Guild Wars 2

Was just wondering if there had been any discussion on the topic of increasing the party size for either explorable areas or doing dungeons. I would like to see 8 like it was in GW1.

Don’t believe so.

I remember the early videos where Colin et al were saying they thought that 8 was too many and that a smaller group was the way they wanted to go.

I hope they don’t ever change that.

5-man content, along with mobile combat, was the thing that drew my guild to this game, and those two reasons are the only things still keeping us here.

I understand someone wanting larger groups; it comes up from time to time (see: suggestions board.) There would have to be massive game redesign. Don’t believe ANet has time/resources for something that large, even if there was interest.

I think the direction is headed more along the lines of larger outdoor “raids”. (See: Tequatl.)

I’m pretty sure they have stated that 5 party members is what works best for them when it comes to designing challenging content. We see groups now where players stack and can easily take down bosses very fast. Just imagine if there were 8 members. I think that is Anet’s concern with 5+ members, too many healing coming from everywhere and really it seems they want heals to be on the low side of combat, well that’s what it seems to me anyway….

5 man content is good, but for groups outside the dungeons/fractals/instances i would like to have a bigger group

Wish they could implement harder dungeons/events that require more than 5-man team…

Immensus.9732:

5 man content is good, but for groups outside the dungeons/fractals/instances i would like to have a bigger group

I was about to say the same. The 5 person group size is doing ok for instances, but does not seem necessary for open world/wvw. Commander is just simulating larger groups at the moment (in a much sloppier way than if we actually had the option for larger groups…)

Five Man Band

Beware it’s TVTropes, once you start it’s hard to leave.

The 5 man party is because of complaints in gw1 that fielding 8 players to do such and such was to hard to do. Or that fielding 8 players for gvg was hard to do if you werent already an established guild with contacts in that community.

Basically the only real content that really requires more than 5 people are the dragon events, temple of lyssa, karka queen and guild missions. Everything else can be done with 5 or less people (and don’t say grenth is impossible to do with 5 people I’ve done it with 4 people at 4 AM)

I’ve done Lyssa with 2 people. 1 is problematic because of the event completion times on both northwest and southeast events, and because if a event respawns you’ll want one person at the centre to prevent Lyssa from rehealing. At very small population sizes, Lyssa does not summon apes, making the fight actually easier than in larger groups.

Shatterer requires only 5 people. 1 to aggro lieutenants and summons, and 4 to man one mortar each. Directly attacking it is actually unnecessary; HP scaling is such that this is actually enough to clear the Shatterer within the timer. On the other hand, groups that don’t understand this can send 40 people to melee the dragon and still fail if nobody mortars.

Haven’t done karka queen enough to comment.

We have done Guild bounties with 4 people, and guild rushes are trivial to complete even with 3. Guild puzzles require at least 6. Guild challenges require at least 10 for defense, 3 for the JP one, 8 for the crystal destruction one.

Melandru requires at least 5 because of the acolyte drake mechanic.

Dwayna requires at least 3.

Tequatl is the odd one out here that requires an absurdly large number of players.