Guild Wars 2

It’s looking more and more like ArenaNet have set their bar for “difficulty” incredibly low, without any hint or announcement of raid-like content or even basic dungeons. All we have is their ambiguous promise of “difficult PvE content”. Can we expect 3 more years of autoattack zerging open world bosses, dodging a few times, and then collecting our gold, or is PvE actually going to be something more meaningful than a farm for pretty armor?

I’m also curious about this, but we won’t know till it actually hits. The truth is in the eye of the beholder.

If it is going to be open world, then it should be at the level of Triple Trouble and the Twisted Marionette.

Statistics over community feedback

The problem seems to be that Anet is developing this game in a vacuum, where they pay more attention to statistics, than to feedback from the community. As such, I don’t expect any of the criticism is being heard. For sure there are devs that read these forums, and are aware of our concerns. But they don’t have a say in the matter, I suspect. It’s all about the people in charge, and it seems it is they who pay only attention to statistics. This is probably why we’re not getting a new Super Adventure Box. See, this is how it often works in the game industry:

SAB 1 = a great succes? Producer: “Marvelous! Make another one!”
SAB 2 = a lot of criticism? Producer: “Rubbish, lets never do this again!”

This sort of blind adherence to statistics, prevents the game from ever developing beyond what it is right now. That is I fear why we haven’t seen any raid content, or any improvements to dungeons. But there is also the problem of small teams working on an island.

See, those in management positions in the game industry, often think that experimenting with different design approaches is a good way to manage projects. So they’ll occasionally have the sudden crazy idea to split a perfectly well oiled machine, into several tiny teams, where no one really knows who is in charge. These teams then work on their own private islands, where it becomes unclear who is the lead of what, who has to answer to who, and any idea is just fine. So you’ll end up with leads having to answer to animators, and nonsense like that. That is also how projects like SAB are born. Sure, it is a very creative and original fun gag. And the game play is fun too. But it has of course nothing to do with GW2. Had a competent project lead been in charge, SAB would never have made it into the game to begin with. This is not criticism towards SAB itself, but merely to the incoherent design, and lack of dedication to a strong design document and style guide. Who approved it to begin with? Either you commit to it, and keep making new SAB levels. Or you never introduce it to begin with. But be consistent in your design!

This is what happens when you cut up teams, and let them do their own thing. What you really need is a clear design structure, where there is one lead game designer, one art-lead and one lead level designer, and everyone answers to them, but the lead game designer gets the final say in the matter.

But you also need to stay in touch with the community. Statistics aren’t everything. If you decide to not further develop dungeons, merely because the statistics show that few people actually play them, then you are disregarding the fact that lots of people are asking for challenging raid content. Now I do not know if this is the case. I do not know if dungeons are suffering from a strong decline in popularity.

But what I am saying is that currently Anet is following a very incoherent design philosophy. Teams seem pushed to unreasonable deadlines (which is why some living story chapters were very disappointing). There doesn’t seem to be a very clear idea of where the game should be heading. So a producer looks at the statistics regarding the last Living Story, and deduces that lots of people are playing the open world event chains. So at the drop of a hat, that can become GW2’s new design direction. No more heart quests, no dungeons, no raids. Just these giant event chains with a very low difficulty. But this ignores the possibility that perhaps a lot of people enjoy normal PVE content more, and would love to see more heart-quests instead, or more difficult content.

Diovid.9506:

If it is going to be open world, then it should be at the level of Triple Trouble and the Twisted Marionette.

^ Not really, they have to cater to all types of players—from casual with limited time to hard core that camp on a map for an hr before the event start. They can’t exclude one over the other.

Well, in an interview with MattVisual, Colin said that the Wyvern wasn’t an example of the challenging group content that they’re talking about; just an example of what open-world fights will be like.

Blude.6812:

Diovid.9506:

If it is going to be open world, then it should be at the level of Triple Trouble and the Twisted Marionette.

^ Not really, they have to cater to all types of players—from casual with limited time to hard core that camp on a map for an hr before the event start. They can’t exclude one over the other.

I agree. Any sort of difficult content needs to be organized, and organization which requires an hour of set up to ferry 100 people on to a map is ridiculous. Not to mention just by the nature of being open world any clueless player can wander into the fight and accomplish nothing, while making the content harder for everyone else and still being rewarded. There’s no need to reinvent the wheel; instanced content works.

World bosses are fine, and inclusivity in them is fine. What isn’t fine are world bosses being the premier challenging content the game has to offer. Basically any dungeon can be 1 or 2 manned, and Fractals are just a glorified 5-man loot grind. There’s no intrinsic reward from completing the content like you get with heroic or even normal raiding in World of Warcraft. Progression is a term that does not apply to PvE in GW2 outside of loot and personal challenges.

Larynx.2453:

Any sort of difficult content needs to be organized, and organization which requires an hour of set up to ferry 100 people on to a map is ridiculous.

One of my many frustrations in the game. It’s fortunate that Aurora Glade has a lot of competent guilds that take down these world bosses on a regular basis. But I remember getting over 70 people into the zone to fight Tequatl, and it just flying off because we still didn’t kill it fast enough. Ferrying over 100 people is unreasonable and not very fun (you are basically fighting the game’s lack of districts), and a boss leaving because it is on a timer is also lame. I prefer to lose a boss fight either due to a complete player wipe, or due to failing a clear objective.

Larynx.2453:

Not to mention just by the nature of being open world any clueless player can wander into the fight and accomplish nothing, while making the content harder for everyone else and still being rewarded. There’s no need to reinvent the wheel; instanced content works.

I’ve seen this quite often with the Triple Worms. Players carefully trying to battle the dynamic scaling, in order to not over scale it. Players should not even be aware of the system when fighting a boss, that’s just silly.

Larynx.2453:

There’s no intrinsic reward from completing the content like you get with heroic or even normal raiding in World of Warcraft. Progression is a term that does not apply to PvE in GW2 outside of loot and personal challenges.

Agreed. There are no rewards or progression to look forward to.

“Raid content” has never meant difficult
The only game I’ve ever played that had any real difficult content was Wildstar
And maybe a little bit of the original Vanilla WoW on release… briefly.

I hope they really do make some tough to complete content in that it requires real skill.

I believe it was stated a while back that the wyvern fight was an example of open-world content, but that the ‘challenging PvE content’ wasn’t referencing that fight specifically.

FrozenChinchilla.5249:

“Raid content” has never meant difficult
The only game I’ve ever played that had any real difficult content was Wildstar
And maybe a little bit of the original Vanilla WoW on release… briefly.

I hope they really do make some tough to complete content in that it requires real skill.

There’s different elements to content.

For most raids there’s a few steps.

First is figuring out the puzzle, generally you’ll go in and just try to push through phases just for the educational benefit. Personally back when I was more hardcore in games we’d take even small groups in off hours and just try to get all the details figured out.

Next comes the cat herding, getting the entire force to understand it, this would be the biggest hurdle for GW2 because of the way it groups people together, “guys do this” “kitten you I’ll do what I want”, that’s what we get in GW2, in other games you went into these encounters with a team and everyone wanting to cooperate to win so at least that animosity wasn’t as much of an issue, though this phase often took the longest because with a lot of people there is bound to be people who just don’t get it.

Then the last is just execution. If you know what to do, have your team all prepared, can you actually pull it off?

Each has different elements and there can be difficulty in them all. There’s a reason guilds with good leaders and a force that was all likeminded typically did the best, the herding of the cats was smooth because there was no conflict. Likewise having some very savvy people in your crew could make the puzzle part go by quickly as they just instantly saw what they were supposed to do. Then execution is where many raids became favorites or hated.

There’s challenging execution, there’s punishing execution, engaging execution, and then just flat boring execution. Seen them all, personally speaking, the engaging ones were the most fun to me. Things that keep you havign to pay attention but don’t necessarily make you hate yourself for doing them. I enjoy a challenge now and then but the ones I wanted to do every day were the ones that were engaging, not so much challenging. And then Punishing were the ones that were like 45min+ encounters that if you sneezed at the wrong time you’d wipe and have to start all over that’s not fun.

So personally I see something like Lupi as perfectly designed. Once you understand him, he’s not all that challenging, however he does keep you having to pay attention and a screw up will kill you, though with a full team you can make a few mistakes and still recover without too much trouble. A nice little middle ground.

I guess this is all just rambling, but when I see people say that raids aren’t challenging I have to disagree, it all depends on perspective and the raid in question. 16 years now I’ve seen a handful of amazing raids, plenty of raids that are mediocre at best, and even more that are just /meh. But those handful… god they were awesome.

I really, truly despise the fact that ‘challenging PvE content’ instantly, unilaterally, and exclusively means RAIDZ to anyone and everyone in this forum that isn’t me.

Gonna be honest with you guys here – I can’t stand RAIDZ. Force twenty guys to get together to do a given thing and your own abilities no longer matter for snot. It doesn’t matter whatsoever what you do, fail to do, or manage to heroically pull off against long odds. The RAID will succeed or fail regardless of what you do. Furthermore, RAIDZ lock a great tremendous majority of players out of doing them because of high player count requirements. A 20-man RAID is a thing anyone without a guild of, realistically, 50 or more people in it is never going to see. A five-man dungeon team? Yeah, solos can’t do dungeons either, but four buddies to run dungeons with is something most folks can eventually aspire to pull off. Being able to find a 50-man minimum guild is less of a sure bet.

And besides. We all know what RAID guilds are like.

I would vastly rather see RAIDZ-style content be something more akin to the Toxic Tower; that sort of semi-instanced content was intriguing, and solo players could still actually see it by tagging along with larger groups, while guilds were still highly encouraged to form their own parties to handle the thing. As for challenging PvE content…dungeons. More of them, more like Aetherpath (if not as agonizingly long) and less like CoF1. Redux the dungeons we have, put new ones in Heart of Thorns, and let Guild Wars 2 be the game where small teams of close friends get to shine, instead of needing herds of nerds as vast as the stars themselves to get anything done.

Not everybody can manage to work a second job with a high-prestige RAIDZ guild in order to continue being able to play the game. Guild Wars 2 is about challenging industry conventions, eh? Let’s challenge the one which says that if you can’t do RAIDZ, you may as well uninstall and go back to playing Angry Birds on your iThing.

Some of us are totally on board with never seeing RAIDZ in an MMO again. As odd as it is for other people to believe.

seems like you have never seen good raid content, if you think it doesnt matter how good the individual plays.

and if you believe you need 50 people minimum for a 20 man raid then i call that lack of organisation skills.

I prefer dungeon content to be difficult more than open world content. Why? Its easier to up the difficulty of one dungeon than a 100 player open world encounter. I bet you no more than a month after release that Wyvern fight will be on farm status no matter how many defiance bars you stack on it. The problem the creeping power curve that will be the specializations and that “difficult” content will be challenging anymore. Thats why most MMO’s add more content and expansions to not only add more challenges but to give more reasons for players to keep logging in. Unfortunately Anet is behind in terms or both challenging content and content that is fun to play because it was challenging. High risk, high reward (and not blues and greens.)

Ohh I agree, there’s no need for challenge to mean raid. But, there were comments about raids which is why I responded.

I actually prefer smaller raids. I did the 50+ man raid thing. I much enjoyed the change when I went to other games where it was 8 man raids or now GW2 and 5 man dungeons/fractals. In fact it’s much easier to design content to be challenging and engaging to the individual when you have smaller numbers.

I just hope they are able to achieve those two aspects, I want some challenging content and I want a lot of engaging content. Right now we have SW which a few bosses fought melee are on the low end of engaging, fought range they are a snoozefest at best. We have fractals/dungeons that are engaging but the challenge has gone thanks to complete understanding of what is there. I hope they actually put in some stuff that can get that feeling back.

Personally I don’t view Triple Trouble as challenging as i don’t feel that “herding cats” is what makes true challenge, it’s just a required aspect of larger scale combat, there is certainly a difficulty level to it, but it’s just a matter of time till each individual understands then it’s quite easy.

Give me more Lupi’s, more Grawl Shamans, more Mai Trins, and hell even something more than that.

Eh,
Something about how you phrased that question sort of makes it seem like Instancing is a requirement for Challenge. I don’t know if I’d stress out over that.

It’s not like MMOs have always had Instances.

Technically, what they’ve always had was a means to limit the number of participants. Pre-WoW this was done in the Open-World. There’s nothing saying it can’t be done in the Open-World again – but this time with an ad-hoc party construction more befitting this game’s dynamic and non-competitive design direction.

They’ve already sort of explored it. Splitting people into different locations via breach/lanes was a real solid step forward. I haven’t heard much traction on this front in the expansion so far. But, here’s hoping all that bending over backwards not to equate their new ‘challenging encounters’ to any label we currently know amounts to some real strides on this front.

One interesting thing worth noting is that there are some real possibilities in the Mastery system to help out with this. The system could be used to increase the complexity of a big boss fight while also keeping open world’s trademark ad-hoc party construction, because it’s possible to use the gating to keep people from entering before they’ve been taught the fight mechanics elsewhere.

Nobody has to sit around explaining what purple mushrooms do to a group of people they trust to listen, if you had to use purple mushrooms to reach the boss fight in the first place.

FrozenChinchilla.5249:

“Raid content” has never meant difficult
The only game I’ve ever played that had any real difficult content was Wildstar
And maybe a little bit of the original Vanilla WoW on release… briefly.

Ah yes, that’s why most guilds can’t seem to finish heroic raids, even today. Most guilds struggle to complete raids on normal difficulty, and it can take them weeks of attempts. I have a feeling you haven’t actually played much WoW.

CambrianExplosion.6394:

FrozenChinchilla.5249:

“Raid content” has never meant difficult
The only game I’ve ever played that had any real difficult content was Wildstar
And maybe a little bit of the original Vanilla WoW on release… briefly.

Ah yes, that’s why most guilds can’t seem to finish heroic raids, even today. Most guilds struggle to complete raids on normal difficulty, and it can take them weeks of attempts. I have a feeling you haven’t actually played much WoW.

Don’t forget that most people suck at games.

Most of the time, the only thing that stops you from completing a raid in WoW is just a damage race. Nothing to do with real difficulty. The only barrier is uptime and rotation (and half the rotations in the game can just be macro’d to 1 button)

The more people you have put into the raid the more room for error there is (and has to be).

Actual difficult content is 10 players and under. You can be much more harsh.

Unless you get a game like Wildstar where ALL 40 people have to be competent and skilled. That’s why after 1.5 years only 6 guilds have even beat it. (There was only 1 guild that had a few months ago)

In difficult content, things like “berserker” shouldn’t even be a thing. If you can go through the content without even being hit more than once it’s definitely not difficult.

Unless the fight is just 1 shot mechanics so that gear doesn’t even matter.

FrozenChinchilla.5249:

Unless you get a game like Wildstar where ALL 40 people have to be competent and skilled. That’s why after 1.5 years only 6 guilds have even beat it. (There was only 1 guild that had a few months ago)

the game isnt out for 1.5 years. its not even out for 1 year.
enigma killed avatus in 40 man 2 days or something before drop 4 (DS 20 man change). and then 1h before my guild (Codex) in DS 20.

without the bugs and if DS was 20 man from the beginning it would have taken about 3 months i guess instead of 6. but thats still longer than 9 days BRF clear in WoW.

NoTrigger.8396:

FrozenChinchilla.5249:

Unless you get a game like Wildstar where ALL 40 people have to be competent and skilled. That’s why after 1.5 years only 6 guilds have even beat it. (There was only 1 guild that had a few months ago)

the game isnt out for 1.5 years. its not even out for 1 year.
enigma killed avatus in 40 man 2 days or something before drop 4 (DS 20 man change). and then 1h before my guild (Codex) in DS 20.

without the bugs and if DS was 20 man from the beginning it would have taken about 3 months i guess instead of 6. but thats still longer than 9 days BRF clear in WoW.

Oh yeah I got the time completely wrong on that lol
11 months

Wildstar is waaaaaaay harder than WoW

i cant really comment on WoW difficulty because i dont have much WoW experience. but from attempt counts i would say that guilds had more pulls in DS alone than WoW guilds in Highmaul and BRF together.

There’s no “challenging” content Anet could add that would satisfy people, within a few weeks max most of these people will have chewed through it and come back to complain for more. See also: dungeons, fractals, taquito, triwurm, aetherpath, etc.

Hyper Cutter.9376:

There’s no “challenging” content Anet could add that would satisfy people, within a few weeks max most of these people will have chewed through it and come back to complain for more. See also: dungeons, fractals, taquito, triwurm, aetherpath, etc.

since when is what you listed challenging?

I don’t know why you people assume when I say “raid content” I mean 20+ players. At best 20 players is the cap, GW2 can’t support any format larger than this while still having individual contributions be relevant, unlike a game like WoW. 5-20 is best, with 10ish being a sweet spot I think.

NoTrigger.8396:

i cant really comment on WoW difficulty because i dont have much WoW experience. but from attempt counts i would say that guilds had more pulls in DS alone than WoW guilds in Highmaul and BRF together.

End bosses take an average of 200-400 pulls. Back in Wotlk, Yogg 0 lights took 1,000+ attempts for the world first kill. This is just for a single guild.

For non-end bosses, the first few bosses can normally be done in 1-30 pulls (ie first 4 bosses in a 12 boss raid) by exceptional guild, though most heroic guilds outside the top 100 or so will probably take 10-50, a lot of the time even going up to 100+ for a few (highmaul actually had a few of these, Butcher, Brackenspore, and Tectus could all take 100+ attempts to do if you kittened up)

Mid-raid, late-raid and pen-ultimate bosses can take as many attempts as the end boss or as few as the earlier bosses, it depends on the tier in question. Heroic Stagecrafter took 300-500 attempts as was considered as hard as Garrosh ( the last boss), for example.

Can’t comment on BRF though, since I stopped playing WoW about when it came out.

Anyways, in case someone is going to quote this out of context, I am not advocating that GW2 have raids like this. I’d even accept normal raid difficulty content. I just think that’s it’s very sad that GW2 has all these neat boss concepts and they’re wasted on trivial content. So many fights could be EASILY ported into a 10-20man format and given an instance, but ArenaNet decided that it should just be another loot farm.

FrozenChinchilla.5249:

NoTrigger.8396:

FrozenChinchilla.5249:

Unless you get a game like Wildstar where ALL 40 people have to be competent and skilled. That’s why after 1.5 years only 6 guilds have even beat it. (There was only 1 guild that had a few months ago)

the game isnt out for 1.5 years. its not even out for 1 year.
enigma killed avatus in 40 man 2 days or something before drop 4 (DS 20 man change). and then 1h before my guild (Codex) in DS 20.

without the bugs and if DS was 20 man from the beginning it would have taken about 3 months i guess instead of 6. but thats still longer than 9 days BRF clear in WoW.

Oh yeah I got the time completely wrong on that lol
11 months

Wildstar is waaaaaaay harder than WoW

WoW also has a significantly more established hardcore raiding community than Wildstar. Wildstar also has a lower population of players, a smaller raiding population, a higher barrier for entry for the raids, and requires more people per raid group than WoW.

Days before world first are irrelevant metrics. Attempts are the only important one. Just check out vanilla WoW numbers, despite the raids being trivially simple, they’d apparently be the most difficult raids in WoW’s history.

FrozenChinchilla.5249:

Most of the time, the only thing that stops you from completing a raid in WoW is just a damage race. Nothing to do with real difficulty. The only barrier is uptime and rotation (and half the rotations in the game can just be macro’d to 1 button)

This is evidence that you have literally no idea what you’re talking about and have never done any actual meaningful heroic raiding in WoW. Half the rotations in WoW can be macro’d to 1 button is an absolutely false statement. There is no rotation in WoW that can be macro’d to any degree such that it’s simplified to triviality while still maintaining optimal damage numbers. You might see examples of macros that can give you a very simplified damage rotation on just one button, but you’re literally doing about half your actual possible damage. You do more of your theoretical possible DPS in GW2 just spamming 1 than you’d get from these macros. Damage rotations in WoW are not even rotations like in GW2, they’re complex priority systems. If X, do Y, if A, do B, etc. This includes responses to more than just ability timers or resource generation, but also how some abilities interact with each other (eg. holding an ability to use in combination with another ability for a small gain in efficiency, at the opportunity cost of a likely actually lowering your total performance if you mess up) and reacting to procs (eg. you need to make a decision for refreshing your several DoT spells to snapshot, but you’d be overwriting the previous ones so you’d retroactively be lowering the DPET of the ability, for a long term gain, and with proper timing you might get additional benefits such as from getting being able to snapshot a DoT in the last second of your proc).

But you’re absolutely right when you say that “Most of the time, the only thing that stops you from completing a raid in WoW is just a damage race.” Except you either ignore or are ignorant to the full picture. Heroic progression can literally be simplified to kill the boss before the boss kills your raid team. In WoW, just like GW2, this is best accomplished by shortening the length of the fight in probably 75% of scenarios (the remaining 25% likely involve bringing less DPS because it’s not necessary, so you stack healers). A typical raid comp for 10m consists of 1-2 tanks, 1-3 healers, and 5-8 dps, with a standard of 2 tank, 2 healer, 6 dps. In a top progression guild, you’re going to hit the berserk timer many times on some fights. Most guilds will only complete a fight with literally single digit seconds to spare, and in a lot of cases will even kill the fight a few seconds after the berserk. So lets put that into actual numbers. Using MoP boss numbers, if you had a boss with 1,008,000,000 health and an 8 minute berserk, you’d require approx 2,100,000 raid DPS to kill it when it hit the berserk. That’s fairly reasonable, since this means you need 300k dps from each DPS and the two tanks combined. If your raid group is off by just a few seconds, lets say 5, that means the raid wiped with only 10,500,000, or 1.04% health. Or in other words, your DPS were about 1% too low. This scenario, like I said before, happens incredibly often during progression. WoW raiding is very much a battle of these tenth of a percent and single digit percent increases in optimizing your performance, all the while having to do the mechanics perfectly (you get one res per fight, and the fights on average last 5-10 minutes, with end bosses going as high as 15, and one mistake is very likely going to cause you to die), and taking almost no avoidable damage (you don’t have a low opportunity cost invuln with a 10s recharge like GW2) since you’re already likely underhealing the content.

So yeah, damage is all that matters in WoW. That’s an incredibly elementary way to put it, though.

Blude.6812:

Diovid.9506:

If it is going to be open world, then it should be at the level of Triple Trouble and the Twisted Marionette.

^ Not really, they have to cater to all types of players—from casual with limited time to hard core that camp on a map for an hr before the event start. They can’t exclude one over the other.

Why do they have to cater to all player types? It’s not necessary.

I hope there is increased difficulty in OW for HoT but I don’t think it’s going to be too much harder than what we get in Dry Top/Silverwastes

Obtena.7952:

Blude.6812:

Diovid.9506:

If it is going to be open world, then it should be at the level of Triple Trouble and the Twisted Marionette.

^ Not really, they have to cater to all types of players—from casual with limited time to hard core that camp on a map for an hr before the event start. They can’t exclude one over the other.

Why do they have to cater to all player types? It’s not necessary.

I hope there is increased difficulty in OW for HoT but I don’t think it’s going to be too much harder than what we get in Dry Top/Silverwastes

Implying Dry Top or Silverwastes is harder than launch content?