Guild Wars 2

Strange thing is, some bosses seem to be rewarding loot properly.

I killed xera, and she dropped loot normally. I killed cairn and sabetha, and neither dropped loot. All that with 3 different pug groups.

I think the question that beg answering is will we be compensated? The game seems to register the kill properly, but not attributing the rewards. I pug most of the time and finding a group and killing bosses like sab isn’t an easy task most of the time, I think it would demonstrate Anet respects its players.

I don’t do a lot of PvP, so I’ll talk about the PvE aspect of the thief.

Right now every profession has at least one build dedicated to provide support or has a mechanic that interacts well with the raid comp. Right now, thief’s main selling point is how stupidly easy it is to have high DPS output. Thieves offer zero support when they come into a raid, just pure DPS.

Now don’t get me wrong, that DPs is quite high, it can even be higher than eles under the right circumstances. However, I think that it would add a lot of flavor to thieves if they had a proper support/DPS build that wasn’t completely useless.

Let’s be honest here, I’m pretty sure everybody here who has beaten any of the bosses, will fail rarely because of the enrage timer.
Mechanics will do that for you just fine.
Analyze the situation with me. Knowing full well that without a timer, people will try going for more tanky specs, that’s a given. However More tankiness means less DPS everybody should agree on that. Less DPS means more time to take down a boss, everyone should also agree to that.

The more time there is, the higher the chance for someone to misstep and fail somehow, whether is it porting into the danger zone in VG or failing to get 4 people in the circle for instance can get quite deadly for any raid, or just getting in the flame line on sabetha(which is instagib, mind you, regardless of gear), or having kard still up when sabetha comes back. Even without a timer the more people that will die due to mistakes the longer it’ll take and more time it’ll take to take the boss down. And the cycle continues. Would it make the bosses easier? Yes and no. Again, mechanics are what kills people and raids, people failing to see that are naive. Would more tanky builds be used for higher survivability? certainly, but again, that means less DPS and longer TTK for the boss and higher mistake rates and fail rate.

Remove the timer on vale guardian, get 10 nomads to last phase, how many people can claim they can keep up with this for a full 5-10 minutes without saying skill isn’t involved?

There’s already soft enrage timer on two of the bosses, VG has softish in the form of the 5th phase, gorseval even has 2 with the updrafts and charged souls, why is it even necessary to have a hard enrage timer that essentially makes every build but 1 or 2 for each profession viable, which among other things excluded thieves from most raid comps raids because of their low DPS.

I agree that timers are lazy design and the analogy of the car just doesn’t work, simply put because it’s not even remotely the same. It’s more like an F1 pilot being given a time limit to complete a lap. There’s no need for that, as if he’s too slow he’ll lose anyway to other racers.

The problem with precursor crafting is that it’s a god kitten PiA to gather all the ascended materials and the second collection is just a nightmare. First collection was pretty cool for spark and the third one really felt good. I ended up buying most of what I needed instead of just waiting for the time gate.

Taking a look at the first collection for flameseeker prophecies and it seems like a lot of fun too.
Essentially, Anet should reduce the overall mats needed to craft the precursor, while making the seeing the world and completing content part more important and do away with everything related to time gating.

The overall idea is great, but as always with anet, implementation is kitten poor.