Guild Wars 2

One thing most people moan about is gear progression and lack of “raid style” end game content. I cannot actually believe I haven’t come across this or made the connection but we already have it… sort of. Unfortunately it was hard to see for the past month from head-start, given that every other D.event chain was broken there. (kudos on ruining your end game and selling feature Anet :p)

I only just realised what I’m saying here myself having actually experienced the chain from the start and seeing how it works and realising why its implemented like it is. Below is a short description of the content skip ahead for the reasoning if your impatient :p

The meta “Temple” events spread around the City of Orr (Straits of Devastation, Malchor’s leap and the Cursed Shore) provide interesting content to play through and complete. Not just because they represent a Raid style end game but because, within lies gear progression and rewards for you and your community. Let me show you why and how:

“Cathedral of Zephyrs”
aka Altar of Dwayna

It comes in 4 parts, Two major “Raid” bosses and two escort/story missions /w ambush

• Opening – Escort Historian Vermoth
  Pretty basic, involves some ambushes of Orrians. Nothing any green geared cant handle.

• Temple Guardian – Involves difficult mechanics similar to dungeon bosses, but more pug friendly. Pulls, places necro fields and summons adds all while doing typical attacks. Also Teleports to random locations doing all of the above. (Took a team of 3 of us to finish the boss, an extra two had arrived towards the end. I was epic/exotic geared with a healing build which helped a lot to keep the pugs up)

• Drive NPC forward – At this point i grouped the 5 of us up into a team to escort this NPC, turned out we had to fight him at various locations and “force” him forward, included some rather large ambushes which was fun to tackle, nothing a little AOE couldn’t handle.

• Final Boss: Statue of Dwayna – This one was unforgiving; initially half of them where downed pretty swiftly, cleaver kiting and teamwork from the remaining team members allowed the rest to be rezed. Without giving too much away in terms of tactics… It was very visible and after a few minutes all abilities had been shown and we knew exactly what to avoid and how to tackle the boss. As we progressed the group ended up more around the numbers of 8-10 people (apt i know right?)

So…

I played wow, i know what those people are looking for when they say it has no progression and no raid content. Personally i blame blizzard for handing players the content on a platter these days… for example how all dungeons are able to be teleported too from anywhere. Gw2 doesnt have that, and to be fair i know its always been about exploring etc but there’s a fine line between rewarding exploration and losing players because content is just not pointed to/right on everyone’s front door in a nice UI ready to enter :p Again… GG blizzard.

That said if you find it, and due to its persistent nature you hope its also only started… there’s very little difference between the two. Infact, GW2 manages to throw in more natural progression of story, similar mechanics and guess what? When your done?… You get rewarded with gear! Sure the Karma per completion and price per item is high but so is wow so kitten :p Atleast with Karma you can get it anywhere and complete the content when you need it if you feel so inclined.

The joy of the content is its repeatable in various time frames and there’s 5 different ones (each with varying degrees of difficulty I might add) Personally i think its more than an appropriate end game goal to aim towards, Hold all Temples around Orr.

TL;DR:

Human God Temple Meta Events around Orr provide excellent end game content in the style of wow Raid bosses, more orientated towards PUG groups while keeping difficulty and also rewarding completion with easier access to exotic gear. If you haven’t experienced them all, I suggest you try them from the beginning. Enjoy your Karma Lootz (:

An interesting thought… I never thought of it that way. The Temple of Lyssa is even more so, since you NEED people at the seals in order to make sure they don’t get taken, to say nothing of the Avatar of Lyssa herself.

Temple of Lyssa is kind of a pain too because even after the event is completed, there’s a load of mobs swarming/spawning on the karma vendor, making it virtually impossible to get your gear.

I think it could be a bug, but I’m not sure.

I think the main problem with those “raids” is that you cannot organize them. Raids in WoW was something I always did with my guild on a specific day each week. And when we managed to beat a raid instance it was always something we, as the guild, were proud about.
The problem with that in gw2 is that if 10+ members are online and we decide to go and kill the claw of jormag there is a chance that
1) It might not spawn for another hour or two if not even more.
2) even if it spawns its not really challenging. (unless you are one of those people that always stands in fire/various other AoE.)
3) When it spawns there will be another 40+ players who will participate.

I guess what I personally want is something that I can do only with my guild without having people interupting.

Also, having to visit an area to enter the dungeon does not makes it more “livley”.
Just as example, look at the charr starting area. There are always people standing at the dungeon entrance spamming their LFG and they dont even bother with the harpy event that triggers every 15min~ and is just a 1min walk away.

People want private, instanced, raids that they can do with their guild. Not open-world raids where everyone can join.
It doesn’t bother me that there isn’t any private ones though. I’m just stating the facts.