Showing Posts For masaplata.3965:
I’ve noticed that consumables such as Fire Elemental Powder can be used inside Spirit Vale. Is this intended? I was expecting these sort of small advantages would be disabled.
We had the chance to do the raid for a couple hours last night. We obviously didn’t finish it, but here are some of my thoughts so far:
Getting rid of hard profession requirements: I think this was generally accomplished with this raid. There are no “must-have” professions, as the roles required can be filled with multiple professions, provided they spec appropriately.
Scale of challenge: I like that everyone needed to be planning and reacting properly. Movement/positioning will be required from players. Everyone needs to pay attention to multiple mechanics of the fight (bullet storm, distributed magic, unstable pylon, etc). There weren’t hard specialized roles where some players focus on one mechanic of this raid and ignore the rest.
Boss facing indicator: We generally liked this feature. It helped us understand what was going on, and added to the feeling of mastery when we learned to start manipulating the boss.
Opening might stacking removal: This was a nice touch. It gets rid of another “hassle” that comes with doing content. It is not fun to go through the motions of might stack/food/nourishment/boosters every time players attempt to do content.
Thematic design: I see a lot of effort has gone into the visual design and making it consistent with the mechanics. The Vale Guardian has 3 components corresponding to 3 pylons, the platform is divided into 3 sections, the markings for the 3 seeker spawn points are 3-pointed arrows, etc.
Coordination requirement: From what I’ve seen/heard so far, extrapolated to the entire encounter, I like the amount of communication/planning that players will need to do. You can’t just put 10 highly skilled players together and expect them to finish this raid. One mechanic that did surprise me was that there was no time limit for depleting the break bar of the individual guardians. I was expecting them to recover in some form if we didn’t coordinate a cc spike during that moment.
I’ve met some of the most amazing people through GW2 and shared experiences I’ll never have anywhere else.
Instead of proposing specific functionality or implementation, I have some thoughts on what a “gw2 raid” should look like. Some of these suggestions enter the realm of game design, so I apologize if that is not desired for this CDI.
To encourage accessability, the leadup to any final raid encounter should be tutorial-like. I think this goes really far in terms of welcoming players and shouldn’t be glossed over. We’ve already seen this design philosophy, most notably in newer dungeons such as Molten Weapons Facility and TA Aetherpath. Consider, for example, what the triple trouble escort events could have been. Imagine if the Cobalt escort required even 1 keg to be picked up and dropped in front of a mini-Cobalt. That would teach much more than any NPC dialogue. To restate, if a raid can’t be “figured out” by most players after repeated attempts, there’s probably an accessability gap in the mechanics somewhere.
One of gw2’s greatest strengths is its dynamic scaling system. This should most definitely be utilized for group-based cooperative content! A gw2 raid should be able to accomodate groups of different sizes. As others have already mentioned, there are negative consequences when players are forced to exclude other players from group content. If a raid can be finished with n players, make sure it also works for at least 2n players. In theory, this means no one ever needs to be left out.
Is it possible, then, to just scale objectives along with the player counts? Perhaps. But it seems that would equate to just making many tiers of the content which, to me, sounds like a good way to diminish the total amount of content we could build. What do you guys think?
I understand this route will require a lot of dev time, fine tuning, and testing, but considering how much raid content is expected to be replayed, the extra effort to create quality content at multiple tiers seems worth it.
For example, imagine teq where the number of usable turrets can change. Or wurm, where the event timer depends on the number of players present. Wouldn’t these world bosses be more accessable if these parameters were always reasonble for the given number of players?
Another core strength of gw2 is its malleable world. Allow epic raids to affect Tyria’s landscape! Currently, “cyclic” events only affect Tyria on the scale of minutes (dynamic events), hours (world bosses), and years (seasonal events). There’s a lot of design space between hours and years in terms of changing the state of Tyria.
Lastly, raids probably don’t belong on the open world (This is not a vote for private controlled instances! Bear with me, this is about focused design, not exclusivity). There’s two issues with the open world that make it unsuitable for raids.
First, it’s too “polluted” with consumables. The raid designer should be focused on creating solid and challenging gameplay mechanics. She should never have to ask questions like “What if all the players bring fire ele powders/ogre pet whistles? Will someone with experimental teleportation rifles completely bypass this awesome mechanic? Will I have to account for road markers planted everywhere?”
Secondly, designing a raid on the open world automatically means it needs to scale for a map at capacity. As others have alluded to, there are so many variables to account for, that any reasonable design will have a diluted experience.
Of course, creating raids with all these characteristics (if they are considered good ideas) is going to be pretty hard, but I think anet is willing to tackle these challenges! =)
Hi Everyone,
Over the past few months, I’ve been experimenting with a method to solo farm influence. I’ve finally determined that it is viable and efficient enough to be worth sharing. I’ve written up a guide, which you can find here.
I want to emphasize you need to be really familiar with guild bounties to make this work. This is going to be more challenging than your standard spam 1 farm. However, you’ll find that the gold/time ratio can be pretty good.
If you do happen to try this out, I’d appreciate any feedback! I’m sure there are lots of ways to improve upon what I’ve discovered.
Happy bounty hunting!
Ventaurion
Here’s a bit more context and detail about what we saw:
On 6/13/2014, after the scheduled 8pm PST Triple Trouble event, which failed during the 2nd phase (decapitated heads), a guild spawned the event again at about 9:20pm PST. The escort event at Crimson (Crusader Yipp) had problems completing. It was able to get near the end of the escort, but Yipp would get stuck and refuse to move toward Crimson’s spawn location. Strangely, the UI indicated that all 3 escort quests had finished.
There were repeated attempts to pull Yipp away from mobs that were assumed to keep him leashed (including getting him killed and reviving him), but none of them worked. Some time after we gave up on this event, a player noticed that there were 3 wurm eggs that had spawned under the red phytotoxin collector (underneath the ground layer).
We suspect these eggs had spawned erroneously away from their intended spot. They were probably either part of the previous wurm event, or the Yipp escort quest. It seems likely that the escort event could not finish because these eggs were not destroyed. Attempts to damage these eggs had no effect.
The megaserver instance this occurred on had an IP address where last octet was 40.