Guild Wars 2

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/designing-challenging-content/

This reads exactly like the type of challenging yet inclusive stuff I hoped to get.
I like the way of soft progression/attunement that this article describes masteries to be.

Also weekly rewards without an instance lockout sounds like what it should have been standard for this type of thing for ages but hasn’t been seen a lot yet.

Fanboi Mode on !
Quaggan likes you !

This is pretty much everything I wanted for raids… like x100

Throws money at screen

Let me start now!!!!

More detailed post:

Looks like roles will be important, which is good. This means my necro may have a place, especially in kiting and cutting down groups of adds.

Enrage timers will be a thing, which I thought was obvious but some people seemed to disagree. This means no cheesing encounters in nomads gear, also good. This does however bring up the awkward DPS meter discussion. It is hard to have an enrage timer if you don’t know who your weak link is…

Masteries- looks like you’ll need at least a few people with masteries to complete the raids. I know people will complain about this but I don’t think it is a big deal. It is a type of progress, and it sounds like you’ll only need a few people to have them completed to do the raid.

Rewards- unique rewards were a given, thankfully the “i’m entitled to get all the rewards in any game mode I want with no challenge” people are not being listened to. No statistical advantage, no problem imo.

Really excited about raids. Love what I’m reading.

We want to create epic experiences for you and your friends to conquer together and, once your foes have been vanquished, to reward you in ways that allow you to show off your skills to the rest of Tyria.

The encounters within Raids will contain tons of exclusive new items you’ll never be able to find anywhere else in the game, from miniatures, to weapon skins, to awesome titles. You can then proudly display these out in the open world to show off your skill and accomplishments. Own a Guild Hall? Awesome! You can loot a trophy from some of our bosses and use them as decorations to show off the challenge you’ve conquered.

Secondly, raids will introduce the very first ever set of legendary armor. This isn’t any ordinary armor set! Similarly to legendary weapons, you’ll be able to change the stats that the armor provides. When entering combat, you’ll become a beacon of your heroic deeds as the armor set comes to life, animating around you. Only the bravest of heroes will be able to collect and craft these legendary threads.

A certain user is not going to be happy lol.

Really impressed with the article, fingers crossed it lives up to the image in my head xD

Arcadio.6875:

A certain user is not going to be happy lol.

I think i know who you mean :p

I’m curious about the enrage timers, but as long as they recognize the clear difference between condition DPS and a white DPS and design enrage timers or encounter mechanics to not massively favor one over the other (e.g. condi and white DPS is interchangable and still viable to get the boss down)

This is really the only sticking point as every class has decent support and control options, but not every class has equally good white and condition DPS options. Having enemies with strengths/weaknesses against either is great, but if the boss enrage timers are so short as to require mostly white DPS it’s gonna be a bad time.

They already fixed condition stacking soit’s obvious they have conditions in mind, I just hope they keep them in mind when designing raids so that DPS elements of a raid group are encouraged to bring both condi and white damage to the fights.

Arcadio.6875:

Really excited about raids. Love what I’m reading.

We want to create epic experiences for you and your friends to conquer together and, once your foes have been vanquished, to reward you in ways that allow you to show off your skills to the rest of Tyria.

The encounters within Raids will contain tons of exclusive new items you’ll never be able to find anywhere else in the game, from miniatures, to weapon skins, to awesome titles. You can then proudly display these out in the open world to show off your skill and accomplishments. Own a Guild Hall? Awesome! You can loot a trophy from some of our bosses and use them as decorations to show off the challenge you’ve conquered.

Secondly, raids will introduce the very first ever set of legendary armor. This isn’t any ordinary armor set! Similarly to legendary weapons, you’ll be able to change the stats that the armor provides. When entering combat, you’ll become a beacon of your heroic deeds as the armor set comes to life, animating around you. Only the bravest of heroes will be able to collect and craft these legendary threads.

A certain user is not going to be happy lol.

Mister " I want everything for free without even doing something useful"?

Ok enough with the fun. I like what I’m reading.

Enrage Timer: Well, considering that these Bosses are Raid Bosses, this is a given. Just hope that the Timers are tuned right because if the Timer is set at 20 Minutes then there would be no pressure and if it is set to one Minute then this would be too insane. There should be some Pressure going on at these Encounters.

But the Line with the Roles where they put in an Example of having Tankier Players to Protect the Condi Players is really sweet. Hope that the Raids will encourage a great Diversity.

Heh, enrage timers. One more reason to go all zerker, i guess, as if what we had up to now wasn’t enough. Encouraging diversity, lol… what a joke.

Enrage timers will ensure that full berserker groups will have massive problems to provide enough HPS in certain encounters.

Astralporing.1957:

Heh, enrage timers. One more reason to go all zerker, i guess, as if what we had up to now wasn’t enough. Encouraging diversity, lol… what a joke.

Good luck with that… full zerker will not be viable for raids. You will almost certainly need a number of gear types to succeed.

Boss isn’t going down if everyone is on the floor.

ZudetGambeous.9573:

Astralporing.1957:

Heh, enrage timers. One more reason to go all zerker, i guess, as if what we had up to now wasn’t enough. Encouraging diversity, lol… what a joke.

Good luck with that… full zerker will not be viable for raids. You will almost certainly need a number of gear types to succeed.

Boss isn’t going down if everyone is on the floor.

Agreed.

And it highlights the biggest difference between raids in Anet and raids in games like WoW. In WoW, fights can be designed with the absolute highest dps gear available at the time in mind because players will slowly advance beyond that gear level, opening up more flexibility in raids. Enrage timers could be pretty extreme for that reason.

While I can see masteries filling that role a little in GW2, I doubt it will be as prominent. Enrage timers in GW2 will need to a little more forgiving to accommodate gear variety in group. At the same time, they should punish groups that try to cheese the fights or invalidate mechanics through extreme 100% defense oriented groups.

I think its also important that they not require ascended gear in order to meet these numbers. Grinding out multiple sets of ascended gear on every toon for every person in multiple 10 party raids to ensure everyone can meet arbitrary numbers is unrealistic and not fun in any way.

Ideally, I dont see enrage timers defining the content – just setting loose parameters to further ensure that fights are strategic and cannot be cheesed through.

So, they want build diversity, but enrage timers will ensure that maximum DPS is required to clear bosses.

And they don’t want attunement, but there are encounters that are flat-out unbeatable if the group lacks specific Masteries.

k.

tobascodagama.2961:

So, they want build diversity, but enrage timers will ensure that maximum DPS is required to clear bosses.

And they don’t want attunement, but there are encounters that are flat-out unbeatable if the group lacks specific Masteries.

k.

You can easily design encounters where DPS is nearly irrelevant. In this case the enrage times would request other aspects of the combat system.

Have you raided in other games?

Enrage timers are absolutely a DPS check, period. That is their entire function. If your boss Enrages, you’re going to wipe, no matter how good your healer and tank are.

These are GW2 raids. The combat system of the game allows completely different encounters compared to other games. Instead of “Kill the boss” your encounter could be “Heal the boss to 100%.” In this case the enrage timer would cause more damage to the boss resulting in its death and the end of the encounter.

Adorable.

But, back in reality, that is definitely not going to be the case.

tobascodagama.2961:

Adorable.

But, back in reality, that is definitely not going to be the case.

In ICC you had to heal a green dragon to full to complete the encounter.

I bet the reason that peeps that work for Arenanet on GW2 is that they may be more imaginable of what kinds of new things to put in there than is often expected by referring to other similar products.
GW2 has always introduced a new spin on things, so it is very unlikely that we see a linear-scaling only raid copycat-feature this time.
That is essentially what that article points out, just to cool down the whole “but in other games it always was like this and that, so that also will apply here”-trolling that we did in the other thread over there.
Apparently it will be something new, maybe giving it a new name would have been a smart choice, though that would not have worked for PR to the same extent.

ZudetGambeous.9573:

Astralporing.1957:

Heh, enrage timers. One more reason to go all zerker, i guess, as if what we had up to now wasn’t enough. Encouraging diversity, lol… what a joke.

Good luck with that… full zerker will not be viable for raids. You will almost certainly need a number of gear types to succeed.

Boss isn’t going down if everyone is on the floor.

Source?

Sounds good on paper, if they manage to follow through with it. If all turns out well I might actually venture out of WvW for some raiding.

I’m mixed.

I like Legendary armor, titles and Guild Hall items buut

I am worried about enrage timers (which ok fair enough it stops players cheesing out the boss for an hour) and bosses being locked behind masteries. I can see it being “LFG Ursanbearboway 10k AP 10/8 LB/norn mastery titles”

I haven’t purchased the xpac yet, still waiting for Druid & Forge reveals but the raids have made me lean a little towards purchasing.

assasin oates.3018:

I’m mixed.

I like Legendary armor, titles and Guild Hall items buut

I am worried about enrage timers (which ok fair enough it stops players cheesing out the boss for an hour) and bosses being locked behind masteries. I can see it being “LFG Ursanbearboway 10k AP 10/8 LB/norn mastery titles”

For sure recognize that certain people will insist that there is only one be-all-end-all way to do the content. Just like in GW1, there was an established PUG meta for all the hard instances.

And that’s fine. PUG meta is usually based around minimal interaction and teamwork to minimize risk of a slip up. If you have two characters that when combined provide the same amount of support and DPS as one specialized support and one specialized DPS, the end result is the same, but the more teamwork intensive comp isn’t going to make the PUG meta because it’s harder to ensure you can find his sympathetic match.

That doesn’t mean meta is the only way. it just means that meta is the easies way to fill a PUG with a good chance of success.

In GW1 you could also complete hard instances without that meta as long as you were willing to be creative and use the full realm of builds avaliable to everyone present, and made sure everyone had a total group comp that complimented one another.

For instance, in my guild we don’t really have anyone that likes guardian, so we do content without them. We don’t blast water for heals, and in stead use necro wells and whirl finishers, etc. I tank the AC swarms on a thief built for the purpose, etc.

GW2’s systems, especially with the new elite specs to add options, are sufficiently diverse that content should be achievable with build alterations rather than kicking out players. It’ll mean getting gear for your group spec probably, just as it did in GW1, but I doubt it’ll be as rigid as “guardian tank and ele water heals with thief blast or you fail”

I liked pretty much everything that I have seen from this post, mostly. I recall mentioning a couple days ago when posted my thoughts on raids in GW2 that I hope they don’t have enrage timers forcing hard dps checks because I can see that really ruining some of the fun in raids. Raids can be challenging without hard enrage timers by means of challenging execution and encounter design. It also puts a lot of pressure on Anet to either balance DPS well or risk running into only certain builds or certain professions being taken on Raids.

However I will say that I hold out two hopes that would address my only concerns with what I’ve read thus far (I really like most of what I’ve seen really, I promise). If they tune it so that it is feasible and doable with full exotic gear (which frankly isn’t bad since full ascended is a very small percentage boost over exotic) then I can see it being totally cool. I don’t mean to say that it has to be faceroll easy with exotics, it’s just that a guild raid leader won’t feel bad about not taking someone who doesn’t have a full set of ascended armor and weapons. This puts pressure more on the encounter design rather than the number balance for the raid team which could also be a good thing or bad depending on how their developers are. The second thing is if enrage timers are loose enough that it’s mostly to prevent full 100% defensive raid comps from clearing. I’d like to see comps that mix defensive players that have to survive against mobs, players with CC and support, as well as pure DPS. This is not to be confused with the traditional trinity set up and is meant to encourage players to find those roles in their existing professions.

As always, these are just my thoughts and feel free to completely disagree with it. I may even feel differently later on as these are my gut reactions.

ZudetGambeous.9573:

Astralporing.1957:

Heh, enrage timers. One more reason to go all zerker, i guess, as if what we had up to now wasn’t enough. Encouraging diversity, lol… what a joke.

Good luck with that… full zerker will not be viable for raids. You will almost certainly need a number of gear types to succeed.

I heard the same thing said about dungeons in the beginning of the game. Turned out not to be true. Then people said the same thing about Fractals. Turned out to not be true. Then there was not-zerker meta at Teq. Now he’s crittable. And now people are saying this about raids, Anet is again advocating diversity, and yet at the same time they mention the strongest incentive to maximize dps ever – enrage timers.

Forgive me for doubting that’s going to hurt zerker any.

I think people are missing the point.

Zerker is definitely going to have its place in raids, but they’re designing it to (hopefully) not be the ONLY stat you bring. You’re going to need a mix of a party composition. Some zerkers, some more PVT types, some condition types, which is fine. Gutting zerker shouldn’t be the point of challenging content – it should be about specific roles that all need to fulfill their duty to succeed or the group faces the consequences.

I am optimistic about the enrage timer. I have done lots of raid bosses with enrage timers in other games and my experience is that, while they are a DPS check, it is not solely that. As others have so aptly pointed out, you cannot do max DPS if you are dead. My experience has been that, whatever the game or boss, you have to have the bulk of your party up and working in order to beat enrage timers. I doubt…or at least I hope…that Anet will not design an encounter with an enrage timer that can be beaten simply by having ten players in berserker gear piling on in a DPS race. I may well be wrong on this…but I am really hopeful having read the article.

JayMack.8295:

I think people are missing the point.

Zerker is definitely going to have its place in raids, but they’re designing it to (hopefully) not be the ONLY stat you bring. You’re going to need a mix of a party composition. Some zerkers, some more PVT types, some condition types, which is fine. Gutting zerker shouldn’t be the point of challenging content – it should be about specific roles that all need to fulfill their duty to succeed or the group faces the consequences.

This guy gets it.
Zerker will still have a place, it just won’t be the ONLY place.

JayMack.8295:

I think people are missing the point.

Zerker is definitely going to have its place in raids, but they’re designing it to (hopefully) not be the ONLY stat you bring. You’re going to need a mix of a party composition. Some zerkers, some more PVT types, some condition types, which is fine. Gutting zerker shouldn’t be the point of challenging content – it should be about specific roles that all need to fulfill their duty to succeed or the group faces the consequences.

exactly. with a total party size of 10 people you could have 2 healers, 2tanks, 6 dps. you may not need full zerk comp to beat enrage timers.

Except that Enrage timers put even more pressure on the 6 DPS roles to be hitting their absolute maximum theoretical output at all times. Which means that any class that can’t Heal or Tank (most of them) will have a minimum amount of DPS they need to bring in order to participate.

Considering the huge gap in DPS output between the S-Tier classes and everybody else right now, I have no faith that the raid meta won’t just be 2 Guardians and 8 Elementalists.

I don’t give a flying fig about which gear stats are required, the Zerker gear set is far and away the least offensive think about the misnamed “Zerker” meta. The thing that sucks about the Zerker meta is that it favours two classes above everybody else because they can hit top DPS numbers and put out top utility (Healing, Boons, Reflects) at the same time. (Oh, and Warrriors get to play as well because of their Might stacking.)

There are quite a few ways they can implement to prevent enrage mode, though. It could be ‘do (x) amount of damage in 10 seconds’, it could be ‘Do 8 CCs in (x) seconds’, or ‘do (x) amount of condition damage or it enrages’.

As others have already mentioned (and the blog itself) there are also a lot of other ways to kill your party without enrage. It doesn’t matter if you beat enrage mode if the boss also has a move that requires boon stripping or it’ll wipe your party, or it’ll taunt your entire party and then blow them up. If they give the bosses enough variety in their attacks/methods, zerk can’t be the only way to beat it.

Zerk being optimal isn’t just about the damage, it’s always been about the encounters/challenges not being varied enough to require other builds.

I would like encounters like this:

-Mob is immune to physical damage. Conditions can only be used.

-Mobs trying to get from point A to point B to trigger something catastrophic, players must cc them for x amount of time.

-Mob must be burned down by X time or it multiplies/triggers something horrible.

-Fail certain areas the entire raid gets one shot wiped.

-Raid is not 100% on killing. Involve puzzles, traps, masteries

JayMack.8295:

There are quite a few ways they can implement to prevent enrage mode, though. It could be ‘do (x) amount of damage in 10 seconds’, it could be ‘Do 8 CCs in (x) seconds’, or ‘do (x) amount of condition damage or it enrages’.

Except that the actual article says that “[Bosses] most assuredly will enrage if you take too long to kill them.”

It’s really, really not ambiguous at all that Enrage timers are a DPS check in HoT raids.

It wouldn’t be the first time ANet have used one example and then later clarified that there are multiple methods/examples.

I don`t think people should be worried about “enrage timers”.

It’s obviously going to be a DPS check of some sort, so a bunch of plain terrible builds might be doomed to fail.
However, since GW2 classes have quite different DPS capabilities and ANet probably doesn’t want every raid group to bring at least 5 berserker staff eles, enrage timers are likely going to be far, far away from the optimal case.

I expect the timers to be there mostly for two reasons:
So the content cannot be trivialized by extremely survivable setups (making succeeding just a matter of patience) and, specially, to enforce the right execution of the mechanics preceding a burn phase.

tobascodagama.2961:

JayMack.8295:

There are quite a few ways they can implement to prevent enrage mode, though. It could be ‘do (x) amount of damage in 10 seconds’, it could be ‘Do 8 CCs in (x) seconds’, or ‘do (x) amount of condition damage or it enrages’.

Except that the actual article says that “[Bosses] most assuredly will enrage if you take too long to kill them.”

It’s really, really not ambiguous at all that Enrage timers are a DPS check in HoT raids.

This could cover so much, just one example is shield, the Boss may have two shields, one makes it immune to physical and one immune to condi and it rotates these shield thoughout the fight so half your dps would need to be zerk physical dmg and the other half would have to be condi.

So many possibilities can come out of that one little statement, it doesn’t mean it all has to be raw zerker power.

OR, here’s a radical thought, it could mean exactly what it says.

tobascodagama.2961:

OR, here’s a radical thought, it could mean exactly what it says.

With no detail it’s open to interpretation on how you get to the end result, a dead Boss in a set time.

The meaning I don’t think is what is in question, its the means to get to the end result. I think after reading the post it’s safe to say that there will be multiple ways to achieve this end result.

ZudetGambeous.9573:

Enrage timers will be a thing, which I thought was obvious but some people seemed to disagree. This means no cheesing encounters in nomads gear, also good. This does however bring up the awkward DPS meter discussion. It is hard to have an enrage timer if you don’t know who your weak link is…

I wish they weren’t. I’d rather the design emphasized the unique mechanics of the fight moreso than a dps check. Heck, I’d rather have rewards or achievements that scale with beating the encounter more quickly (i.e. rewarding for skilled play rather than punishing players that can’t quite make the cut). When they talked about wanting to put their own unique spin on raids and getting rid of the annoying stuff like attunements, I’d hoped enrage timers would also be discarded.

Vargamonth.2047:

I don`t think people should be worried about “enrage timers”.

It’s obviously going to be a DPS check of some sort, so a bunch of plain terrible builds might be doomed to fail.

If the content is truly challenging, then the “plain terrible builds” are going to wipe anyway. Enrage timer is a fake difficulty, notthing more than a gear check.

There are a few Ways to implement Enrage. The most simple Way is to add a Timer, where the Boss completely snaps after a set amount of Time. But there are also other Enrage Triggers.

One Example is Oregorger, a WoW Boss from the Blackrock Foundry Raid.
This Boss has two Phases. The first one is a normal Phase where he attacks the Raid and every Attack from him depletes his Energy. Once the Energy Bar is Empty he goes to the Pac Man Phase where he rolls around and Eats Ore. He can deplete his Energy Bar two times, the Third time this happens he goes Enrage. But here is the Catch there is a Skill he uses that can be interrupted. This Skill uses a good amount of Energy and is a really fast Cast. But if the Skill is interrupted no Energy will be used, so, the better your Interrupts are the more Time you have and the less DPS you need to avoid the Enrage Timer.

This is one of the better Enrages, where the PErformance of the Players can determine how fast the Boss will go enrage

Walhalla.5473:

There are a few Ways to implement Enrage. The most simple Way is to add a Timer, where the Boss completely snaps after a set amount of Time. But there are also other Enrage Triggers.

The article says that they bosses will enrage if not killed in a certain time, so we’re almost certainly talking about the first kind, not the others.

It’s possible to have an encounter that simultaneously requires maximum DPS and support. Some people are fixated on the enrage timer, but there may be other mechanics in the fight that will cause full zerker groups to fail.

Astralporing.1957:

Vargamonth.2047:

I don`t think people should be worried about “enrage timers”.

It’s obviously going to be a DPS check of some sort, so a bunch of plain terrible builds might be doomed to fail.

If the content is truly challenging, then the “plain terrible builds” are going to wipe anyway. Enrage timer is a fake difficulty, notthing more than a gear check.

It is a skill check. There is very little gear dependence on damage.

As much as people like to tote the “zerker” meta you can maintain equally good dps with the following gear combos:

1. Zerker
2. Assassin
3. Sinister
4. Solider
5. Rabid
6. Rampagers
7. Carrion

By using banners, spotter, fury, PS, and EA, you can use any of those 7 gear sets to maintain optimal dps within a 10% margin. As long as you maintain the proper support roles your dps will be fine.

If you can’t clear an enrage timer using a combination of those gear sets then you aren’t going to do it with 10 zerkers either. Of course all the organized guilds and groups that will be clearing this content already know that.

Astralporing.1957:

Walhalla.5473:

There are a few Ways to implement Enrage. The most simple Way is to add a Timer, where the Boss completely snaps after a set amount of Time. But there are also other Enrage Triggers.

The article says that they bosses will enrage if not killed in a certain time, so we’re almost certainly talking about the first kind, not the others.

I agree it will likely be the “times up” kill everyone enrage they mean, that has a few forms itself though – uninteruptable cast that 1 shots everyone, suddenly gains a ticking damage that is unhealable, makes every melee swing a 1 shot with increased attack speed. Some of them you can survive a tiny bit longer to dps that last 2-3% down.

Enrage timers are good they allow the devs to balance the encounter around mechanics and prevents super cheese tactics.

I think the agreement here is that people don’t necessarily hate enrage timers. They just hate enrage timers so short that there’s no room in the party for anything other than “ALL MAX DAMAGE”

Considering they want roles to be important in this content, I doubt the timers and encounters will be tuned to encourage a lack of role diversity.

Yeah I do think this will be a continuation of zerker only to be honest and its not just about the enrage timer. It seems theyre main way to make things challenging is their typical one-shot gimmicks.

I know there are a lot of people out there who like the challenge being doing puzzles while under pressure but personally I would have liked to see encounteres where we use the games combat system to its full potential such as using fields and finishers other than fire field and blast.

Another issue with the continuation of one-shot gimmicks is that this means that necro will continue to not have adequate damage mitigation has blocks and dodges will rule.