounter for 10 level 40 players just as easy at 10 level 80 players. Or 20 players, or 15. Whatever Areanet would decide to go with.

GW2 is a game that really appeals to almost every player, within its own system. I just don’t see a reason to exclude raiders, especially when it can work within GW2’s own horizontal progression system. Most people think tiered raiding is the only way to go, but honestly tiered raiding didn’t exist until WoW, or if you want to get technical EQ: Planes of Power. But prior to that EQ and DAOC had tough, zoned raids that didn’t have progression tiers.

I am gonna post that encounter (just need to find it) to illustrate how a instanced raid encounter differs from a world boss raid or a 5 man explorable mode dungeon.

I’d say Guild Wars doesn’t have raids and it works just fine.

The only thing you need is to tune up the difficulty of exp mode. Currently CM and CoF exp are intolerably easy.

Most definitely. I expect them to add it later on. It would be a fantastic addition and something that will allow guilds to get together and enjoy their time as one.

Found it! As promised:

Well apparently there is a rather restrictive post limit, so I couldn’t copy and paste it here. So here is the link to the exact post number with the encounter.

http://forum.gamebreaker.tv/viewtopic.php?pid=54934#p54934

Keep in mind that was designed for 10 man level 80. You could just as easily design something similar for more players or players of a different level.

But you can see from looking at the encounter how a raid encounter like that really differs from even explorable mode 5 mans, or open world raid bosses like Shatterer or Claw.

Did they ever really say anywhere that they wouldn’t have raids? Is there a quote somewhere or interview confirming this? I mean no raids at all in any level range?

I just think the problem with raids in this game will be the risk to reward ratio. Raids will either be much harder or they will be just an instanced zergfest on a slightly larger boss. Well you can already find DE to fill in for the latter. But if raids are much harder they will need to be rewarded better. Will anyone bother doing raids if bis can be crafted? If they reward raids better than you can make with crafting then you just made raids a requirement and created a gear progression. I just don’t see them doing this. some of the explorables are already close to ridiculously difficult. They are already riding the razor’s edge of that risk reward ratio. Add on top of that the logistics of getting larger numbers of people organized and the multiplication of difficulty factor in boss fights and coordinating combos. I just don’t see lots of people bothering with them without exotics dropping like crazy. Yet people will still want to see these raids so then you will have the call for a story mode raid that 20 randoms can get through. And if you have story mode raids then how do you reward them in relation to story mode dungeons? And if a story mode raid is easy enough for randoms to do then how is that different than zerging a world boss or a difficult DE?

Deer.1504:

Bloodtau.4672:

They need dungeons that take more than 5 people.
For a supposedly social game, it doesn’t feel very social.

I agree, for the wonderful scaling this game offers depending on how many people are present in the area, I’m surprised they haven’t added a dungeon scaling yet to cater to both small 5-man parties up to 20-man parties (random number, I’m sure ArenaNet would have a more suitable number if scaling was implemented) for those who have a bigger crowd of friends who want to stick together.

I don’t understand why a handful of people are anti larger dungeons in this game, using reasons like “it promotes elitism” to back up their disdain for larger-sized dungeon scaling when this game is tailored to not promote elitism that is acquired through gear (and vertical progression, something GW2 doesn’t really cater to) that makes your character better than someone who does 5-man of the same dungeon. Players would still be equal with no loot/badge advantage from playing in a larger group assuming scaled dungeons were balanced 100% in a perfect world.

Balanced dungeon scaling would encourage friends overall to play together no matter if they have a smaller group of friends or a larger group, and not force friends to have to “choose” who they want to bring in the petite 5-man size, leaving other friends behind to pug, get frustrated they weren’t chosen for this small group, or find a game elsewhere where they can play with all of their friends at once.

Raids just aren’t part of the plan. They never have been. Even if you shoehorned them in, what would you do about drops? You’d skew the current gear distribution design. You’d have to overhaul the game. And if you do that, the game isn’t different at all. Why don’t you just go play (and enjoy) a game that has raids?

Viking.1950:

I just think the problem with raids in this game will be the risk to reward ratio. Raids will either be much harder or they will be just an instanced zergfest on a slightly larger boss. Well you can already find DE to fill in for the latter. But if raids are much harder they will need to be rewarded better. Will anyone bother doing raids if bis can be crafted? If they reward raids better than you can make with crafting then you just made raids a requirement and created a gear progression. I just don’t see them doing this. some of the explorables are already close to ridiculously difficult. They are already riding the razor’s edge of that risk reward ratio. Add on top of that the logistics of getting larger numbers of people organized and the multiplication of difficulty factor in boss fights and coordinating combos. I just don’t see lots of people bothering with them without exotics dropping like crazy. Yet people will still want to see these raids so then you will have the call for a story mode raid that 20 randoms can get through. And if you have story mode raids then how do you reward them in relation to story mode dungeons? And if a story mode raid is easy enough for randoms to do then how is that different than zerging a world boss or a difficult DE?

Well the one that I linked to would probably fit in that challenging category, but I don’t think its insanely tough. Its just execution. Challenge is relative though.

As for rewards, let me address that and the post below yours:

Raids just aren’t part of the plan. They never have been. Even if you shoehorned them in, what would you do about drops? You’d skew the current gear distribution design. You’d have to overhaul the game. Why don’t you just go play a game that has raids?

Firstly they never said raids weren’t part of the plan, they never really said anything at all.

But to get back to loot, you don’t need to overhaul the game or screw up any existing design. The system is already there. You just have cosmetically interesting gear. The people at Arenanet are smart people who I’m pretty sure alot of them have been doing this for awhile. I’m fairly positive they can come up with a way to make raids desirable without breaking the horizontal progression of the game.

The question is why would you want people to play another game? I doubt arenanet really wants that. Though I am actually playing two MMO’s currently, that doesn’t mean I don’t think raids wouldn’t be cool in GW2

You guys do realize that there are ‘several’ areas in this game which seem to be hints of raid like content right? I mean look, these dev’s are the same ones that used to work for Blizzard and some likely worked on WoW vanilla content.

The massive doors, forts you can’t enter, and other locations like that throughout the world hint at something. And as far as I know they never ever officially anywhere said they wouldn’t add raid type content. They just said they won’t have an ‘end game’ like other MMO’s. The end game is spread throughout the levels.

In an Asura zone that is I think the Metrica Province level 15-25 there is a bandit fort with a whole buttload of Champion mobs guarding a fort. You cannot enter the fort at all, but you can walk up to the doors to get the location icon credit (whatever those little squares on maps are called). Consider that they likely have a very strict NDA to abide by and cannot and will not give away information that is currently very secret.

I hate traditional raiding with a passion. Having said that, everything in the open world as the potential to turn into a raid like massive encounter. Why do we need raid content when the entire game is already so scalable?

Vincire.1048:

I hate traditional raiding with a passion. Having said that, everything in the open world as the potential to turn into a raid like massive encounter. Why do we need raid content when the entire game is already so scalable?

Well like I said its not the same thing. I’m all for making complex and difficult open world raid encounters, but I doubt many people would like that and I wouldn’t advocate Arenanet doing it for that reason. Its much better to put it in an instance and let the people who want that kind of content, do it.

If you have never done raids before and or don’t like them its hard to explain how they are different, but the best way I can explain it is to look at current explorable mode content, and tighten down executio
n even more and spread it out between more players.

Its worth mentioning also that while I am much in favor of raiding, I’m not much of a raider myself anymore. I do it from time to time in Rift, but I don’t have the time to invest in doing it hardcore like I used to back in the day. Yet I think raiding is a good thing to have. Alot of people like it, and GW2’s unique combat system I feel would add a whole new layer of complexity and uniqueness to raiding. Not everyone needs to like something for it to be a good idea. Alot of people don’t like pvp, yet pvp is a big part of this game.

There’s something I don’t feel like I’m understanding with this thread as some individuals tend to get defensive once the term “raiding” is announced and maybe “raiding” isn’t the proper term to use with the suggestion? (I too am not particularly fond of the “raids” of other games and the anger and hostility associated with gear upgrades/pitting friends against each other indirectly/etc, this is why I enjoy GW2 so much; I’ve raided quite a bit in the past and I have absolutely -no- desire to hop on the gear treadmill, engage in guild/loot council politics, and vertical progression ever again and GW2 will never have these problems even if the term “raid” is used to describe a larger person dungeon.)

The way I’m thinking of a “raid” is just a current explorable scaled for a larger amount of people with no advantages (or disadvantages) for doing this. It’s for people who have additional friends than 5-mans whose friends that can’t join the current 5-man group have a way of feeling more part of their other friends’ GW2 experiences in PVE. There’s no loot benefits, everyone is getting cosmetic gear still, it ideally would be tuned to be the same difficulty which would probably be the hardest part to achieve, there’s really no reason to not want this feature in my eyes other than a caution toward a larger group having an easier time with encounters than a 5-man, which would be up to ArenaNet to fine tune.

Would people offended rather call it scaled dungeons over “raiding?” All of the negative connotations that come with traditional raiding can be ignored in GW2 as the game is designed around horizontal progression, not around gear upgrades besides cosmetic with equally distributed badges per player in the chests without pitting friends up against each other in a ragefest that can occur in raids over a gear. Would that make people prefer the idea better if it wasn’t called a “raid?” I know raiding sucks in other games to very many people, but my interpretation of this thread was just the instances used now scaled to fit a larger group of people and I feel like there’s a lot of subjective answers to the OP merely because of the word “raid.”

Doubtful that anyone here neither dislikes GW2 nor wants to move to another game (Why is this even suggested? It’s obvious people here adore this game and wish for it to prosper in any facet we can suggest or debate via the forum, all out of love.) as some have stated when the word “raid” is used, but it’d be awesome to see this scaled option introduced one day for players to have the ability to enjoy dungeons with a larger group of friends and it really isn’t harmful – or unproductive – at all to propose this to ArenaNet as nowhere did they say 100% that scaled dungeons couldn’t be a possibility for the future.

With a desire for GW2 flourish and succeed furthermore, it wouldn’t harm anyone to cater to as many peoples’ needs as possible and this suggestion doesn’t seem unreasonable. Once in a while for instance, I would enjoy playing with more than 4 other people and letting a dungeon unfold with plenty of my friends who don’t have anyone to play with due to the small instances, but I too don’t mind the 5-man either in its current state as sometimes a smaller-sized dungeon is peaceful and makes you feel special in being part of a smaller crowd. But generally, the more options the better to suit both people like me who could play in any scale or people who do sorely miss having their dungeon misadventures with a larger throng of friends to PVE without any scale having any special benefits or cons nor hindering the current state of 5-mans.

Just making sure I understood this thread correctly and why some people are saying “no!” to dungeon scaling while offering my own perspective of the thread as I understood it. Hugs!

krandill.4918:

kinda like a “story area” but for guilds…. and that is repeatable once a day maybe?

You’re allowed to say “instanced dungeon”.

No. They couldn’t, and they don’t need to.

The problem with the idea of instanced large-group dungeons (aka raids) is that it will instantly create an elitist sub-class of players in the community. Pretty sure that goes against the game’s design goals.

What they could do instead, though, is tune their open-world encounters better. Make them more challenging, more demanding in regards to player skill and cooperation.

DrakeWurrum.6049:

No. They couldn’t, and they don’t need to.

The problem with the idea of instanced large-group dungeons (aka raids) is that it will instantly create an elitist sub-class of players in the community. Pretty sure that goes against the game’s design goals.

How is there an opportunity for players to act elitist though if there’s no extra benefits from partaking in a larger group? Everyone gets the same amount of badges from the chest, the same drops as a 5-man, with the only benefit being getting to invite more friends to go on dungeon misadventures together if they so wish.

DrakeWurrum.6049:

No. They couldn’t, and they don’t need to.

The problem with the idea of instanced large-group dungeons (aka raids) is that it will instantly create an elitist sub-class of players in the community. Pretty sure that goes against the game’s design goals.

What they could do instead, though, is tune their open-world encounters better. Make them more challenging, more demanding in regards to player skill and cooperation.

Thats just silliness. And completely untrue. The community does this wether or not raids exist. It depends on the community not the content. Raids don’t magically produce elitest jerks. The only time you see raids produce this sort of behavior is if you have progression raiding. And obviously you can’t do that in GW2 since it doesn’t have vertical progression. You’re concerns are unfounded.

Making open world encounters more difficult would lead to alot of QQ and honestly is more trouble than its worth. Makes alot more sense to keep that sort of challenging large group content seperate.

So happy to be playing a game with no raids. There are plenty out there that have them…go there and have fun.