Guild Wars 2

just make the kitten things sellable already and you solve the problem.
i have gold*, i have an inner aversion to crafting, i want top notch gear.
let me buy it off the trading post and i ll call it a day.

*so much gold i could start a bank

A couple of things to note. If a dev says that ascended gear is recommended, many elitist players will take that for requirement, and thus ascended gear becomes a requirement. A viable solution would be to make gear more easily obtained (and whoever wishes to exaggerate this, no i do NOT mean to have a vendor in lion’s arch handing it out for free easy, i simply mean easier to obtain than now and give casual players the ability to obtain it if they put in enough work).

a second solution to fix the raid problem of ascended gear requirements is to have levels of difficulty for raids, going from puggable with exotics to raid guild with legendaries. Have the same type of rewards throughout all difficulties, but have those drops be at a lower rate or fewer drops per boss for lower difficulties. Also having a raid finder option for lower difficulties would go a long way too.

Finally, have the ability to create legendaries no matter the difficulty of the raid. But again, like above, those who do lower difficulties would have a longer road to journey before they can get legendaries, making it more work but without requiring elite skill gameplay to make them more accessible to casual players (and for those who wish to exaggerate it, not i do not mean faceroll get it in a day accessible, casual players will STILL need to put in hard work and time, but they can go at their own pace and still be able to get the legendaries).

Because i’m certain that with the way that elitists already are currently, they’re going to get worse with raids and within a few months time, when all the elitists have legendaries, those legendaries will become requirements for raids.

Making raids more accessible does not have to remove the challenging part of it. Making ascended gear more accessible does not remove the value of that gear. making legendaries more accessible does not remove the uniqueness of those legendaries. There are ways to keep the whole crowd happy, and difficulty levels will help make that possible, giving hard core gamers the challenge they desire and casuals the ability to experience and enjoy that content as well as obtain the same rewards with more work. I don’t see how that solution could offend anyone except those who want to completely prevent anyone from experiencing raids.

Skywing.4836:

Windsagio.1340:

There’s been a lot of math on the gains of ascended gear vs the gains of class/play.

If they actually tune it so tightly that that 1.98% extra you get from ascended armor (as vs weapons and trinkets) is necessary for top players, it’s going to be utterly inaccessible to everyone else, and then the mode will fail.

I don’t want it to fail, I don’t think they want it to fail, They can’t tune the cnounter that tightly — if it’s possible to do so at all, given the ‘active combat’ element in GW2

Of course not. The entire thing has been blown out of proportion. There’s vid of someone SOLO all 3 guardians:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLTe3OzDM98

…so, he soloed the three trash mobs that are there just to teach you mechanics of the actual boss, then failed the real boss (the only one that counted).
Good job soloing it (not!).

If you haven’t noticed, the actuall boss has an enrage timer that makes killing it difficult even in a 10-man group that pulls all mechanics perfectly (and seems to be tuned for zerker/sinister stats).

Just check the reddit, there were several groups that did everything right and still failed, because they came up short on damage because they weren’t running zerker. The timer is very close, so the 10% damage more from ascended is important.

I don’t get it… so they want us to have full ascended squad + all the party members run berseker, and there will be maybe one healer?

I hate crafting with a passion. I’ve played this game since launch and finally quit for about a year. Upon my return about a month ago, I discovered SW and realized Anet went out of their way to teach us to fish. At first I began farming gold just to build my bank back up, then I after I purchased some cool dyes I’d always wanted I was back to trying to decide what I wanted to focus my game time on. I read this post and decided what the heck, let’s craft our ascended gear since SW essentially removes the cost in crafting.
At that time I had @50 Google in the bank,so I made my very first gem purchase with a whopping $35 to cover the costs. In about 4 hours I had my mesmer from 0-500 in tailor and weaponsmith, finally upgraded my sclerite back I got in the Southsun event years ago to ascended, crafted the Anomaly (another item I have wanted for years, and built my ascended GS. I should have full ascended gear by hot. I would say that there is not a very high barrier with crafting as it was early in the game, no real excuse not to get the gear if you want it.
For me, that 4 hours was some of the most rewarding game time I have had in a very long time. I am seriously considering going for the hot legendary since an entirely new portion of the game has been opened up.

Bombastic.1428:

I hate crafting with a passion. I’ve played this game since launch and finally quit for about a year. Upon my return about a month ago, I discovered SW and realized Anet went out of their way to teach us to fish. At first I began farming gold just to build my bank back up, then I after I purchased some cool dyes I’d always wanted I was back to trying to decide what I wanted to focus my game time on. I read this post and decided what the heck, let’s craft our ascended gear since SW essentially removes the cost in crafting.
At that time I had @50 Google in the bank,so I made my very first gem purchase with a whopping $35 to cover the costs. In about 4 hours I had my mesmer from 0-500 in tailor and weaponsmith, finally upgraded my sclerite back I got in the Southsun event years ago to ascended, crafted the Anomaly (another item I have wanted for years, and built my ascended GS. I should have full ascended gear by hot. I would say that there is not a very high barrier with crafting as it was early in the game, no real excuse not to get the gear if you want it.
For me, that 4 hours was some of the most rewarding game time I have had in a very long time. I am seriously considering going for the hot legendary since an entirely new portion of the game has been opened up.

This.

I hate crafting as well, it kittenes me off to grind. I dont even do map completion because I hate spending time in game doing stuff I dont find fun (ie. walking around).

Getting full ascended armor can take hours if you buy some gems or it can take you 18 days and around 8g a day (for Tailoring). That’s due to time gated materials and I’m using the most expensive material as an example (Bolt of Damask).

I honestly don’t think that’s a HUGE grind. I did it for my warrior and for my ele, and while not incredibly fun, it literally takes 3 minutes a day to craft the time-gated materials. The grind for mats is done automatically with WHATEVER else you’re doing in the game, pvp, wvw, pve.

Yes you may have to buy some silk, and a few other cloths for tailoring, but basically anything else is thrown in your face for you to craft ascended.

My advice for people just starting, enjoy the game, play what you like and you’ll find that pretty soon you have enough mats to gear up your toon for raids. Also, do dungeons, there are very easy and fast paths to do, they give good gold and can be a very good source of gold and other valuable mats (ecto’s).

After playing the raid with entire squads in full ascended and still having trouble beating the boss, I’m now very concerned that raids truly will be reserved for the hardcore elite 5% of the game’s population.

While trinkets aren’t much of an issue to get (just time-consuming due to laurel or fractals grinding,) armor and weapons still aren’t purchasable at vendors and require crafting 500, which can be ridiculously costly and time-consuming for some. It gets even worse when some classes like druid, reaper, guardian etc. may require two sets for a raid, (and this is where Anet really needs to give us a proper build editor where we can choose builds/sets on the fly for raid encounters because it takes a while waiting for a few to properly gear up.)

Maybe something like a fractals layout would be better, where ascended is only required for higher scaled raids with better rewards, while lower-scaled raids are reserved for exotics?

All in all, I did enjoy the beta raid content and the improved difficulty overall, but I don’t like the grindy gear treadmill/powercreep direction that this is going in. Sort of goes against their original manifesto, and it’s going to rule out a large number of their new and returning playerbase – especially if the majority of ascended gear is still only obtainable by shear luck or heavy crafting.

La Goanna.8142:

After playing the raid with entire squads in full ascended and still having trouble beating the boss, I’m now very concerned that raids truly will be reserved for the hardcore elite 5% of the game’s population.

While trinkets aren’t much of an issue to get (just time-consuming due to laurel or fractals grinding,) armor and weapons still aren’t purchasable at vendors and require crafting 500, which can be ridiculously costly and time-consuming for some. It gets even worse when some classes like engineer, necromancer, etc. may require two sets for a raid, (and this is where Anet really needs to give us a proper build editor where we can choose builds/sets on the fly for raid encounters because it takes a while waiting for a few to properly gear up.)

Maybe something like a fractals layout would be better, where ascended is only required for higher scaled raids with better rewards, while lower-scaled raids are reserved for exotics?

All in all, I did enjoy the beta raid content, but I don’t like the grindy treadmill/powercreep direction that this is going in.

I honestly don’t see any power creep in terms of gear. It’s not as if they added more powerful gear to the game or have any plans to do so.

In fact, since the release of ascended two years ago they have done nothing but make it easier and easier to acquire. There was once a time where the only way to get dragonite was from world bosses and the only way to get empy shards was from JP chests you know.

Couple days in SW and pretty much anybody has a full set of ascended, and there’s no telling what other acquisiton methods they may or may not have added to HoT.

The elite specs on the other hand, yeah, total power creep, but at least you have those from an easy mastery just by getting the same expansion that unlocks the raids.

PopeUrban.2578:

Couple days in SW and pretty much anybody has a full set of ascended, and there’s no telling what other acquisiton methods they may or may not have added to HoT.

I’d love to know what you’re doing out in the silverwastes because I still have zero ascended armor as far as I’m concerned. Trinkets, sure, but those only come in the sinister variety at the vendor. Crafting for armor and the occasional weapon is still required and it’s still huge grind and money sink. While it may be fine for people like us who’ve been playing the game consistently or on-and-off for over a year, it’s going to scare away the influx of new and returning players

So I’m going to agree with the other user here who claims that raids are going to be completely dead in 5 months or less because of this – even moreso if the rewards themselves are underwhelming and grindy via currencies like fractal relics and so on. They need to scale like fractals so that full exotics can experience it and beat via lower levels, at the very least. Difficulty of the actual boss and gameplay mechanics should be relatively the same, but don’t gate it behind a grindy gear-wall of power creep stats.

La Goanna.8142:

PopeUrban.2578:

Couple days in SW and pretty much anybody has a full set of ascended, and there’s no telling what other acquisiton methods they may or may not have added to HoT.

I’d love to know what you’re doing out in the silverwastes because I still have zero ascended armor as far as I’m concerned. Trinkets, sure, but those only come in the sinister variety at the vendor. Crafting for armor and the occasional weapon is still required and it’s still huge grind and money sink. While it may be fine for people like us who’ve been playing the game consistently or on-and-off for over a year, it’s going to scare away the influx of new and returning players

So I’m going to agree with the other user here who claims that raids are going to be completely dead in 5 months or less because of this – even moreso if the rewards themselves are underwhelming and grindy via currencies like fractal relics and so on. They need to scale like fractals so that full exotics can experience it and beat via lower levels, at the very least. Difficulty of the actual boss and gameplay mechanics should be relatively the same, but don’t gate it behind a grindy gear-wall of power creep stats.

Why does anet have to dumb everything down to accomodate players who feel entitled to everything?

For once , can anet get away with saying
“we aren’t going to lower our standards for this particular content (raids), instead, we ask you to step your game up if you want to beat it”…..

Outside of high lvl fractals, EVERYTHING in PvE has been casual (in terms of requirements to beat)…..anet wants to give raids a shot, as the endgame, so let them…

We will see in 6 months if it worked or not… if it doesn’t, don’t worry, all you ppl in exotics, who don’t even want to ATTEMPT to get ascended will have your wish…

La Goanna.8142:

PopeUrban.2578:

Couple days in SW and pretty much anybody has a full set of ascended, and there’s no telling what other acquisiton methods they may or may not have added to HoT.

I’d love to know what you’re doing out in the silverwastes because I still have zero ascended armor as far as I’m concerned. Trinkets, sure, but those only come in the sinister variety at the vendor. Crafting for armor and the occasional weapon is still required and it’s still huge grind and money sink. While it may be fine for people like us who’ve been playing the game consistently or on-and-off for over a year, it’s going to scare away the influx of new and returning players

So I’m going to agree with the other user here who claims that raids are going to be completely dead in 5 months or less because of this – even moreso if the rewards themselves are underwhelming and grindy via currencies like fractal relics and so on. They need to scale like fractals so that full exotics can experience it and beat via lower levels, at the very least. Difficulty should be relatively the same, but don’t gate all of this behind a grindy gear-wall.

I built an entire set of ascended heavy armor in a week, starting at zero armorcrafting, doing nothing but silverwastes. Salvage the trash, sell the mats you don’t need, use the resulting money to buy the ones you do, use laurels from dailies to fill in the difference.

Granted I was off work that week so I probably played 6ish hours a day, but given a more normal play schedule of the industry average 20ish hours a week, you’re still only looking at about a month.

That’s a HUGE difference compared to the first time I crafted the stuff, getting dragonite on world boss timers and being hard capped on empy shards due to the daily cooldown of world chests containing them.

Not only that, it is literally best in slot gear. It’s the first assumed goal of every player once they hit 80 and figure out their build. Those who choose not to persue it have already made a conscious choice to be less mechanically powerful than they could be. You can’t exactly design content you claim to be a challenge for your veteran players around the assumption that people that started your game two days ago would even have interest, let alone gear and ability to complete it.

I spent my first four months in GW2 doing nothing but world completion, story, and dungeons, and that was before fractals, the living story, achievement chests, and collections were even a thing.

The assumption that new players would immediately prioritize the “endgame hard content” without also being willing to pursue the most efficient route toward that goal kind of doesn’t make sense.

I have tons of super casual people in my guild. They choose manageable goals that are fun for their preferred playtime and schedule because that content exists and is built for that type of player, and anet has been very good about giving them a continual stream of new things to do right up until the content drought after LS2 that left every type of player without new content for several months while anet was buckling down on HoT.

Why do people that never pvp, wvw, dungeon, or fractal suddenly even care about raids? All of those pieces of content have unique skins as well. It’s not like that stuff was changed to make it more accessible to the guy who only wants to solo open world events 5 hours a week. What they did do though was introduce a constant stream of content that was achievable on that schedule, and paid out pretty good rewards for playing it that way.

I just don’t get it I guess. Are people just afraid that going forward GW2 will become a raid focused game? It just doesn’t seem to be the direction anet is going given the focus on story and open world in HoT versus the extremely small amount of raid content that isn’t even finished or playable on release day.

SkiTz.4590:

La Goanna.8142:

PopeUrban.2578:

Couple days in SW and pretty much anybody has a full set of ascended, and there’s no telling what other acquisiton methods they may or may not have added to HoT.

I’d love to know what you’re doing out in the silverwastes because I still have zero ascended armor as far as I’m concerned. Trinkets, sure, but those only come in the sinister variety at the vendor. Crafting for armor and the occasional weapon is still required and it’s still huge grind and money sink. While it may be fine for people like us who’ve been playing the game consistently or on-and-off for over a year, it’s going to scare away the influx of new and returning players

So I’m going to agree with the other user here who claims that raids are going to be completely dead in 5 months or less because of this – even moreso if the rewards themselves are underwhelming and grindy via currencies like fractal relics and so on. They need to scale like fractals so that full exotics can experience it and beat via lower levels, at the very least. Difficulty of the actual boss and gameplay mechanics should be relatively the same, but don’t gate it behind a grindy gear-wall of power creep stats.

Why does anet have to dumb everything down to accomodate players who feel entitled to everything?

For once , can anet get away with saying
“we aren’t going to lower our standards for this particular content (raids), instead, we ask you to step your game up if you want to beat it”…..

Outside of high lvl fractals, EVERYTHING in PvE has been casual (in terms of requirements to beat)…..anet wants to give raids a shot, as the endgame, so let them…

We will see in 6 months if it worked or not… if it doesn’t, don’t worry, all you ppl in exotics, who don’t even want to ATTEMPT to get ascended will have your wish…

Your rhetorical question is very easily reversed, but I’m going to go another way, and answer:

“Because they’re running a business”.

If it doesn’t add to their bottom line, they shouldn’t spend money on it.

Specifically this means, if raids are so hard that people don’t do them, they won’t (and shouldn’t) continue to support the feature.

PopeUrban.2578:

La Goanna.8142:

PopeUrban.2578:

Couple days in SW and pretty much anybody has a full set of ascended, and there’s no telling what other acquisiton methods they may or may not have added to HoT.

I’d love to know what you’re doing out in the silverwastes because I still have zero ascended armor as far as I’m concerned. Trinkets, sure, but those only come in the sinister variety at the vendor. Crafting for armor and the occasional weapon is still required and it’s still huge grind and money sink. While it may be fine for people like us who’ve been playing the game consistently or on-and-off for over a year, it’s going to scare away the influx of new and returning players

So I’m going to agree with the other user here who claims that raids are going to be completely dead in 5 months or less because of this – even moreso if the rewards themselves are underwhelming and grindy via currencies like fractal relics and so on. They need to scale like fractals so that full exotics can experience it and beat via lower levels, at the very least. Difficulty should be relatively the same, but don’t gate all of this behind a grindy gear-wall.

I built an entire set of ascended heavy armor in a week, starting at zero armorcrafting, doing nothing but silverwastes. Salvage the trash, sell the mats you don’t need, use the resulting money to buy the ones you do, use laurels from dailies to fill in the difference.

Granted I was off work that week so I probably played 6ish hours a day, but given a more normal play schedule of the industry average 20ish hours a week, you’re still only looking at about a month.

That’s a HUGE difference compared to the first time I crafted the stuff, getting dragonite on world boss timers and being hard capped on empy shards due to the daily cooldown of world chests containing them.

Not only that, it is literally best in slot gear. It’s the first assumed goal of every player once they hit 80 and figure out their build. Those who choose not to persue it have already made a conscious choice to be less mechanically powerful than they could be. You can’t exactly design content you claim to be a challenge for your veteran players around the assumption that people that started your game two days ago would even have interest, let alone gear and ability to complete it.

I spent my first four months in GW2 doing nothing but world completion, story, and dungeons, and that was before fractals, the living story, achievement chests, and collections were even a thing.

The assumption that new players would immediately prioritize the “endgame hard content” without also being willing to pursue the most efficient route toward that goal kind of doesn’t make sense.

I have tons of super casual people in my guild. They choose manageable goals that are fun for their preferred playtime and schedule because that content exists and is built for that type of player, and anet has been very good about giving them a continual stream of new things to do right up until the content drought after LS2 that left every type of player without new content for several months while anet was buckling down on HoT.

Why do people that never pvp, wvw, dungeon, or fractal suddenly even care about raids? All of those pieces of content have unique skins as well. It’s not like that stuff was changed to make it more accessible to the guy who only wants to solo open world events 5 hours a week. What they did do though was introduce a constant stream of content that was achievable on that schedule, and paid out pretty good rewards for playing it that way.

I just don’t get it I guess. Are people just afraid that going forward GW2 will become a raid focused game? It just doesn’t seem to be the direction anet is going given the focus on story and open world in HoT versus the extremely small amount of raid content that isn’t even finished or playable on release day.

People care because ArenaNet is going to be less than intelligent and put the best rewards in raids, because without that no one will continue to do them. If legendary armor was gated by SPvP or WvW you would have people upset, but with Legendary being gated by raids is it not okay for non-raiders to be upset? Not to mention that ArenaNet tends to have tunnel vision and will probably spend 75% of future development time on raids. I mean look what happened to class balance, WvW, SPvP, dungeons, fractals, etc… ArenaNet started to focus on Living world and everything else fell by the wayside.

SkiTz.4590:

Why does anet have to dumb everything down to accomodate players who feel entitled to everything?

For once , can anet get away with saying
“we aren’t going to lower our standards for this particular content (raids), instead, we ask you to step your game up if you want to beat it”…..

Outside of high lvl fractals, EVERYTHING in PvE has been casual (in terms of requirements to beat)…..anet wants to give raids a shot, as the endgame, so let them…

We will see in 6 months if it worked or not… if it doesn’t, don’t worry, all you ppl in exotics, who don’t even want to ATTEMPT to get ascended will have your wish…

Difficulty and challenging game mechanics =/= elitist stat grind.

At its core, the beta raid is still fairly challenging on its own. Stacking is no longer a viable thing to do anymore. Players now have to be alert and constantly on their feet, dodging and avoiding boss moves, else they get downed in one hit. Specific skills from specific skills from specific classes are required, and squads must be organized into groups of zerkers, condition dealers, boon strippers, circle-runners and so forth. There needs to be a squad leader to explain the mechanics and organize the squad into smaller parties to tackle those specific boss mechanics. There’s already a good deal of challenge and coordination involved in these raid bosses and trash mobs.

But when you lock all of that behind an ascended gear gate, that becomes a problem. Because it’s no longer about the actual skill of player or the coordination of the team – just the stats they carry with them to drain the ridiculous amount of health coming from those said bosses.

At least with fractals, it’s split into scales for both exotic and ascended/legendary users. Exotic users can still experience and beat the challenging, group-oriented content brought upon by certain events like the Mai Trinn or Thaumanova Anomaly fractals. The scaling system even entices those said exotic users to grind for ascended gear, as higher scales bring better rewards and drops. It provides a good sense of progression to the both the casual players who are in it for the experience, as well as the hardcore who enjoy challenging content or grinds.

But putting up an ascended gear gate in the first wing of the first fractal? Not even allowing exotic users to beat the boss, let alone play it thanks to no real scaling system? That’s incredibly daunting and excluding to the playerbase at large. It’s going to be overwhelming for new players, it’s going be frustrating for returning players, and its going to be completely avoided by the casual players with little free time. Because there’s a gear gate outright at the first level with no sense of gear progression or increased reward rates via scaling, it’s going to have a difficult time persuading the exotic users to grind for full ascended.

Speaking of ascended weapons and armor, I own around 7-8 ascended weapons, 2 of which I’ve crafted myself. But the armor? Crafting ascended armor at the moment is ridiculously expensive, way more than the weapons – around 400-450 or so for a full set. And the crafting mat prices needed to craft these weapons and armor sets are going to kitten-ing SKYROCKET once raid wings are open to the playerbase. So it’ll become even more of a grind than it is now.

Then again, it’s too early to say. I guess we’ll just have to see how they handle ascended and legendary crafting in HoT; maybe the expansion will make ascended gear easier to come by now.

PopeUrban.2578:

I built an entire set of ascended heavy armor in a week, starting at zero armorcrafting, doing nothing but silverwastes. Salvage the trash, sell the mats you don’t need, use the resulting money to buy the ones you do, use laurels from dailies to fill in the difference.

Granted I was off work that week so I probably played 6ish hours a day, but given a more normal play schedule of the industry average 20ish hours a week, you’re still only looking at about a month.

That’s a HUGE difference compared to the first time I crafted the stuff, getting dragonite on world boss timers and being hard capped on empy shards due to the daily cooldown of world chests containing them.

It’s good that you brought this up, because it details another major issue with the loot system: the only viable gameplay modes and zones that drop a consistent amount of decent loot needed to craft ascended gear are dungeons, several world bosses like Tequatl and the silverwastes. And after doing hours and hours of farming in the silverwastes for the last month in prep for HoT, it’s gotten real kitten-ing boring doing the same events over and over. It’s not like there wasn’t enough grinding already involved with the silverwastes to begin with, thanks to the season 2 achievements and all.

Anet really needs to up the reward drops and gold in other dungeons besides ASC/CoF, world bosses besides Tequatl, zones besides silverwastes and so on. The grind can burn people off if there isn’t enough variety to go around.

Here’s s perfect solution.

Anet makes there be two modes for raids: normal mode and hard mode.

The hard mode will be what is currently intended for raids.

Normal mode will exist solely for those players that want to experience the story within the raids. The enemies and bosses have minimal mechanics and can be killed like how current bosses are killed (i.e. Just auto attack until they die). Drop rates are 10% of whatever the levels are in hard mode and subjected to the same weekly lockout.

Everyone wins.

Ayrilana.1396:

Here’s s perfect solution.

Anet makes there be two modes for raids: normal mode and hard mode.

The hard mode will be what is currently intended for raids.

Normal mode will exist solely for those players that want to experience the story within the raids. The enemies and bosses have minimal mechanics and can be killed like how current bosses are killed (i.e. Just auto attack until they die). They will also not get any rewards as that’s reserved for hard mode only.

Everyone wins.

What about the ones who don’t want to grind for ludicrously expensive gear, but still want a greater challenge other than pressing 1?

Also, good luck getting casuals interested if there’s zero rewards of any sort involved; that’s not good for the long term. I’ll feel bad for new players who want to try out the raids but can’t because the LFG panel is constantly empty, sans for core elitists who’ll kick those out who’re aren’t in full ascended everything.

La Goanna.8142:

Ayrilana.1396:

Here’s s perfect solution.

Anet makes there be two modes for raids: normal mode and hard mode.

The hard mode will be what is currently intended for raids.

Normal mode will exist solely for those players that want to experience the story within the raids. The enemies and bosses have minimal mechanics and can be killed like how current bosses are killed (i.e. Just auto attack until they die). They will also not get any rewards as that’s reserved for hard mode only.

Everyone wins.

What about the ones who don’t want to grind for ludicrously expensive gear, but still want a greater challenge other than pressing 1?

Also, good luck getting casuals interested if there’s zero rewards of any sort involved; that’s not good for the long term. I’ll feel bad for new players who want to try out the raids but can’t because the LFG panel is constantly empty, sans for core elitists who’ll kick those out who’re aren’t in full ascended everything.

Ok. Drop rates are 10% of whatever the levels are in hard mode and subjected to the same weekly lockout. If ascended chests have a 10% drop rate in hard mode then they’ll have a 1% drop rate in normal.

Ayrilana.1396:

La Goanna.8142:

Ayrilana.1396:

Here’s s perfect solution.

Anet makes there be two modes for raids: normal mode and hard mode.

The hard mode will be what is currently intended for raids.

Normal mode will exist solely for those players that want to experience the story within the raids. The enemies and bosses have minimal mechanics and can be killed like how current bosses are killed (i.e. Just auto attack until they die). They will also not get any rewards as that’s reserved for hard mode only.

Everyone wins.

What about the ones who don’t want to grind for ludicrously expensive gear, but still want a greater challenge other than pressing 1?

Also, good luck getting casuals interested if there’s zero rewards of any sort involved; that’s not good for the long term. I’ll feel bad for new players who want to try out the raids but can’t because the LFG panel is constantly empty, sans for core elitists who’ll kick those out who’re aren’t in full ascended everything.

Ok. Drop rates are 10% of whatever the levels are in hard mode and subjected to the same weekly lockout. If ascended chests have a 10% drop rate in hard mode then they’ll have a 1% drop rate in normal.

So that who is already decently geared, only gets better gear..while the others get..nothing. A very good example of skill-oriented game.

And what if: everyone drop ascended..but only in hardmode raid you can get legendary skins?
It seems more fair play to me.

Windsagio.1340:

SkiTz.4590:

La Goanna.8142:

PopeUrban.2578:

Couple days in SW and pretty much anybody has a full set of ascended, and there’s no telling what other acquisiton methods they may or may not have added to HoT.

I’d love to know what you’re doing out in the silverwastes because I still have zero ascended armor as far as I’m concerned. Trinkets, sure, but those only come in the sinister variety at the vendor. Crafting for armor and the occasional weapon is still required and it’s still huge grind and money sink. While it may be fine for people like us who’ve been playing the game consistently or on-and-off for over a year, it’s going to scare away the influx of new and returning players

So I’m going to agree with the other user here who claims that raids are going to be completely dead in 5 months or less because of this – even moreso if the rewards themselves are underwhelming and grindy via currencies like fractal relics and so on. They need to scale like fractals so that full exotics can experience it and beat via lower levels, at the very least. Difficulty of the actual boss and gameplay mechanics should be relatively the same, but don’t gate it behind a grindy gear-wall of power creep stats.

Why does anet have to dumb everything down to accomodate players who feel entitled to everything?

For once , can anet get away with saying
“we aren’t going to lower our standards for this particular content (raids), instead, we ask you to step your game up if you want to beat it”…..

Outside of high lvl fractals, EVERYTHING in PvE has been casual (in terms of requirements to beat)…..anet wants to give raids a shot, as the endgame, so let them…

We will see in 6 months if it worked or not… if it doesn’t, don’t worry, all you ppl in exotics, who don’t even want to ATTEMPT to get ascended will have your wish…

Your rhetorical question is very easily reversed, but I’m going to go another way, and answer:

“Because they’re running a business”.

If it doesn’t add to their bottom line, they shouldn’t spend money on it.

Specifically this means, if raids are so hard that people don’t do them, they won’t (and shouldn’t) continue to support the feature.

If that were the case ,

Why on earth are they spending time and resources with a new PvP game mode that most serious PvPers don’t care about? or the new changes with leagues and what not?

Why are they spending time and resources with WvW – it generates no revenue at all and takes a lot of effort to create a whole new map like that…..

All that guild hall stuff…thats not adding to the bottom line unless theres some stuff tied into the gemstore that we haven’t seen……

Point is, anet DOES make spend money across ALL game modes….PvP / WvW isn’t adding kitten to their bottom line, but they will continue to spend money on it…..

Their bottom line used to be LS + constant Gemstore stuff….see how well that did for them? it made them say “we’ll, we are not doing good enough, we need to make an xpac”….

My main isn’t a Necro but I feel sorry for Necros…

If people are expecting ascended then Necro’s will even be more neglected

Like some else said if it needs ascended then it matter more about what classes you bring. So Zerker Zerk(No idea about warrior elite zerker being a meta but I just like typing Zerker Zerk) ascended only no Necro. Which I’ve never understood because this groups state Warr/Guard Zerk only yet still type no Necro.

Wetpaw.3487:

Full ascended+stat infusions is more than 5% damage increase, plus take in consideration the overall damage/support increase with a full ascended raid group of 10 players.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/159ml1oahEyM6zWQ-oD4XQcHsk1mI5G6tVnjk_FOeinA/edit?pli=1#gid=348011649

thanks to https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/31wbip/ascended_vs_exotic_gear_comparison_spreedsheet

A 5% increase to individual player effectiveness, across 5 players, is a 5% increase to group effectiveness… not, say, 25%.

Math.

Kevan.8912:

Ayrilana.1396:

La Goanna.8142:

Ayrilana.1396:

Here’s s perfect solution.

Anet makes there be two modes for raids: normal mode and hard mode.

The hard mode will be what is currently intended for raids.

Normal mode will exist solely for those players that want to experience the story within the raids. The enemies and bosses have minimal mechanics and can be killed like how current bosses are killed (i.e. Just auto attack until they die). They will also not get any rewards as that’s reserved for hard mode only.

Everyone wins.

What about the ones who don’t want to grind for ludicrously expensive gear, but still want a greater challenge other than pressing 1?

Also, good luck getting casuals interested if there’s zero rewards of any sort involved; that’s not good for the long term. I’ll feel bad for new players who want to try out the raids but can’t because the LFG panel is constantly empty, sans for core elitists who’ll kick those out who’re aren’t in full ascended everything.

Ok. Drop rates are 10% of whatever the levels are in hard mode and subjected to the same weekly lockout. If ascended chests have a 10% drop rate in hard mode then they’ll have a 1% drop rate in normal.

So that who is already decently geared, only gets better gear..while the others get..nothing. A very good example of skill-oriented game.

And what if: everyone drop ascended..but only in hardmode raid you can get legendary skins?
It seems more fair play to me.

People have yet to prove that raids will require ascended. How much of the difficulty players had was due to the lack of skill to that specific raid and proper team configuration/coordination?

Ayrilana.1396:

Kevan.8912:

Ayrilana.1396:

La Goanna.8142:

Ayrilana.1396:

Here’s s perfect solution.

Anet makes there be two modes for raids: normal mode and hard mode.

The hard mode will be what is currently intended for raids.

Normal mode will exist solely for those players that want to experience the story within the raids. The enemies and bosses have minimal mechanics and can be killed like how current bosses are killed (i.e. Just auto attack until they die). They will also not get any rewards as that’s reserved for hard mode only.

Everyone wins.

What about the ones who don’t want to grind for ludicrously expensive gear, but still want a greater challenge other than pressing 1?

Also, good luck getting casuals interested if there’s zero rewards of any sort involved; that’s not good for the long term. I’ll feel bad for new players who want to try out the raids but can’t because the LFG panel is constantly empty, sans for core elitists who’ll kick those out who’re aren’t in full ascended everything.

Ok. Drop rates are 10% of whatever the levels are in hard mode and subjected to the same weekly lockout. If ascended chests have a 10% drop rate in hard mode then they’ll have a 1% drop rate in normal.

So that who is already decently geared, only gets better gear..while the others get..nothing. A very good example of skill-oriented game.

And what if: everyone drop ascended..but only in hardmode raid you can get legendary skins?
It seems more fair play to me.

People have yet to prove that raids will require ascended. How much of the difficulty players had was due to the lack of skill to that specific raid and proper team configuration/coordination?

The raid vendor was giving out full ascended only sets…..
Will some of the highly skilled guilds be able to do it in full exotic? probably…

The timer left on this first boss between all the guilds finishing in full ascended was 1-2 mins….that DPS loss going from ascended to exotic would probably have stopped some of those successful runs…..

This is the first boss… i fully expect this too be the easiest and it only gets harder…exotics probably won’t cut it in future bosses…

Most of the runs ppl did, they figured out the mechanics quickly enough…. what got them messed up was the enrage timers…. and enrage timers are purely a DPS check…and the fact remains…ascended applies more pressure/DPS than exotics…

SkiTz.4590:

Ayrilana.1396:

Kevan.8912:

Ayrilana.1396:

La Goanna.8142:

Ayrilana.1396:

Here’s s perfect solution.

Anet makes there be two modes for raids: normal mode and hard mode.

The hard mode will be what is currently intended for raids.

Normal mode will exist solely for those players that want to experience the story within the raids. The enemies and bosses have minimal mechanics and can be killed like how current bosses are killed (i.e. Just auto attack until they die). They will also not get any rewards as that’s reserved for hard mode only.

Everyone wins.

What about the ones who don’t want to grind for ludicrously expensive gear, but still want a greater challenge other than pressing 1?

Also, good luck getting casuals interested if there’s zero rewards of any sort involved; that’s not good for the long term. I’ll feel bad for new players who want to try out the raids but can’t because the LFG panel is constantly empty, sans for core elitists who’ll kick those out who’re aren’t in full ascended everything.

Ok. Drop rates are 10% of whatever the levels are in hard mode and subjected to the same weekly lockout. If ascended chests have a 10% drop rate in hard mode then they’ll have a 1% drop rate in normal.

So that who is already decently geared, only gets better gear..while the others get..nothing. A very good example of skill-oriented game.

And what if: everyone drop ascended..but only in hardmode raid you can get legendary skins?
It seems more fair play to me.

People have yet to prove that raids will require ascended. How much of the difficulty players had was due to the lack of skill to that specific raid and proper team configuration/coordination?

The raid vendor was giving out full ascended only sets…..
Will some of the highly skilled guilds be able to do it in full exotic? probably…

The timer left on this first boss between all the guilds finishing in full ascended was 1-2 mins….that DPS loss going from ascended to exotic would probably have stopped some of those successful runs…..

This is the first boss… i fully expect this too be the easiest and it only gets harder…exotics probably won’t cut it in future bosses…

Most of the runs ppl did, they figured out the mechanics quickly enough…. what got them messed up was the enrage timers…. and enrage timers are purely a DPS check…and the fact remains…ascended applies more pressure/DPS than exotics…

It doesn’t matter what the vendor was giving out. The issue people were having was the lack of skill in regards to the mechanics (it was everyone’s first time doing these) and the lack of proper set up and coordination. These are meant to be difficult so I don’t see why the first boss should be a freebie because it happens to be the first.

SkiTz.4590:

Windsagio.1340:

SkiTz.4590:

La Goanna.8142:

PopeUrban.2578:

Couple days in SW and pretty much anybody has a full set of ascended, and there’s no telling what other acquisiton methods they may or may not have added to HoT.

I’d love to know what you’re doing out in the silverwastes because I still have zero ascended armor as far as I’m concerned. Trinkets, sure, but those only come in the sinister variety at the vendor. Crafting for armor and the occasional weapon is still required and it’s still huge grind and money sink. While it may be fine for people like us who’ve been playing the game consistently or on-and-off for over a year, it’s going to scare away the influx of new and returning players

So I’m going to agree with the other user here who claims that raids are going to be completely dead in 5 months or less because of this – even moreso if the rewards themselves are underwhelming and grindy via currencies like fractal relics and so on. They need to scale like fractals so that full exotics can experience it and beat via lower levels, at the very least. Difficulty of the actual boss and gameplay mechanics should be relatively the same, but don’t gate it behind a grindy gear-wall of power creep stats.

Why does anet have to dumb everything down to accomodate players who feel entitled to everything?

For once , can anet get away with saying
“we aren’t going to lower our standards for this particular content (raids), instead, we ask you to step your game up if you want to beat it”…..

Outside of high lvl fractals, EVERYTHING in PvE has been casual (in terms of requirements to beat)…..anet wants to give raids a shot, as the endgame, so let them…

We will see in 6 months if it worked or not… if it doesn’t, don’t worry, all you ppl in exotics, who don’t even want to ATTEMPT to get ascended will have your wish…

Your rhetorical question is very easily reversed, but I’m going to go another way, and answer:

“Because they’re running a business”.

If it doesn’t add to their bottom line, they shouldn’t spend money on it.

Specifically this means, if raids are so hard that people don’t do them, they won’t (and shouldn’t) continue to support the feature.

If that were the case ,

Why on earth are they spending time and resources with a new PvP game mode that most serious PvPers don’t care about? or the new changes with leagues and what not?

Why are they spending time and resources with WvW – it generates no revenue at all and takes a lot of effort to create a whole new map like that…..

All that guild hall stuff…thats not adding to the bottom line unless theres some stuff tied into the gemstore that we haven’t seen……

Point is, anet DOES make spend money across ALL game modes….PvP / WvW isn’t adding kitten to their bottom line, but they will continue to spend money on it…..

Their bottom line used to be LS + constant Gemstore stuff….see how well that did for them? it made them say “we’ll, we are not doing good enough, we need to make an xpac”….

Because you don’t have any idea of their retention and conversion numbers?

Something doesn’t have to DIRECTLY convert to gems to generate revenue.

A popular gamemode drives retention, which drives a certain % of sales.

So: Point to point: They don’t need to drive retention to serious SPvP’ers. They want ot make the game mode more attractive and give more things to do.

You have no idea how WvW drives income, people seem to play it a lot, which seems to imply a retention effect.

Guild halls give guild activities and goals, which drives retention and play in other modes.

~~~

These all have a common theme with Raids – modes that they want to see more people use, and that they think are able to drive retention (and sell downloads).

Similar to those, If you make a mode that the vast majority of players hate, you’re going to have a hard time getting any retention or conversion benefit out of it.

~~~~~

TL;DR

They invest in modes because they expect people to play them. Just the play generates revenue. They won’t make, or will abandon a mode that too few players play.

Soval.3206:

Wetpaw.3487:

Full ascended+stat infusions is more than 5% damage increase, plus take in consideration the overall damage/support increase with a full ascended raid group of 10 players.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/159ml1oahEyM6zWQ-oD4XQcHsk1mI5G6tVnjk_FOeinA/edit?pli=1#gid=348011649

thanks to https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/31wbip/ascended_vs_exotic_gear_comparison_spreedsheet

A 5% increase to individual player effectiveness, across 5 players, is a 5% increase to group effectiveness… not, say, 25%.

Math.

Also, it’s down to <2% if you ignore the trivially acquired weapons and trinkets.

Ayrilana.1396:

SkiTz.4590:

Ayrilana.1396:

Kevan.8912:

Ayrilana.1396:

La Goanna.8142:

Ayrilana.1396:

Here’s s perfect solution.

Anet makes there be two modes for raids: normal mode and hard mode.

The hard mode will be what is currently intended for raids.

Normal mode will exist solely for those players that want to experience the story within the raids. The enemies and bosses have minimal mechanics and can be killed like how current bosses are killed (i.e. Just auto attack until they die). They will also not get any rewards as that’s reserved for hard mode only.

Everyone wins.

What about the ones who don’t want to grind for ludicrously expensive gear, but still want a greater challenge other than pressing 1?

Also, good luck getting casuals interested if there’s zero rewards of any sort involved; that’s not good for the long term. I’ll feel bad for new players who want to try out the raids but can’t because the LFG panel is constantly empty, sans for core elitists who’ll kick those out who’re aren’t in full ascended everything.

Ok. Drop rates are 10% of whatever the levels are in hard mode and subjected to the same weekly lockout. If ascended chests have a 10% drop rate in hard mode then they’ll have a 1% drop rate in normal.

So that who is already decently geared, only gets better gear..while the others get..nothing. A very good example of skill-oriented game.

And what if: everyone drop ascended..but only in hardmode raid you can get legendary skins?
It seems more fair play to me.

People have yet to prove that raids will require ascended. How much of the difficulty players had was due to the lack of skill to that specific raid and proper team configuration/coordination?

The raid vendor was giving out full ascended only sets…..
Will some of the highly skilled guilds be able to do it in full exotic? probably…

The timer left on this first boss between all the guilds finishing in full ascended was 1-2 mins….that DPS loss going from ascended to exotic would probably have stopped some of those successful runs…..

This is the first boss… i fully expect this too be the easiest and it only gets harder…exotics probably won’t cut it in future bosses…

Most of the runs ppl did, they figured out the mechanics quickly enough…. what got them messed up was the enrage timers…. and enrage timers are purely a DPS check…and the fact remains…ascended applies more pressure/DPS than exotics…

It doesn’t matter what the vendor was giving out. The issue people were having was the lack of skill in regards to the mechanics (it was everyone’s first time doing these) and the lack of proper set up and coordination. These are meant to be difficult so I don’t see why the first boss should be a freebie because it happens to be the first.

If you have watched any of the videos of guilds beating the boss, you would notice lack of skill,coordination and proper setup was a non issue….those guys have ran raid MULTIPLE times and understood the mechanics very well and coordinated it on their voice chats very well…they had very few ppl getting downed throughout the whole fight…and they were able to beat the enrage timer by roughly 1-2 minutes AT BEST…

If those guys switched their ascended to exotics… they would probably still have beat it but with mere seconds to spare probably…. I doubt the avg group completes it easily in exotics until they have ran it a bajillion times to never die and to learn how to constantly be applying DPS/pressure

Windsagio.1340:

TL;DR

They invest in modes because they expect people to play them. Just the play generates revenue. They won’t make, or will abandon a mode that too few players play.

Right, but you think too few players will play raids because of ascended/difficulty?

what about the fractals 51-100 that anet is also spending time and working on??
That for SURE requires ascended … you think few ppl will be playing it too? just because of “ascended requirements”??

They aren’t going to abandon raids, just like they didn’t abandon high lvl fractals….

Its going to be a “wait and see” approach with this stuff… once anet gets good data/info on how many players are doing it and how well its received, then we will know if anet is making the right choice…until than, its a bit premature to say “welp, no one is going to do raids, stop working on it anet! focus on other stuff!”

La Goanna.8142:

After playing the raid with entire squads in full ascended and still having trouble beating the boss, I’m now very concerned that raids truly will be reserved for the hardcore elite 5% of the game’s population.

Does anyone else remember when beating Teq was considered difficult? I do. I remember failing Teq numerous times with an organized guild leading on voice coms. Now Teq is about as automatic as the Shatterer. My point is, relax. Raids will be tough at first until you learn them, but before you know it, you’ll be farming them with pugs.

SkiTz.4590:

Ayrilana.1396:

SkiTz.4590:

Ayrilana.1396:

Kevan.8912:

Ayrilana.1396:

La Goanna.8142:

Ayrilana.1396:

Here’s s perfect solution.

Anet makes there be two modes for raids: normal mode and hard mode.

The hard mode will be what is currently intended for raids.

Normal mode will exist solely for those players that want to experience the story within the raids. The enemies and bosses have minimal mechanics and can be killed like how current bosses are killed (i.e. Just auto attack until they die). They will also not get any rewards as that’s reserved for hard mode only.

Everyone wins.

What about the ones who don’t want to grind for ludicrously expensive gear, but still want a greater challenge other than pressing 1?

Also, good luck getting casuals interested if there’s zero rewards of any sort involved; that’s not good for the long term. I’ll feel bad for new players who want to try out the raids but can’t because the LFG panel is constantly empty, sans for core elitists who’ll kick those out who’re aren’t in full ascended everything.

Ok. Drop rates are 10% of whatever the levels are in hard mode and subjected to the same weekly lockout. If ascended chests have a 10% drop rate in hard mode then they’ll have a 1% drop rate in normal.

So that who is already decently geared, only gets better gear..while the others get..nothing. A very good example of skill-oriented game.

And what if: everyone drop ascended..but only in hardmode raid you can get legendary skins?
It seems more fair play to me.

People have yet to prove that raids will require ascended. How much of the difficulty players had was due to the lack of skill to that specific raid and proper team configuration/coordination?

The raid vendor was giving out full ascended only sets…..
Will some of the highly skilled guilds be able to do it in full exotic? probably…

The timer left on this first boss between all the guilds finishing in full ascended was 1-2 mins….that DPS loss going from ascended to exotic would probably have stopped some of those successful runs…..

This is the first boss… i fully expect this too be the easiest and it only gets harder…exotics probably won’t cut it in future bosses…

Most of the runs ppl did, they figured out the mechanics quickly enough…. what got them messed up was the enrage timers…. and enrage timers are purely a DPS check…and the fact remains…ascended applies more pressure/DPS than exotics…

It doesn’t matter what the vendor was giving out. The issue people were having was the lack of skill in regards to the mechanics (it was everyone’s first time doing these) and the lack of proper set up and coordination. These are meant to be difficult so I don’t see why the first boss should be a freebie because it happens to be the first.

If you have watched any of the videos of guilds beating the boss, you would notice lack of skill,coordination and proper setup was a non issue….those guys have ran raid MULTIPLE times and understood the mechanics very well and coordinated it on their voice chats very well…they had very few ppl getting downed throughout the whole fight…and they were able to beat the enrage timer by roughly 1-2 minutes AT BEST…

If those guys switched their ascended to exotics… they would probably still have beat it but with mere seconds to spare probably…. I doubt the avg group completes it easily in exotics until they have ran it a bajillion times to never die and to learn how to constantly be applying DPS/pressure

And they will get much better as they play it more and fine tune their strategies. Just look at Teq. When it was first revamped, people were barely able to chip of 10% of its health. People learned the mechanics and progressively got better. I’ve seen some guilds kill it with over 10 min left in the timer. Don’t assume that what some players were able to do was the epitome of what could be accomplished and that there’s no room for improvement.

If you truly believe that ascended gear then take a group of random players and a group like DnT or rT. Make everyone have the same build, classes, and so on except the highly coordinated group is in full exotic while the randoms are in full ascended. Which group will out-DPS the other? It’s safe to assume that it wouldn’t be the group of ransoms because gear is not everything.

I’m very curious to how groups like DnT and rT did compared to everyone else. If they did much better than everyone else, and everyone was in full ascended because of that vendor, it shows that there’s still a margin of improvement that pkayers can make that isn’t attributed to the tier of armor that you’re wearing.

Never mind that ascended trinkets are relatively easy to get nowadays compared to when they were first introduced and that them and weapons account for about 80% of the DPS increase that you would get by wearing full ascended. From a soreadsheet made earlier this year’s, full ascended without infusions provided a little over 10% in damage increase. About a little under 2% of that is attributed to armor.

SkiTz.4590:

If you have watched any of the videos of guilds beating the boss, you would notice lack of skill,coordination and proper setup was a non issue….those guys have ran raid MULTIPLE times and understood the mechanics very well and coordinated it on their voice chats very well…they had very few ppl getting downed throughout the whole fight…and they were able to beat the enrage timer by roughly 1-2 minutes AT BEST…

If those guys switched their ascended to exotics… they would probably still have beat it but with mere seconds to spare probably…. I doubt the avg group completes it easily in exotics until they have ran it a bajillion times to never die and to learn how to constantly be applying DPS/pressure

My group was organized and we came incredibly close to beating it several times, yet we were still in full ascended with only 30 seconds or so to spare. I doubt mixed ascended/exotics, let alone full exotics are going to beat the vale gaurdian. And keep in mind that this is just the first boss of the first wing…

Osu.6307:

La Goanna.8142:

After playing the raid with entire squads in full ascended and still having trouble beating the boss, I’m now very concerned that raids truly will be reserved for the hardcore elite 5% of the game’s population.

Does anyone else remember when beating Teq was considered difficult? I do. I remember failing Teq numerous times with an organized guild leading on voice coms. Now Teq is about as automatic as the Shatterer. My point is, relax. Raids will be tough at first until you learn them, but before you know it, you’ll be farming them with pugs.

I remember the Forum after the first revamped Teq Try. Everyone was crying on how impossible this Fight is, why it should be nerfed and why its gonna be a Wasteland. Even after the first Kills most were saying that only the no-life Players would beat this Teq. And now? On Farm

PopeUrban.2578:

In fact, since the release of ascended two years ago they have done nothing but make it easier and easier to acquire.

Quite the opposite. Each next group of introduced ascended required more and more effort and grind.
Just compare rings to armor – the second is soooo much easier[/sarcasm]

PopeUrban.2578:

There was once a time where the only way to get dragonite was from world bosses and the only way to get empy shards was from JP chests you know.

First, those were never a real problem, and second, it’s not actually true – empyreals for example were available from dungeons and wvw since day one.

PopeUrban.2578:

Couple days in SW and pretty much anybody has a full set of ascended

oh, please, stop exagerrating. Few days of SW will not get you even close to enough mats for ascended set, and to get enough gold you’d have to run the farm literallycouple of days.

PopeUrban.2578:

and there’s no telling what other acquisiton methods they may or may not have added to HoT.

If those hypothetical new acquisition methods change the situation that much to have a serious positive impact on difficulty of obtaining ascended, i may change my opinion, but so far we haven’t heard even a hint that anything like that is planned. Besides, based on past experience, any method with such a big impact would get nerfed into the ground within hours anyway.

Calcifire.1864:

so much for “no gear treadmill” and “we will never make ascended gear mandatory outside fractals”

I’m not sure how the hell they will balance them,

new type of raid infusion for armors instead of rings and necks

Remember they will be including masteries. I can only assume masteries will scale off ascended and above gear.

Yes there will be a newly implemented gear treadmill. That is actually okay, that means people will play longer and the devs will retrieve more money due to that which provides a better product for yourself.

Granted I was off work that week so I probably played 6ish hours a day, but given a more normal play schedule of the industry average 20ish hours a week, you’re still only looking at about a month.

You consider averaging three hours a day to be “more normal?” I’m starting to understand why you’re so often wrong about things.

Here’s s perfect solution.

Anet makes there be two modes for raids: normal mode and hard mode.

The hard mode will be what is currently intended for raids.

Normal mode will exist solely for those players that want to experience the story within the raids. The enemies and bosses have minimal mechanics and can be killed like how current bosses are killed (i.e. Just auto attack until they die). Drop rates are 10% of whatever the levels are in hard mode and subjected to the same weekly lockout.

Everyone wins.

Agreed.

And what if: everyone drop ascended..but only in hardmode raid you can get legendary skins?
It seems more fair play to me.

If they’re going to split the rewards, I would prefer that both get Legendary skins, but only hard mode drops ascended. Ascended armor you can get all over, it’d be convenient, but not necessary. What is important is having access to the loot exclusive to that content.

Osu.6307:

La Goanna.8142:

After playing the raid with entire squads in full ascended and still having trouble beating the boss, I’m now very concerned that raids truly will be reserved for the hardcore elite 5% of the game’s population.

Does anyone else remember when beating Teq was considered difficult? I do. I remember failing Teq numerous times with an organized guild leading on voice coms. Now Teq is about as automatic as the Shatterer. My point is, relax. Raids will be tough at first until you learn them, but before you know it, you’ll be farming them with pugs.

If so, it will happen for the same reason Teq went on farm status. Only because it will get nerfed.

SkiTz.4590:

If you have watched any of the videos of guilds beating the boss, you would notice lack of skill,coordination and proper setup was a non issue….those guys have ran raid MULTIPLE times and understood the mechanics very well and coordinated it on their voice chats very well…they had very few ppl getting downed throughout the whole fight…and they were able to beat the enrage timer by roughly 1-2 minutes AT BEST…

And those were almost pure zerker/sinister groups, at that. Which means their damage output was likely near the top of what was possible for this boss.

SkiTz.4590:

If those guys switched their ascended to exotics… they would probably still have beat it but with mere seconds to spare probably…. I doubt the avg group completes it easily in exotics until they have ran it a bajillion times to never die and to learn how to constantly be applying DPS/pressure

Precisely. And what i mentioned above means, that a group in exotics that doesn’t run pure dps stat sets will fail before even entering the raid.

Astralporing.1957:

PopeUrban.2578:

and there’s no telling what other acquisiton methods they may or may not have added to HoT.

If those hypothetical new acquisition methods change the situation that much to have a serious positive impact on difficulty of obtaining ascended, i may change my opinion, but so far we haven’t heard even a hint that anything like that is planned. Besides, based on past experience, any method with such a big impact would get nerfed into the ground within hours anyway.

Probably, it’s the only condition that may convince me to buy HoT
Acquisition of ascended much easier than now (and without crafting, if possibile)
I’m 1000% sure it won’t happen.

SkiTz.4590:

Windsagio.1340:

TL;DR

They invest in modes because they expect people to play them. Just the play generates revenue. They won’t make, or will abandon a mode that too few players play.

Right, but you think too few players will play raids because of ascended/difficulty?

what about the fractals 51-100 that anet is also spending time and working on??
That for SURE requires ascended … you think few ppl will be playing it too? just because of “ascended requirements”??

They aren’t going to abandon raids, just like they didn’t abandon high lvl fractals….

Its going to be a “wait and see” approach with this stuff… once anet gets good data/info on how many players are doing it and how well its received, then we will know if anet is making the right choice…until than, its a bit premature to say “welp, no one is going to do raids, stop working on it anet! focus on other stuff!”

Fractals are a tiny investment compared to raids, so there’s very little downside to adding them.

In the case of raids, they’re a large investment to make and maintain, so population matters more.

More to the point, I don’t think you really get how tight the tuning would be to make this ‘recommendation’ meaningful. So many things have larger impact (group makeup being a big one) that tuning into the 2-5% range they’re talking about (going from some ascended “Suggested” to all ascended “Suggested”) would require also tuning to some pretty intense group makeup and player build requirements.

It’s such a minor thing that so many other things they’re not likely to want to do are prerequisites for it to matter.

~~~

Also, my intent isn’t to say “Don’t work on Raids, Arenanet!” but rather “This seems amiss because if it’s true as describe, they’re sabotaging their own content”.

I think it’s not true – either a Mistake in the tweet that they’re trying to put a good face on or a PR maneuver to make raids seem more intense

Astralporing.1957:

Obtena.7952:

Lachanche.6859:

Draknar.5748:

Wow some serious knee-jerk here. At no point did anyone say it was required.

the dev litterally just said thaton twitter. before retconning it on reddit.

No, I read the twitter :

@blacklionchest Earlier wing bosses can prob be killed by top tier players in mix of asc/ex. Last boss should be full asc.

Doesn’t say it’s needed.

Yep, but it does say that the dev in question thinks that not having full ascended on earlier bosses makes the fights uncertain for top tier players (hint, most of the raiders will not be top tier, even if they consider themselves skilled). It also strongly suggests, that the dev thinks that not having full ascended on the last boss will likely end up in failure. Even if you are top tier.

See, if people take a step back and think about what this dev said, they come to a quick realization that it makes no sense.

If Anet has balanced some part of the game around top tier players in top tier gear, you might as well not even bother playing this content if you aren’t either of those two things. If that’s true, Anet has shoot themselves in the foot here because this is the thing that makes GW2 so great for so many people; they can play any aspect of the game and be successful. /shrug … I guess they want to placate these top tier players, but that’s a failed strategy unless they have like … 10 raids being released with a schedule of numerous other top tier raids continuously released months after that follow this top tier formula to keep those players busy. I doubt it. Bad move for them.

Nike.2631:

((looks at dungeons))

((looks at open-world farming festivals- er, I mean “events”))

The Devs for this game don’t have the slightest idea what “top tier” players are capable of. Let them tune it for “all ascended” gear… If the first raid boss hasn’t been reduced to a roflstomp within 3 months that people are doing in all yellows just because they’re bored I will be STUNNED.

Hmm. Players killed it a man short in 5 hours.

Yeah. Not finding GW2 “challenging” group content all that intimidating.

Nike.2631:

Nike.2631:

((looks at dungeons))

((looks at open-world farming festivals- er, I mean “events”))

The Devs for this game don’t have the slightest idea what “top tier” players are capable of. Let them tune it for “all ascended” gear… If the first raid boss hasn’t been reduced to a roflstomp within 3 months that people are doing in all yellows just because they’re bored I will be STUNNED.

Hmm. Players killed it a man short in 5 hours.

Yeah. Not finding GW2 “challenging” group content all that intimidating.

Going to be a bit optimistic and assume the difficulty will continue rising quite heavily from the first boss onwards.

The first encounter might need to be tuned a bit better though towards the tougher end unless they intend on making the 2nd boss a brick wall.

Sykper.6583:

Nike.2631:

Nike.2631:

((looks at dungeons))

((looks at open-world farming festivals- er, I mean “events”))

The Devs for this game don’t have the slightest idea what “top tier” players are capable of. Let them tune it for “all ascended” gear… If the first raid boss hasn’t been reduced to a roflstomp within 3 months that people are doing in all yellows just because they’re bored I will be STUNNED.

Hmm. Players killed it a man short in 5 hours.

Yeah. Not finding GW2 “challenging” group content all that intimidating.

Going to be a bit optimistic and assume the difficulty will continue rising quite heavily from the first boss onwards.

The first encounter might need to be tuned a bit better though towards the tougher end unless they intend on making the 2nd boss a brick wall.

It’s more a problem of people assuming that ‘difficult’ would mean ‘difficult for the top 1/10th of 1%’ as compared to ‘difficult for the top 15%’.

They’re very different things. Of course, that distinction is why the ascended thing makes no sense. For ascended to matter it would have to be the former.

Bombastic.1428:

For me, that 4 hours was some of the most rewarding game time I have had in a very long time.

Funny that you say the above right after saying…

Bombastic.1428:

At that time I had @50 Google in the bank,so I made my very first gem purchase with a whopping $35 to cover the costs. In about 4 hours I had my mesmer from 0-500 in tailor and weaponsmith

Congrats. Your most rewarding experience in the game was after buying those rewards with real money. That’s a huge statement about the state of the reward system in GW2 and how much ArenaNet has pushed its monetization scheme on players.

Windsagio.1340:

Sykper.6583:

Nike.2631:

Nike.2631:

((looks at dungeons))

((looks at open-world farming festivals- er, I mean “events”))

The Devs for this game don’t have the slightest idea what “top tier” players are capable of. Let them tune it for “all ascended” gear… If the first raid boss hasn’t been reduced to a roflstomp within 3 months that people are doing in all yellows just because they’re bored I will be STUNNED.

Hmm. Players killed it a man short in 5 hours.

Yeah. Not finding GW2 “challenging” group content all that intimidating.

Going to be a bit optimistic and assume the difficulty will continue rising quite heavily from the first boss onwards.

The first encounter might need to be tuned a bit better though towards the tougher end unless they intend on making the 2nd boss a brick wall.

It’s more a problem of people assuming that ‘difficult’ would mean ‘difficult for the top 1/10th of 1%’ as compared to ‘difficult for the top 15%’.

They’re very different things. Of course, that distinction is why the ascended thing makes no sense. For ascended to matter it would have to be the former.

Thats exactly why it was retracted and not true… I can’t believe people still believe it is… I mean its impossible to balance something so perfectly you can tell 5% difference would make a difference in a game mode played by masses of people with many random occurances and unknown classes playing.

It was just an aspiration – it was never true, just an employee misspoke.

Coulter.2315:

Windsagio.1340:

Sykper.6583:

Nike.2631:

Nike.2631:

((looks at dungeons))

((looks at open-world farming festivals- er, I mean “events”))

The Devs for this game don’t have the slightest idea what “top tier” players are capable of. Let them tune it for “all ascended” gear… If the first raid boss hasn’t been reduced to a roflstomp within 3 months that people are doing in all yellows just because they’re bored I will be STUNNED.

Hmm. Players killed it a man short in 5 hours.

Yeah. Not finding GW2 “challenging” group content all that intimidating.

Going to be a bit optimistic and assume the difficulty will continue rising quite heavily from the first boss onwards.

The first encounter might need to be tuned a bit better though towards the tougher end unless they intend on making the 2nd boss a brick wall.

It’s more a problem of people assuming that ‘difficult’ would mean ‘difficult for the top 1/10th of 1%’ as compared to ‘difficult for the top 15%’.

They’re very different things. Of course, that distinction is why the ascended thing makes no sense. For ascended to matter it would have to be the former.

Thats exactly why it was retracted and not true… I can’t believe people still believe it is… I mean its impossible to balance something so perfectly you can tell 5% difference would make a difference in a game mode played by masses of people with many random occurances and unknown classes playing.

It was just an aspiration – it was never true, just an employee misspoke.

thats well within the realms of required by the game populace. These are the same type of teams which in general beat dungeons 4 times faster than normal groups, and generally demand all the players being wearing exotic.

High end players will demand ascended for effeciency and reduction of chance to fail
and regular players will require it for a decent chance of success.

anybody thinking people are going to knowingly let you decrease their chance of success in difficult content unless you are their team mascot are smoking crack

phys.7689:

Coulter.2315:

Windsagio.1340:

Sykper.6583:

Nike.2631:

Nike.2631:

((looks at dungeons))

((looks at open-world farming festivals- er, I mean “events”))

The Devs for this game don’t have the slightest idea what “top tier” players are capable of. Let them tune it for “all ascended” gear… If the first raid boss hasn’t been reduced to a roflstomp within 3 months that people are doing in all yellows just because they’re bored I will be STUNNED.

Hmm. Players killed it a man short in 5 hours.

Yeah. Not finding GW2 “challenging” group content all that intimidating.

Going to be a bit optimistic and assume the difficulty will continue rising quite heavily from the first boss onwards.

The first encounter might need to be tuned a bit better though towards the tougher end unless they intend on making the 2nd boss a brick wall.

It’s more a problem of people assuming that ‘difficult’ would mean ‘difficult for the top 1/10th of 1%’ as compared to ‘difficult for the top 15%’.

They’re very different things. Of course, that distinction is why the ascended thing makes no sense. For ascended to matter it would have to be the former.

Thats exactly why it was retracted and not true… I can’t believe people still believe it is… I mean its impossible to balance something so perfectly you can tell 5% difference would make a difference in a game mode played by masses of people with many random occurances and unknown classes playing.

It was just an aspiration – it was never true, just an employee misspoke.

thats well within the realms of required by the game populace. These are the same type of teams which in general beat dungeons 4 times faster than normal groups, and generally demand all the players being wearing exotic.

High end players will demand ascended for effeciency and reduction of chance to fail
and regular players will require it for a decent chance of success.

anybody thinking people are going to knowingly let you decrease their chance of success in difficult content unless you are their team mascot are smoking crack

To be fair, high end players are unlikely to be inclined to take non high end players along regardless of the less skilled player’s gear.

The funny thing is to me a player that demands ascended is one that doesn’t understand game systems well and I should feel free ignoring (although the dev shooting off might change that some).

Windsagio.1340:

The funny thing is to me a player that demands ascended is one that doesn’t understand game systems well and I should feel free ignoring (although the dev shooting off might change that some).

you are wrong. The dungeon groups that require exotics are not the crappiest ones. High tier players generally dont reduce their chances of success unless they like a specific person, or decide to try to do something just for kicks.

the reality is weather its literally required or not, the content is difficult enough no one is going to willingly kitten their group with full exotic guys.

to be clear this is NOT the old game, this is a dps check that is tricky for coordinated dungeon runners. They arent going to be taking exotic people on average.
and pick up groups, or small groups working together, definately wont.

If you really think they will, you have not played MMOs very much. I have never seen groups demand the minimum requirements for the best players for any difficult content. Heck they rarely allow it for average difficulty content

i have been in multiple fractal groups where they kick the guy who barely has enough AR to survive, its never about whats possible best case, but about whats probable.

yup, if you sign up for any guild that would attempt raids now, gear check through gw2efficiency with at least minimum 2 characters in full ascended weapon and trinket and at least berserker/assassin/sinister exotic armors. its the standard now. if you don’t like it you’re welcome to join a guild that doesn’t require it and has little to no chance of success in raid.

and if anyone believe its a gear treadmill it’s false. its not. ascended has came out since the beginning. it’s been 2 years and if you can’t afford it then you’re not playing the intended progression correctly.

for new players, u can get ascended weapon + full trinket sets in just one month of playing for one hour a day. easy. before that one month, raid would be the last thing a new player would want to worry about, maybe learn the mechanic of the game and progress their character to BiS gear first.

After trying out the raid encounter, i think it will be perfectly possible for groups with perfect coördination to run this in exotics, however anything less then the best groups and it becomes a problem. Full ascended groups hit the enrage yesterday because they didn’t have a grasp of the fight enough to actually be able to do enough dps in that time.

This isn’t meant to be pug content anyway so if your guild is ok with you rocking some exotics then that’s ok.