Guild Wars 2

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.

Only if they are easy to avoid. By the same reasoning, by the way, the whole raid is an easy win. All you need to do, after all is “avoid the mob mechanics and dps hard”

Ayrilana.1396:

If you make the mechanics too difficult then you’ll have people complaining about how gimmicky it is.

I’d say that the current ones are perfectly okay, with perhaps a slight tweaking.

Harper.4173:

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.

When using nomads, the difficulty of avoiding some mechanics is lessened, that’s true. It has no impact on some others, however, and it extends the fight, and thus the number of times you have to avoid making any deadly mistakes to a much, much greater degree.

Lets assume that a normal zerker group during the fight has to execute certain mechanic perfectly an average of 5 times (or wipe). Let’s assume, that a nomad group does not need to execute that mechanic equally perfectly, and that their chance to get through it safely is 2 or 3 times better. Easier, right? Except, they have to execute it not 5, 10 or even 15 times, but 50 (yes, the difference in dps will extend the fight that long).
In the end, their chances of getting through the fight safely are actually lower.

The only way it would not be true is if nomads could reduce the chances of failing the mechanic execution by a significantly greater degree than they would increase the number of times the mechanic needs to be executed.

I do not believe this is the case in the fight we were shown. And the next fights in that raid wing are supposed to be even harder.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

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.

Again, that was because of several nerfs that made the timer mostly irrelevant (it is here now basically only to ensure that the stage gets cleared before people will start arriving for the next Teq, and to make some bigger mistakes – like failing a battery defence – unrecoverable unless you are really good).

If the enrage timers get extended (or the boss nefed) to the same comparable levels as in Teq, you will have a point, but at the moment it’s nowhere close to that.

Timer or not alone does not dictate whether the team need a dedicated healer or otherwise. Instead it is whether the combat force you eat the damages or you can avoid and mitigate them. This encounter seems to be the later one. But it doesn’t say all encounters in the future will be design in this way.

What about to increase damage of bosses by 50% and reduce their health by 30-50%?
(of course, that means that tanks can finish it and zerkers will be shooted at the 1st error XD)

Ashen.2907:

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.

Except in that situation my point still stands – you just need to bring a bit more damage than he can heal.

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

Exactly – because if the developers do this the difficulty level will way out there. People don’t like things being too hard.
If people enjoyed a real challenge people would go to PvP – where human opponents offer the ultimate adversary – fast and cunning.
Guess what – people just want their loot.

Astralporing.1957:

When using nomads, the difficulty of avoiding some mechanics is lessened, that’s true. It has no impact on some others, however, and it extends the fight, and thus the number of times you have to avoid making any deadly mistakes to a much, much greater degree.
Lets assume that a normal zerker group during the fight has to execute certain mechanic perfectly an average of 5 times (or wipe). Let’s assume, that a nomad group does not need to execute that mechanic equally perfectly, and that their chance to get through it safely is 2 or 3 times better. Easier, right? Except, they have to execute it not 5, 10 or even 15 times, but 50 (yes, the difference in dps will extend the fight that long).
In the end, their chances of getting through the fight safely are actually lower.
The only way it would not be true is if nomads could reduce the chances of failing the mechanic execution by a significantly greater degree than they would increase the number of times the mechanic needs to be executed.
I do not believe this is the case in the fight we were shown. And the next fights in that raid wing are supposed to be even harder.

By itself – the large challenge in Raids as far as I’ve seen them aren’t the one-miss and wipe mechanics – but these mechanics coupled with other things – like constant high damage pressure and the timer pressure forcing you to have to damage or fail.

If you eliminate two sources of pressure on the party – even if they have to pass the insta-wipe mechanic many more times they’ll have an easier job doing it because they really only have one thing to focus on and once they get it down there are no disruptive factors, no other threats that can prevent them from doing so.

It’s more of a patience game – sure – but once humans get something down they can pretty consistently do it.

The whole Vale Guardian encounter as far as I understood the boss is designed to assault you from multiple directions with mechanics, damage and even time working against you in order to create a difficult setting.

Astralporing.1957:

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I think you have no idea what facerolling is. Hint: it’s not “just spam 1”.
Yes, during the impassable mechanic phase the raid is equally challenging regardless of gear, but what happens for the rest (and higher duration) part? A faceroll. Imagine this, in Vale Guardian with 10 full nomads you could go faceroll – mechanic – faceroll – mechanic – faceroll, in other words all you need to do is make sure 4 players enter the big glowing circles when they spawn, and the rest of the encounters is a faceroll. Exciting isn’kitten

And pretty much what Harper said. The 3 colored mobs before the boss were very easy to deal with, the raid only became hard when you combined the different mechanics. All of the mechanics together (with the enrage timer) contribute to the overall difficulty, remove a couple of those and the fight won’t be challenging at all. Without the timer you could simply faceroll the fight and only bother when the raid wipe mechanic was up. ZzzZZZzzzZZ

Astralporing.1957:

snip

I’m hoping that you could provide me some confirmation on your stance for a couple of points that you made.

• Are you for or against build diversity when it comes to raids?
• Specifically, do you feel that players should not be forced to go berserkers/sinister?

• Are you for or against the enrage timer?
• Do you find the mechanics that result in a party wipe, or at the very least high damage, a valid way to increase the difficulty of an encounter?
• The enrage timer was about10 minutes from what I remember. If they did a soft enrage timer, at what point would you have it kick off? At what point would you have the hard enrage timer kick off? Keep in mind that Anet does want to keep the time to completion within a certain time frame.
• Is there any other way you would replace the timer to increase difficulty?

I hate enrage timers. There is nothing wrong with killing a boss through attrition. If you can hose a boss down quicker by throwing tons of zerkers at it, then great. Your reward is a faster kill. Making this a mechanic however is terrible.

Jarvis.9540:

I hate enrage timers. There is nothing wrong with killing a boss through attrition. If you can hose a boss down quicker by throwing tons of zerkers at it, then great. Your reward is a faster kill. Making this a mechanic however is terrible.

It’s supposed to be challenging.

Why is it that so many think that ‘challenging’ means only ‘dodge the insta-kill and pump out max DPS’? What if bosses got Aegis, protection or retaliation stacks when they were hit with direct damage? Condi would be a real thing then. But then maybe bosses could transfer condis to the group or convert them to boons. I’d like to see more creativity and variety in boss mechanics. This DPS or get out environment means that most builds are useless, and that’s boring.