Guild Wars 2

i think 10 is about right, too many and it becomes like the open world events already

Dreggon.6598:

Flexible, not 20

Actually, that would make some sense for future raids, mainly as GW2 is one of the few MMO’s that has an efficient scaling system already in place, so adjusting scaling for raids should not be too much of an issue from that standpoint, just as long as the different sizes are entirely optional.

Dreggon.6598:

BIGHARSHNESS.3510:

There is an lfg tool to fill the gaps. Problem solved.

No, if i have 11 people they can’t all play together.

Then act like adults and rotate people out?

8-12 would have been a perfect compromise.

I also HATE HATE HATE the idea of set number raids.

Freywstrider.5780:

It would seem that Arena net is forgetting what they set out to do. To make a different type of MMO, at least, that was what they said during the beta and release. Now, they seem to be moving towards being like other MMO’s and not different.

Well, for what it’s worth, THAT has been happening pretty steadily for the last three years, and that’s because the market demanded it. There’s a reason why most MMOs start drifting towards the World of Warcraft clone model… because that’s what MMO players are familiar with, and as a result, it’s what they want. Gamers don’t particularly like different. They want more of the same.

This entire upcoming expansion itself is a testament to that. Players steadfastly refused to entertain the possibility that Arena.net could gradually update the game on a steady basis. Nope, this game HAD to have a boxed expansion. There was simply no willingness to entertain any other option… because that’s how it’s always been done.

Read the occasional cries for open-world dueling, mounts, the “holy trinity”, etc… and realize, yeah… people WANT this game to become a WoW clone.

So all 21 players NEED to play at the exact same time? Don’t you think 2 can swap at some time?

Freywstrider.5780:

I have not played Runescape so I can not answer if it is a WOW clone. My wife and I were Beta testers for GW2 and it was the lack of the trinity and raiding that made it different and enjoyable. If you want to have raiding then fine but it needs to be fair for those that do not raid. No epic gear should be dropped that cannot be gotten another way. If you want different gear drops for raids then make it gear that you can only use in raids.

It would seem that Arena net is forgetting what they set out to do. To make a different type of MMO, at least, that was what they said during the beta and release. Now, they seem to be moving towards being like other MMO’s and not different.

1) They will not add another tier of stats so raids won’t be necessary to keep up in terms of stats.

2) Raids are only one of many features that HoT offers, so people who are not into raiding will have enough to do without it.

If you are seriously QQing because there may be some cosmetics that are exclusive to raiding then, wow, no idea what to tell you.

Larynx.2453:

Dreggon.6598:

BIGHARSHNESS.3510:

There is an lfg tool to fill the gaps. Problem solved.

No, if i have 11 people they can’t all play together.

Then act like adults and rotate people out?

Why should we do that?

Dreggon.6598:

Larynx.2453:

Dreggon.6598:

BIGHARSHNESS.3510:

There is an lfg tool to fill the gaps. Problem solved.

No, if i have 11 people they can’t all play together.

Then act like adults and rotate people out?

Why should we do that?

I’m actually having a hard time understanding this question. Maybe the content just isn’t made for your playstyle, and you shouldn’t play it.

Larynx.2453:

I’m actually having a hard time understanding this question. Maybe the content just isn’t made for your playstyle, and you shouldn’t play it.

That is quite unnecessary; he is simply suggesting that raids should be flexible with how many players can enter them at any given time. As opposed to a fixed number of 10 players, he was suggesting we could have the same raid but scaled to 11 players if 11 wish to party up, or even 20 players, so on and so forth.

For a long time, fixed raid size has been an issue. You will see, it sucks to be on a bench while the other guild members raid.
In the last expansion World of Warcraft introduced flex raid. It was a true breakthrough. The raid difficulty scales with the number of people you bring. It has been a true success. No more people on the bench. For instance you have a flex raid size between 10 to 20. This will satisfy most of the guilds.

Don’t forget Colin said that the second raid won’t necesseraly have the same type of content. He said that even events can be some kind of raid depending on how Anet decide to use it.
So don’t get stuck on that 10 players raid. It will other “raid like content” later that will not be like the first raid. We will likely get different raid-type content with HoT, not at the release (yeah now I have to be more precise since some people read what they want to read; cf others threads) but it’ll come. They probably won’t call it raid but something like Hard Mass Players Event or whatever.

PS: Personnaly I also find 10 players a bit disapointing^^

WTKITTEN … people whine “I WANT RAIDS I WANT RAIDS” then Anet makes them .. and now people are kittening because of the size? REALLY? this is just ridiculous .. i feel sorry for game devs for having to put up with this childish crap

Is raiding going to be required in order to complete the living story in the future?

Venatorn.7619:

WTKITTEN … people whine “I WANT RAIDS I WANT RAIDS” then Anet makes them .. and now people are kittening because of the size? REALLY? this is just ridiculous .. i feel sorry for game devs for having to put up with this childish crap

Well, it wasn’t a heated discussion until your post. This thread was a calm suggestion for future raids to be flexible with regard to how many can enter – keep that heat for the true complaint threads.

Cant make everyone happy

So, to put it simply ArenaNet has a terrible track record when it comes to small scale PvE in GW2.

Let’s hope we get less of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OamhniesRfg
And more of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RSeVCw3hVgQ

They had hired a new raid designer for creating this content (I presume the position was filled), and I don’t think we have seen what their new employee is capable of producing just yet. So I wouldn’t compare it to content created by other developers.

Larynx.2453:

So, to put it simply ArenaNet has a terrible track record when it comes to small scale PvE in GW2.

Let’s hope we get less of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OamhniesRfg
And more of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RSeVCw3hVgQ

I don’t want either.

I’ll be honest. I expect their first raids to have some serious problems. I expect massive complains about overpowered classes, overused builds, cheap strategies allowing to “cheat” an encounter, and so on.

But over the time I’m confident they will refine and it will eventually be good.

LS1 wasn’t very good originally, but they found a much better design for LS2. I expect nothing different for their raids.

I’m honestly baffled at the people arguing against this proposal. Why would you object to something which can only help people?

PaxTheGreatOne.9472:

Mursaat caused agony in gw1 if I’m right…

As we will be meeting Mursaat it could be a thing?

if u kill him in gw1 no

Zalladi.4652:

They had hired a new raid designer for creating this content (I presume the position was filled), and I don’t think we have seen what their new employee is capable of producing just yet. So I wouldn’t compare it to content created by other developers.

The problem is that their base systems limit them immensely. The lack of tank and healers reduces what they can do with a raid. The huge variance in health limits it as well, you can’t have a boss putting out a 20k hit if some classes struggle to get 18k hp. Gear level limits them, are they designing for ascended gear because that sort of ruins the whole “ascended isn’t required”. The horrible class balance will mean that certain builds will find it easy and others will find it absolutely impossible.

I really hope they can do something challenging and unique, but I’m afraid it will just be full of gimmicks(Swap weapon or die, dodge the raid wipe or die) and the beserker meta will reign supreme. I certainly don’t expect any of this to be a real challenge like FFXIV savage stuff, ArenaNet just does not have the balance team to tune things that tightly.

I wanna see Urgoz’s Warren in GW2.

Or riot :x

Distaste.4801:

Zalladi.4652:

They had hired a new raid designer for creating this content (I presume the position was filled), and I don’t think we have seen what their new employee is capable of producing just yet. So I wouldn’t compare it to content created by other developers.

The problem is that their base systems limit them immensely. The lack of tank and healers reduces what they can do with a raid. The huge variance in health limits it as well, you can’t have a boss putting out a 20k hit if some classes struggle to get 18k hp. Gear level limits them, are they designing for ascended gear because that sort of ruins the whole “ascended isn’t required”. The horrible class balance will mean that certain builds will find it easy and others will find it absolutely impossible.

I really hope they can do something challenging and unique, but I’m afraid it will just be full of gimmicks(Swap weapon or die, dodge the raid wipe or die) and the beserker meta will reign supreme. I certainly don’t expect any of this to be a real challenge like FFXIV savage stuff, ArenaNet just does not have the balance team to tune things that tightly.

Another issue I see limiting raid mechanics is ArenaNet’s all-inclusive philosophy with their game. GW2 can have different health pools, etc like you said, but unless they specifically design a mechanic around a certain class or set of classes (warrior/necro to soak etc) or buckle down a bit and actually straight up change how they balance classes I don’t see the raid design to even remotely approach the industry standard, and it’ll end up being yet more half-baked promises and potential.

A lack of healers/tanks doesn’t preclude the possibility of having interesting and difficult content; it just makes it harder to design and diversify that content. You can actually take a note from a few WoW bosses for mechanics that could be ported directly into GW2 with no complications (eg. Garrosh’s phase 4), but sadly I don’t really see any evidence that ArenaNet will be able to pull it off. The #1 issue ArenaNet have with PvE is making the group synergy matter over the individual, and that’s kind of the hallmark of most raid bosses. Their two world bosses are okay first attempts, but fundamentally they’re still world bosses and balanced so that anyone can join in, low leveled, bad, organized, or otherwise, so they’re not really comparable to true raid bosses. Most of those mechanics would be really contrived or just not work very well outside the 100+ man format they have.

Give Anet a rest, obviously they will tweak raids in the future.

This will be how they’ll sneak in a culinary application for Bloodstone dust into GW2.

Introduce agony gating to raids.
Bloodstone dust + cooking = agony resist food

“But guys, there’s no gear requirement!”

Yeah i heard about this mysterious man they hired. Supposedly he’s like one of the best in the business for that sort of thing. I’m not expecting it to be complete garbage or anything but yeah, I’m guessing that the 2nd and 3rd ones will be a lot better than the first.

YOUNGaz.5690:

Yeah i heard about this mysterious man they hired. Supposedly he’s like one of the best in the business for that sort of thing. I’m not expecting it to be complete garbage or anything but yeah, I’m guessing that the 2nd and 3rd ones will be a lot better than the first.

Let’s hope it’s up to Molten Core’s triple A standard of quality then.

Expect to see ascended gear almost required however. That’s probably why they wanted to buff it a little while ago, to make it more obvious.

I don’t think they will need agony resist, although I could see Arenanet adding some sort of gating with their raid mastery in order to entice player to start with the easiest raid and do them in order.

Blaeys.3102:

8-12 would have been a perfect compromise.

I also HATE HATE HATE the idea of set number raids.

What if you have 7 people or 13 people? What if you have 35 people? What if you have 60 people?

Scaling is already not perfect and raid encounters are content that is supposed to be challenging and cleared in very specific and coordinated ways. I think scaling takes away from that aspect of it.

GW2 does a great job providing PvE content for solo, small groups, or massive groups but there is no middle ground between the latter two and nothing for the cutting edge to pursue. Raids are meant to fill that gap.

Jahran.8456:

For a long time, fixed raid size has been an issue. You will see, it sucks to be on a bench while the other guild members raid.
In the last expansion World of Warcraft introduced flex raid. It was a true breakthrough. The raid difficulty scales with the number of people you bring. It has been a true success. No more people on the bench. For instance you have a flex raid size between 10 to 20. This will satisfy most of the guilds.

This comment is a little disingenuous no? The highest level of raiding in World of Warcraft is still a fixed size because of balance. Even with flexible raiding there are ‘sweet spot’ group sizes that many people aim for.

Raids are meant to be difficult content for organized groups, it’s not really surprising that it’s balanced around a set size to reduce variables.

—

These reactions aren’t exactly surprising though, there has been a huge shift in the past few years for MMO gamers to expect all content to be tailored specifically to what they want. It’s a very entitled culture.

I just can’t wait for the massive outcry for nerfs to difficult and crying about certain rewards being locked behind raid content.

Distaste.4801:

Zalladi.4652:

They had hired a new raid designer for creating this content (I presume the position was filled), and I don’t think we have seen what their new employee is capable of producing just yet. So I wouldn’t compare it to content created by other developers.

The problem is that their base systems limit them immensely. The lack of tank and healers reduces what they can do with a raid. The huge variance in health limits it as well, you can’t have a boss putting out a 20k hit if some classes struggle to get 18k hp. Gear level limits them, are they designing for ascended gear because that sort of ruins the whole “ascended isn’t required”. The horrible class balance will mean that certain builds will find it easy and others will find it absolutely impossible.

I really hope they can do something challenging and unique, but I’m afraid it will just be full of gimmicks(Swap weapon or die, dodge the raid wipe or die) and the beserker meta will reign supreme. I certainly don’t expect any of this to be a real challenge like FFXIV savage stuff, ArenaNet just does not have the balance team to tune things that tightly.

Well, 2 things. First off, “lack” of dedicated Tanks and Healers mean they can’t just get complacent and rely on gear checks and Tank&Spanks to fill out encounters.

Secondly, (in general design, not just games), working with limitations generally increases creative solutions. Without limitations, designers just go the path of least resistance.

Dreggon.6598:

My guild(s) contain hundreds of people and one is bursting at the seams with a waiting list. We frequently have many more than 10 people online, and there are probably going to be more than 10 wanting to raid. If I have any number not divisible by 10, we won’t be able to play together.

Instead I’d request raid sizes of a minimum maximum (i.e. the smallest amount that the maximum raid size should be) be 20 players and preferably more, so if I have 21 we can form groups of 10 and 11, or larger groups if I have more than 21. This game is supposed to be about everybody playing together, not being excluded because “we have enough people”.

Don´t get me wrong here, but isn´t the point of raids to have in this case 10 top notch people than are adaptable and highly stress resistant, instead of hundreds of people that are not for whatever reason?

Contradicting statement is contradicting maybe?

Healix.5819:

Expect to see ascended gear almost required however. That’s probably why they wanted to buff it a little while ago, to make it more obvious.

this would be a good time for a.net to say:

Btw, we are now ready to implement what we stated before.

A +10% difference in stats between exotic and ascended, if you are seriously considering beating our raid challenge you’d better bring full ascended gear with you.

The standard WoW raid design mechanics are pretty straight forward and can be translated into GW2 if you look at them at the basic level

Burst Phase: Straight forward enough deal lots of single target damage
Add Phase: Lots of cleave or AoE damage
Dodge Ground Effects: Use your dodge. . .
Raid Wide Damage: Use small recovery to not dip too low
Spike Damage: Mitigate and Heal

Then you can get into more unique mechanics

Soak Effects: Rotate players to soak beams / puddles / breathes / etc.
Kite Effects: Use swiftness to kite adds / lasers / etc.

Unique UI Elements: Consciousness / shields / toxicity / etc.
Environment Elements: Area damage cover / interactable items / etc.

—

One thing I see a lot is people saying because there is no dedicated tank / healer you can’t do x, y, or z; however, if you flip that argument over you can just say because there is no dedicated tank / healer everyone can do x, y, or z.

For example if they created an encounter where the boss targets the closest, furthest, highest health (or something equally predictable) player then players can easily rotate in and out and ‘tank’ the encounter while utilizing breaks to ‘heal’.

Lots can be done with the system, it’s just a matter of if it will. From my perspective it’s a wait and see type thing.

“This game isn’t Warcraft, so the raids are going to suck.”

Jeebus, people. Just go play Warcraft already. You already got them to ditch dungeon content in favor of these oversized, unwieldy nonsense instances, and now they’re Not Up To Industry Standard specifically because there’s no strict trinity?

Go play the other game. It’s clearly what you actually want.

As some people have already stated, I think it’s going to have a rocky start, but eventually smooth out into something cool later on. That’s just my thoughts on the matter.

Could there ever be a raiding/fractal hybrid that requires agony in the future?

Probably, yeah.

Distaste.4801:

The problem is that their base systems limit them immensely. The lack of tank and healers reduces what they can do with a raid.

Not true. The lack of healers and tanks does not reduce any of their options at all. Not having dedicated roles will increase their design options. GW2 also has soft roll sets with damage, control and support; any predefined role elements in the game revolve around those.

Distaste.4801:

The huge variance in health limits it as well, you can’t have a boss putting out a 20k hit if some classes struggle to get 18k hp.

This is not a limit. It just changes some of the variables and how they’re dealt with. Their options aren’t any less if HP ranges go from 10K to 30K than from 20K to 25K. If your purposely designing for one hit kills your HP is irrelevant and you have bigger problems to deal with anyway.

Distaste.4801:

Gear level limits them, are they designing for ascended gear because that sort of ruins the whole “ascended isn’t required”.

Raids will most likely be built around Exotic gear, the same as the rest of PVE. The only place designed for Ascended is upper level fractals and that’s only for the use of AR.

Distaste.4801:

The horrible class balance will mean that certain builds will find it easy and others will find it absolutely impossible.

This is purely Learn to Play. I have yet to find any content I could not complete with any profession. If I had trouble it’s because I wasn’t very good with the class. This is not a Raid issue.

Distaste.4801:

I really hope they can do something challenging and unique, but I’m afraid it will just be full of gimmicks(Swap weapon or die, dodge the raid wipe or die) and the beserker meta will reign supreme.

HOT Beta has already shown that they are capable of doing more than that. Dungeons and Fractals have largely been built that way in the past and I’m sure there will be elements of that in Raids and future Fractals. I’m also sure that they’ve learned from their mistakes and are making steps to resolve it.

Distaste.4801:

ArenaNet just does not have the balance team to tune things that tightly.

2 years ago I’d agree with you but they’ve been improving and things are tuned much better now. But if you’re going to demand that the Raids be hard enough for the top 1% hard core Raid runners then you’re going to be disappointed.

Honestly, I think there’s a lot they can do with raids in the GW2 mold. Look at encounters like new teq/triple wurm, dredge fractal boss, and jade fractal. These encounters create encounter roles in place of Character roles and still require coordination, practice, and knowledge of the encounter without resorting to lame mechanisms like main tank aggro and health bar whack a mole where there are advantageous builds across the fight for multiple classes.

If they keep to that style of design, I can see 10 man raids working very well.

Larynx.2453:

So, to put it simply ArenaNet has a terrible track record when it comes to small scale PvE in GW2.

Let’s hope we get less of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OamhniesRfg
And more of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RSeVCw3hVgQ

in both cases very bad examples of content :S

gw2 example is something that was not intended and has been fixed.

wow example, bunch of people standing around following rotations OMFG can you say LAME and BORING.

EDIT:

The only thing about that wow video I want in gw2 raids is the VO and the story. apart from that it was boring animations were boring everything else about it is boring.

The problem with “flexible” is that somewhere with scaling there will be “optimal” amount of ppl that for example causes boss to use his killer move less often yet is numerous enough to deliver the kill. And so instead of 10 ppl raids we’ll get meta 7 ppl runs or some such, cause “optimal”..

latinkuro.7304:

wow example, bunch of people standing around following rotations OMFG can you say LAME and BORING.

Following a rotation is just optimisation, the most optimal output for said class. You know what to do and when to do it, as it has certain mechanics you learn and adjust to. Now on the other hand when it’s a health sponge, you could argue 5 Ele’s taking a boss down is boring and lame but it is the most optimal because the mechanic here is stack and blitz.

excpet raiding in wow is all about following a pretty hard set rotation and waiting for specifically scripted things to happen " the lich king is casting defile" OMFG

The combat system in gw2 lets you defeat content in several different ways.
in wow if you do not follow the rotations and such you never beat that content period.

that to me is what was boring when I played such mmo’s, fully scripted BS

Instances that scale according to the number of people isn’t a new thing. City of Heroes had this down pat, with different scaling options to raise the difficulty. Guild Wars 2 has even done it themselves with Tower of Nightmares with mini-dungeons that scaled according to the party size of 1-5. It would be really be nice to see more of this, especially in a game like this one.

That WoW video was terribly boring lmao

All you do is stand there , spam your rotation and watch for the mechanic.

It didn’t even look fun. At least the combat system in gw2 is much better and fluid than that nonsense in the WoW video. Plus half your screen is clutter with hideous UI full of junk. I hope to god the raids we are getting are neither from your videos.

latinkuro.7304:

excpet raiding in wow is all about following a pretty hard set rotation and waiting for specifically scripted things to happen " the lich king is casting defile" OMFG

The combat system in gw2 lets you defeat content in several different ways.
in wow if you do not follow the rotations and such you never beat that content period.

that to me is what was boring when I played such mmo’s, fully scripted BS

Several different ways? Do you use every ability when its CD is up? If not, you have a rotation, you have an optimal output. There is no difference between the buttons you push and those attending a raid in another game. Where the difference lies is what it does in retaliation, here it usually stands and takes it, we stack and nuke. Other places it has a ruleset of mechanics, yes hardcoded, we’re not at extremely high AI awareness levels of coding in a video game, but they at least have mechanics. Something GW2 is slowly picking up on.

tetrodoxin.2134:

I wanna see Urgoz’s Warren in GW2.

Or riot :x

Urgoz requires Anet to actually give us Factions :P

Ticky.5831:

Distaste.4801:

Zalladi.4652:

They had hired a new raid designer for creating this content (I presume the position was filled), and I don’t think we have seen what their new employee is capable of producing just yet. So I wouldn’t compare it to content created by other developers.

The problem is that their base systems limit them immensely. The lack of tank and healers reduces what they can do with a raid. The huge variance in health limits it as well, you can’t have a boss putting out a 20k hit if some classes struggle to get 18k hp. Gear level limits them, are they designing for ascended gear because that sort of ruins the whole “ascended isn’t required”. The horrible class balance will mean that certain builds will find it easy and others will find it absolutely impossible.

I really hope they can do something challenging and unique, but I’m afraid it will just be full of gimmicks(Swap weapon or die, dodge the raid wipe or die) and the beserker meta will reign supreme. I certainly don’t expect any of this to be a real challenge like FFXIV savage stuff, ArenaNet just does not have the balance team to tune things that tightly.

Well, 2 things. First off, “lack” of dedicated Tanks and Healers mean they can’t just get complacent and rely on gear checks and Tank&Spanks to fill out encounters.

Secondly, (in general design, not just games), working with limitations generally increases creative solutions. Without limitations, designers just go the path of least resistance.

This is pretty awful reasoning. Having “real” tanks and healers doesn’t default to this, see GW. The entire game showed you even with the holy trinity in place, you can have diversity. Anet’s legendary balance skill skews things but hey, there are creative builds.

GW2 is too much limitations rather than too little. Heck even the trait systems was changed so you are forced to go all in on a tree. Options give you creativity, not limitations. Limitations just set a baseline. Least resistance is not always incorrect either from a general design stand point.

I love GW2 as the next person but did we not just see what the first video consisted of?

Stacking 4 of the best class in this game to take down a boss to see clustered of numbers fly on a stagnate boss where you get to dodge every now and then… and this is fun? …BORRING..