Guild Wars 2

Here’s the video where MattVisual explains why this is an issue https://youtu.be/gYA4xOZw41k?t=9m41s

You’ve basically forced people to do the most optimal amount of damage in the smallest amount of time by adding timers…. Which means going full zerker which unfortunately is the current meta, which you have said time and time again wouldn’t work in these raids…. But as matt has explained, they basically needed zerkers or they would fail the encounters…

Anet wtf?…..

I despise raid timers which is why I don’t play FFXIV but I think with tuning they can allow for non speed run groups to complete the raids while preventing fully safe Soldiers and Nomads geared groups from completing the instance. While I hate them, I recognize that GW2 is a nightmare to balance with the amount of evades and immunity and healing available.

This is the FIRST encounter of the FIRST wing of the FIRST raid, Other encounters may require different mechanics.Needing damage for specific encounter is fine as long as it’s not all.

Also this belong to HoT discussion.

Better to do a timer up and scale difficulty up as time goes on.

Lets groups that aren’t fully Zerk still have a chance and possibly forces Zerkers no not go in with Zerk gear. Doesn’t mean groups won’t but the possibility is there to happen.

Hey, what’s not to love about a time limit boss?

Absolutely everything.

Oh noes, DPS is actually under the same kind of scrutiny to do their dam job that other roles always have to endure.

Cry me a river.

And while soft timer is more graceful than a hard timer, at the end of the day ALL timers serve a very useful purpose.

Frankly I could care less about gear and more about play style. If traits and skills are being swapped to meet completely different goals I’m fine with not needing different gear. Just cause you run in their with Zerker, Sinister, and Knights gear that doesn’t really say much other than you have 3 gear sets. As long as you have to change play style and use different skills in different ways I find it much more relevant.

While i would like to see a change from the Zerker meta the raids meet the mark in requiring changing skills/traits from what I’ve seen. While a ramp up timer would be more interesting im more concerned with the content than the meta-gaming around the content. Since its difficult either way dont see much of an issue just nitpicking at this point.

Did really anyone think raids are not full zerker content? Just remember, zerker is love, zerker is everything, zerker is awesome, zerker is best, only play zerker!

Abe Kleine.3568:

Here’s the video where MattVisual explains why this is an issue https://youtu.be/gYA4xOZw41k?t=9m41s

You’ve basically forced people to do the most optimal amount of damage in the smallest amount of time by adding timers…. Which means going full zerker which unfortunately is the current meta, which you have said time and time again wouldn’t work in these raids…. But as matt has explained, they basically needed zerkers or they would fail the encounters…

Anet wtf?…..

Well you need DPS to kill things. Slapping it back and forth with a wet noodle really isn’t going to hack it.

This is highly challenging content that requires organization and teamwork. You should be aware that the team that had world first only have four players in berserkers. Another player was wearing something with healing power and another with toughness. The rest were in sinister. Yep, they definitely followed the berserker meta.

I suggest not taking everything that bloggers say as gospel. They’re really no different than anyone else except they make vlogs.

With that said, you have to realize that the guild the got world first were not doing an optimized run. They had a little over a minute remaining and could do better. However, you have people who misinterpreted the dev’s post, wither intentional or not, and are now so set that ascended must be used to succeed that they are unable to comprehend how much more that goes into the encounter than just your gear.

How many people were in full ascended and still didn’t beat it? By the sounds of it, quite a lot. How can a few groups succeed in full ascended while all of the other failed? It definitely wasn’t gear. Supposedly everyone knew the basic mechanics based on what a few posters on the forums have stated. So why couldn’t everyone else beat it too?

It’s because there’s more to the game that just gear. Compare how a DnT or rT group does a dungeon path in full ascended versus a group of people who have done the same path enough times to know it and are also in full ascended. Who will outperform whom? The answer should be fairly obvious.

The raid was available for less than a day and there really wasn’t enough time to tweak builds and party compositions to make sure there were the necessary roles to optimally complete the encounter. As people do the raid more, and fine-tune everything from their builds, to their strategies, and to their role compositions, they will complete the raid quicker and quicker. It’s what we did with Teq and TT.

While ascended only provides an additional 10-12% more damage, it will not prevent your group from completing the raid any more than it would prevent your group from completing any other content which has a timer. Not to mention how relatively easy it is to get ascended trinkets and the various sources that offer ascended boxes. The raids will also have a 10% to drop ascended chests as well so this will give you another way.

Speaking of timer, it’s there to give a sense of urgency and to push your group to complete the raid as efficiently as possible. If it did not exist, then you would have people who would just equip soldiers or dire gear and try to win the fight by attrition. Not very challenging as it is grindy.

Some people want soft and hard enrage timers. Anet has specifically intended for the bosses to be defeated within a certain time-frame. Do you really think adding a soft enrage timer would prompt them to shift the hard enrage timer out? They would likely leave the hard enrage timer where it is at and add a new soft enrage timer a minute or two before it.

So imagine, there was no timer..you all take whatever builds that heals a lot, does meh damage and be able to kill this boss in 30 mins or 1h because of that little dmg and big heals.. What would be reaction then? Easy boss, bullkitten raids and blah blah..

First, they said they want to eliminate the “zerker meta”, as in all players using berserker gear stats, not eliminate “zerker”, that would be dumb. Once you identify the difference between the two you can stop using what the devs said as an argument for your case…

Second, as I said in another thread on this topic, having enrage timers is a great thing. I will remind you of the Spider Queen solo afk kill using Cleric gear as a Water attuned Elementalist, Soloing Giganticus Lupicus without ever dodging using Nomad’s gear and many many other examples of what defensive/healing builds can do in this game.

Enrage timers make sure players can’t faceroll content.

Now you’re just hating on zerker to have something to hate on.
Ironic, but the dungeons where the zerker meta evolved are actually perfect because you can literally do every dungeon with any stat combo you want. It may need more time to do it with a cleric’s setup, but you will eventually get there.

Raids on the other hand need the dps from zerker and sinister stats.
This is pretty entertaining. I can already see how the “evil” zerker meta using people will breeze through raids (changing to other stats where necessary), while the zerk-haters will just cry themselves to sleep every night because the lack of damage will make their raids fail.

maddoctor.2738:

First, they said they want to eliminate the “zerker meta”, as in all players using berserker gear stats, not eliminate “zerker”, that would be dumb. Once you identify the difference between the two you can stop using what the devs said as an argument for your case…

Second, as I said in another thread on this topic, having enrage timers is a great thing. I will remind you of the Spider Queen solo afk kill using Cleric gear as a Water attuned Elementalist, Soloing Giganticus Lupicus without ever dodging using Nomad’s gear and many many other examples of what defensive/healing builds can do in this game.

Enrage timers make sure players can’t faceroll content.

You seem to ignore the fact that this encounter does have mechanics that not even full-bunkered nomad is going to survive if they’ll try to faceroll.
Enrage timers are not necessary at all, they are just a cheap way of forcing the zerker meta. The same one that devs claimed they didn’t desire in raids.

Timers are there to keep people from using cheap cheese techniques from beating what is supposed to be hard. Without timers, people could run ultra bunkery sets or just kite for days bypassing the difficulty that is already limited in a videogame environment.

It’s also there to keep DPS’ers on their toes and stay in optimal rotation just as the healers and tanks do in other games.

Then again, this is GW2 and people will kitten about anything they can’t face roll with their favorite ‘just for fun’ RP set.

Astralporing.1957:

maddoctor.2738:

First, they said they want to eliminate the “zerker meta”, as in all players using berserker gear stats, not eliminate “zerker”, that would be dumb. Once you identify the difference between the two you can stop using what the devs said as an argument for your case…

Second, as I said in another thread on this topic, having enrage timers is a great thing. I will remind you of the Spider Queen solo afk kill using Cleric gear as a Water attuned Elementalist, Soloing Giganticus Lupicus without ever dodging using Nomad’s gear and many many other examples of what defensive/healing builds can do in this game.

Enrage timers make sure players can’t faceroll content.

You seem to ignore the fact that this encounter does have mechanics that not even full-bunkered nomad is going to survive if they’ll try to faceroll.
Enrage timers are not necessary at all, they are just a cheap way of forcing the zerker meta. The same one that devs claimed they didn’t desire in raids.

First, maybe there are mechanics that don’t allow faceroll by full bunkers but in any way or form a full bunker will have a much easier time than a full dps character, only take a lot longer to finish the same content. And no, even the hardest encounters have been known to turn into facerolls, but I guess thanks to the enrage timer players won’t look for those.
Second, I think you don’t understand what the “zerker meta” is and what the devs claimed. It’s not rocket science, even those who killed the raid boss didn’t use full zerker compositions which is what the devs claimed. They didn’t desire full zerker groups in the raid, and we don’t have full zerker groups in the raid, so what’s there to complain?

Did you just start playing MMOs?

Enrage timers in raids is nothing new, it’s what separates good groups from bad ones, and there’s nothing more rewarding than to kill a raid boss with a few seconds left.

Too many people mistakenly translated “no zerker meta” in their head as “zerker will now be garbage and nobody will use it” me thinks….

fireflyry.7023:

Too many people mistakenly translated “no zerker meta” in their head as “zerker will now be garbage and nobody will use it” me thinks….

They just don’t understand what the “zerker meta” actually mean. Part of the reason is because many players have some blind hatred over the “zerker meta” that is clouding their reasoning and logic. Let’s hate everything that is based around DPS because it’s the cool thing on these forums.

Timers are essential for challenging (!) encounters which the raid ones are supposed to be. Imagine there wasn’t a timer. You could make your characters as tanky as possible and still be able to beat the bosses. You would never ever be in danger of dying to the mechanics, but it would take ages for you to kill it. It would become a challenge of patience instead one of skill. The complete raid would become a question of “who kills the boss the fastest” instead of “who kills the boss at all” – remove the timer and you remove the challenge and you will get in quintessence the same boring content you have right now. Please don’t remove the timer. Instead go ahead and take a look again at them numbers. One minute left on the timer (one of the groups in kill videos had 1 minute left) is way too much.

Mate honestly how do you think people should have done, most of the elite specs are brand new, revenant is brand new. There are 2 reasons people were hitting the enrage mechanic.

1)People are still learning these new specs, they don’t have a full comprehension of their class yet.
2)People don’t understand the fight mechanics fully yet. Melee keeps getting teleported all over the plays by the blue rocks mechanic, and everyone runs to the orbs to catch them while only 4 people need to do so.

Matt’s group in particular was him and WP on voice chat, and the rest just basicly not hearing them live. This is not and never will be a good option to do the raid.
As to support not helping, a good guardian can basicly prevent anyone from being teleported away, since you can actually block the teleport so aegis right at the good time does not make your group of melees flie all over the map, a tanky character can keep the boss in place, rather then making him run all over the place. And heals can keep people dpsing instead of going down, wich happened allot even in the fights that got him down. A character pumping out swiftness or super speed will help the 4 ranged assigned to catching the orbs.

Don’t get me wrong, we will never get a “soldier meta”, that’s not what we want and it’s not what A-Net wants. And that’s where people mistake the devs, no more zerker meta doesn’t mean no more glass specs, it means if you want to run those that you will benefit from having some supporty specs aswell. Wich is certainly the case with this boss.

I am happy to see timers. Currently there are actually two metas for dungeons, the zerker meta and the tank gear max range auto attack meta. The latter had to die.

maddoctor.2738:

First, maybe there are mechanics that don’t allow faceroll by full bunkers but in any way or form a full bunker will have a much easier time than a full dps character, only take a lot longer to finish the same content.

Again, you pass over the fact, that if the fail mechanics exist (and they do), full bunker groups will need to perform them perfectly (or fail) many times more than a zerker group.

maddoctor.2738:

And no, even the hardest encounters have been known to turn into facerolls

With zerkers? So true. Burn the mob before it can execute their mechanics. And there are many cases where the fight is trivialized by exploiting of the fight mechanics – but that’s equally true of all the gear types.

Now, if you can tank a mob in a full defensive build without dodging and moving (which is true for some mobs, but not for others), it usually means not that there’s some problem with the build, but that there’s some problem with the mob.
Surely you don’t suggest that the raid bosses will be badly designed, do you?

maddoctor.2738:

Second, I think you don’t understand what the “zerker meta” is and what the devs claimed. It’s not rocket science, even those who killed the raid boss didn’t use full zerker compositions which is what the devs claimed.

If by “didn’t use a full zerker composition” you mean “there was one player that didn’t go berserker/sinister to draw aggro on toughness” then you are technically right… but you are wilfully ignoring the fact that 9 out of 10 players did go full zerker/sinister.

Raqanar.3648:

Timers are essential for challenging (!) encounters which the raid ones are supposed to be. Imagine there wasn’t a timer. You could make your characters as tanky as possible and still be able to beat the bosses. You would never ever be in danger of dying to the mechanics

That’s actually not true. Look closer at the mechanics of that fight again.

Aidenwolf.5964:

I despise raid timers which is why I don’t play FFXIV but I think with tuning they can allow for non speed run groups to complete the raids while preventing fully safe Soldiers and Nomads geared groups from completing the instance. While I hate them, I recognize that GW2 is a nightmare to balance with the amount of evades and immunity and healing available.

But you’ll actually need those evades, immunities, and even heals (since damage won’t be totally unavoidable)

My planned WvW build on my warrior sounds like it might be great for raids. The only thing worse than giving the other team the right to trash talk and call us out for being noobs is being the reason why your team lost and your own team calling you out for it.

The gear is Berserker helmet, chest, and boots with soldier greaves, gauntlets, and pauldrons all ascended with soldier’s hammer+ berserker sword + celestial shield since I’ll transfer the ascended quiver and triforge from my thief to him he could likely get away with ascended due to all the extra stats from the ascended armor) Traits are kick, shake it off, balanced stance, and battle standard. So it revolves around banners, stunbreaks, and interrupts. Sword 2 has a gap closer for after kick or in general. Hammer is the interrupt tool but telegraphs too much but when it’s good it’s excellent. I just hope raid mobs and bosses won’t have cheap defenses that totally invalidate interrupts or crowd control.

Astralporing.1957:

Again, you pass over the fact, that if the fail mechanics exist (and they do), full bunker groups will need to perform them perfectly (or fail) many times more than a zerker group.

Not really. You can look up a 5-Guardian Cleric Arah run to see what happens if everyone runs full healing builds. Mechanics can, and will, be bypassed using cheesy builds if there is no enrage timer.

With zerkers? So true. Burn the mob before it can execute their mechanics. And there are many cases where the fight is trivialized by exploiting of the fight mechanics – but that’s equally true of all the gear types.

No, I meant with defensive gear. That’s how you finish content while semi-afk without using any of the active abilities. Even those teams that “burn” the mobs quickly as you say are actually using active skills to do so and not stand still and afk-faceroll. There is a difference between the first players actually playing the game, while the second type of player is standing afk. We have enough of this in the open world, let’s not have it in instances shall we?

Now, if you can tank a mob in a full defensive build without dodging and moving (which is true for some mobs, but not for others), it usually means not that there’s some problem with the build, but that there’s some problem with the mob.
Surely you don’t suggest that the raid bosses will be badly designed, do you?

Only you can facetank almost any mob in the entire game. You might need to stack a few more healers though for certain mobs. You know you can even facetank hard hitting mobs like Subject Alpha?

If by “didn’t use a full zerker composition” you mean “there was one player that didn’t go berserker/sinister to draw aggro on toughness” then you are technically right… but you are wilfully ignoring the fact that 9 out of 10 players did go full zerker/sinister.

From the raid kills I read about they used condition specced people (Engineers in Rabid), a Celestial Guardian, and the rest Sinister/Berserker players. I don’t understand why this is bad, what did you expect, for the raid to be doable without any kind of DPS? Isn’t the “point” of the whole thing to have enough survival to survive the encounters/mechanics, then use DPS?

Even if that wasn’t the case and for some reason they decided to remove the enrage timer, the community would turn the raid into that anyway, to get as much DPS as possible to finish the raid faster. The only thing the enrage timer does, is preventing players from facerolling the content using full defensive builds.

It’s probably just a way to promote balance. Full zerker/DPS would have a hard time killing, mainly due to the DPS loss if they die or the inability to kill due to lack of survivability. It would also deter full bunker builds since you couldn’t rely on attrition to kill, lastly it would also make it close to impossible to do without a full group.

Dps classes optimizing gear for damage isn’t an issue, dps disparity between classes likely will be. It’s still too early to call out though.

Important about the enrage timer:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/dungeons/Raid-Feedback-1/first#post5570808

Much better discussion on the raid on the appropriate forum anyway, and it even gets dev attention.

Abe Kleine.3568:

Here’s the video where MattVisual explains why this is an issue https://youtu.be/gYA4xOZw41k?t=9m41s

You’ve basically forced people to do the most optimal amount of damage in the smallest amount of time by adding timers…. Which means going full zerker which unfortunately is the current meta, which you have said time and time again wouldn’t work in these raids…. But as matt has explained, they basically needed zerkers or they would fail the encounters…

Anet wtf?…..

Anet is right to do this – they want raids to be hard not just take a long time.

If bosses didn’t have a timer then if you stacked up let’s say 2-3 druids – and everyone went in very healy/tanky gear then you could possibly completely invalidate any amount of danger or challenge since you’d be in a situation where you could easily mitigate and heal incoming damage while constantly dealing out a small amount of your own.
Eventually the boss would die – sure it might take an hour but it would not force people to improve.

A more glassy party would maybe take an hour too – wiping a good 5-6-7 times – but they would learn mechanics and improve in order to finally succeed.

One of the greatest complaints I’ve heard about the zerker meta ( and trust me I’ve heard them all) is that it invalidates mechanics – by burning the boss too quickly it doesn’t have time to become a threat or push you to adapt to its mechanics – well here’s the other side of the coin – at the opposite side of the spectrum going FULL defensive also invalidates mechanics because you don’t need to dodge or position or do anything if you can just facetank the boss and be fine.

That’s where the timer comes in – it doesn’t allow you to sit there for 2 hours constantly chipping away at the boss’ health until it’s dead with no risk to yourself.

Matt points out a lot of parties went in as glass – I will point out a lot of parties failed.
I suspect you’ll either go full zerker with a few dedicated healing people ( druids) or you’ll go in with mixed gear with no druids.

So yeah- if you want raids to be hard and not just a “are you willing to spend x time to get this done” thing then timers are a must.

Astralporing.1957:

maddoctor.2738:

First, they said they want to eliminate the “zerker meta”, as in all players using berserker gear stats, not eliminate “zerker”, that would be dumb. Once you identify the difference between the two you can stop using what the devs said as an argument for your case…

Second, as I said in another thread on this topic, having enrage timers is a great thing. I will remind you of the Spider Queen solo afk kill using Cleric gear as a Water attuned Elementalist, Soloing Giganticus Lupicus without ever dodging using Nomad’s gear and many many other examples of what defensive/healing builds can do in this game.

Enrage timers make sure players can’t faceroll content.

You seem to ignore the fact that this encounter does have mechanics that not even full-bunkered nomad is going to survive if they’ll try to faceroll.
Enrage timers are not necessary at all, they are just a cheap way of forcing the zerker meta. The same one that devs claimed they didn’t desire in raids.

While there are mechanics that will still wipe you I dare you to tell me that doing said boss in Full nomad’s is as difficult and engaging, requires as much coordination and preparation as doing it in zerk.
Tell me that’s the case – go on.

Nomad gear gives you incredible leeway, you can make a LOT of mistakes and on top of that a lot of the mounting pressure the boss puts out where your party’s health status deteriorates the longer you go on simply disappears.

Please get rid of the timer so that the new meta will be cleric. Heal all day without having to worry about dying much.

Aidenwolf.5964:

I despise raid timers which is why I don’t play FFXIV but I think with tuning they can allow for non speed run groups to complete the raids while preventing fully safe Soldiers and Nomads geared groups from completing the instance. While I hate them, I recognize that GW2 is a nightmare to balance with the amount of evades and immunity and healing available.

I believe you still gotta admit that it’ll be great if gw2 had the cool controller support from FFXIV. It’s sad but im playing it for that xD

Fuji.6284:

Please get rid of the timer so that the new meta will be cleric. Heal all day without having to worry about dying much.

You can always add instant-wipe mechanics rather than timers :V

Iyeru.5240:

Fuji.6284:

Please get rid of the timer so that the new meta will be cleric. Heal all day without having to worry about dying much.

You can always add instant-wipe mechanics rather than timers :V

And then what. All they need to do is avoid those mechanics and it’s an easy win. If you make the mechanics too difficult then you’ll have people complaining about how gimmicky it is.

Ayrilana.1396:

Iyeru.5240:

Fuji.6284:

Please get rid of the timer so that the new meta will be cleric. Heal all day without having to worry about dying much.

You can always add instant-wipe mechanics rather than timers :V

And then what. All they need to do is avoid those mechanics and it’s an easy win. If you make the mechanics too difficult then you’ll have people complaining about how gimmicky it is.

This is why developers need to understand “Fake Difficulty.” As well as why it’s bad. I already mentioned some things about FFXIV in another thread: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/players/can-someone-tell-me-what-a-raid-is/first#post5582318

Iyeru.5240:

Ayrilana.1396:

Iyeru.5240:

Fuji.6284:

Please get rid of the timer so that the new meta will be cleric. Heal all day without having to worry about dying much.

You can always add instant-wipe mechanics rather than timers :V

And then what. All they need to do is avoid those mechanics and it’s an easy win. If you make the mechanics too difficult then you’ll have people complaining about how gimmicky it is.

This is why developers need to understand “Fake Difficulty.” As well as why it’s bad. I already mentioned some things about FFXIV in another thread: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/players/can-someone-tell-me-what-a-raid-is/first#post5582318

I don’t agree with your labeling of “fake difficulty” nor that the timer is bad.

Raven.1524:

Aidenwolf.5964:

I despise raid timers which is why I don’t play FFXIV but I think with tuning they can allow for non speed run groups to complete the raids while preventing fully safe Soldiers and Nomads geared groups from completing the instance. While I hate them, I recognize that GW2 is a nightmare to balance with the amount of evades and immunity and healing available.

I believe you still gotta admit that it’ll be great if gw2 had the cool controller support from FFXIV. It’s sad but im playing it for that xD

I play GW2 with a controller. Xpadder + a few tweaks and you’re set up. And its a very smooth experience too.

Message me if you’d like to know more

Strages.2950:

Raven.1524:

Aidenwolf.5964:

I despise raid timers which is why I don’t play FFXIV but I think with tuning they can allow for non speed run groups to complete the raids while preventing fully safe Soldiers and Nomads geared groups from completing the instance. While I hate them, I recognize that GW2 is a nightmare to balance with the amount of evades and immunity and healing available.

I believe you still gotta admit that it’ll be great if gw2 had the cool controller support from FFXIV. It’s sad but im playing it for that xD

I play GW2 with a controller. Xpadder + a few tweaks and you’re set up. And its a very smooth experience too.

Message me if you’d like to know more

True, but its hard to play with the xpadder when Im a well necro. Maybe I just suck at using the controller.
Also, FFXIV content is tooo easy even on the expansion, maybe that is another reason for controller users to have some difficulties on GW2, which is awesome. I wish we could find a balance between the Xpadder + semi-action oriented combat + a way to use ground skills.
I’ve gotta admid that im truly happy with the reaper and his lack of ground targeted skills, I would have an orgasm if I could better manage my inventory iwth the controller though xD

I played DDO for about 6 years. I don’t remember a single raid having a hard timer sitting on the screen. There were some that had a stoft timer if you took too long you could easily get over whelmed with adds but you could still pull it off if you got lucky.

There are so many other ways that A-net could balance raid difficulty. Bosses with reflect, slowly stacking regen or retaliation, slowly increasing toughness or vitality, escalating dps bursts, toggling between invulnerability to direct damage and conditions , corrupting or stealing boons, autocrits every time a character heals, preventing weapon swaps, confusing players who do direct damage or mirroring conditions. The list goes on and on.

Harper.4173:

If bosses didn’t have a timer then if you stacked up let’s say 2-3 druids – and everyone went in very healy/tanky gear then you could possibly completely invalidate any amount of danger or challenge since you’d be in a situation where you could easily mitigate and heal incoming damage while constantly dealing out a small amount of your own.
Eventually the boss would die – sure it might take an hour but it would not force people to improve….

…So yeah- if you want raids to be hard and not just a “are you willing to spend x time to get this done” thing then timers are a must.

Bosses with self heals, or healer minions would make what you describe largely ineffective.

Hours of whittling away at his health pool only to see it still at full.

Complex encounters with groups of mobs including healers, CCers, interrupts, condition pressure, burst damage, and an AI that recognizes the value of a KD after a period of pressure but just before its big hit.

Hmm mobs that knock healers away from their party stack in order to isolate and spike them down?

Its doable, its more a matter of willingness to do it in the face of inevitable backlash than inability.

The timer is essential to protect your hands from injuries. Flighting this boss is like playing an arcade shooter in which you need to constantly move around to avoid damage from orbs with different colors and pick up power up for mitigating damages from instant wipe. There are no pause button , no resurrection, and break from combat in this encounter. Slow burn will put too much stress on your hands before you notice it hurts. The timer force you to take a short break even you don’t want to.

Doug Whisper.2465:

The timer is essential to protect your hands from injuries. Flighting this boss is like playing an arcade shooter in which you need to constantly move around to avoid damage from orbs with different colors and pick up power up for mitigating damages from instant wipe. There are no pause button , no resurrection, and break from combat in this encounter. Slow burn will put too much stress on your hands before you notice it hurts. The timer force you to take a short break even you don’t want to.

Doing something over and over again due to the failure of a specific condition is not going to help anyone with RSI.

Abe Kleine.3568:

Here’s the video where MattVisual explains why this is an issue https://youtu.be/gYA4xOZw41k?t=9m41s

You’ve basically forced people to do the most optimal amount of damage in the smallest amount of time by adding timers…. Which means going full zerker which unfortunately is the current meta, which you have said time and time again wouldn’t work in these raids…. But as matt has explained, they basically needed zerkers or they would fail the encounters…

Anet wtf?…..

You’ve assumed that however people managed to beat the timers during one weekend during the testing phase is going to be the only way. ANet might loosen up the timers, reduce health, increase the amount of ways you can whittle the health bar down, etc. People thought that the Tequatl timer was too short to kill that beastie…and it took a bit to kill the dragon at all. Low & behold, months later, PUGs could do it without caring about which builds people brought.

tl;dr it’s too soon to say whether this is an issue.

Whether having timer or not is one thing. The other thing is whether the time period is appropriate or not. Months later adding different level of timers for lower level of rewards might help softening people opinions.

I do feel like the timer is there just to create some feeling of the boss being difficult. I’ve played other games where there was no timer and the dungeon/raids felt much more challenging. Not having a timer doesn’t mean everyone will run cleric since you can take care of the group meeting some level of dps differently. As someone stated above you can just add to the difficulty if the group is not meeting the requirement. I know it’s just one boss in one wing, but let’s be honest: it’s not really that challenging.

The mechanic of the boss are very simple and in the end it comes down to having enough dps. To me, harder mechanics would be something I would enjoy more over a timer due to the fact every class in gw2 is self sustainable and wearing zerker gear is not any kind of challenge. If you make a mistake, you can just heal up yourself and move on. This is also why a healer was never needed in this game. The whole downed state system doesn’t help it either, people can just simply get you back up without any punishment.

I don’t think anyone is asking for no zerkers in raids, but they are the equivalent of dps from other mmos. In 10 man group having 8 of them is a bit too much imo as it doesn’t give enough space for other stat specs. I know lots people have been saying it wouldn’t be fair if healers/tanks were required for the runs, but I don’t think it’s fair people in cleric are kicked from dungeons. The whole ‘’play anything you want, the way you want’’ isn’t really true due to this and it never was. If you wanted to play a healer you would most likely get kicked because you’re not doing dps. This obviously goes hand in hand with bad healing power scaling on nearly every single skill in the game.

So from my point of view I would like to see players having the choice between focusing on either dps, healing or eventually tanking. And before you start with ‘’gw2 has no trinity’’ go back to them saying you can play anything you want because there are people who want to heal or tank. Raids are a good opportunity for this to work, but after the beta I’m a bit worried it’ll go back to the mindless dps once people learn the bosses a bit.

Edit: Yes, in every other MMO I’ve always played a healer.

Laraley.7695:

So from my point of view I would like to see players having the choice between focusing on either dps, healing or eventually tanking. And before you start with ‘’gw2 has no trinity’’ go back to them saying you can play anything you want because there are people who want to heal or tank. Raids are a good opportunity for this to work, but after the beta I’m a bit worried it’ll go back to the mindless dps once people learn the bosses a bit.

Edit: Yes, in every other MMO I’ve always played a healer.

You realize that raids will create an even stricter meta, where certain professions just won’t be able to join. Not because of a dungeon taking 2 minutes longer, but because it would actually be unbeatable. This is something quite funny, because it comes from all the whine about zerker meta being exclusive and now instead we’ll get an even more exlusive one. Good job.

Oh wait, i actually wanted to comment on “mindless dps”. There is no mindless dps and there never was. If you did instances with only dps in mind, you were doing it wrong and either wiped a lot or were carried hard. I’m sorry that you never found out that you can support your party with boons, reflects, blocks, invulnerability, condition cleanse, stealth, CCs. It means you never played the game to its full potential.

kolompi.1287:

Laraley.7695:

So from my point of view I would like to see players having the choice between focusing on either dps, healing or eventually tanking. And before you start with ‘’gw2 has no trinity’’ go back to them saying you can play anything you want because there are people who want to heal or tank. Raids are a good opportunity for this to work, but after the beta I’m a bit worried it’ll go back to the mindless dps once people learn the bosses a bit.

Edit: Yes, in every other MMO I’ve always played a healer.

You realize that raids will create an even stricter meta, where certain professions just won’t be able to join. Not because of a dungeon taking 2 minutes longer, but because it would actually be unbeatable. This is something quite funny, because it comes from all the whine about zerker meta being exclusive and now instead we’ll get an even more exlusive one. Good job.

Oh wait, i actually wanted to comment on “mindless dps”. There is no mindless dps and there never was. If you did instances with only dps in mind, you were doing it wrong and either wiped a lot or were carried hard. I’m sorry that you never found out that you can support your party with boons, reflects, blocks, invulnerability, condition cleanse, stealth, CCs. It means you never played the game to its full potential.

That’s the issue of a balance, though.

And I’m sorry, I don’t know what game you’ve been playing but most group content does not require you to think about what you’re doing. Midnless dps doesn’t mean spamming your AA, btw. The content is just easy, far from being challenging and doing stuff as you described is just natural to everyone who has played the game for a while. You can literally run everything without focusing 100% and still not wipe nor lose dps.

Fights need lose conditions.

If you just bunker up, and there’s no timer, you’ve eliminated the lose condition.

Encounter design 101.

maddoctor.2738:

Astralporing.1957:

Again, you pass over the fact, that if the fail mechanics exist (and they do), full bunker groups will need to perform them perfectly (or fail) many times more than a zerker group.

Not really. You can look up a 5-Guardian Cleric Arah run to see what happens if everyone runs full healing builds. Mechanics can, and will, be bypassed using cheesy builds if there is no enrage timer.

That’s because those fights in arah do not have such impassable mechanics. Vale guardian does. There are attacks, that, if not avoided/mitigated in a very specific way, will outright kill you.

maddoctor.2738:

With zerkers? So true. Burn the mob before it can execute their mechanics. And there are many cases where the fight is trivialized by exploiting of the fight mechanics – but that’s equally true of all the gear types.

No, I meant with defensive gear. That’s how you finish content while semi-afk without using any of the active abilities.

That Arah run would have died fast if they weren’t timing their active abilities at the right times. The mossman solo in nomads also was active play (though this one had a little bit more leeway). The only case of semi-afk fight i have heard of is that often mentioned ele on AC spider queen (i haven’t actually seen that one, so i will agree that it has happened).

maddoctor.2738:

Even those teams that “burn” the mobs quickly as you say are actually using active skills to do so and not stand still and afk-faceroll. There is a difference between the first players actually playing the game, while the second type of player is standing afk. We have enough of this in the open world, let’s not have it in instances shall we?

That someone is standing still and not dodging doesn’t mean they are not actively playing or they’re afk. In lot of such cases single missed aegis/heal/cleanse/invuln can end in death. So will consistently missing the timing on those in the remaining cases.

There’s much more cases of ignoring/bypassing fight mechanics with zerker approach than with the bunker one.

maddoctor.2738:

Now, if you can tank a mob in a full defensive build without dodging and moving (which is true for some mobs, but not for others), it usually means not that there’s some problem with the build, but that there’s some problem with the mob.
Surely you don’t suggest that the raid bosses will be badly designed, do you?

Only you can facetank almost any mob in the entire game. You might need to stack a few more healers though for certain mobs. You know you can even facetank hard hitting mobs like Subject Alpha?

Yes. In zerkers. That’s because its attacks are way more dangerous at range. If you stack on his head and spam aegis, regen and protect you will be perfectly fine. You won’t even need to dodge once.

maddoctor.2738:

If by “didn’t use a full zerker composition” you mean “there was one player that didn’t go berserker/sinister to draw aggro on toughness” then you are technically right… but you are wilfully ignoring the fact that 9 out of 10 players did go full zerker/sinister.

From the raid kills I read about they used condition specced people (Engineers in Rabid), a Celestial Guardian, and the rest Sinister/Berserker players.

The 7-minute kill one used one hybrid condi, 3 sinisters and 6 zerkers. The next one used one celestial, rest sinister/zerker.

maddoctor.2738:

I don’t understand why this is bad, what did you expect, for the raid to be doable without any kind of DPS? Isn’t the “point” of the whole thing to have enough survival to survive the encounters/mechanics, then use DPS?

It’s bad because enrage timer enforces what was up to now just a voluntary choice – go full dps on stats, and relegate survival to active defences only. basically, it does the opposite of what Anet claimed they wanted to avoid.

maddoctor.2738:

Even if that wasn’t the case and for some reason they decided to remove the enrage timer, the community would turn the raid into that anyway, to get as much DPS as possible to finish the raid faster.

Of course the community would optimize to make the raids faster. But that would be the matter of individual preference, not some arbitrary dev decision forcing that choice on players.

maddoctor.2738:

The only thing the enrage timer does, is preventing players from facerolling the content using full defensive builds.

Except they wouldn’t be facerolling it anyway. The fight is already set up that way, that anyone trying that woukld die. So in the end all the enrage timer does is enforcing a certain buidl setup, and making sure that straying to far from it will result in failure. I don’t see any value in that.

Abe Kleine.3568:

Here’s the video where MattVisual explains why this is an issue https://youtu.be/gYA4xOZw41k?t=9m41s

You’ve basically forced people to do the most optimal amount of damage in the smallest amount of time by adding timers…. Which means going full zerker which unfortunately is the current meta, which you have said time and time again wouldn’t work in these raids…. But as matt has explained, they basically needed zerkers or they would fail the encounters…

Anet wtf?…..

An enrage timer alone will not favor the meta of an encounter. The mechanics of an encounter will do it. The first encounter needs a certain amount of damage (direct and condition DPS). Therefore you will see a lot of zerker and sinister gear.

The second encounter could need a certain amount of healing in a certain time. This would favor much more more players in apothecary or cleric.

The third one could need a mix of healing and damage before the enrage timer starts. Favoring a more balanced gear composition within the group.