Guild Wars 2

I am currently a bit too casual to get into raids. Ideally I would love to just PUG and get kills within the first 3 tries. Obviously this doesn’t happen so I can’t be bothered with raids. SAD

apharma.3741:

Yes, well done, you found that absolute niche place where it offered the fastest clear time with some of the best players in the game using a strategy most pug groups would never do.

In other words a situation so completely detached from the thread it might as well have it’s own zip code.

You can run minstrels, skip the extra healer and 9 man a boss which isn’t completely outside the realms of pug groups. Even skipping a 2nd PS warrior if you have eles which can fill in the gaps on might without losing much damage. However in the context of this thread and most raid groups they will not run minstrels and it won’t be the best for most bosses or most groups.

Would you like me to add a disclaimer to my statement saying it is a broad generalisation across all raid wings and that these niche builds may in fact offer the quickest clear time in extremely organised groups doing unconventional tactics?

Wait I thought this was the whole point of the thread. You don’t bring meta builds aka cookie cutter builds to pugs. Just because it is “optimal” doesn’t mean it is optimal for your group. Read my reason 3. You have to adapt your build based on the players you have in your group and use the DPS meter to justify a so called bad build(your minstrels example).

One can even go as far as going nomad tank guard and justify it by saying “I’m getting all the aggro so you guys can do vacuum DPS and our group DPS increased by 20%”

So you know the classic Dead DPS = no DPS? Well here is another thing that you should keep in mind that I feel not alot of people want to admit. Just because you are running meta builds, it doesn’t mean your DPS is good. In fact if you are some one that pugs, chances are your meta build DPS is crap. Why is it crap?
Well
1: the DPS rotation complicated and you are just can’t be bothered to practice that.
2: the build requires you to stay in melee most of the time and you are probably ranging because you fear dead DPS = no DPS.
3: The meta build may be dependent on buffs/support from other classes which your group doesn’t have.
So how do you improve on your dps if you are this type of player? Run a random build that will up your DPS by experimenting and using a DPS meter as a way to gauge your DPS vs the group. And when some one trashes your “kitten build” you can justify it with the DPS meter. Like for example in a random fractal group which we kept dying to the boss, people blamed my P/P teef build because its not meta and only scrubs use p/p right? I pointed out my DPS was literaly 2x the next highest, shuts them up instantly. /rant

Absurdo.8309:

There is other content if you can’t find an hour to raid. Like you mentioned, fractals or dungeons. Other content on this game also requires a certain level of time commitment, like dragon stand.

Dungeons and fractals are not new content, I have done them enough. Dragon stand is on a timer and I can’t do it on most days because of it. So what does that mean? Basically I play guild wars 2 about once every 2 weeks when DS timer aligns with my schedule.

Dear Arena Net,
I am a player who have a irregular schedule for playing games. I have a full time job and real life events that prevent me from logging into the game at the same time everyday. I love guild wars and has been playing since 2005. I am not sure if I am your targeted demographic, you know the one who sometimes only has 30minutes to an hour to play the game. As a result I can’t really PUG raids because setting up the team simply takes way too long and its frustrating to have to get new players when they rage quit after a wipe which results in more waiting. Waiting to have fun is not fun.
I hope you have not gone into development for your next raid yet because I feel it should be important to take community feedback on reducing the barrier of entry to raids. For me personally I can’t raid because I don’t want to schedule my life around a raiding schedule with a guild and I feel I should be able to raid without the need of being in a guild while still maintaining the same level of challenge. I believe you should introduce raid events in parallel that can be tackled in any order like guild wars 1 underworld events and have each event completion give raid shards. The events are balanced around different party sizes with 2-3 of these events being the current raid boss difficulty. You can have smaller events that is of the difficulty of dungeon bosses. This allows players such as myself to have the option to go into the raid and maybe solo 1-3 events that is as difficult as a Lupicus fight but will still be unable to complete the whole raid. It also allows other players who don’t have time to get a full 10 man group but can get 5 to do a smaller portion of the raid, get some reward and get their feet wet into the raid environment. If you are wondering how is an event balanced around 5 players good for a content that is balanced around 10? Well like in underworld, you can split your squad up and tackle multiple events at the same time. This allows for the players to adjust their own difficulty at the expense of time spent in the raid. Like in underworld, if you decided to 10 man each of the lesser events, it would be much slower than if your group decided to split up the squad to better fit the encounter. Suddenly your 5man no updraft gorseval allows your other 5man team to speed up the raid by doing other events.

Raids are definitely not what I expected from GW2. The whole experience is very linear and is just a series of boss fights. I prefer raids where exploration is a bigger factor and one where you must complete a series of tasks in any order to complete the raid much like underworld in gw1. The entire dungeon was the size of a zone which made it feel super epic. Also what was great about this style of raiding is that it allows teams to split their groups up into smaller units of any number size to tackle the events in parallel. People that enjoy soloing can get to enjoy coming up with solo tactics for given events and people that enjoy bigger groups can also enjoy the raid as well. The events also allow players who had limited time to do something quick and feel rewarded. If I had 20 minutes in gw1, I could go to underworld and do someting that I felt was satisfying and rewarding, I could easily to go to plains to farm banshees and get a few ectos or farm the smite crawlers and get some ectos. These trash events were rewarding and challenging. Current raid design is basically an all or nothing reward system which I feel does not fit the Guild Wars philosophy of play for 30 minutes and feel like you did something. Anyways I feel raids are a good idea, I just feel that the current implementation is flawed in player experience.

So when is the ETA for the new fractals?

Hopefully the FoTM team can release boss encounters that are just as challenging as the raid bosses.

I have a question, what times do you guys do FoTM?

Raizen.7981:

Swagger.1459:

Always common builds and lack of variety.

That’s forced to you by players. Have you seen the 10 [insert whatever profession] raid runs? Please watch them.

Actually player behavior is caused the the system that the developers has set into the game. In other MMOs that has kill stealing, you are more likely to see toxic players running around and raging at others. Kill stealing mechanics causes players to not want other players around as it is slowing down their progress towards their quest reward. If you need a rare monster kill that spawns every 5minutes, and you have been camping at its spawn point for an hour, I’m sure you will rage at the person that stole the kill from you. The same thing can be said about raids where the mechanics are designed to force players to kill bosses based on speed. If your build does not boost your party’s DPS, you are simply not wanted. Another thing is clearing raids as fast as possible is an increase in your personal monetary rewards.

As some one who is not willing to schedule my life around a guild’s raiding schedule, how do I go about raiding?

Actually if u have dungeon recipes u can still make a lot of money running dungeons.

That’s what they said about dungeons 3 years ago. Currently raids are already on farm mode for top guilds, once pugs can start farming them, then I think raid might be too easy.

They should move venom share to another trait line, like deadly arts and make mug base line.

Eponet.4829:

EcoRI.9273:

SirMoogie.9263:

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EcoRI.9273:

Here is a list of why I think Engie is just better.

“Better” does not mean “necessary” or “only choice”. The original question is about thieves having a place, not thieves being the best at one particular thing.

Engie is like the iPhone 6s and Thief is like the iPhone 5. When both cost the same, which would you choose?

It’s more like a laptop vs a desktop of the same price.

One’s more powerful, the other is more mobile. It depends on what your need is.

Except Mesmer is better at mobility in PvE so if you really needed mobility for encounters, chronomancers would be the go to. So Thief is like the macbook pro i5 and Mesmer is like macbook pro i7(alacrity buff, quickness buff) and both are at the same price, which would you choose?

SirMoogie.9263:

[

EcoRI.9273:

Here is a list of why I think Engie is just better.

“Better” does not mean “necessary” or “only choice”. The original question is about thieves having a place, not thieves being the best at one particular thing.

Engie is like the iPhone 6s and Thief is like the iPhone 5. When both cost the same, which would you choose?

SirMoogie.9263:

EcoRI.9273:

it doesn’t look promising for the future of raids to include thieves when engies are better in every way.

Even if this is the case, and I find it quite difficult to measure “better” in this game when there is so much that can be done, this doesn’t mean there is no place for thieves in raids. It will be a rare group of friends or guild mates that wouldn’t bring one of their own along if the profession can contribute to raid success. Thieves would have to be in some miserable state not to bring anything to the table, but thankfully this isn’t the case. I have played many dungeons with thieves in my party and the content didn’t suddenly become impossible. I imagine raids will be much the same. An engi may be optimal, but a thief is viable. In the end, if you’re playing with friends, they will be fine with you playing the viable option. If you aren’t playing with friends I suggest you find a new guild where people will be welcoming to a non-meta, but viable, profession/build.

Well that is always the case in the game, a bear bow ranger is totally viable. There is no benefit to bring a bear bow to a party and the only reason why one would do so is because they just like the play style. Any class is perfectly fine if that is how you view the game. But for the players who look for beneficial reasons to bring a thief, there really isn’t much to work with since the only thing thieves are good at is running to the next boss event. When bosses are melting in 10seconds you can shift your team comp focus to running but when raid bosses(vale guardian) die in 6minutes and start becoming the bottleneck, the niche role that thieves have are pretty much useless.

Here is a list of why I think Engie is just better.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/dungeons/Engie-Thief-in-dungeons-fractals/first#post5637871

Given how aetherblade dungeon,the molten facility, and vale guardian is structured, and to some extent FoTM, it doesn’t look promising for the future of raids to include thieves when engies are better in every way. Also thief initiative system doesn’t benefit greatly from quickness/alacrity which are powerful boon.

Ryn.6459:

Yeah, nothing new. IB just nerf just made it more visible. I also believe engi>ele by the way.

This and the vale guardian fight, it doesn’t look good for thieves if they don’t get significant buffs.

Well the thing is in Fractals Engineer shines even brighter than Thieves compared to dungeons because most of the content cant be skipped and boss fights tends to last longer so DPS becomes more important.

My tears already ran dry when I realized engie>>thief against the vale guardian.

Currently Engineers are basically the better versions of Thieves in PvE.

1: Engineer DPS >> Thief
Power and Condition Engineers have significantly more DPS than their Thief counterparts. Even with the the elite daredevil spec, engie dps is still waaaaaay better.

2: Engineer Stealth < Thief Stealth
With the introduction of the stealth gyro, engineers are pretty much decent enough to stealth through content in dungeons and fractals.

3: Engineer soft CC >>>>>>>>>>>>> Thief soft CC.
A condition pistol pistol Engineer has a crap ton of cripple, chill and immobilize -
pistol 5, nades 4, bomb 5, mortar 3 or supple crate net turret.
Thief on the other hand has a super expensive immobilize(sword 2) that is unrealistic to upkeep and if the current meta of sword/pistol, dagger/dagger you can’t even chain cripple and immobilize together. Engies also currently has a crap ton of blinds in nades 3, bomb 4 and mortar 4.

4: Thief mobility >> Engineer mobility.
Ok this one thief wins but in the current dungeons and fractals, extreme mobility is pretty useless in boss fights.(thief extreme mobility was also pretty useless on the vale guardian)

5: Thief hard CC >= Engineer hard CC
Ok so thieves have an unlimited amount of hard CC so they win but Engineers also have a crap ton of hard CC as well, and when you factor in the fact that you have 4 other teammates who can also provide some form of hard CC, you can basically break defiance on demand with Engineers as well. So this advantage that thief has is currently useless in the current dungeons/fractals. If you look at the vale guardian fight, engineers were also pretty decent at breaking the break bar.

6: Thief blast finishers = Engineer blast finisher(out of combat). Ok so you need to blast stealth, if there is 1 other team mate helping you, you will get 15seconds of stealth regardless.

7:Engineer blast finishers >> Thief blast fnishers (in combat). Engineers dps rotations include alot of fire fields and blast finishers, if you blast with a thief in combat, that is a dps loss.

TL:DR there is absolutely no reason to bring thieves over engineers with the current combat/puzzle mechanics.

Life Pro Tip: Join lfg PUGs, find someone you think is good and around your level, add them to your friends list, keep doing that until you don’t need to use lfg anymore.

As a passionate dungeon player, I will stop doing dungeons with this new change because you have made it unfun.

yea tell me about it, i cant even find people to do the underwater dungeon at diessa plateau

new legendaries look like poop. I guess i will just burn my money on more perma contracts for my alts.

Im a perfect world where they have all the development time in the world, can balance perfectly, and have all the money they need, then this system would be great. The opportunity cost is way too high and is better spent else where.

Pretty sure progressive mechanics are already in the first boss. phase3, soft enrage, 2/3 lighted floors.

I feel the end result is the same, which is once you reach X time, you will lose. What I don’t like about this system is basically each tier of enrage timers can be ignored by the better players which effectively means the better your group is, the longer the “game over” enrage timer starts. In terms of balancing, this is horrible. It is a feedback loop where it punishes the lesser skilled players because their “game over” enrage timer starts earlier and for the more experienced players, their “game over” enrage timer starts way too late.

Well here is the thing, information is really easy to get access to today than it was 10 years ago. More players share their content via twitch/youtube/reddit. More players are internet savvy. Was trenchway DoA not something pugs do because most of them don’t know it exists? I mean hell, I know nothing about DoA farming and I consider myself very internet savvy.

Bad player and hard content is subjective. Some groups can run a clerics guardian for fotm/dungeons and do better than if they ran a berserker guardian. All the current non dps oriented builds for the raid are already in the game and was more prevalent when the game was first released. Sonic Boon warrior was insanely popular back in the days when people said dungeons were hard. Over time people got so good at the content that more DPS oriented builds just became better for those players.

optimal and average pick up groups are mutually exclusive. Current pick up groups use bearbows and necros. If you are talking about the current berserker pugs, they just copy what they see dungeon guilds run. Once dungeon guilds find out the optimal strats, then we will come full circle.

If thieves has access to fast hands, they will be instantly desired. I think the raid designers are trying to encourage people to range by introducing X mechanics such as the yellow lightning aoe where 4 people have to stand in. Thieves excel in mobility which will make them ideal for these situations where they can go into melee or range whenever they want. The 10second recharge to go into shortbow is really punishing currently for this type of playstyle.

zerk always had great cc. Icebow, tremor, gust, basilisk venom, binding blades, temporal curtain and so on.

Once people understand the mechanics, pure dps will likely be the optimal setup. I am basing this assumption from what I have seen on the first boss. Healer and face tanking is not required.

Torqbow.2839:

For a game that lacks hardcore competitive PvE, there certainly is a lot of wannabe elitists out there. It’s pretty amusing.

CS:Go, Mobas, starcraft are the most competitive. I also find it amusing when pvpers in this game think they are good.

My DPS on my Engie is total kitten compared to my DPS on my Thief because I am mediocre on Engie.

Video game players are people. Not every person in this world is nice, u will ocassioñally meet a d/bag. Of course if you meet too many of them every dingle day, then theres a saying to that;)

Be the first to leeroy into the mosscave. Thats how you herd your party. It always works.

The 1 class that i avoid like the plahue in pugs are thieves. 90% of them are shortbow camping which means they do no damage.

well even in fotm, hammer prot symbol is not that useful most of the time. The only one that gets some benefit is the guardian, most melee classes stand too far from the guardian to get it. The reason why they stand far away even in melee is because of boss cleaves.

hammer prot radius too small to be good for raids.

Can you get a permanent uptime on some of these defensive buffs? I feel wipes usually happen when people rely on active defenses that have windows where they aren’t up.

Let’s be real if a necro was “very effective” in a raid, I can’t see it being hard. It seems like as long as you know the mechanics you will do fine.
Also I probably wouldn’t want any thieves/ele if there are mechanics in the raid where you can get 1shotted easily.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/3jdjtv/designing_challenging_content/cuoh8b6

“When bosses don’t die in 5 seconds, survivability and sustainability actually becomes a thing.”

Oh look dungeon requires no skills says a dev.(At least thats how I interpret that statement.)

Quarktastic.1027:

EcoRI.9273:

Jerus.4350:

Dusk and Eco hit what I was going to say. I’m still not sure I like it, but it has it’s merits.

I think Spoj makes some great points that can be concerning, but to add, I don’t want to be stuck throwing just nades on Engi because I have to slot some other utilities for some niche situation where they go unused for the majority of the raid.

Certainly conflicted, more and more the more I think about it.

If you are slotting a utility for a niche situation then your build is just suboptimal. Part of the fun is figuring out which class can spec a util/weapon set that can somewhat deal with a niche situation while still being general purpose. Remember you have 10 classes to work with. If you like building magic the gathering decks or is familiar with Trading card games you should be able to see that slotting weapon sets/utils for niche situations is the wrong approach to optimal team comps.

To build on your magic analogy: Competitive players are allowed a 15 card “sideboard” to compliment their decks. Matches are typically played in a best two out of three scenario. Players are allowed to exchange cards from their main deck and sideboard at any point between matches. Kind of like how GW2 players are allowed to switch utilities/traits/weapons between fights.

I guess its up to how we view a match in magic compared to the raid then. Let’s say an entire wing is a match, and you are skilled lock. Each encounter would be like a series of card combos that are in your opponent’s deck. You can deal with his aggro monsters encounter, you can deal with his mana building encounters, but then he pulls out another encounter where its an enchantment that allows him to draw more cards and slowly overwhelm you. So you realized you can deal with 2/3 encounters but you dont have an answer to his third and you lost. You now have to reshuffle your utilities(side board) and start all over.

Personally speed shouldn’t be something people optimize for until they have figured out how to farm the raid. Thief imo is too squishy and can be a liability. Personally i would go warrior and GS rush for anything that requires mobility.

I can see thieves being left in the dust if there are no major trash mob skipping encounters.
I can see eles being left in the dust if boss mechanics have very hard to avoid aoes. If you look at the bosses in silverwaste, or even those 2 plant dragon bosses in living story, most of the aoes are not easier to dodge just because you are ranging it. If that is the case, eles with its low HP and low armor getting 1shotted will probably not be desired for a while until people really get the raids down to a science.

Actually a big chunk of current dungeons are done where bosses are disabled and does nothing.