Guild Wars 2

My thoughts on OP’s problems:

1. Cooldown

I didn’t think Power Block had an internal cooldown, maybe I’m wrong on that. It was my understanding that the skill places enemy skills on a 10 second cooldown and that the trait itself has no internal cooldown.

2. Thieves

Power block should work on thieves. The idea that thieves but no other profession get immunity to the trait is pretty much as unbalanced as it gets. The argument that thieves shouldn’t be affected as their skills don’t normally have cooldowns is illogical. Their skills are effectively put on cooldown when they are knocked down, dazed or stunned – why is this any different?

Other Problems

• Power Block on bosses
  IIRC at one point power block would interrupt and put boss skills on cooldown through defiance – this was clearly a bug and it was correct to fix it.

• As it is should Power Block work on autoattacks?
  No. An interrupt mesmer would be good fun but that’s because of the counterplay – choosing what skills to interrupt and having the skill to pull it off. You don’t need skill to interrupt an autoattack and managing to put it on cooldown is devastating to enemy dps. It’s too much.

• As it is should Power Block work on finishers?
  It’s harder to call but I’d probably say no. Players would have to look for the finisher animation and react to it, so that’s a plus over vs autoattacks. However the charge time is so long that it is trivial to interrupt. No – finishers aren’t the only way to defeat enemy players but they are an important feature of the game. A power block mesmer would completely shut down that feature on an enemy team, which again is probably just a little bit too much.

What I would want changed

I don’t think that Arenanet currently realise how much potential Power Block has. If it were powerful enough it would open up a viable, interesting new way to play as a Mesmer. It needs a buff of some kind.

I don’t mind exactly what the effect of the skill ends up being but I do believe it should be proccing on interrupts – that’s the most compelling part of the trait. It should also work on other professions equally – one profession arbitrarily being invulverable to it is silly.

Some Ideas:

Perhaps it could be the same but would now work on thieves, maybe with a longer duration?

Perhaps it would apply a short daze on an interrupt (not including AA or finishers).

Perhaps rather than having a fixed duration it doubles ( or increases by x percent) the cooldown of whatever skill is interrupted, including autoattacks. That way it would still be effective but wouldn’t completely disable autoattacks for an extended period of time. Or maybe autoattack cooldowns would be increased by less – say, 50%. Thief skills could have the initiative cost doubled.

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Neon.5976:

Chris Whiteside.6102:

What I would like to see is us taking the very best of the core of our game and then re-imagining what co-operative, strategic and challenging instanced content could be rather than retro fitting existing paradigms.

Some folks have been doing this, it would be great if we could all focus on this as the spring board for discussion.Chris

Sorry to get a little off-topic. I already posted most of my high-level preferences in a big double-post on page 7. I just wanted to reply to something I disagreed with.

By that do you mean you’re looking for more detailed concepts of what an individual raid could involve? For example suggestions / brainstorms for a particular encounter within a raid?

Well one way to approach to it would be to brainstorm what an encounter could be like based on our core combat and movement. What cool things could we do with dodge, the way we build our environments, bundles, combos, profession support, etc. How should enemies behave? How big a part should the environment play? etc.

This way we can start to build up a shared vision of just how cool the encounters could be and then build from there.

Chris

I won’t post anything else today as I’m just about to head off to bed. However do you have a particular difficulty level in mind at this point? I can think up some ideas but they wouldn’t all be appropriate for every difficulty. Its hard without much context.

Chris Whiteside.6102:

What I would like to see is us taking the very best of the core of our game and then re-imagining what co-operative, strategic and challenging instanced content could be rather than retro fitting existing paradigms.

Some folks have been doing this, it would be great if we could all focus on this as the spring board for discussion.Chris

Sorry to get a little off-topic. I already posted most of my high-level preferences in a big double-post on page 7. I just wanted to reply to something I disagreed with.

By that do you mean you’re looking for more detailed concepts of what an individual raid could involve? For example suggestions / brainstorms for a particular encounter within a raid?

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Personally I would also want to see raids as end game content and by that I mean level 80 only.

Chris

I suppose endgame isn’t the best word in the world to be using so liberally. It does usually mean content to play once at max level but for a lot of players, myself included, it has a lot of other implications as well.

cesmode.4257:

When you start creating level 80 content only, ala raids, you segregate the playerbase much like other games where its then a rush to max level to do the raids. All of the gorgeous 1-80 content you have in this game becomes completely trivial and a stepping stone to the real game. You might as well just allow people to boost to 80 via potions or something and skip leveling all together because it becomes absolutely meaningless.

I remember it being stated how the whole game is end game content. At level 80 you can continue running through the world, exploring, completing dynamic events etc. But that’s not what i’ve been doing since I hit level 80 – I don’t know anybody who spends the majority of their time doing that after they have leveled up.

There are already dungeons and world bosses, sPvP and WvW. Players are already being attracted by different types of content. The idea that the addition of what would ultimately just be one more instanced type of content would cause the rest of the game to suddenly become devoid of players seems a little baseless. Sure I can imagine if the rewards were far too generous then farmers would flock to it. But can you really see a PvPer giving up on PvP forever just because they could be doing raids instead? What about a WvW player or a world boss enthusiast? If that were the case wouldn’t the explorable modes of Honor of the Waves, Crucible of Eternity and Arah along with Fractals, all of which are designed for level 80, already be doing this?

Crystal Reid.2481:

So having said that where do you feel raiding falls (end game VS horizontal)?

I’d want to see Raids as end game content. Others are right in stating that other games have raids as end game content – it’s what they are normally categorised as. However I’m not sure I follow the logic where that therefore means they shouldn’t be end game content in GW2. It’s not like end game raids make a game worse or less appealing and I don’t want to be forced to go play a different game to play the type of content I like. It’s important to avoid getting hung up on whether GW2 should or shouldn’t be taking cues from other games and to focus on making raids they best they can be, regardless of where the ideas come from.

I’d like to see raids as end game content as challenging PVE content is something that is currently missing from the game and raids could the thing that fills the hole. It’s not as if end game raids make all other content redundant. In fact if they weren’t end game you could argue they could be so similar to other content such as dungeons or world bosses depending on their final form that they would start making other content redundant.

I suppose ultimately people want raids to be accessible. However if they are too easy they make the game as a whole less accessible. Those who want easier content, who already have a very diverse selection to choose from will get more, which is great for them. But those who want the challenging endgame PVE content that is currently lacking would be left out. In that sense by making raids more accessible, GW2 could potentially miss an opportunity to appeal to a wider audience.

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

Nick.6972:

Punishing – if one player or all players fail, they should start from the beginning or get completely kicked out of the instance like in Underworld, Guild Wars 1.
That being said, even if the party fails an attempt, the monsters inside the instance should provide decent enough drops with relatively low RNG, again, like Underworld in Guild Wars 1 – Aatxe ecto drops.

Aatxes never dropped ecto for me. They would always drop trash white gear.

Sorry. The RNG drops of UW/FOW were crap – already we could do better in GW2 just by dropping “green or better” plus valuable junk for vendoring.

I’d argue ecto drops in GW1 in UW were far better than the equivilant value drops in GW2. Ectos were really worth something – I’d say that’s probably an exotic worth a few gold in GW2 and those are really quite rare. It’s very unusual for me to see a drop like that. In GW1 however each player would usually get a few ectos each run. I’d equate greens and most yellows to that “trash” gear from GW1.

Rewards

I’ve always felt a mix of tradeable and account bound rewards are important.

Account bound items are best for prestige items – they show that you personally managed to complete some content. The problem is that once you have the account bound items they are no longer rewarding. It’s also extremely frustrating to get the “wrong” reward out of a set – think fractal weapons. If you don’t want it, you don’t want it and because it’s account bound it’s useless to you. If there’s a set then drop it in a box and let players pick the reward.

Tradeable items however don’t have the same problem where after the first drop they become worthless. If the player doesn’t want it themselves they can give it away or sell it on the TP. To some players earning gold will be more motivating than unlocking a particular account bound skin anyway for example. Including tradeable items extends the life of content so long as they hold some kind of value.

RNG is very much a hot topic. I’m leaning towards the side of not wanting RNG, at least for the prestige account bound items anyway. If you manage to complete the content, you should be able to show it off. Prestige is however very much connected to rarity. The fewer the number of people that can complete the content, that have the item, the more impressive it is to see and the more “rewarding” it is. The liadri mini was like this for a short time although ultimately liadri turned out to be much easier than initially realised and nowadays the mini doesn’t mean much.

I’m not quite as fussed about RNG on tradeable items so long as the percentages are appropriate for the difficulty level of the raid.

It’s also worth noting that there could be multiple reward stages throughout a raid. Failing just before the end boss and getting nothing would be very frustrating. I don’t think that person should get the ultimate prestige reward, or the best chance at the rarest tradeable reward. They should however get something for what they did manage to do. A fairly easy way to do this would be to add chests after beating mini-bosses throughout the raid or something akin to that.

Duration

I’m not a fan of content that requires hours upon hours to complete. Difficult content and content that takes a long time to complete are two very different things. Admittedly I’m finding it difficult to come up with an actual length of time I’d like Raids to take. I’d say maybe in the ballpark of 1h30-2h but I’m fairly flexible on that, I suppose it depends how engaging it is.

It becomes more difficult to organise a team the bigger it is and the longer you need the team together for. Most people can find an hour long block at some point in the week – not everybody can find a four hour block and very few can spare an eight hour block. Furthermore anything gets boring after a while and that should be avoided.

One method suggested is to allow players to save their progress in the raid to allow them to leave and come back later. But it’s quite hard to get that exact team back together and if you run with other people you lose that sense of comradery. If you can run with other people you give yourself another issue to deal with – how do you prevent skipping?

All in all I feel like the best approach is for players to need to complete the Raid in one go but to keep the duration down.

Issues

The first issue I see is that there are certainly players who want to see very large scale raids. I strongly feel that large numbers just don’t work well with GW2 combat mechanics and are hard to tweak difficulty for. However I’m perhaps looking for something different to those people.

The second issue is that the level of difficulty I’m asking for is very unforgiving. It won’t be for everyone and there would for sure be people unhappy with it. For the record I have no problem whatsoever with some raids being harder than others. If some players want slightly easier raids than me that’s totally fine but I want to play the super kittene. Of course hard modes and / or multiple raids would mean a significant increase to the workload of the dev team which isn’t ideal. In the end though whatever difficulty is chosen it won’t be perfect for everyone. Somebody is going to be left out – I just think it’s time the so called “hardcore” players had their turn.

What I’d like to see. Sorry this is split into two posts – I went over the 5001 word limit.

Failure

I’d want to see failure i.e. if your team wipes you’re out. It sounds harsh and it’s not something players are used to in the rest of the game but it makes everything much more interesting. It’s much more exciting if you know you could fail at any moment and it makes victory so much sweeter. Overcoming a challenge under pressure creates a real lasting sense of comradery. If you can just carry on from where you left off whenever you wipe it removes any sense of pressure and trivialises even the most difficult content.

I feel strongly about this – it’s very important.

Difficulty

I’d love for raids to be extremely difficult, or at least for some of them to be. I’m a fairly decent player and I wouldn’t want to be able to finish the Raids within the first few weeks or even month of them being released. Much of the PVE is GW2 is really very easy so if I can step straight from that into “challenging” content and immediately beat it – that’s a problem. I shouldn’t be good enough now – I’d want to see content that I need to better myself as a player to be able to complete.

Without getting too detailed for what’s really just a concept discussion I’d want to see more damaging enemies, with bigger skillsets, lots of area mechanics, lots of pressure and less vitality / toughness on mobs. So many enemies right now in GW2 have a massive pool of health and little else. Even some of the most impressive world bosses are ultimately killed by standing next to them and attacking until they die, with the odd reshuffle of players. There’s very little pressure and an individual player makes next to no difference. There is an element of organisational difficulty in them but it’s not ultimately all that interesting.

It also goes without saying – safespots and the like are a big no no.

Size

I’d prefer for Raids to involve more than 5 players, if anything to differentiate them from other content. However I’m not too fussy over an exact number. What I would not want to see however are world boss scale raids. In fact I probably wouldn’t want to see anything over 15 players. Beyond that some of the combat mechanics in GW2 start to break down (think cc, conditions) and each individual’s importance to the team starts to decrease. I think every player should be significant and ideally profession mechanics shouldn’t be hitting caps too much.

Scaling

In a perfect world I see no problem with scaling. If raids could be scaled perfectly with the number of players I’d totally support that. However they can’t. It’s hard enough to design high difficulty raids for a specific number of people without it being mathematically impossible let alone doing it for ten different group sizes.

I’d have no problem with teams entering with less than the recommended number of players if they want but there should ideally be one specific number of players in mind. I really think that trying to scale this kind of content that has to be so carefully tweaked is a mistake.

Progression

This is another hot topic. Some people like to see progression as they feel they are improving or getting closer to beating the content. Others see it as an artificial barrier to victory. I’m probably sitting inbetween the two. I don’t want to have to “grind” anything in order to have a chance of victory, but I don’t mind something like AR which I unlocked naturally as I progressed through fractals.

Would I mind if there were no progression? No. Would I mind if there was heavy progression? Yes.

hybrid.5027:

Size Raids will have a fixed player scale of 8-15. Any smaller than 8 is hardly worth of being called a raid, any larger than 16 some of the nuance of the unique combat system is lost due to particle effects and decreased mechanical complexity.

There will be no waypoints, and no ability to resurrect in case of a full party wipe. If you wipe players will be returned to the open world. Players can hard res each other as normal in cases of a partial wipe.

As an example of the suggested difficulty, I would cite Lupicus as an example of the baseline easiest difficulty and complexity of these subbosses. Each quest will have Raid Reward Chest (detailed below) upon completion.

This boss will be extremely mechanically challenging and tuned to a level of difficulty that would commensurate with challenging raid bosses in other games in the genre…

To be blunt, the end boss, like the ones mentioned above, will be especially mechanically challenging and guilds should not have the expectation to defeat the boss (or even get to the boss as the sub bosses will be challenging) until they have significant practice.

I don’t have time to write up all of my thoughts right now but these are things I for the most part agree with. Perhaps not all raids would have to be this unforgiving but it’s what I personally and my friends in game would like to see.

Either Arenanet should choose the topics for the CDI or come up with a shortlist of topics and then the community can vote on those. Leaving topics entirely up to the community may just result in votes for topics that just aren’t viable at the moment.

Tl;DR 1 or a 1/2 hybrid.

6/4/0/4/0 Phantasm & interrupts locking down the enemy with Power Block. Reflects in there too along with push + pull.

I don’t know about the Mesmer portal issue myself as I have never done it nor have I seen anybody doing it. I rather feel the treb itself is too powerful. The fire rate on it is far too high as is the radius of the projectiles. It can hit the ground nowhere near you and you will still be hit.

The red spawn area on the sPVP map “Raid on the Capricorn” is too high up. On occasion upon leaving it I shall receive falling damage even when appearing to enter the water cleanly. This is not actually fair since on blue you spawn much closer to sea level and there is no chance of receiving fall damage upon leaving the spawn. Receiving fall damage will put the player into combat mode and will therefore slow them down, meaning it will take them longer to reach capture points than it would do otherwise.

Granted this is a minor issue but in order to keep sPVP totally fair it should be fixed.

[Note] This has now being going on for around two hours (since I first arrived). This event is clearly not functioning as intended.

Honestly I am not entirely familiar with the event chain that is required to be completed in order for Arah to be accessible however it appears that on Desolation this chain has been bugged for most of today. Beyond random waypoints coming under attack the chain is stuck on “Gates of Arah > The Pact are preparing to establish a forward base” and will not progress.

[Bug]
People have told me in map chat that the world event “Enrage Risen and lure them to fight Halla Corpseflayer” is what is causing the problems (although generally I regard map chat as unreliable so I am unsure if this is actually the block if even relevant).

That said the event does seem buggy & the instructions vague. There seem to be two main problems with the event. Firstly it requires players to not simply kill the mobs on sight. This is an open world area and new players are walking through all the time – players who don’t read the instructions and kill the mobs. You can explain the event to them however even if they do listen (some will not) a new player will likely walk in, making it very difficult to progress. This is not counting the fact that some players may be trying to grief and fail the event on purpose, which is especially a problem if this is indeed an event that must succeed for the Arah chain to progress.

The second problem is that it simply doesn’t seem to be working. I have been standing by the event for upwards of half an hour now with players occasionally managing to lure risen to Halla and enraging them. But Halla doesn’t seem very interested most of the time; she won’t move off her spot by the wall and rarely attacks mobs even when they are close by. Mobs will become enraged, but it often takes a long time for them to gain the enraged buff and it does not seem to last long and usually by the time they get it they are very low on health. Mobs are being killed around her, some with the enraged buff and she is hitting a few of them but nothing seems to be happening. It is very difficult to see whether the event is actually progressing or not. There is a bar on the objective panel in the top right but it is simply Halla’s health bar and it is unclear if we are supposed to let her die (if we are, see problem #1). It is not completing either by winning or failing the event after x amount of time.

In summary the instructions could be more clear and in its current form the event seems very difficult to complete if not broken and is possibly blocking progress on the Arah chain. If it isn’t then this is a double bug report, as both the Arah chain seems stuck as does this event.

[Suggestion]
I believe Halla is supposed to die, if so for a suggestion to fix the event you could simply add more mobs to the area as there is not a huge number or make them stronger (there are few vets around). Alternatively Halla could be made weaker. Currently mobs are doing very little damage to Halla which is a problem if she needs to die. Even with a Veteran Risen giant aggro’d her health is hardly moving.

It may also be better to change the event completely, perhaps splitting it into two phases. In the first phase players could simply kill x risen in the area / capture a control point. The second phase would spawn a veteran / champion for players to fight alongside Halla. When the boss mob reaches a certain amount of health (say 10%) it would go invulnerable, lock on to Halla and kill her before going vulnerable again. Players finish off the boss, pay their respects to Halla (or don’t) and the event finishes. This would make it much more straightforward to complete and avoids problem #1 while retaining the theme of Halla’s overconfidence leading to biting off more than she can chew and ultimately her demise.