I honestly don’t see how you can see it as not forced? I can no longer access rewards I want unless I now play maps I have no desire to play. Before I could choose what I wanted to do to get the reward.
Ehh not really. It was an illusionary choice. You did 3xSwamp otherwise you just didn’t do fractals. It’s not like most people could solo high level fractals so you did what the group wanted (which was generally 3xSwamp) or you never found anyone to do anything else.
Resetting seals encounters is a PITA. It’s really hard to get out of combat. I accidentally dodge rolled into kitten, while I had the hammer, during the arm seals section and it took about 15 minutes to figure out how to completely reset the encounter. Occasionally when we got out of combat we’d hit the reset button and the mobs at the first seal would instantly aggro to us.
Last boss is good, though I do agree that the hammer cone is really not breakable or even worth doing since it’s very easy to avoid.
Raids are incredible. If everything in this game had as much care and attention to detail put into it the game would be hands down the biggest MMO on the market.
Sadly everything surround raids looks subpar in comparison.
You have 4 daughters and have legendary weapons?! I only got a wife and I still don’t have a single legendary.
Seems to be an issue of in game priorities. If you can find a guild to raid with (There are quite a few “raid hub” guilds out there that have multiple raid teams) you should only have to dedicate a couple hours maybe once or twice a week to raiding. Don’t make the mistake that raiding means sitting there on the day it drops waiting for the patch to download then banging your head against the wall for 10 hours that day only to do it the next day. That’s hardly required unless you are going for world firsts.
Even if you are pugging it only takes me 15-30 minutes to find groups usually and I spend about an hour or two playing with that group depending on how well it goes.
Unless you are logging in for only 30 minutes each play period you can probably find time to raid. If you ARE logging in for 30 minutes each play period… well then what ARE you doing? Daily fractals and log out? Gathering? None of those seem like great reasons to continue playing this game.
Let establish some things. First the problem:
Players want to experience the lore part of the raid without having to deal with the actual raid difficulty and all that entails.
I believe most players would agree that everyone being able to experience the lore would be acceptable but the problem is that most of the solutions being proposed have been tried in other games and have some pretty large drawbacks.
Let’s talk about an easy mode difficulty:
What it solves:
- Gives players who don’t have a ton of time to invest a chance to experience the raid and the lore involved.
- Creates potential interest in further raiding.
Issues that arise:
- Rewards are hard to balance. Too little rewards and no one runs them (See dungeons) and the people who want to experience the lore are in the same position they are now. Too much and it feels like you are being forced to clear it regularly, WoW has a problem with this as players who are working on normal+ modes feel like they also should clear LFR to maximize their time gated rewards.
- Mechanics need to be scaled down and become irrelevant. It doesn’t become a “practice mode” people don’t learn mechanics that don’t hurt them. Bosses become zergsfests which are wholly uninteresting. Often times even if you are trying to learn mechanics you cannot tell what is going to be threatening and what will not in the next level of difficulty.
- You still have the difficulty of getting 9 other people together to run it. You either have to develop a queue system for these people or a large chunk of the people you are trying to reach won’t be able to do it.
- Is this replayable content? Once everyone is done and seen the lore how do new players get to experience it? What if no one wants to do it after a few weeks because they’ve already done it?
- Development time, there’s a lot of overhead that you introduce with this system. Mechanical tuning, systems surrounding it to group people together, etc.
Lets talk about a story/soloable mode:
What it solves:
- Gives players who don’t have a ton of time to invest a chance to experience the raid and the lore involved.
- Removes the requirement of making a group to experience the content.
- Rewards are easy because you don’t need to drive people to do it, the people that want the story will and those that don’t care can ignore it.
Issues that arise:
- Development time is the biggest one. This would essentially be a small LS release. Which is no small feat according to Anet. This is a ton of work for maybe a half hour of play time for maybe half the population.
- Mechanics would have to be reworked for an individual level (Think about how you’d make Vale Guardian a single player experience. You’d essentially have to rework half the fight).
Of the two I think a story mode is the least damaging mode, BUT I’d be very wary of the amount of resources it would take to develop something like this. The current rate of development is already disappointing and having something like this take up more resources would be a further let down.
I believe Anet when they say this is simply a side story. It probably won’t lead into LS3 at all and maybe LS3 will recap it somehow for those that missed it. The biggest issue is the drought of non-raid lore we are in. People need to just hold tight or go play another game until LS3 launches.
(edited by Pandabro.8743)
It’d be really nice to be able to swap to a 10 man party UI for raids. The condition information does seem to be very much needed with the latest raid wing.
Slothasor reminds me a lot of Vale Guardian.
WHAT? Are we watching/playing the same fights? I cannot think of any similarities between the two.
Two of the undoubtedly best classes aren’t played very often at all (rev and scrapper), while two of the worst ones are (thief and DH). It’s pretty weird.
I feel like I see Rev and Scrapper in every game…
No. This just encourages a defeatist attitude.
There’s some merit for it in MOBA’s because games can be fairly long and surrendering early can save people a lot of time. In Conquest games last between 6-10 minutes average. You really only KNOW that the game is lost around the 5-6 minute mark if it’s really obvious and then you only have to wait around a couple minutes for it to end.
Surrender option would just encourage troll behavior, like players seeing three thieves on a team and saying “LOL thief gg” while spamming the surrender vote.
Having played a lot more with the system there is certainly something fishy going on. I’m pretty convinced the matchmaking system is giving terribly lopsided matches to one team or the other because it’s not trying to match MMR of the two teams.
The way matchmaking is working it’s significantly increasing your chance to have low skill teammates if one of your friends is below you in division while not effecting your opponents team at all. Which means your opponents team is almost guaranteed to have high skilled players.
Here’s an example with theoretical MMR:
Team 1:
Player 1 – Emerald 1000 MMR
Player 2 (Queued with Player 1) – Amber 500 MMR
Player 3 – Emerald 700 MMR
Player 4 – Emerald 800 MMR
Player 5 – Emerald 900 MMR
Average MMR: 780
Team 2 (SoloQ):
Player 1 – Emerald 1000 MMR
Player 2 – Emerald 900 MMR
Player 3 – Emerald 950 MMR
Player 4 – Emerald 925 MMR
player 5 – Emerald 900 MMR
Average MMR: 935
These are theoretical numbers obviously but this is a huge advantage to solo queue players. The kind of MMR offsets that are being thrown at players who are queuing together are just too large to overcome. I’ve noticed this when I’ve queued with other players as well as facing other players queuing together.
This is basically the game saying “Don’t queue with anyone ever unless they are very close to your MMR and Rank”.
MMR is used to determine your teammates, but not your opponents.
Okay when I first started the season I didn’t really read up on the changes to matchmaking but now that I have; this seems like the single worst decision you could possibly make for a match making system. Why doesn’t the system try to find two matching average MMRs between the two teams. It makes absolutely no sense to not try to match the two team’s MMR’s. This is leading to an enormous amount of lopsided games.
That is so wrong for the current situation that it hurts. … (snip)
How do you know you have a “high MMR” and a “low MMR” account? Your evidence seems very anecdotal at best because we don’t have access to any real numbers. You may be right but it’s really hard to tell and my experience with matchmaking systems over many years is leaning towards you being wrong.
I’m almost at sapphire, but I have to admit, there will be hard to get out from amber if you still wait, there are so many idiot players out there, you want to cry… if you start to late you end up in ruby and never get out from there, ever… the idiots somehow will get to ruby to, eventually, then you will cry…
It won’t be hard if you are a decent player. Went like 9-1 out of amber. If you are a good player in a pool of terrible players you should be able to easily carry your team no matter how bad they are.
And he is right, you know it. Build diversity is pretty bad.
Is it really though?
http://metabattle.com/wiki/Conquest
8/9 classes represented in the Meta/Great categories with about half of those having multiple builds. Sure, Warriors are still hurting, but for the most part it seems like most classes have their spot in the meta. The new season just hit so everyone is generally playing what they know works and will deviate when they hit a wall or don’t want to play the same thing anymore.
Sure there’s a ton of work to be done on balance but it’s absolutely not any worse than when I was heavily playing PVP a year ago when 3+ classes simply had no build that was considered good in the meta.
Point me to the meta where 3-4 classes haven’t had dominating builds…
Uhh what? This is a really good meta for Thief. Sounds like a personal issue. If I switched to my elementalist, who I rarely play, I wouldn’t come to the ele forums if I started losing and complain about the balance.
This is not really the raid’s fault. It’s partially the nature of the content, but it’s also the fact that it’s just REALLY hard to find like-minded people in this game. There aren’t any good tools out there that let people find guilds that have a similar mindset.
Trust me when I say there are plenty of guilds out there that need someone else consistent for their group and are willing to teach as long as you learn at a good pace. I know because I’m in one of them. We have about 6-7 solid raiders, 1-2 that aren’t cut out for it but we consistently need more people so we have to keep them along.
On the flip side Raids have made me play this game WAY longer than I should. I’ve been gearing up multiple characters for raids, gathering ascended and actually min/maxing my characters. Before HoT I didn’t see a point in min/maxing because everything was so easy. Raids have given me that drive and I think I probably would have quit a few months ago if I wasn’t intent on finally clearing the raid wing.
Throwing my support behind this because I think some smart developers could use this to create some very interesting combat log data that we can use.
Great job! Pretty awesome to see a Guardian in there even if the rotation is mind numbing.
Blood or Death Magic. Death magic if you have a lot of adds dying in a fight (Subject 6, Archdiviner) or you need lots of condi transfer (Mia) and Blood Magic for everything else.
With Blood try to utilize dodges for DPS by dodging into enemies.
No Updraft run is the definition of OP. I think no one / raid group should able to skip a designed step in the raid. It is not a joke, Anet should keep nerfing all the classes until no meta group can skip this content. It is a bug same as FOTM mossman pole/tree exploit.
Stop it. It’s not OP. Gorseval is the second boss in the raid. It’s basically Patchwerk. It’s a hard dps check to see if your group is competent enough to pull okay numbers they will need for the next several bosses.
Everyone would be happy because only superior organized group with zero mistake can kill gorseval in the future.
What? Beginning to suspect you’re just a troll.
Do Thieves and Necros actually bring something to the party other then damage?
Naw, but Elementalists, Engineers and Guardians don’t bring anything substantial either.
There are certain nuances but outside of the following classes there aren’t many “Mandatory” group utilities.
Warrior – Banners/Aura/Might stacks
Mesmer – Alacrity/Quickness
Ranger – Spirits/Glyph/GotL
Revenant – Facet of Nature/Might Stacks
If the group fulfills the above classes to some extent then the only thing that really matters is damage.
how does the jaxnx dps meter work? i think it counts the dmg to all targets. If it does, the dps numbers from necro are to all targets, and much lower at gorseval only and not even close to 25k.
Yes the actual Gorseval damage is much lower than the DPS shown. Though one of the necros is getting massively inflated numbers by bouncing the conditions back onto Gorseval from the adds.
It lets other people focus on just damaging Gorseval as well. So it’s not like the damage is worthless but it’s not as completely insane as the damage meter alone shows.
As far as I know it prioritizes subgroup healing, and if a subgroup member is full the healing goes to members to other subgroups. Just put the Druid/Auramancer/random healer spec with the tank/by itself.
It’s not supposed to. Healing is supposed to work like the OP described.
Putting a healer in a subgroup screws up their own buffs (Glyph, Frost Spirit).
Honestly we shouldn’t have to manipulate sub groups to get healing to work properly. If this was indeed changed in the last patch it should be reverted.
But frankly, I’m would be more happy with the Squad working with the LFG for open world content.
Yes. Being able to form a raid from a squad will probably be just as easy but the main QoL fix is how much easier it’ll be to taxi players for meta events. We won’t need 10 people trying to taxi into the same map. One commander can slap on a tag and start a LFG post and taxi in as many people as they want.
I’m largely opposed to this idea, not because the idea isn’t sound but I don’t trust Anet to implement something like this and have it not be extremely exploitable. It’s really hard to gauge if someone is “experienced” or not in some algorithmic way.
Just look at the most recent PVP league system. Hundreds of people were abusing the system by queuing with “new players” so they would get into lower quality matches and be able to easily win. It was a huge pain point for the community. I’ve no doubt something like that would arise from a system like this.
Mostly we need LFG to be fixed. Squads need to be listable and the tabs need to be sorted out. After that we’ll see what kind of “lfg meta” develops.
EDIT: I wanted to add that raids are not supposed to be highly accessible content. Carrying a player is often pretty hard so the rewards for taking a “new” player would have to be high to encourage this behavior.
(edited by Pandabro.8743)
We desperately need a LFG tool overhaul. I’m absolutely astonished that it’s taken this long for something that (should be) relatively simple.
Couple things that should be in the game by now:
- Squads should be able to list in LFG
- Raids and individual meta events should have their own section
- No default tab open, people are abusing this for visibility. You should have to select what you are looking for before you see other people LFG.
GS needs some work. Currently Power necro is about the same level as Guardian, which is to say that they can work but no one is super excited when they get one in a raid.
GS auto needs to get a buff along with GS 3. Perhaps some group utility in Wells would be nice.
Currently they are just so far behind the other utility-light classes (Thief & Ele).
Biggest issue here is the huge cost on Condi gear. If it wasn’t such a huge commitment to gear a class for condi we’d have a lot less issues when balance patches drop and one build gets nerfed “into the ground”.
What are you talking about? Have you seen the death magic condi reaper in raids? The traitline is perfectly viable.
It IS a little gimicky. It basically revolves around one GM trait that spawns horrors everything else is pretty superfluous. I wouldn’t say the traitline is viable because of that.
Other things that would prevent zerging the boss could be:
Boss removes condition from him (turn them into regeneration, dmg on players and so on)Remove boons from players (-||-)
Punish players for too high dmg (each 2% spawn adds, aplly debuff, …)
Hey guys! I found the one responsible for the current state of Fractal Instabilities! What should we do with him?
Raids are actually in a pretty good spot with this. Things that most groups need when clearing for their first time:
1. A healer of some sort.
2. Surplus of boons and assorted profession buffs.
3. Hard CC for break bars.
4. Someone to hold aggro.
5. A healthy amount of condition damage in addition to physical damage.
That’s to bad for a game who’s meta was max boons and physical damage for 3 years. Hopefully the next raid wing encourages some more non-meta things but for the most part the game is going that direction.
Most MMO content devolves into DPS races after content has been out for a while. Even in WoW top raid groups will reduce healers to one for 25 people just to get top ranks on the logs. Damage needs to be a large part of the game, but it shouldn’t be the whole game.
It’s probably viable. People just see nerfs and expect everything that was touched to be trash tier.
Vuln stacking is a group buff.
Very weak one. Basically every class has Vuln stacking in droves. It’s easy to maintain 25 stack of Vuln even in 5 man content.
I have a strong feeling there will be more boon strip mechanics necessary in the next Raid wing. The over buffing of boon corruption just for PVP purposes cannot be a coincidence. I think they want to play with that mechanic more but are hesitant because only Mesmers have a low cooldown boon strip.
Basically all those skills exist in some form or another. You are asking to have all 9 professions skill sets at your disposal at any time. That doesn’t really make for a better game.
im curious what you consider the 3 condi classes? Burnzerker is absolutely done, its not viable anymore. That leaves engi and necro?
However, I think you may see condi mesmer and ranger a lot more now
It’s a little early to say Burnzerker is done… I’ll wait a bit to draw that conclusion.
But yes Warrior, Engi, and Necro have been the “socially acceptable” condi classes. I wouldn’t be surprised to see Ranger enter the meta either the extra 13% duration is a pretty big buff. I’m not sure about Mesmer, they still rely on a very poor condition.
Thief venom share was also decent but took a huge hit with the alacrity nerf so probably isn’t good anymore. It was never really meta but I think it was more capable than most people thought.
Current meta build is Viper Condi using Reaper/Curses and either Death Magic (For fights with lots of adds) or Blood Magic for the utility/support.
Zerk reaper is generally just okay. Doesn’t excel at anything and is fairly inflexible, has to fight for slots against PS warriors and Heralds which is an uphill battle.
Condi is currently hard to come by so finding spots is fairly easy, with the Burnzerker nerf the 3 condi classes are fairly equal so you will probably be able to find a decent group.
Dagger 5 is now a ground-targeted boon corrupt…whats the point of axe now?
FTFY
Uhh… what? I feel like a lot of this patch was directly targeting PVE.
Burnzerker nerf. Thief buffs.
Only thing that won’t have a decent build in raids now is Guardian.
Actually the point of gaming in a group is to have fun and not get obsessed with winning or its a fail night. Imagine you tried to join an imaginary raiding group that was genuinely light years ahead of your skill and demanded that you had to have 500 insights to join – its the same thing, its 1 person being judgemental and forgetting that once apon a time they were new players too.
You are right. The point of group gaming is to have fun. But fun is subjective and what is fun to the person just trying to get some experience on Vale Guardian isn’t necessarily the same as what is fun for the person who’s cleared the raid every week since it’s been out. In fact it’s usually not fun to have those two people in the same group.
Thus requirements are made, since there’s very little performance related requirements that can be made it usually comes down to class, gear or # of insights discrimination.
This isn’t necessarily a bad thing because it prevents people who have very different views on “fun” from getting together and creating a toxic environment.
That’s how raids will be because they are going to be challenging for a large portion of the player base. There are plenty of groups out there who are looking to learn the raids and plenty that are clearing it fully and have no interest in teaching people how to do them.
That’s totally fine on both accounts but those two groups need to be able to find people to group with. Which is the real problem, it’s really hard to find like-minded groups of people to do this content.
It’s because there’s no good way to filter players. Raid leaders who have a goal of clearing the whole wing have responsibility to 8 other people to find someone who they know will be reliable. One way to do this is to make sure they have a certain number of insights which means they have a solid amount of experience.
Sure it’s far from fool proof but what other options are there? We don’t have performance measuring tools in the game so it’s impossible to gauge another person’s performance once they are in a group. The best away is trying to prevent underperformers from ever joining.
It will depend on the encounters that we are given.
Thief will probably skyrocket in popularity because of the huge damage buffs it’s getting. Mesmers will probably not be mandatory with the Alacrity nerf, Necros getting boon strip and their already mediocre damage. Warriors will probably still be very meta, not actually convinced the condi “nerf” is really a nerf.
But at the end of the day encounters will dictate the most how the meta forms.
Hero points are insanely easy to get. Contrary to what a lot of people thought at the beginning of the expansion there are plenty of hero point trains going on VB, AB and TD still. I just took a fresh Ranger to Druid in about two hours of play time.
Interesting build. The lack of a target limit on Communal Defense is really interesting. Will be curious to see what kind of numbers it puts out while tanking.
I shall peer into my looking glass and predict the steps of what will happen, upon the inclusion of a dps meter:
1) builds get tested
2) HIGHEST damage build(s) identified (with actual 100% reliable data)
3) Discrimination
4) worse off than we are now
This will only happen if balance is so far off that one or two single professions is doing exponentially more damage than others -OR- if there are certain professions that simply have a very hard time contributing the correct damage. Which is a balance issue. Currently Burnzerkers are a balance issue.
If professions are within 10-15% of each other then player skill will trump class balance. In games with damage meters you only really see a lot of class discrimination at the very top of the population. Most people realize that all classes are capable and are much more willing to let people prove their worth.
I see this sometimes and sometimes not. I’m wondering what the reason is behind it.
Just started playing a Ranger and I thought this was the oddest thing. I couldn’t figure out why my character wasn’t responding. It was seriously frustrating until I figured out that the AA was doing it.
Not sure why this hasn’t been addressed yet. Just another one of those millions of things in this game that are just weird and will probably never be fixed.