Guild Wars 2

I have to say that the current direction with the raid seems to be in the right place. I think that overall it does seem to be an interesting challenge. The only thing I think feels out of place is the Rage Timer. Basically we have a time limit to defeat the boss or the boss will received an overpowering boost to his dmg. Now this kind of goes against the very idea that “beserker will not be the meta”, since it does force players to consider using more dmg based gear to finish the fight at quickly as possible. I can only hope that the timer is either removed for the boss in the future, tweek the dmg output at the end to be a little more tolerable, at least double dmg, not 5x, or you extend the timer to something a little more reasonable. Everything else is okay to me.

yes the timer need to remove

Here’s the thing about an enrage timer – it’s lazy. It has NOTHING to do with skill or profession competence, and merely encourages excluding some classes while stacking others. You are already seeing people not wanting certain classes because they have inadequate DPS numbers.

Like, is that the best they could come up with? Putting an enrage timer on a boss is just another way of saying, “I’m out of ideas about how to make this fight more complex or interesting, so I’ll slap a timer on it that will nuke everyone if they don’t blast it first”.

Or are MMO developers just out of new ideas? I would note, many MMO’s use this awful enrage timer crutch, not just this game. It’s the easy way out. It’s a tired, dull mechanic.

Better to do a timer up and scale difficulty up as time goes on. And by harder I do mean harder. And it could be said to make it even harder start with more health.

Lets groups that aren’t fully Zerk still have a chance and possibly forces Zerkers no not go in with Zerk gear. Doesn’t mean groups won’t but the possibility is there to happen.

Their goal wasn’t to destroy zerkers, it was to make it so other builds had a place and the entire group wasn’t running offensive zerker builds. Like every other RPG, if you’re the DPS role, your build and gear should be optimized for DPS.

The benefit of the enrage timer is that it forces people to play optimally or they fail.

The downside is that the less skilled your group, the more they need to build full DPS to make up for lack of DPS up-time. But more versatility also doesn’t open up when you’re in a more skilled group either.

It’s ANet’s first time trying to make a raid in GW2, you should expect some of the old standards that you’ve grown to hate to make an appearance.

Hopefully, they’ll be replaced with better mechanics over time, as they get practice at this. But they’ll need more feedback than “we don’t like this”. And while I’ve seen some general suggestions, how would you change THIS fight to remove the timer and keep the challenge?

Rage timers = Zerker Gear and since i’m going to be playing a druid, i’ll have to keep all the glass cannons alive. WoW ;P

I see some people in here who I guess are new to raiding? Enrage timers are pretty standard design for raid bosses. The idea is nothing specific to GW2. The concept is simply that if there is no enrage timer, then you can take as long as you want to kill the boss, if you stay alive.

This is problematic because if you can take as long as you want, then you can substitute skillful play for heal/support stacking (basically you spam support healing and support skills, so that people can get away with tripping into mechanics over and over).

I’m kind of ??? as to why people seem surprised by it though. Most (if not all) world event bosses have a kind of enrage timer – it’s simply done in reverse. Instead of the boss enraging when you run out of time and killing you, the boss disappears and the event is over.

It’s possible the timers need to be tweaked to ease up time a little (I have no idea if they do – have not tested the raids myself) but removing them entirely would go against one of the fundamental mechanics of a raid.