Guild Bounties Now Punish Smaller Guilds
I have a tiny family guild. We can do none of the guild content. Sigh
I have a tiny family guild. We can do none of the guild content. Sigh
Agreed. They are going the wrong way with this “get the community involved” campaign that they’ve decided to tack onto gameplay and in doing so, allow another token grind as the only means of gathering precious commodities. One step forward, two steps back.
Another great patch today; “Guild Vault Transports are now unlocked with Economy level 5 instead of Economy level 2. The cost has been increased from 50 influence to 1 Guild Merit and 50 influence.”
Sweet.
Wow, they are really keen to have everyone be in big guilds, aren’t they? Seems like someone may have inadvertently erased the second ‘Y’ from the ‘Play Your Way’ motto.
But I mean, sure, I guess eliminating all the players who aren’t falling all over themselves about guild missions is a good way to solve the problems, too. All hail our glorious, dissent-free paradise!
[TWG] – Gunnar’s Hold
Always remember Wheaton’s Law
Unfortunately from the dev responses we’ve had, they’ve put their foot down and are adamant that they don’t see a problem, and that things won’t change.
More and more things are exclusive only to those in large guilds, with nothing being given to those in small guilds. And it looks like this is the way things are going to continue. It’s a sad state of affairs from a game where a five-person group used to be the ideal size.
I have a tiny family guild. We can do none of the guild content. Sigh
How tiny are you talking about?
My small guild can complete Tier 2 bounties with 10-12 players, Tier 1 is doable with 5 players.
Now I’d agree with the previous posts on the randomness of guild bounties, some are very easy to find and fight while others are terrible. I’m thinking about Sotzz, Tricksy-Trekksa or Half-Baked Komali. Needless to say we failed a few times.
(edited by Krag.6210)
A tier 1 bounty can be done with 5 people without pre scouting Targets. This content is not aimed at only super large guilds. You can always ask for outside help as well if you have less than 5 people in your guild. Everyone angry they cannot do this content with less than a group of 5 should also start complaining you can’t do dungeon solo. My guild failed a few Tier 1 bounties the first week. Now we only fail if we make a mistake like this week when I sent everyone to searcher for wrong target.
People just need to learn enemy patrol path and mechanics. Everything people are getting mad about is similar to when GW2 first came out and complained about dungeons. Everyone called all them impossible because they could not rush though it like it’s a hack and slash game.
Right now yes I think Scotzz should be changed because he is sometimes impossible to find with a small number of players due to him having over 300 possible locations. I think they should shrink the possible location he can possibly be. But that is only 1 out of 18 targets. You have about an 11% chance of getting Scotzz as a target for Tier 1 Bounty.
(edited by MaxLothor.3568)
My guild is roughly 6-10 active players. Most of them couldn’t make it to our first guild missions tonight.
Myself and a guild leader both shelled in 20 gold each plus about 15 gold in donations from other players to unlock AoW5 + Guild Bounty Unlock. While that was a hit in our wallet, we really wanted to play guild bounties and it made us extremely happy to be able to play with our friends again( a few logged on just to check this out).
They’re actually super fun, it made a lot of the less active people want to play more. We did three guild training missions tonight to warm up. We had done one in the middle of last week just to test it out with 6 people and it was fine. Tonight, we did two of the training bounties with 5 people and then one with 6. The battles were fairly easy and really fun.
The problem we struggled with was scouting. With so few people we were unable to cover that much area, especially when it came to bounties like Prisoner 1411 or Devious Teesa. We almost didn’t find Devious Teesa.
Even if we yelled on map, we only got one real reply all night and we had already found the bounty when they told us.
My suggestion is to get rid of some of the bounties that have longer paths from T1 bounties and make T2-T3 ones have a higher chance to use the longer path bounties.
It’s like MaxLothor says, this can be doable. However it will be quite hard depending on the mob with 6 people. Scouting is an issue and luck on getting the right bounties with small paths plays a huge factor in success for smaller guilds. And yes, we were using dulfy’s fantastic guide, even though I wish there were more in-game hints to find the mobs (like random NPCs you can ask about the mobs, tracking skills for guilds, etc. etc.).
Also, we were happy we were able to do one real bounty, but we ended up failing it. We were able to find the first bounty but we simply did not have enough scouting power (with 6 people) to nab the second bounty. We were still happy that we got our reward, but I can see it being frustrating eventually if we want to get some merits.
My only other complaint is the fact that I need 70k more influence to get guild treks at this point. Our guild isn’t super large, we’re active, but it still seems like a crazy amount after we spent so much on just bounties. We’d like to be able to progress at a reasonable rate. It would be nice if there were other “training” missions similar to bounties that may reward less influence but still gave us something to do and make it feel more varied. I can see doing just bounties will eventually bore us.
tl;dr
Guild bounty trainings are perfect, real guild bounty missions (T1) can be punishing for groups of 6, and influence is still hard to come by still/not varies enough (add treks/rushes… and maybe a training JP for more influence or variety of stuff to do).
(edited by ArkisTruefire.1746)
My only other complaint is the fact that I need 70k more influence to get guild treks at this point. Our guild isn’t super large, we’re active, but it still seems like a crazy amount after we spent so much on just bounties. We’d like to be able to progress at a reasonable rate. It would be nice if there were other “training” missions similar to bounties that may reward less influence but still gave us something to do and make it feel more varied. I can see doing just bounties will eventually bore us.
This, I’d rather pay 30 influence at Economy rank 5 to unlock tiers 1 and 2 then rank 6 to unlock tier 3 that we don’t need since we’re a small guild.
A lot of you are misunderstanding something here. You don’t need a large guild to do Bounties. If you fail to kill a Bounty target, it doesn’t mean your guild isn’t big enough. It means you aren’t good enough.
Hacking and slashing will only get you so far. You also need skill to do these missions. Think if it like Hard Mode. You need actual strategy.
It is a lot harder to go these with smaller guilds. My guild, mostly RL friends and family, only has about 20 or so members, and maybe 15 of them do guild content. That is the absolute max at times, given everyone’s work schedule and real life. We usually only get maybe 10 or so members being able to do them as a given time.
Large guilds can get away with it when members can’t log on, smaller guilds not so much. Two or three people can’t be on? Well… there goes a good chuck of your dps, and we’ll have an even harder time locating bosses now.
It doesn’t help the smaller guilds either, when you keep adding more bounties into the equation…
They should just split up the bounties, either by difficultly (in path or combat) or just randomly. Tier 1 gets these bosses this week. Tier 2 gets these bosses, an Tier 3 gets these. It would help the smaller guilds better divide their numbers to finding them, and it wouldn’t effect the large guild at all. They have the numbers to easily flood an area with people to search for them. Smaller guilds don’t have that option.
That or just bring back guild alliances. That would solve the problem as well.
Smooth I think you have mis-understood us – the bosses themselves aren’t the main source of frustration, it’s finding them and the pure luck that is involved no matter how orgainsed and communicative your team is. We’ve acknowledged the bosses need strategy to beat and that is how it should be, getting to that stage would be nice though.
Several suggestions have been put forward constructively to rectify this;
1) a sensible time limit. If non-zerging tactics are what are needed to kill boss, then half hr to find boss is the min. That will give time to engage a tactical fight.
2) split the bosses into the 3 tiers – for eg the lornars pass one is easy enough to find (if another team doesnt kill him first which is another separate issue). The Gendarren/Frostgorge ones shouldn’t roll in t1 – it takes too long to find them and then find the next target
3) Alliances. We have been told by the dev its our fault we are failing these because we aren’t co-operating with others, yet no infrastructure exists to do this atm.
Three very valid suggestions put forward by a range of guilds, including sympathetic larger ones
A lot of you are misunderstanding something here. You don’t need a large guild to do Bounties. If you fail to kill a Bounty target, it doesn’t mean your guild isn’t big enough. It means you aren’t good enough.
Hacking and slashing will only get you so far. You also need skill to do these missions. Think if it like Hard Mode. You need actual strategy.
Yeah your missing the point, do you even read bro? I’ve done T1 with my 4/5 man guild team but its luck as to which ones u get and where they r at. Honestly we will always have 4 qued up so we can hopefully get lucky and get the easy to find ones. We usually count on failing one or two of them to not having the man power to scout both.
(edited by Ballads.2509)
We do the missions with 5-15
This is just part of a disturbing trend with GW2’s ongoing development. When are they going to wake up and realize that players want FUN content, not content so challenging that it ruins the fun for the vast majority of the playerbase.
It’s such an oft repeated cliche in the MMO industry, the decision to cater live development to the most elite of the playerbase, on the assumption that they are a.) worth the nearly impossible effort to keep happy and b.) that that 1% is somehow more important to retain than the other 99% of us. Every MMO that has gone this route has dwindled away to nothingness. WoW may have gone to far in the other direction, but their success shows that mindfulness of casual players is the key to burgeoning success for an MMO.
I think this game has a high percentage of high play hour “casuals”. We don’t want content that can be facerolled, but we also don’t want content that is highly frustrating and most often doesn’t offer rewards any where near worth the frustration. However, we’ve spent several hundred+ hours playing the game because we love it and want more, fresh content and FUN things to do with friends and guild mates. Stop assuming that the hard-core are the only ones you will lose if you don’t find new ways to keep them happy and there are exponentially many players and potentially lost players that are casual than are “hard-core”.
If you want hardcore content, make hard core modes, in addition to normal modes, for dungeons and make T3 guild activities challenging, while allowing normal dungeons and T1/T2 Guild activities to be something “casuals” can actually have fun playing and leave feeling sufficiently rewarded for their time.
It really feels like Arenanet has had a major personality transplant since the game went live and it’s not taking the game in a positive direction. There seems to be a large portion of the company that still possesses the soul of what makes this game great, but it also seems like there is a darker faction pushing to take the game someplace that could tumble the entire wonderful house of cards that 5+ years and 300+ people built!
Well spoken. If you have three options of missions (T1, T2, T3), they should be doable by three different types of guilds/player types. Small guilds as well as “casual” gamers are still customers of no small number and you should very well show us, if you care for them as well as for those people how need extra challenging content to be happy.
Some bounty guys are way harder to fight than most dungeon bosses, who always offer a big chest for fighting them. And those aren’t even hard to find in some short restricted time.
Make it more fun and more accessable to hunt within the guild. We are not only fans but customers.
My guild had no problems with T2 til the update. We failed 2 tier 2’s in a row after that. IDK what the difference seems to be. We beat the Mesmer boss in Maguuma the first time we faced him with zero problems. The second time however was a totally different story. In all fairness, we lost to Bookworm Bwikki(?) 2 times. One time before the patch and a time after. I don’t think it is every boss that has gotten harder, but something seemed different about the Mesmer boss the second time around. Just thoughts on the fights to check into.
The rules for fights don’t seem uniform either. SOme bosses will change into a Moa with Moa Morph while others do not even on a planned use of the skill after Defiance stacks are removed. It would be nice to start seeing rules be applied across the board. Without having uniform rule sets, it just becomes a crap shoot. More so when it isn’t listed in the boss descriptions. If they have a different rule set, it should be listed so that we can adjust accordingly.
You are making sweeping statements here, but I think you are making them from a position of ignorance. Gendarran is a huge zone — just try “swarming” it with 8 people; the same with Sparkfly Swamp and the suspicious trees. Tricksie generally takes more than 15 minutes to find, even with 6 or 7 people in that one, single area.
This appears to be the biggest issues with bounties.
Not the fight, but finding the mob before it fails.
You don’t need people with DungeonMaster for these things, you need people who find Easter Eggs well…
JAH Bless – Equal Rights and Justice for all.
Justice And Honor – Tarnished Coast.
OK, my 2 cents. We run a small all-friends guild of about 15 ppl. The usual amount of players online is 7-8 due to different life schedules and what-not. The first time we tried bounty training we went in without preparing and got our arses handed to us on a silver platter by Yanonka the Rat-Wrangler. But that’s what you get for rushing in flailing. The second time we came prepared – we found whatever bounties we could and hoped for it to be one of them. Fat chance – we got Teesa this time. Off we go, all 7 of us to look for her. After finally finding her we killed her with whole 15 seconds to spare (and that’s with about 10 more people joining us in progress). All that took us 13 minutes. Yes, we read Dulfy.net. Yes, we took the most suitable heroes we could think of.
Now tell me this – HOW are you supposed to FIND AND KILL 2 or more champions in 15 minutes with 7 people ? Teesa is actually easy to kill, but if you get Komali or Bwikki – what then? What if your bounty is already being attacked by another guild? Attack 2 of them at once? That leaves 3-4 ppl per champ. Do you really think that 3-4 people can take on most of the bounties? There’s simply not enough DPS to take them out in time. We really want to do other guild missions, but we’re stuck because we’re unable to get any Merit.
And that’s only T1. T2 is 6 champs – solo them?
Thanks, Anet, for thinking of small guilds. No, really.
Seafarer’s Rest
Now tell me this – HOW are you supposed to FIND AND KILL 2 or more champions in 15 minutes with 7 people ? Teesa is actually easy to kill, but if you get Komali or Bwikki – what then? What if your bounty is already being attacked by another guild? Attack 2 of them at once? That leaves 3-4 ppl per champ. Do you really think that 3-4 people can take on most of the bounties? There’s simply not enough DPS to take them out in time. We really want to do other guild missions, but we’re stuck because we’re unable to get any Merit.
And that’s only T1. T2 is 6 champs – solo them?
Thanks, Anet, for thinking of small guilds. No, really.
Training = 1 target
Tier 1 = 2 targets
Tier 2 = 3 targets
Tier 3 = 6 targets
Tier 3 is not intended for a guild with 5 people to finish, that is why ArenaNet added multiple tiers. Training & Tier 1 are both doable with 5 people (preferably 10 people for Tier 1), it may be tough but it not nearly as impossible as everyone makes it out to be. Adding more people will make finding the target easier but not killing it. People keep bringing up mobs are too tough and you need more people to fight the mobs, more people does not make it easier. The game scales the mobs just like any other event in the game. If more people are fighting the target they it will have more HP and stronger attacks. Unless you get a very large zerg that it trivializes killing it like what happens at dragons, more people will mostly just make it harder unless every one of them know the mechanics.
Also just so you and others know if 2 guilds have the same target both will get credit for killing it, it’s not just the one who started it first. As long as you had at least 1 person attack it that is.
I’m in a large guild that can pull of Tier 3 bounties, and managed to do so this week without pre-scouting (way more fun that way, and gives more of a sense of teamwork/community, but you need the numbers and excellent organization to pull it off). That said, I think there ought to be changes made to make this content more fun and fair for everyone.
1. Sotzz has got to be bugged. We’re lucky and haven’t drawn him much, but a smaller guild that we co-operate with has been unlucky and drawn him a lot. His despawn timer when you find him is insane. It would be nice to know if he’s supposed to despawn that quickly, and if he is… what the kitten?
2. Any guild bounty that has mechanics which cause it to be easily failed if nearby non-guild players hop into the fight really ought to be changed. Ever tried to fight Komali in the volcano right after 40 random server-mates just finished the mega-destroyer event? We have! No amount of begging them to stop wailing on his fire shield in chat helped. They just auto-attacked like crazy until we failed the bounty. When missions were first announced, the official line on them was that you should feel free to hop in and help out if you see a guild doing one nearby. That sure isn’t the case with bounties like Komali and 2-Mult.
3. Why are there two time limits nestled in the Bounty? You’ve got to finish the whole thing within 15 minutes, and to add insult to injury, each bounty escapes after a certain amount of time after being engaged? Yecch, especially for smaller groups.
4. Guild Trek and Guild Rush (with the exception of the awful awful crab scuttle) are so much friendlier to small guilds than Guild Bounties. How come we’re required to unlock Guild Bounty first? Why not give guilds the option to unlock one of the smaller, friendlier mission types before Bounties?
5. With the increased difficulty of the new bosses and the many, many things that can go wrong because of the open world, I really think the Bounty time limit should be upped to 20 minutes. This would help a lot in instances of other guilds killing a bounty during your time limit, random people messing up boss strats, pulling Sotzz or rat-man, etc.
I am pretty sure that if you got 100 guild members scouting an area for a bounty boss, they will find it within a minute.
With 10 members, I wouldn’t even attempt tier 2 or tier 3. Tier 1 will be luck if you make it.
We have a big guild, even with 100 online it takes a good 2 hours to find all the targets, and things like sotzz are impossible even for us..
Komali, tarban, mayana and a few others are just as hard for large numbers to deal with sadly, 15 mins is insanely hard to coordinate 100 players..
I feel bad for smaller guilds trying to tackle such insane content, even large guilds have troubles with..
I am pretty sure that if you got 100 guild members scouting an area for a bounty boss, they will find it within a minute.
With 10 members, I wouldn’t even attempt tier 2 or tier 3. Tier 1 will be luck if you make it.
We have a big guild, even with 100 online it takes a good 2 hours to find all the targets, and things like sotzz are impossible even for us..
Komali, tarban, mayana and a few others are just as hard for large numbers to deal with sadly, 15 mins is insanely hard to coordinate 100 players..
I feel bad for smaller guilds trying to tackle such insane content, even large guilds have troubles with..
I am going to give you some tips by explaining what my guild has done for Tier 3 bounties. We have yet to ever fail one and this week we even managed to finish with 5 minutes to spare. We do our Tier 3 with around 40-60 people.
- I can’t emphasize this enough to all people. DO NOT waste your time pre scouting it just leads to frustration and is not worth it. My guild did this the first two weeks and it was just a big head ach. When we decided to just not scout it has become a lot more fun.
- Have everyone gather at a set location. We personally meet just north of lions arch @ Cornucopian Fields Waypoint.
- Split up into 6 groups before you start your bounty. Don’t throw all your people at the same target. Have each group go for a different target.
- When speaking in your guild chat have people refer to relevant information by putting “Party Leads Name: Target, location or other such information” this helps keep things from getting cluttered.
- Assign each group a number 1-6, then when the bounty starts each group will know what target to go after from order on the list.
- Spread out on the maps, being in actual parties of 5 helps here a lot.
- Always ask into map chat if someone has seen your target, if someone replies only send 1 person at the target to confirm. Sometimes people lie, GW2 in game community is normally friendly in my experience but not always.
- If you can fight targets near a waypoint, some fights are hard and nearby WP for people to spawn at helps.
- If one group is finished send the group to help the target that is hardest to find not fight. Adding people to hard fights normally just make them harder due to scaling.
- Pray you do not get Sotzz, he is the only target in my opinion needs to be reworked on finding him. I have been lucky so far with him but sooner or later our luck will run out.
I hope these tips help you & other people. This is just the basics of how my guild successfully does Tier 3 Bounties every time. Same ideas apply to Tier 1 as well. We split into 2 groups of 5 and each group takes a different target. Also I know it’s not possible for everyone but having a person with commander title in groups help.
Training = 1 target
Tier 1 = 2 targets
Tier 2 = 3 targets
Tier 3 = 6 targetsTier 3 is not intended for a guild with 5 people to finish, that is why ArenaNet added multiple tiers. Training & Tier 1 are both doable with 5 people (preferably 10 people for Tier 1), it may be tough but it not nearly as impossible as everyone makes it out to be. Adding more people will make finding the target easier but not killing it. People keep bringing up mobs are too tough and you need more people to fight the mobs, more people does not make it easier. The game scales the mobs just like any other event in the game. If more people are fighting the target they it will have more HP and stronger attacks. Unless you get a very large zerg that it trivializes killing it like what happens at dragons, more people will mostly just make it harder unless every one of them know the mechanics.
Also just so you and others know if 2 guilds have the same target both will get credit for killing it, it’s not just the one who started it first. As long as you had at least 1 person attack it that is.
Killing them isn’t a problem – finding them with few people is. Training are easy enough, but you get no merit for those. However T1 is nearly impossible for tiny guilds like ours, unless you get lucky and draw 2 champs that are both easy to find. Hasn’t happened yet. It takes about 10 minutes to find the ones on bigger maps – there’s simply not enough coverage. We’re (smaller guilds) no complaining about them being hard to kill – we actually like the challenging fights. We’re simply saying that for smaller guilds 15 minutes is not enough time to find even 2 bosses most of the time.
Seafarer’s Rest
Always ask into map chat if someone has seen your target, if someone replies only send 1 person at the target to confirm. Sometimes people lie, GW2 in game community is normally friendly in my experience but not always.
Yeah, not always. My experience with that so far:
Me: Anyone seen Prisoner?
Random 1: Yeah, he’s here.
Random 2: We’re following him.
Me: Where?
Random 2: Obviously, not where you are, n00b
Asking rarely helps as those who found the targets usually keep them to themselves. They either say nothing, give you a wrong location or simply insult you and tell you to sod off.
Yeah, communication and cooperation is key indeed…
Same ideas apply to Tier 1 as well. We split into 2 groups of 5 and each group takes a different target.
What if a guild doesn’t have enough people for “2 groups of 5 each”?
Seafarer’s Rest
(edited by unseen.7245)
Always ask into map chat if someone has seen your target, if someone replies only send 1 person at the target to confirm. Sometimes people lie, GW2 in game community is normally friendly in my experience but not always.
Yeah, not always. My experience with that so far:
Me: Anyone seen Prisoner?
Random 1: Yeah, he’s here.
Random 2: We’re following him.
Me: Where?
Random 2: Obviously, not where you are, n00bAsking rarely helps as those who found the targets usually keep them to themselves. They either say nothing, give you a wrong location or simply insult you and tell you to sod off.
Yeah, communication and cooperation is key indeed…
Same ideas apply to Tier 1 as well. We split into 2 groups of 5 and each group takes a different target.
What if a guild doesn’t have enough people for “2 groups of 5 each”?
They should find another small guild and agree to help each other with guild missions. Why not?
They should find another small guild and agree to help each other with guild missions. Why not?
Because you can’t effectively communicate with everyone in the said guild? There’s no mechanism for communicating between the guilds like there was in GW1 with its alliance chat. The only way you can speak to the other guild is either by whisper (1 person, poor speed), or inviting people you don’t know to your TS3 server (not gonna happen any time soon).
Seafarer’s Rest
They should find another small guild and agree to help each other with guild missions. Why not?
Because you can’t effectively communicate with everyone in the said guild? There’s no mechanism for communicating between the guilds like there was in GW1 with its alliance chat. The only way you can speak to the other guild is either by whisper (1 person, poor speed), or inviting people you don’t know to your TS3 server (not gonna happen any time soon).
Okay this is really simple. You create a guild rank. You give that guild rank no permissions. You call those guys allies. They do the same. We have such a rank in our guild.
For the duration of your guild mission they rep you. For the duration of their guild mission you rep them.
For half an hour a week you rep each other. There’s no security risk. They don’t have permission to take anything out of your guild bank for instance.
During the event you have guild chat. Why must everyone make things like this so difficult?
Its a good technique, but unnecs convuluted resolution to a problem where easier solutions have been put forward. I guess we will see what april brings.
I agree with this. Lets add 3 more mobs, the inability to lock them down and buff them, while adding specific mechanics in an already short time frame, plus while having to find them like normal. really?
Always ask into map chat if someone has seen your target, if someone replies only send 1 person at the target to confirm. Sometimes people lie, GW2 in game community is normally friendly in my experience but not always.
Yeah, not always. My experience with that so far:
Me: Anyone seen Prisoner?
Random 1: Yeah, he’s here.
Random 2: We’re following him.
Me: Where?
Random 2: Obviously, not where you are, n00bAsking rarely helps as those who found the targets usually keep them to themselves. They either say nothing, give you a wrong location or simply insult you and tell you to sod off.
Yeah, communication and cooperation is key indeed…
Same ideas apply to Tier 1 as well. We split into 2 groups of 5 and each group takes a different target.
What if a guild doesn’t have enough people for “2 groups of 5 each”?
There are jerks out there who will lie and people who don’t actually know what they are talking about. Still it never hurts to ask, there are people who are nice and helpful. This is also why I said send one person to confirm when people do give a location. Stuff like this does happen but not every time. If this type of thing does happen every time on your server I feel sorry for you.
I have done multiple Tier 1s in my guild just to see if we could do it with a group of 5 and we have. We thought it was a nice and fun challenge. We successfully did it by splitting in group of 2 and 3 while staying in party of 5. Both searched for different targets when one was found we meet up and killed it then all 5 went after the other target. We have never had an issue killing targets except Half-Baked Komali which basically requires a Mesmer or Necro to properly kill.
Maxlothor, would like to say I feel your tips are dead on. We only have enough for t2 at this time but your tips are exactly what we have been doing. It does make them more enjoyable. Scouting really does take the fun out of it. I know there are times we have failed because of the luck of the draw. But its all good, we have succeeded on more. Hope people that aren’t doing it the way you suggested and having trouble will give it a shot.
In response to my posts, some people misunderstand when I said this is like Hard Mode. You have a 15 minute timer to find the targets. Can you get lucky and find them quickly? Sure. Can you get unlucky and run a different direction on their path? Sure.
This brings me back to the fact that Guild Missions aren’t for everyone. If you have a small guild, you play by the same rules as the bigger guild. Find the target, be it luck or not, and kill it. If you want an easier time, you should grow your guild, or partner with another guild. If you have a guild with enough man power to search, more power to you.
Spending 15 frantic minutes running all over a zone trying to find one stupid mob who never shows, or died before you got there, is the opposite of fun. Playing Where’s Waldo in a constantly changing landscape with mobs attacking you which you do not have time to fight off is the opposite of fun. You can be as coordinated and organised as you like – we have split our team up between the relevant zones and then searched in quadrants from there, starting with known/previous spawns and moving on, all whilst communicating on Mumble – and end up with nothing. I am in a small guild (about 5-7 active players) and I will not be bothering with guild missions anymore.
For very large guilds who are actually able to encounter and engage the guild missions content, I’m sure it is just super-duper. For the rest of us, Anthony, I’m afraid it’s just a fail.
We are about the same size, maybe slightly smaller. The conclusion we’ve come up with is that to finish these the basic strategy is just build a stack of tier1 bounties(10 is the max). The rest is luck. Last week we got Devious Teesa + Yanonka the Rat-Wrangler followed by …. Yanonka the Rat-Wrangler + Devious Teesa THEN we got Big Mayana + Short Fuse Felix.
In short the basic strategy for a small guild is just to burn Influence and hope the RNG works in your favor. That was pretty much what Anthony’s suggest amounted to in another thread.
The training missions are supposed to support that but the build time seems to be in conflict with that goal.
And it just so happens to be that influence is one of the things small guilds have an abundance of… oh wait. And those training missions take a long amount of time to build, indeed.
One other thing about those training missions. Yesterday, my guild got Multi to battle. We were with 6 so we managed to find him within 5 minutes. We started fighting him and all went well, until a whole lot of random people started joining, upscaling the event so much it became too much for us to handle and it failed. Those people didn’t kill the sparks, much less throw them back at the boss.
I appreciate the open world thing Anet wanted to have, but for guild missions(hell, anything challenging), it’s just one big fail. And oh yeh, being a kick in the balls for smaller guilds too of course. But hey, we are happy if we manage to at least complete the lower tier after a dozen of prayers we get some decent targets.
I guess we are a bit unique there in terms of Influence gain for a small guild. Getting enough influence to build tier 2 and 3 bounties as throw away practice runs isn’t really a problem for us.
Due to the 12 hour timezone spread of out guild members we usually end up doing hunts when the server is mostly dead so we have been lucky enough to avoid having other people screw things up. I still dread seeing other people show up at our target. The way scaling for these fight happen for these definitely need some work.
As for the training missions, I’ve been thinking about it and it seems really more geared towards guilds consisting mostly of people who play infrequently than small guilds. It’s great to say you can do unlimited number of them per week but with a 3 day build time and there are only 7 days in a week … I also forgot that the ability to build two upgrades at the same time is actually NOT the default. You have to get Guild Workshop first. The problem with the build time is that it eats too much into the build time for the regular bounties.
2mult is hard to kill as compared to other bounties. It will cause stun when shooting out the spark and these aoe is PAINFUL, it is not possible to kill with a small group unless that small group consist of a few individual that has feedback or reflect. In other words, you will need a very specialized team to kill it. Killing it in the timeframe will require quite a lot DPS.
My guild started T3 and we have 4 parties jump on the 2mult just to kill it and it took about 5min? 5min just to kill a bounty and still have other bounties =,=
At that time we had 40+ people doing guild bounties
I really dont see how small guild can enjoy the mission with 2mult as target, and there are also the hide and seek. To begin with, by adding 3 additional targets already reducing the chances of small guilds completing them.
I can see that anet signalling to the small guilds, either grow big or merge or give it up.
Henge of Denravi Server
www.gw2time.com
Fact – Guild Missions are a numbers game. The larger the guild, the larger the advantage. From unlocking the content, to finding the bounties, to killing the bounties.
My guild can no longer grow because of guild missions. When we get new people, they see that we are unable to do guild missions and they move on. At this point, being in a small guild is equal to holding yourself back from content and gear.
They are not comply numbers games there more then just guild bounties and even they scale with more ppl. Having more ppl only lets the bigger guilds play a bit more lazily its not so much easier just most of the guild dose not have to “work” for the rewards.
Yeah right. Try being in a guild of friends, with 12 total, and it’s a high login night if 5 up us are on at the same time. Then get back to me on scouting 3 maps and killing 3 bounties in 15 minutes. Not a numbers game my kitten
I personally think finding them is the relatively easy part – it’s killing them that’s gotten obnoxious. 2-Mult, the new frog, the rat ogre, Komali, Diplomat, just about as obnoxious as it gets.
(I suspect that this has been suggested already, but I haven’t seen it.)
Perhaps the time limit should scale inversely with the number of guild members online? The fewer you have, the more time you get, up to some ceiling.
Coming from a small guild, I do feel the frustration. We usually have 10-15 people doing guild bounties. After the patch we have more bosses to track. And not tracking the NPCs in advance and rolling bounties with larger paths/random spawn points ( Lornar’s Pass, Blazeridge, etc) will most likely lead to failing the mission.
Here is my suggestion:
1. Group the NPCs according to the difficulty (to track and kill).
- 6 easiest NPCs = Tier 1 NPCs
– the next 6 NPCs = Tier 2 NPCs
– the last 6 NPCs = Tier 3 NPCs
2. Limit the NPCs that need to be killed/tracked according to tier.
- Tier 1 = kill 2 out of 6 T1 NPCs
– Tier 2 = kill 3 out of 12( T1 + T2 NPCs )
– Tier 3 = kill 6 out of 18 ( all )
so smaller guilds running with 15 or less members can enjoy T1 or T2 and not having to worry about getting an NPC that is very difficult to track.
Since Guild Merit is different on each tier, so it should be no problem.
SoR
Floppyjr – It blows my mind that the Devs of this content couldn’t come up with a setup like that, or scrubbed it if they did…………………………….
Failed our bounties this week, had about 16 people.
First attempt: Group A and B find and kill their bounty, Group C and D can’t find their bounty in Gendarran Fields (barrel guy… 300 spawn points!… >:C ) Found only one clickable barrel that 3 minutes before the time limit only said that it looked suspicious and that was all. No activate or anything on it.
Second attempt: A and B find their bounty, C and D find their bounty (timberline falls?). AB kills theirs, joins CD. CD bounty starts one shotting everyone in the area, people wandering by join in, makes it worse, it’s impossible to pick up the sparks without being one shot, can’t kill boss because people wandering by won’t leave long enough for us to throw sparks at the robot. Boss despawns after 10 minutes. Mission failed.
SOOOO we do a guild bounty training in hopes to salvage the night. 5 players, no big deal right? Blazeridge Steppes, we send the players to different map points, and search along the path. Mob just doesn’t exist. Looked for the 15 minutes plus another 10 after we failed. Still didn’t find her…
This is just disheartening and not particularly fun.
peasants had no bread and who responded: “Let them eat brioche.”
I think mobs with mechanics are great – but not on a timer or in the open world, especially when they require everything to go perfectly.
(I suspect that this has been suggested already, but I haven’t seen it.)
Perhaps the time limit should scale inversely with the number of guild members online? The fewer you have, the more time you get, up to some ceiling.
This could be easily exploited by everybody but 1 person logging out before activating.
Seafarer’s Rest
I agree that there are some issues that should be worked out, like finding Sotz or random people joining in on Komali, but in general I think the bounties are great the way they are. Its nice to have something challenging when a lot of the game is missing that. I have a couple solutions for some of the problems that seem like a shared concern.
1. Smaller guilds should group together. My guild has found that hiring what we call “mercernaries” works best. And by hire I mean exchange services. We then do the tier of bounty that works best for many people we have available.
2. Get a commander. I know this will harder for very small guilds, but considering smaller guilds are usually friends and family and should be more willing to chip in to get a commander time. Squad chat should help alleviate the issue of not being able to cross-guild chat. A better solution would be for Anet to add alliances, but a squad should work well for small guilds.
3. Use Dulfy. Learn your battles and paths. If you have a full party out looking for an NPC you should be able to find with enough time to kill. Exceptions for Sotz, but he sucks in general.
4. Visit my thread on my bounty hunt findings and app idea. I would like to write an app to help guilds of all size coordinate better, but no one seems interested thus far. https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Guild-Bounty-Discussion-App-proposal/first#post1808072
Before the patch 12-18 of us would hop in vent and have a great time. I don’t think we lost a t1 or t2
After patch the fights seem harder, are harder to find since they cant be stopped, Scotts is now impossible, 2-MULT is always a massive failure even while trying to do the mechanic and their are more targets to find making even tougher then that.
Now we have lost 6+ bounties at all levels and haven’t gotten a merit since the patch. Instead we settle to do a t3 to have better chances of picking who to fight to get our personal reward after continued failure.
Our small guild has 8 Dungeon Masters and cant do a t1 bounty . . . . . Something is very very wrong here.
I’m hoping this can be rebalanced back the way it was or give a buff or less possible targets to smaller guilds.
lol this post is hilarious! I can’t believe people are actually complaining about the guild bounties when they have 18 freaking people doing it! We’re lucky if we have 8 people and it’s rarely a problem. Last week we failed the training one with 3 people but beat t1 with 5. If you’re really having problems when you have 18 people, the problem isn’t the content.
http://www.youtube.com/user/randomfightfan/videos?view=0&flow=grid
(edited by randomfightfan.4091)
Before the patch 12-18 of us would hop in vent and have a great time. I don’t think we lost a t1 or t2
After patch the fights seem harder, are harder to find since they cant be stopped, Scotts is now impossible, 2-MULT is always a massive failure even while trying to do the mechanic and their are more targets to find making even tougher then that.
Now we have lost 6+ bounties at all levels and haven’t gotten a merit since the patch. Instead we settle to do a t3 to have better chances of picking who to fight to get our personal reward after continued failure.
Our small guild has 8 Dungeon Masters and cant do a t1 bounty . . . . . Something is very very wrong here.
I’m hoping this can be rebalanced back the way it was or give a buff or less possible targets to smaller guilds.
lol this post is hilarious! I can’t believe people are actually complaining about the guild bounties when they have 18 freaking people doing it! We’re lucky if we have 8 people and it’s rarely a problem. Last week we failed the training one with 3 people but beat t1 with 5. If you’re really having problems when you have 18 people, the problem isn’t the content.
The problem is the randomness of the encounters and FINDING the hard-to-find bounties in 15 minutes. You did a tier 1 without any problems, congratulations, but if you had rolled any of the long-fight bosses, and a hard to find boss, you would have failed.
The RANDOM nature of the easy mechanics vs. hard mechanics bosses is fine. The random nature of the easy to FIND bosses and hard to find bosses is not. The joy of the bounty should be in finding and killing them. Not freaking out every 2 minutes and opening your guild tab to see if 15 mins is expired yet. Raise the time cap to 30 mins and people will be much happier. Is it really GAME BREAKING if the time limit is 30 minutes? The bosses already have a built in flee timer if you are not properly DPSing or executing the mechanics.
Small guilds still have to know and execute the mechanics, but now they have some wiggle room on finding their next bounty.
oh trust me, I know. We had 6 people today and got the frog kitten in sparkfly. Worst boss mechanic ever. All she does is jump in the air the entire freaking fight, dropping mass aoe poisons and projectile damage everywhere. You can pick up her pots and throw them back but that doesn’t work. Don’t argue with this, it doesn’t work because every time she jumps, she’s evading… and she’s ALWAYS JUMPING. In the 7 minutes or so before it failed we managed to get her to 5%… then she fleed. Pain to find her but only a pain due to finding crusader michelle every 2s but not getting to capture her instead.
Fights like this would actually be fine if the boss to a freaking break from evading and didn’t throw 100 projectiles a second at multiple people all around her. We probably would have been fine if we were 6 guardians spamming wall of reflect… but we weren’t.
that’s what fighting the boss was like… only we were the werewolf
http://www.youtube.com/user/randomfightfan/videos?view=0&flow=grid
Arenanet please address smaller guilds. we have tried guild training missions a number of times and only found the target once. we have 10 members, but only about 5 active at a time. I have put about 900 hours into the game and have multiple characters at 80. My guild mates are about the same except the guild leader that has over 1500 hours in game. we have tried to get newer members, but this does not help with the current setup of guild missions, as they really take level 80 characters. i do not understand why i should join a guild of 100 to do guild missions. On another note why would i have to get to more than 5-10 just to get to the second tier or guild missions……. we play and love this game alot. why can’t we join with other guilds to do the missions. i am a player that has loved the game up until we have spent everything we have to try guild missions, only to realize that guilds apparently meanshaving a lot more online at a time than me and my friends can muster.
The only thing I would do is redo the bounties so the first one is for 1 target only and it goes up from there. Maybe make 4 or even 5 tiers of it. That way a group of around 10 people should be ok with tier 1 and maybe 2, though they might fail. That sounds ok for me.
Edit: What I would find helpful is a raid group interface (I can hear the haters hissing) so we can better organize groups for the guild events and to speed up communication and task assigment, since everything is a narow timer. Would also be useful for puzzles, and possibly for organized WvW or even big meta events (well, those are too faceroll atm but one can hope they improve them).
At some point everyone has to agree that x people are unlikely to complete it or we end up balancing for guilds with 3 players 2 of which arent online eventually. I think a good cut-off is a having at least 8 people online and willing to participate (no matter how many are actually in guild). If you have less then that, sorry but reschedule.
(edited by Mastruq.2463)
The magic number in GW2 is 5 players. All Training Missions and T1 should be doable by 5 level 80 exotic geared players.
Any guild larger than 5 can’t truly play together unless they are WvWing or rampaging Orr. Even then you can’t chat unless you have a commander in WvW and only with non game comms in other places.
The magic number in GW2 is 5 players. All Training Missions and T1 should be doable by 5 level 80 exotic geared players.
Any guild larger than 5 can’t truly play together unless they are WvWing or rampaging Orr. Even then you can’t chat unless you have a commander in WvW and only with non game comms in other places.
My guild players together with larger numbers. We just use mumble and guild chat when doing missions.