Showing Posts For Elena.3642:
Quite a few interesting posts with some points I haven’t considered while writing this post and as such I would like to address some of them.
I’d highly suggest giving the first encounter of wing 3 a try, unlike VG there’s no enrage timer there so your squad can take all the time you need to clear it. It serves as a much better intoduction to raiding than VG, who’s actually one of the hardest encounters!
Yes, we actually tried that after our last fail at Vale Guardian. While I’m thankful for advice the problem is that that particular encounter requires at least someone in the group to have raid mastery to get through the tunnel to tower. As far as I am aware (and I checked a couple videos and wiki) there is no way to survive through that tunnel without mastery and no workaround that would enable the raid group where none of the members have that mastery to beat that initial step. I do plan to try and get mastery by trying to get into pug raid this weekend and then use my mesmer to maybe get my guildies successfully through encounter but that will defend if I am able to find a pug that will accept a necro that doesn’t follow current meta (aka power reaper). Thank you anyways.
I can count the number of times I’ve failed a raid due to enrage timers on the fingers of one hand. Hitting enrage timers due to low dps is almost never the reason raids fail. What actually causes groups to fail is dying to various mechanics, spending too much time ressing people, not being confident enough with the fight to actually dps the boss, that sort of thing. You only end up hitting enrage timers if half your members are dead and you’re trying to squeak out a kill with the remaining people.
It’s not like you even have to play meta builds to finish these fights either. Plenty of groups finish with varying levels of non-meta-ness. VG was even finished with just 4 people. That shows you just how far you can go off of the meta 10 man group and still finish fights. People that require strict adherence to the meta are usually the same people that don’t have a good understanding of the fights or mechanics.
Ultimately, people complaining about enrage timers are always people that don’t actually have any experience in raids. They pick that ticking clock in the corner as an easy target to complain about, not realizing that they’re complaining about the least impactful mechanic in any currently existing raid. If you want easier raids, you should be asking for anet to make versions that have less punishing mechanics, not removing the enrage timer.
You are probably right. Maybe the biggest issue is that we just haven’t tried enough. But it is really easy to blame enrage timer, exactly because last few times I and my guildies tried Vale Guardian we died to that. Ultimately – the enrage timer gives you quite a psychological pressure. I will tell you honestly – when I see that time in corner ticking down (and it is very hard to resist not looking at it) I do panic. It is like a clock ticking down to your ultimate death. I would guess, and it probably would be correct guess, that a few deaths where we did get through second split resulted precisely because of those numbers ticking down. Hell, you know what would make me kinda happy? Removing enrage indicator. Leave the timer in effect but don’t show it to players. That would help slightly. Guess I could just try to cover that part of screen too.
Might try that next time I raid.
And that’s why enrage timer is needed. It’s to prevent player to win through mass ressurection. It’s to encourage players to actually outsmart and outplay the encounter. I’m sure a lot of raiders have experienced a “messy kill”. While you got the reward, I don’t think it feels good as beating the boss super quick in 1 shot with no one getting downed, right?
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe that you cannot resurrect dead people during raid. You can resurrect only players that are in downed state. As such your argument doesn’t really apply to raiding, but still thank you for taking time to read my wall of text and reply. I also wish you luck with fractals. ^^
And look at it this way – if you’re getting angry at your squad for making a simgle mistake that ruins a ~5 minute pull, imagine how frustrated everyone is going to be when each pull takes 20 minutes. Imagine how much more often this would happen since many of the mechanics ignore defensive stats and you now have to face them 4x as much to get a kill. Imagine how bored you will be when you die 3 minutes in because you’re team can’t CC on matthias, then you have to wait another 15 minutes while they run around in their super defensive gear with people getting picked off one by one. Sure removing the enrage timer might increase your chance of a kill for each individual pull, but if you’re actually taking advantage of that by running defensive gear then your pulls will take potentially a much longer time on average.
So yeah maybe there is some small set of players for which removing the enrage timers would help but really allowing players to be successful with defensive stat sets just makes the fights less enjoyable for groups that were already having trouble.
This is something I haven’t thought about while writing my first post and after reading through this and thinking about it for a bit – I agree. You are right – extended fights would actually also leave more time to make mistakes that would ultimately lead to wipe. When I wrote this post I fixated on enrage timers as easy solution because it is – having even a couple more minutes in Vale Guardian fight would have resulted in me and my guildies successfully killing Vale Guardian. Like I mentioned in reply a bit above – it is easy to blame and fixate on them and it is quite easy mechanic to dismiss and flame on. But yes, you are right, fighting Vale Guardian for an hour and then wiping because we somehow missed a green circle spawning in corner would not be fun.
I do want to express my appreciation to the OP for having a well thought out and respectful suggestion. Although I disagree with it, it is very nice to have some well-mannered discussion.
I think that part of the issue is that the community is very split. There is the section of the community that find enjoyment from just playing different parts of the game and have a much more relaxed playstyle. Then there are the people who find enjoyment out of really challenging content and min-maxing.
Pre-HoT the ‘hardcore’ community was really desperate for some challenging content. At the start of the game they had dungeons, which were very challenging at the time. Then they had fractals. But by the time HoT came around those gametypes had become very easy for various reasons.
What it comes down to is speedrunning and lowmanning easier content just isn’t as satisfying as having legitimately challenging encounters. If the game didn’t have raids as is, the hardcore community would be the ones on the forums asking for things to be different.
Without enrage timers, you’re right, people would be able to turtle up and beat the encounters. But then people who can kill the bosses quickly would not be satisfied with the content. It is satisfying to kill quickly because we have to kill quickly.
Raids were not designed to be completed by everybody, nor should they be. There will always be some people who optimize their builds, leading to creating the meta. This will always be a fairly large portion of the community, and they need content to play. If you are not one of these people, but want to become one, then there is a lot of support for learning. If you want to keep your playstyle and don’t like to optimize, then raids are content that was not designed for you and that’s ok. There is still a whole world out there for you to enjoy.
GLHF
Thank you for nice words, even if you do not agree with suggestion itself. Also thank you for taking your time to write your own walls of text for me to read through
. Anyways, on to your post. Yes, community is split. Yes, prior to raids we did not have much of a challenge (even current T4 fractals are not actually that hard. That might change as they keep updating old ones, though). Yes, going through easy content and just getting rewards is not going to be satisfying. What bothers me the most, though, is the fact that yes, you are right – raids are not designed to be completed by everybody.
And that fact, if nothing else, is what makes me actually sad. As a person who loves unique stories and challenging, big bosses raids are a concept that I always looked for as an ultimate pve experience. It makes me quite… disappointed that a lot of people who can’t for various reasons get into raiding will never experience story, maps, and unique encounters present exactly in raiding. It is good that they are challenging, it is good that there is content that can’t be easily get through. But what is bad seems to me that the entry level to start and get through raid seems to be just too high.
I will agree to the posts here. Entirely getting rid of all enrage timers might be too much. But I feel that all people, regardless of class and skill level should have at least a bit of easier time at very first raid boss in GW 2. Because let’s face it – while I don’t know numbers and not sure if there is place to find them – not a lot of people are actually heavily into raiding. And it is not exactly easy to get into raiding after all this time. I would imagine that the quite a lot of people got discouraged and simply have wrong impression about raiding because they don’t know better. I, for example, was completely under impression that without fully following meta and perfect party composition you actually have no chance of beating any of the bosses. That is the kind of vibe I get from videos I watched on some encounters and my personal experience in failing to kill the very first boss in first wing seemed to only confirm this.
As this is the case and a lot of people are under opinion that raids are just not designed for everyone and those who do not optimize should just not attempt them, let me ask you this – is that a good thing? To me, it looks that at least slightly lowering down the difficulty bar in some way would attract more people to raiding. Is that good or bad is a whole different question, but more people trying out raids and successfully beating them maybe would melt the frosty opinion quite a few people have on raids currently. And then another expansion comes and we get new raid instead of multiple cries of ‘Oh no! Another ten people group content I will never manage to see. Guess I will pass this expansion.’ we would get ‘Yes! More epic bosses and interesting story! Pre-order now!!’ (exaggerated, but you get my point).
Let’s take some example of a progression from easy entry level to hard difficulty from fractals. One thing fractals kinda seem like they do right is increasing difficulty as you go through tiers, introducing instabilities and different mechanics. What if you applied similar concept to raiding? For example, start off bit easy – remove enrage mechanic from Vale Guardian, or extend it slightly so that even most new groups could kill it after a few tries and would get mastery. Then increase difficulty. Next boss has both soft and hard enrage mechanics. Yet another adds additional layer of complexity. That way new raid groups could get chance to unlock mastery, get 1 kill and attempt to get further and further against increasingly harder challenges. It would be just like climbing on large hill – feels easy at first, but at the top you encounter such a monster of epic proportions that you feel like typing /surrender by just looking at it.
What do you people think? As a compromise – would changing the very first boss of first wing to make it an easier ‘entry level’ fight would satisfy those who are currently hating on raids while leaving all of other bosses as a large challenge for those awesome skilled players who can beat them? Would allowing people who are just getting into raiding to have such easier ‘freebie’ be okay? I would like to hear what you all think about that. (And yes – I am aware that wing 3 escort is basically that. But it needs mastery. If it didn’t it would be nice, but can’t always have nice things.)
As I see it – all content need a carrot and a stick. Raids are not exception. And while the current raid has quite alluring little carrot (promise of legendary armor, ascended items and more), instead of letting you take a small bite and luring you deeper into rabbit hole, the rabbit holding the stick with carrot keeps beating you with stick until you either give up or take that stick and beat him with it (poor metaphor, but as I write this it is nearing 1am – sorry).
As such, once more to repeat myself, as I’m rambling – do you people think that lowering difficulty for just Vale Guardian and letting players have this lower level difficulty initial encounter and introduction to raiding would hook them enough to get them into raiding, changing their opinion and making them honestly want to get better and join raiding community? Would just giving this easier entry level be okay, or should raids just be kept as they are? Personally, I’m under opinion that something needs to change, but I can’t just yet figure out what. I want more people do raids. I want more friendly groups in LFG. I want to everyone have fun playing this great game. So please, discuss, offer suggestions and do your best so we could make raiding (and all other aspects of GW 2) as enjoyable as possible to as many people as we can.
Have fun and see you in game.
(edited by Elena.3642)