Showing Posts For Ghost.6731:
Final Boss in CoF Path 1
By simply learning to avoid an enemy’s attacks these “hard” bosses are brought down rather easily. For the Searing Effigy that means avoiding the ignite (the big red circle in melee) and therefore never taking double damage from the rest of his attacks. Learn to dodge roll when he raises his fist to avoid the frontal cone and ground slam. By mastering these little techniques you can go from being down half the fight, to only using your heal once in a while when you make a mistake.
Hope you all enjoy the video. I’d love to hear tips and tricks you’ve figured out about other bosses.
Wow, thanks for all the input on my post here guys. Both sides of the issue bring up some good points.
I do agree that GW2 does not need the same style raids as WoW has. I have been part of a full clear heroic mode WoW raiding guild and I don’t think that is the direction that GW2 should go. If you make raiding about gear progression then you destroy it’s optionality. If the best gear comes from raiding, then you have to raid to be the best, therefore everyone who raids is good and everyone else is bad. It breaks down the balance GW2 wants to achieve.
Raids would have to have a different incentive to succeed. Because the focus of the raid is bringing guilds together and giving them direction and purpose I would suggest that raids benefit them in the greatest way. If I were designing the raid I would have each raid start at a Guild Hall. When the guild starts a run that is where everyone they invite to the raid meets, gets stocked up, and gets ready to invade the enemy stronghold of the week. Each Guild Hall would start as a small palisade or fort, but as the guild completes runs that they orchestrate they upgrade their Guild Hall so that the best guilds have an amazing castle with banners and tournament grounds. Let’s be honest, in the end, good raiders and good players like nothing better than to show off to lesser more inexperienced players. A Guild Castle would allow them to do just that without destroying the gear balance GW2 strives to achieve. It’s not the only idea, but it’s one.
I agree that certain things in a raiding environment need to be challenging in order to avoid being boring. I think the trick to this would be to have planning on the guild’s part to be the difficult bit, and fighting on the visitor’s part the easy bit. If the guild officers lead their troops into a ambush, or throw them all against a wall without proper siege techniques, then those troops will die. I would rather have the battle plans be difficult than the fate of your raid depending on whether a single visiting raider “gets out of defile” or not. This is also a method where guilds could become famous and well known on a server. If they lead the best and cleanest raids then the server will love them for it.
Perhaps there could be some optional bosses/keeps that are not part of the primary objective reserved for those guilds which want a greater challenge. These bosses could have more difficult personal challenges and provide unique rewards.
Raids should be something that players “want” to do, not something they “have” to do. It should be an epic experience that can provide a challenge to the orchestrator, while not putting so much weight on each individual that the average player feels intimidated to attend them. Food for thought.
Thanks for commenting,
Ghost
Guild Wars 2 has been the boldest MMO in a long time when it comes to trying new ideas and I know it has broadened my own stereotype on what an MMO can look like. The only thing I personally have felt lacking is the sense of community and purpose with a close knit group of people. I fear that when the honeymoon is over with Guild Wars 2 I will move on because I do not have that group of people that I’ve battled through thick and thin with over the past few years. With that being said I think that GW2 can solve this problem by focusing on implementing “raids” (large scale group PVE with a group of people that work together on a consistent basis to accomplish a difficult task) using some of the new ideas they have seen great success with.
One great success GW2 has had is WvW. The large scale group assault and defend feels so completely epic that I honestly don’t care as much about the reward and bettering my character as I do about the epic experience. For a game to do this to a seasoned MMO player is remarkable. If I were to design “raids” in GW2 I would focus on a great assault on an enemy stronghold that takes multiple nights to accomplish. Each keep would be a benchmark where the players in the raid could resume on a later night. Once resumed they would have to defend an enemy assault on the keep, and then take the fight to the enemy in a neighboring keep. Siege would have to be employed strategically to assault difficult keeps, and each keep would have a “boss” encounter once the walls are breached. The grand battle/assault would mimic the epic feeling one currently gets invading the walls of Stonemist Keep in WvW.
The problem with this set up is that human opponents in WvW make a siege less predictable and the tide can turn very quickly. This is where the second great strength of GW2 comes in. Dynamic Events have blown my mind in their ability to get me to care about things going on in the world of Tyria. Throwing off the grind of a predictable quest with an unpredictable giant stomping my face in, is a breath of fresh air in a world of cardboard cutout quests given in other MMOs. So, perhaps in GW2 raids there is a different enemy commander each week. Same scene, but the enemy commander could go from overly aggressive, to overly defensive, from seeking out the smallest fight to throw his forces at, to seeking out the largest one. The raid leader and raiders in vent will have to scout to watch for ambushing parties that may not have been there last week. One week a treb might be able to bring a wall down without taking a hit; the next week it may take every raider you have to defend that treb as it hits the enemy wall. Dynamic Events could play a great role in a raid if Arenanet makes them even less predictable then they currently are. Eventually a good raiding team will see patterns, but being able to twist the enemy commander’s strength and make it his weakness would be a truly awesome experience. Imagine having a scout that sees an overly aggressive enemy force and leads them directly down a ravine where you have multiple arrow carts prepared to ambush them and tear that column to shreds. Working with a system like this would make raiders feel like an army and a raid leader feel like an experienced general.
The plague of raiding is always finding the exact number of people to fill your well designed raid. I would suggest having a raid of 50 players where at least ten of them have to be from the guild that is running the raid. There would be a place in the interface where a player could sign up to go to a raid and guilds looking for additional players could hit a “fill” button when they have all their guildies and quickly acquire waiting players. When a player runs a raid they have done previously that week he receives a fraction of the reward much like the current dungeon system is designed. Guilds would receive guild perks for the week for taking their enemy keep, much like a server is rewarded for success in WvW. Within the raid itself guild members/officers would be able to assign waypoints and fill in raiders would be assigned to follow a leader assigned by the guild running the raid.
The gear acquired through raiding should not surpass the current exotics to maintain GW2 philosophy, however, perhaps it could provide an awesome set that takes half the time to acquire as a dungeon slog.
I think blending WvW and Dynamic Events into a raiding experience for GW2 would not only provide an amazing raiding experience never before experienced in the MMO genre, but I think it would also create the community that would keep this MMO active and healthy for many many years to come.
Thanks for Reading,
Ghost