Guild Wars 2

I don’t know how I should take it, but right now it’s the case, I still think dungeons could have done it aswell, but oh well, at least Mursaat are back.

To those who don’t know what I’m talking about: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YIW_oH49P1M

I hope they are finally tying up the knot on Saul’s storyline all the way back to the bonus pack in GW1. Either way Mursaat are awesome “It was me plotting all along!” kind of villains (so is Abbadon, but it is much easier to go along with Mursaat since they are a whole group and Abby is kinda deader than dead).

And now I need that stupid Ascended Gear to actually go through this myself.

Unfortunately this is just another way raids have made me feel left out.

I wouldn’t call it “richer” but it is based off of more established well loved lore.

Honestly, I don’t get all this complaining about lore being in the raids. I mean, raids are basically GW2’s version of elite missions we had in GW1, and every one of those had good lore behind them – especially The Underworld and Fissure of Woe. Mind you, GW2’s putting more lore into their ‘elite mission’ variants, but they’re trying to put more lore in everything.

Konig Des Todes.2086:

I wouldn’t call it “richer” but it is based off of more established well loved lore.

This is what I don’t get. People are raving about how wing two has way better lore and writing than anything we’ve seen in HoT (regardless of where you think that bar is set) but the cinematic was basically a really short summary of things we knew before GW2 even came out (some of it is even rewritten history). I get that White Mantle/mursaat and GW1 in general excites people, but so far we haven’t gotten rich lore – just throwbacks to beloved lore from GW1 and the possibility of something exciting to come.

Shiren.9532:

Konig Des Todes.2086:

I wouldn’t call it “richer” but it is based off of more established well loved lore.

This is what I don’t get. People are raving about how wing two has way better lore and writing than anything we’ve seen in HoT (regardless of where you think that bar is set) but the cinematic was basically a really short summary of things we knew before GW2 even came out (some of it is even rewritten history). I get that White Mantle/mursaat and GW1 in general excites people, but so far we haven’t gotten rich lore – just throwbacks to beloved lore from GW1 and the possibility of something exciting to come.

I think we have to consider the Nostalgia Factor here. Nostalgia Google are the only Explanation I can think of, that makes the outcry right now “justified”. I don’t think it makes Sense that people are now enraged because some Lore Bits of GW1 are now related to the Raid, but you know. Nostalgia.

DoA"Doman of Anguish" had lore tied to it (including the first margonite!) but i dont recall this kinda outcry over it.
i think its the word “Raid” that is causing all this fuss IMO

I think GW2 raids are generally more exclusive than the GW1 elite dungeons for a few reasons:

• GW1 elite dungeons had the same party requirement as the rest of the game. Players always expected to need eight players so bringing along eight for UW or FoW or DoA was the same as doing the sixth mission in Nightfall or Factions.
• GW1’s combat system was mechanically less skill based and more rotation based than GW2. Wall blocking using invulnerable tanks (often Shadow Form or VoW or some other vulnerability) made everyone safe most of the time. The only reaction based mechanics were monk healing and some interrupt builds. GW2 combat requires complex movement around the arena, constant dodging and positioning and general action combat skills.
• Only Factions elite dungeons had the same or more people required than GW2 raids. Getting ten people together for a GW2 raid is not an easy task. At least in GW1 you had heroes.
• The reality is, a good chunk of GW1’s elite dungeons were solo or duable. UW was commonly farmed this way, DoA even had areas that were solo’d. GW2 raids are tuned to be more difficult and the GW2 combat system is less gimmicky than what ruled during GW1 (nothing close to Shadow Form/Ursan/Spirit Spammer exists in GW2).
• Elite dungeons were in GW1 since the beginning. Up till Spirit Vale came out, everything in GW2 was relatively accessible to all players. Our GW2 community was built around the expectation of being able to access all story content. Raids are a departure from the norm for GW2.

Ultimately it doesn’t matter what GW1 did or whether people complained – if the audience of GW2 is upset that they can’t access story content gated by raids, those people have a legitimate concern. WoW devs actually talked about this issue when they were reflecting on the flaws of Burning Crusade’s raids. They had this epic story and characters a lot of players cared about but a small minority of their community was able to experience it – everyone else was missing out on this content that was such a big part of this story. If I recall correctly, the solution was to create two versions of the same dungeon/raid so story completionists could experience the story while the hardcore audience had the extended challenge they desired.

As it is, raids are fracturing the PvE and ironically the lore community and taking a bit of heat that’s not good for their longevity. If they become the PvE version of “esports” they will continue to be criticised by players who feel like they are missing out on content. If raids don’t capture the attention of enough people, how long before they move the raid devs onto projects which please more people?

some things about GW1
(1) there was no heroes till nightfall

(2)you could only enter faction elite missions if your faction guild alliance owned the town

(3)you could only enter UW/FoW if your region had favor /scrolls didnt come till later

(4)DoA had extreme Build exclusion (50% melee miss in one zone+at myllax)

compairing both at the releases of their elite content GW1 was way more walled off
IMO xD
“yes there was changes later on but raids is waaaaaaay less restrictive at its release”

Shiren.9532:

some of it is even rewritten history

Which part is that?

Closest thing I saw as ‘seems rewritten’ is that the White Mantle overthrew the throne – which isn’t entirely false. We don’t know the circumstances behind King Jadon’s fleeing the throne, and we know that the White Mantle came into being before the charr invasion (the first Test of the Chosen took place 5 years before the events of Prophecies – e.g., 3 years before the Searing).

For all we know, Jadon fled the throne at sword-point because of the White Mantle (without Saul’s knowledge – or with).

Furthermore, this recap is based on the Pact Squad Leader’s knowledge of history – which is prone to errors. Ever since War in Kryta, we knew that the Shining Blade portrayed Saul D’Alessio as a tyrant and liar, despite we players knowing he was at least partly honest and caring.

Shiren.9532:

Only Factions elite dungeons had the same or more people required than GW2 raids. Getting ten people together for a GW2 raid is not an easy task. At least in GW1 you had heroes.

No henchmen or heroes were allowed in elite dungeons in Prophecies of Factions (excluding Tombs and Sorrow’s Embrace, but henchmen in Tombs was suicide and SE was as much an elite mission as Arah is a raid).

So this argument seems silly. No one complained about the story denied to them in UW/FoW/Urgoz/Deep before Nightfall came out – at least not in large numbers.

And then consider accessibility to those areas (favor for UW/FoW, ownership of HzH/Cavalon), and how for years you could only have 3 heroes (thus you needed at least one other person anyways) even after they were introduced (and even then heroes are vastly inferior to players), honestly raids feel far more accessible to the average joe.

Shiren.9532:

The reality is, a good chunk of GW1’s elite dungeons were solo or duable. UW was commonly farmed this way, DoA even had areas that were solo’d. GW2 raids are tuned to be more difficult and the GW2 combat system is less gimmicky than what ruled during GW1 (nothing close to Shadow Form/Ursan/Spirit Spammer exists in GW2).

People are already doing wing 1 bosses with self-given handicaps like no armor, fewer teams, not using certain mechanics, etc.

While none has been solo’d yet (afaik), folks have done Gorseval with 7 players instead of 10 (if not fewer). Just like the elite dungeons were not solo’able at first, given time people will find ways to do low-number raids just as people figured out how to do solo Lupicus.

Shiren.9532:

Elite dungeons were in GW1 since the beginning. Up till Spirit Vale came out, everything in GW2 was relatively accessible to all players. Our GW2 community was built around the expectation of being able to access all story content. Raids are a departure from the norm for GW2.

Except it’s still accessible by everyone. They just need to find a group for it – no different than needing to find a group for dungeons.

Accessibility to raids is very little different than accessibility to Arah.

So I really don’t get these complaints of accessibility. Many of the people complaining also say they’ll never do raids – which puts the fault on them not ArenaNet because they don’t even try.

Konig Des Todes.2086:

Shiren.9532:

some of it is even rewritten history

Which part is that?

Closest thing I saw as ‘seems rewritten’ is that the White Mantle overthrew the throne – which isn’t entirely false. We don’t know the circumstances behind King Jadon’s fleeing the throne, and we know that the White Mantle came into being before the charr invasion (the first Test of the Chosen took place 5 years before the events of Prophecies – e.g., 3 years before the Searing).

For all we know, Jadon fled the throne at sword-point because of the White Mantle (without Saul’s knowledge – or with).

Furthermore, this recap is based on the Pact Squad Leader’s knowledge of history – which is prone to errors. Ever since War in Kryta, we knew that the Shining Blade portrayed Saul D’Alessio as a tyrant and liar, despite we players knowing he was at least partly honest and caring.

You are correct, the part about the throne is what I was referring to. I said rewritten as opposed to retcon because ArenaNet is using their unreliable narrator trope again.

As to the rest of your post, I think you are out of touch with what the average GW2 player is capable of. I was in a VG pug yesterday (VG, a boss that has been out since November last year) and we had both an ele and a warrior pulling aggro away from the tank because they had toughness gear. That group constantly failed to reach green circles, their break bars were far too slow and people were blaming the healer because they weren’t getting healed through seeker damage before the first green circle even spawned. This is the first boss in the first raid.

Some very skilled players are beating bosses with handicaps but unlike GW1, no-one is soloing large chunks of the raids (nothing like Sliver Armor, Spirit Spammer or Shadow Form exists in GW2). Look on the GW2 guild recruitment subreddit at raiding guild recruitment posts. Even this week there are several raid guilds which never killed Sabetha and are still trying to reliably down Gorseval and VG.

You can argue that raids are accessible until you are blue in the face, but join ten pug groups on lfg and I bet less than five will kill the boss they are forming for. The harsh reality for anyone who thinks raids are accessible is that Blizzard – arguably the one company that understands MMOs and their players more than anyone else seeing as their audience is larger than several competitors combined – decided raids were too elite.

It doesn’t matter what GW1 did – that game is a decade old and it wasn’t perfect. The fact is, many players are unhappy with lore and story locked behind raids. Many players are expressing they are unable to participate in this content for a variety of reasons. That’s a fact, it’s not something you can dismiss by saying “I personally think raids are easy” or “GW1 did the same thing” – neither of those things are solutions for people who are saying right now they are unable to complete the content.

Chances are, if you played GW1 and regular post in lore forums and have completed raid wing one, you are in the minority of GW2 players. Your situation is different from these other people’s.

To get back on topic (lore richer than Living World) after seeing more of wing two, I’d say it’s fairly similar in terms of scattered papers and references to different things (Prosperity was like this, Silverwastes is full of scraps hinting at White Mantle and the bandits). There is considerably less story in terms of character dialogue and NPCs but given how unpopular that kind of content is in fractals, it’s probably for the best. They’ve done a good job of separating the lore and story into opt-in pieces you explore at your own pace, rather than cut scenes, cinematics and talking heads which makes your party resent anyone who forces them to watch it your tenth time through the raid, if you’re lucky enough to be able to skip it at all. It references a rich well of GW1 lore and events (which Scarlet was unable to do seeing as she was mostly new stories that couldn’t even reference GW2’s core game) but in terms of generating new rich lore for GW2, I think we still have to see how wing two turns out.

Shiren.9532:

You can argue that raids are accessible until you are blue in the face, but join ten pug groups on lfg and I bet less than five will kill the boss they are forming for.

I… would call that accessible elite content.

Inaccessible elite content, to me, would be as if 1 out of 10 pug runs beat VG, and 5 out of 10 well established groups beat VG.

So I guess the issue comes down to how one defines “accessible”. Anyone can enter the raid, and you have a 50-50 chance, roughly, of beating the boss with pugs. This chance will only get better with time as people make better guides for the mechanics – just as dungeons began as something semi-challenging and ended up with ‘this is how you solo it’ and ‘clear in 5 minutes’ stuff.

In time, the harsh reality is that raids will not get updated and becomes more accessible. Even now, they’re more accessible than most inaccessible elite content.

I think the idea of them being richer is simply because it does use some old and established lore.

While nostalgia might play an factor here, I think the main reason is that the “new” lore, GW2 is trying to establish, just doesn`t feel good enough in compairson to the the “older” ones right now.

Too many questions, too many weird turns, too many loose ends.

While everyone wants to know how it continues, i believe a lot of people also fear the many many unfinished parts of the story that might never be concluded.

The white mantle story was “concluded” in the original Guild Wars, with only few “big” questions and the raid is actually taking them is about to answer them (we will see how this will play out).

GW2 and HoT does not try to answer at the moment. While they include the old elements and try to tackle some older mysteries it is just focused on creating their own path, their own story.

While this is certainly not bad, it just feels like they don`t use the fundament they build upon isn`t unsed to it`s fullest and they just try to build a tower on top of it.
The higher it gets, the more it will tumble if it doesnt expand at the bottom.

Right now the raid is giving people what they crave for. A conclusion to something, which is still missing from the living world and HoT.

Even if people are not knowing what the white mantle it, if they are just a bit interested in the lore they will stumble upon their significance. They hear other players talk about them, they hear the veterans, they will get pulled along or be intruiged.

While some are put off, like the people who are not willing to do a bit of research or dont read the information that is scattered in the raid, many will find enough to stay invested.

I mean, WoW wouldn`t work, if people would complain that there is lore from the good old strategy game time.

Konig, I recall you complaining a few months after release about how all the juicy lore in Arah was locked behind content that only the elitists who mostly cared about loot and challenge rather than the lore could get through. :P

(Paraphrasing somewhat, since it was close to three years ago now…)

I think there are a few other distinctions to be made between the GW1 elite missions and the raids:

First, the GW1 elite missions are essentially side quests and epilogues to the main story. FoW and the UW had some rich lore in them, but they weren’t part of the story. Urgoz’ Warren and the Deep were at most tangentially related. DoA and the last Stone Summit dungeon were epilogues to the main story of Nightfall and EotN respectively – you could complete the main story and consider yourself to have completed the story without worrying about the mopping up. (Think in terms of a novel – if Nightfall was a novel, would the author dedicate another five chapters at the end to Mallyx after the big climax with Abaddon? Probably not. Unless it’s Tolkein, and even then, the point of the Scouring was to show how the hobbits had changed from their experiences and how the events had affected the Shire: a bunch of established heroes beating up on Abaddon’s generals after beating up on Abaddon just doesn’t fill the same narrative purpose.)

The raid… well, we don’t know at this point whether it’s going to be part of the main story moving forward or a side quest. If it’s the former, then that’s a part of the main story that a lot of people are missing out on. If it’s the latter, then they’ve just relegated the White Mantle and Mursaat to the same status as Kanaxai.

Second, the GW1 elite missions pretty much used the same mechanics as the rest of the game, toned up. It largely didn’t have DPS checks – if you wanted to take things slowly and carefully, you could, and the only punishment was that it would take longer and thus you wouldn’t get the same ratio of loot per time spent to the speedclearers. The closest thing to an explicit DPS check that I recall was Shiro’s Meditation of the Reaper, and that was in the main story and tuned appropriately. In the raids, the DPS checks are often the main hurdle to overcome.

Additionally, there’s also the element that the boss fights in the raids are basically endurance events. If you’ve got the gear (which I’ll get to in my third point…) then completing the raid is basically a matter of ten people going through fairly simple mechanics for six to eight minutes without any of them making a mistake (at least a significant enough mistake to cost the raid). My experience is that after a few attempts it stops being something that’s fun and starts being a mix of stress and boredom – boredom because you’re basically doing exactly the same things over and over and over and over again, and stress because one relatively small mistake and you could be responsible for the whole team having to do exactly the same things over yet again. For me, the combination of being bored and stressed basically translates to ‘work’ – the reason I told my guild that I’d consider filling in gaps for raid teams to help out but wouldn’t take the place of someone who genuinely wanted to be there was that I realised that after the first four hours of banging our collective heads against that wall, I realised that I would have enjoyed myself more and have received more meaningful remuneration if I’d spent that time doing the job I’m paid to do. (Not that it was really an option to do work at that time instead of raiding, but it’s the principle that counts.) I understand that some people do enjoy the raid mechanics, and more power to them I guess, but the fact remains that the raids are something quite different in feel to the base game, while Guild Wars 1’s elite missions had the same feel as the base game except with the difficulty turned up. If you face a setback in one of the GW1 elite missions, then as long as you didn’t wipe or fail an NPC defence event, then you could generally recover and have another go. With the raids, just being a little slow in your damage output (so much for breaking the berserker meta…) is enough to have to start again.

Third, there’s the fact that Guild Wars 1 stuck to its guns about skill over time spent, while Guild Wars 2 has Ascended gear that is very expensive for the average player to obtain (especially with damask requiring a hundred bolts of silk per bolt of damask…), which gets even more expensive if you want multiple sets in order to be able to fulfill different roles in a raid, or if the build you were using gets nerfed into the ground and you need to replace your gear (yes, you can transmute it to different stats, but that’s still an expense that you may have to repeat if you switched back). ArenaNet sold Guild Wars 2 initially on the promise that it was like Guild Wars 1 and that top-end stats would be easy to obtain and more valuable stuff would only be about getting more impressive skins, and that went out the window within months with Ascended. They then damped down the outcry on that by promising that Ascended would only really be relevant for fractals and was intended for those people who like “beef up your numbers so you can fight enemies who have bigger numbers” types of progression – which was somewhat fair enough, since you can experience the stories of the fractals at the low tiers without reaching the point where agony is a major issue. Well, that also went out the window when we were told that the raids were balanced for people in full Ascended. And unlike low-level fractals or the regular/hard mode split of Guild Wars 1, there is no less-frustrating mode for people who just want to experience the story. It’s beat what is billed as the most difficult PvE content in the game – after getting together a team of ten – or miss out entirely.

Most of that apply to GW1 one mistake usually ended in a full party wipe /restarting all of the mission no wp/checkpoints

also i wouldnt call the added PvE skills in GW1 “sticking to its guns” (yeah you didnt have to use them but it was expected with pug “plus the title grind”
and taking it slow rarely was something pugs did “unless you get lucky and get nice people but the same can happen in GW2”

had anet used any other word then “Raid” i bet this would have been tottally diffant xD

Apart from areas where you need to keep NPCs arrive, all you needed is for one person to get away with Rebirth (or some other suitable strategy for ressing the party) and you were able to recover and go again. Can’t do that with the raids – can’t run away, and unlike the rest of the game, you can’t res someone who’s defeated at all.

The PvE skills did offer some reward to grind, yes, but a) content wasn’t made to require them (you could argue DoA with Lightbringer, but apart from that most GW1 elite missions were made and beaten before they were introduced) and b) you could get those skills to a usable state with relatively little grind, particularly after the scaling was adjusted a year or so afterwards in response to the backlash. I didn’t like the PvE skills either for a number of reasons, but getting full Ascended when the damask alone is worth around 70g* for medium or heavy armour (let alone the cost of getting your crafting to 500 in the first place) is an entirely different scale.

(As an aside, too, PvE skills at least had the fig leaf of being horizontal progression (they were too powerful relative to regular skills, but nevertheless). Ascended gear is purely “your numbers are bigger so you can fight enemies with bigger numbers in turn” progression. When content gets gated by being designed on the assumption that people have it – when most people don’t - it becomes a requirement to spend time preparing to have fun rather than playing the game how you want to. I think there was something about that in the GW2 manifesto or somewhere else in the prerelease propaganda somewhere.)

*Whoops, forgot that the insignia required 3 damask apiece. So, with the elonian leather squares, that’s over 60g for the damask patches alone, plus salvaging an average of 5 exotics for the dark matter globs, crystalline dust worth a couple of gold, plus the cost of the gossamer insignia itself, just for the insignia alone. This is a major investment for the average player. Repeat that six times for an entire armour set, and that’s somewhere around 400 gold just for the insignias. As someone who doesn’t enjoy farming, I simply don’t have that sort of money on my account. (Note, this is partially because I do have some wealth in commodities, including commodities that would go towards ascended equipment. The point, however, still stands. My wealth level is probably about typical or even on the high end for a player who doesn’t engage in farming activity, and that’s at a level where a full set of crafted exotics would probably clean me out entirely… and that’s after playing since release. Getting those resources together is a much, much, much bigger grind than any of the PvE tracks except Kurzick/Luxon ever were.)

draxynnic.3719:

Konig, I recall you complaining a few months after release about how all the juicy lore in Arah was locked behind content that only the elitists who mostly cared about loot and challenge rather than the lore could get through. :P

(Paraphrasing somewhat, since it was close to three years ago now…)

If memory serves me right, the complaint wasn’t that it was inaccessible, but that it’s hard to find a group that won’t rush through the cinematics and threaten to kick you (if not actually do so) if you take your time.

Which isn’t an issue with raids because there is no skippable cinematic.

draxynnic.3719:

First, the GW1 elite missions are essentially side quests and epilogues to the main story.

[…]

The raid… well, we don’t know at this point whether it’s going to be part of the main story moving forward or a side quest. If it’s the former, then that’s a part of the main story that a lot of people are missing out on. If it’s the latter, then they’ve just relegated the White Mantle and Mursaat to the same status as Kanaxai.

And so far, so is the raid. An epilogue/side story. Bobby Stein has stated in the past – paraphrasing this – that the raid story won’t be necessary to know moving forward, but it will help bridge into Season 3. So its story, while thicker, is equivalent to Tombs, which acted as a bridge into Nightfall, or Sorrow’s Embrace, which acted as a bridge into Eye of the North (though far less so).

draxynnic.3719:

the fact remains that the raids are something quite different in feel to the base game, while Guild Wars 1’s elite missions had the same feel as the base game except with the difficulty turned up.

This seems the same in GW2 to me. Just as Factions, Nightfall, and Eye of the North introduced better enemies in the base of their games, HoT does too, and the elite missions for each release was tougher versions of those, sometimes with unique mechanics (such as the environmental effects in Urgoz and the Deep, unique to them and RoT HM/Mallyx).

draxynnic.3719:

If you face a setback in one of the GW1 elite missions, then as long as you didn’t wipe or fail an NPC defence event, then you could generally recover and have another go. With the raids, just being a little slow in your damage output (so much for breaking the berserker meta…) is enough to have to start again.

Just the fight where you failed, which is no different than GW1’s elite missions – so long as you didn’t wipe in GW1. If you wiped in GW1, you started from scratch. Wipe at Dhuum? That’s the entire Underworld to redo with minimal rewards. Wipe at Sabetha? That’s just Sabetha fight to restart – and if you leave, you start after Gorseval’s death, instead of from the beginning.

So gonna have to disagree there.

Third, there’s the fact that Guild Wars 1 stuck to its guns about skill over time spent, while Guild Wars 2 has Ascended gear that is very expensive for the average player to obtain

While helpful, it’s not necessary to have ascended gear to do the first two wings; just as it wasn’t necessary to use the meta builds or PvE skills in GW1’s elite missions.

And you completely forgot about heroes and PvE skills, which made PvE vastly easier. Yeah, armor and gear effectiveness stayed the same, but they stilled inserted power creeps elsewhere.

draxynnic.3719:

Apart from areas where you need to keep NPCs arrive, all you needed is for one person to get away with Rebirth (or some other suitable strategy for ressing the party) and you were able to recover and go again. Can’t do that with the raids – can’t run away, and unlike the rest of the game, you can’t res someone who’s defeated at all.

Except for Dhuum, which locked the area, and almost all of Urgoz/Deep which had doors close as you progress (potentially locking slow players out of the rest of the run), and Tombs where aggro was pretty much the entire map. And most wipes were caused from those defense events, so running wasn’t an option most of the time, and even when it did – the aggro range was larger than it is in GW2.

Even if you wipe at raids, you can go right back to the fight you were in. Wipe at Vale Guardian? No need to kill the three elites before it! Wipe at Tormented Spirits in UW? Gotta redo the whole thing over again – including entry fee.

draxynnic.3719:

Ascended gear is purely “your numbers are bigger so you can fight enemies with bigger numbers in turn” progression.

A 5% stat improvement is hardly effective.

I don’t consider heroes breaking skill over time spent because they were easy to get (you got most of them through doing the story).

Regarding the difference: Most of the GW1 elite mission “boss fights” were the boss accompanied by various adds. When you consider Tombs and Sorrow’s Embrace, the ‘bosses’ were on the same level, relative to the rest of the mobs in the zones, as your regular boss you’d find with an aura anywhere in the game, using largely the same skills as available to the players. FoW and pre-Dhuum UW didn’t even have those, it was all regular mobs that happened to be high-level mobs. You started to see more ‘boss fights’ appearing in later installments, but almost all of those were still a case of ’there’s a boss, but there’s also a bunch of adds to deal with, so it feels very similar to regular gameplay with maybe a couple of added complications.

The raid bosses? They stick to the tank, so everybody else has little or no threat from the boss itself (never liked tank-and-spank mechanics, and boss fights in the rest of the game generally have some variability in who they attack rather than sticking to the highest-toughness character like superglue). The threat is all from the mechanics, and my feeling from the Spirit Vale Guardian was basically that as long as nobody messed up on the mechanics, nobody would die (yes, the mechanics are hard enough that people can mess up, but that’s not the point) – unless you got a green circle in the bad and then it was game over (although that’s arguably the result of the tank not rotating fast enough). You’re fighting the mechanics, not the boss itself.

Similar with Gorseval: he’s a bit more pro-active than the Guardian due to AoE attacks and knockdowns, but if you fail Gorseval, it’s not because of the damage he does during the general fighting phases, it’s because your squad failed one of the many DPS checks in that fight (they’re basically equivalent to Shiro’s Impossible Odds – break it or die – except the amount of damage you need to do it as a proportion to what the typical team can do is a LOT higher).

There’s few if any kills along the way, so traits and abilities that are linked to killing something just don’t get to trigger.

The only fight outside the raids that feels similar is Mordremoth with the gimmicky ‘launch into the air with the buggy mechanics or die’, which is another case of fighting the mechanics… and for the record, I hate that too. It’s also probably no coincidence that that fight is an immediate precursor to the raids both in terms of development and story.

Regarding that extra 5%… that’s huge when the fights are basically DPS checks, and they’re calibrated so you need to have pretty close to optimum DPS in order to pass. To pluck some numbers out of the air as examples, let’s say that the boss is calibrated so that you need 95% of your squads theoretical maximum DPS output in full exotics to pass the DPS check. That extra 5% you can get from Ascended isn’t just increasing your chance of succeeding by 5%, it is in fact doubling your margin for error.

If the raid fights weren’t built around enrage timers and DPS check phases calibrated to be hard to pass, then yeah, 5% probably would not be much. But they are, and the way the raid fights are calibrated, it’s less about how much damage you do, and more about how much damage you do over or under the minimum required to pass a DPS check. And when that minimum required is pretty close to the maximum you can do with full exotics… than yeah, that 5% makes a huge difference.