When I have to start training runs myself I tend to do something like “silent training semi-exp know mechanics” and just go along with that. If a newbie joins and he’s honest about it we usually give a quick rundown (unless it’s Matthias or any of the other hard bosses) and get low % practice/kill anyways. You gotta understand the raiding community is tight-knit and very small (in NA even more so than EU if that’s your case). And like any small community, they are suspicious/aggressive towards newcomers, regardless of whether or not they are being kind enough to do their own training runs. So as the others said, just block and move on, and don’t give up, I found many people that are “worth it” by attempting to raid.
but this is a non-issue in raids.
And there will probably never be gear checks in here
none issue in raids?
Spoken like someone who has never played ranger/mesmer. edit: forgot ele other than dps.and gear check is technically already available.. via the API. it just takes to long to be of practical use for sharing current build.
aka – incorrect on both counts.
Sorry, I really still fail to see how it is an issue, specially for the Chronomancer since you mentioned that one. If you miss a trait (and the OP already gave examples with ele and war) your group will pop in less than 5 min, and now everyone should be looking for this kind of thing. It does not warrant developing a new tool at all. Raids are already one of the fastest clearing environment there is, the only reason it should ever take more than 2 hours of your daily time is if you don’t have a static group.
It might have sounded like I wouldn’t welcome build templates, oh I kitten would, but it is indeed, a non-issue for raiders. VG is not going to go and cap the entrance waypoint because you took too long to build and food up (a real matter in WvW), the only possible reason someone would be getting so anxious about trivial trait and tricket misplacing is peer pressure. The minmaxing is getting to everyone’s head here. How is a group wiping without elem taking one trait, if not because they’re also getting wrong distortions and dodges?
Also, you answered it yourself, the API is useless as a specific gear checking tool and Anet has no intention at all (so far) to introduce proper WoW style gear checking, because it does not positively reinforce the presence of everyone else around you.
I have serious doubts missing one piece, one trait, or one trinket would even result in that much of a drop from personal DPS, as well as doubts that one or two people making that mistake would ruin a team that has actually trained. I am also seriously concerned that you’re worried about wiping once (and rightly so) in what is usually a <10min boss, enough to want a whole new tool developed just for that purpose. Don’t get me wrong, build templates would be a light in the darkness for many people (specially in WvW), but this is a non-issue in raids.
And there will probably never be gear checks in here, for the simple reason that it is not positive reinforcement. The one policy Anet has always clung to is to never give a reason for us to not be around other players, whoever they may be, and that would be a dreadful first step in the opposite direction; we should rather keep kicking players who lied about our group requirements, and keep missing traits in our builds, because these can be fixed by others around you being nice human beings. Fixing our own bigotry upon gear checking everyone is arguably harder
Why did Anet even open this can of worms? If they aren’t willing/have no time to develop it the way they want themselves, don’t allow it done at all. DPS meters are great but quickly become a sausagefest without any supervision.
It’s actually very nice that elite specializations finally have lore built around them so it doesn’t seem like our characters suddenly gain new abilities out of poof.
As for this one in particular, it’s very nice to have cutting-edge tech being done in Tyria by non-Asuran groups (the Zephrytes are an all-encompassing group and Elonians are majorly human, potentially only human). Would be weird and make it seem like Asuras are actually “smarter” in some sense if we never really saw the amazing stuff they can do being done by others (the Charr already minimize this to some extent, but they are too steampunk-ish).
Their [Anet’s] description of the profession is also nice because it fits all the proper motifs of real life photonics required to tingle our suspension of disbelief, like a proper fiction setting would do to increase immersion.
I hope it doesn’t turn out that Weaver is by far the highest DPS in the game, because it’s probably going to be a very hard rotation. Top tier DPS + hard rotation = pugs become insufferable (currently pugs are VERY ok compared to old dungeons for example).
There’s gonna be more raids and fractals, chill guys ^-^
Maybe they can bring back FoW / UW soon??
Given that “human gods” is now a main point of the plot, they might go along with their previous statement of “developing side stories inside raids that do not affect the main one”. I wouldn’t count on fighting Dhuum inside a raid oh my god please do this for example, but I suppose we could definitely visit their domains in the Mists. There are plenty of places inside Underworld and Fissure of Woe that would make for awesome encounters. It is also a great opportunity for a Lord Ordran Fractal or something related to Nightfall that isn’t the Fall of Abbadon one we were promised to never get. Reintroducing GW1 plots is actually so much better to raid/fractal stories than the main story, because there’s that much more options of development.
I would stick to the old adage: “Buying an experience pays off much more than buying a thing”. As amazing as the legendary is, you’ll probably feel more legendary walking around the desert on top of a giant kitten bunny while killing hordes of living armors forged by the god of war and fire.
Well this is the good part about GW2, you didn’t really “miss out” on things insofar as you can simply pick up and start playing again. Depending on how much gold you used to have, be sure to acquire the LS3 episodes you didn’t unlock (they are available for promotional gem price, enough that you can convert it easily from gold I’d wager). Other than that you might want to check out on achievements and new HoT legendaries (WvW and PvP only changed the reward systems and WvW now has a legendary if that’s your thing).
Fractals were also added so there’s a lot of replayability there as well, and I assumed you have HoT so there’s also raids to try out. But if this content is not your thing stick to Fractals, they are at a really good spot atm; and overall there’s not much needed to “prepare” for the new expansion, as it will have exclusive masteries that, apparently, do not require you to have HoT masteries in order to explore the new maps.
Balthazar GW1:
Cool guy who values strength, courage, and honor in battle. You ask him for assistance in fighting a god, and he (amongst the others) offers only words of encouragement for the upcoming battle.Balthazar GW2:
IM A SIMPLE COMIC BOOK VILLIAN F*** HUMANS ILL KILL YOU ALL I HATE EVERYONE FITE ME M8 YU’LL GET #REKT 360 NOSCOPE MY BLADE IS DARK AS MY SOUL #MOUNTS_NOW_AVAILABLE_IN_WORLD_OF_GUILDCRAFT #BUYMOREGEMSAlso, if he can just simply conjure up an army even in the presumed weakened state the gods are in in GW2, why the heck didn’t he do so to clear Menzies out of his realm in GW1? What’s Menzies doing now anyway?
Seriously, I would have actually thought it was neat if the Menzies/Dhuum partnership came back as the big bad this time as both have a precedent of essentially being an evil fallen God, but no, writers are being crap like always.Oh God, I can’t even imagine what they’re going to do to Joko, the Sunspears, or anything else that I remember fondly from GW1.
I think Palawa Joko is a pretty safe character, specially with the way writing is going. Just pick a sassy voice actor and fill him up with sassy lines to be the not-so-evil guy who you must assist because the other option is always more edgy.
They’ve already pulled an Abbadon on us twice now with the expansion announcement, so why not do it a third time with DSD huh? It was planning to be the only Elder Dragon all along! I fear something like this may end up happening if they don’t kill it off screen (which is also way up top at the ‘would suck to hear’ list). I only hope they do something with this one that has development instead of just shoehorning it into us (like LS3 did in some places).
From what I gather the Mounts are identical, equal to, and inseparable from, the mastery system. The game did not become Perfect World because of gliding (and there were many doomsayers about this feature too back then), and it won’t become WoW with mounts, because they are strictly tools of the mastery system, think of them precisely as something akin to the special action buttons.
Besides, I’d love the option to hide the fabulous infusions before we even start talking about hiding masteries.
They are still gonna keep adding Fractals, at the very least until we have a single unique one for each tier. Who knows after that they might change the system again or add 101, 102, etc. But be sure that the Fractals team still remains a team and will keep adding content.
HoT dropped the ball heavily because they announced features knowing beforehand they wouldn’t be ready at launch. I think with Mike in charge they turned that upside down and now they’re going to release most things only as Live updates. What you’re buying shouldn’t be thought of as an expansion really, but merely as a season pass of sorts (which is pretty okay given they also learned not to charge full game price).
That is pretty much what we can gather from the newest fractal trilogy yes. But only with a small addendum to your first two points: if I recall, the Fractals can contain manifestations from either past, present and future, so it might be that there’s still some real Dessa and Arrk out there. Also I’m interested in whether or not the Challenge Motes play any part in this, since they went out of their way to develop a whole new character (the Harbinger) instead of simply having a mote put there.
The OP did not help his own case very much, but it is a very good case. As I see it, he’s not complaining about raid difficulty per se, but rather he is complaining about how hard it is to group up with 10 others who can actually run through the content. This is a very hard issue to tackle and Anet did recognize officially that it was an issue.
Saying it wasn’t meant to be pugged, if Anet did think like this at first, surely was a shot on their own feet: the whole kitten game is based on pugging LFG or joining randoms in maps to do events, why the kitten would you break with expectations so abruptly? And then again, the encounters are not hard enough to actually make that claim valid: raids can and I would even say should be pugged by many, just like CM Fractals. The idea of guilds and static groups is awesome, but chances are that you are playing GW2 and not other MMOs precisely because it didn’t require commitment at specific (and often massive if you think of games like WoW) time intervals; you pick it up, you play it, you leave it. And if you only come back 3 months later, new content should be learned (and it can, even with raids) in few days at most.
So, even if Anet tells everyone to git gud it doesn’t actually tackle the problem, as I still can’t raid without others who gut gud (and really, most of us didn’t even git gud enough to 3-man VG), and it’s not all that easy to find these people, let alone in weeks where I miss the reset. Finally, this should not be turned into its strawman extreme, I’m not saying there are no groups to be had for raiding at any given time, just that their numbers are increasingly low and will become even more diluted as number of raids increase and population leaves/spread out. It is a dying from its inception mode, unlike fractals that now also present interesting challenge, so I can just play CM everyday instead of raiding, lol.
If I got my timelines correctly, the Cataclysm in Orr happened long before the fall of Abbadon. When Charr invaded Orr, the gods were still six and all were still openly worshipped, and most importantly, there was still a Crystal Sea. Only a lot of time later was the reign of Doric and the whole Bloodstone thing. And only then was Abbadon banned to Torment and fallen from grace. Given that, and also that Abbadon was also keeper of secrets for the other gods, it should be pretty much expected that his presence be very strong in all of the reliquaries.
Massive unblocked spoilers ahead, you have been warned!
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So, in the latest couple episodes, we have seen Balthazar has somewhat fallen from godhood and now seeks power to fulfill some plot of his own. Thing is, he is more than willing to do so at the spent of Tyrians with no care at all for whatever the gods have done for humans before (the bloodstones, the exodus, the whole of Nightfall, etc.). Basically he has turned a complete 180 degrees on what we believed he (or at least the five gods in general) meant for Tyria. And now we have to stop him from killing a dragon (bonus plot twist!) whether we are atheistic Charr or previously devout humans (Livia kept saying praise the Six even after our character sees Balthazar depraving all of the Crystal Desert).
And, in all of this time, the only god who didn’t quite go along the way we believed, was Abbadon. During the period where magic was sealed into the bloodstones, he was the only one to refuse and revolt. Given the recent events (most of GW2 actually), we could maybe even claim he knew better somewhat, or at least he knew that the magic the other five were drawing from was dragon magic (as per the Orr explorable dungeon) and perhaps had other plans for it. Whatever it was, Abbadon either knew something the others god didn’t or the other gods refused to listen to his reasoning about the magic in Tyria.
Nevertheless, we now have one of these gods attempting to do exactly what they prevented before altogether (releasing magic into Tyria, Abbadon’s original objective). Abbadon’s motivation for this (I think) was never really explained in GW1 and really didn’t need so: that was an event so back in time and Abbadon was lost for so long that it ceased to be important. But if Balthazar is trying to do something analogous in order to absorb the magic into himself, it once again begs the question of why would he do this and why would the other five have fought Abbadon before. And now getting more straight to it, for the more lore oriented people around, what do you think the whole Balthazar thing will mean for Abbadon? Is there any chance he was actually trying something “better” (insofar as preserving Tyria) than the other gods, or has Balthazar fallen into insanity like Abby apparently had soon before being banned to Torment?
It is heavily disencouraging that both parts of the post actually feel authentic. Makes pugging raids feel like a really bad “either way you lose” experience for everyone until they get that small rush of adrenaline after they finally kill a boss, whereas the rest of the time is spent either being a newbie who wants to fit in even at the expense of other people’s effort, or a veteran who has to carry people on your back because you actually worked for it.
Considering that the majority of the GW2 experience for the majority of the population probably consists of pugging or at least filling in their parties with pugs (it is even a given thing in map completion and achievements with dynamic events and such), it actually gives some leeway to the argument “raids should not be in GW2”. I love the raids as a standalone thing mind you, but the general attitude from both sides demonstrated on that post is just awful compared to the rest of the game. Then again, I suppose the rest of the game is not even considered “the real game” by some raiders.
Unless they give incentive to take toughness (by changing it directly) people are merely going to find other ways of doing it. There’s more than enough passive blocks and invulns to go around. If you present a boss that hits that hard they’ll just sync the heals on druids rather than changing the meta; if you present a teleportation mechanic on the tank they’ll just have a secondary one or even have the PS’s take a bit of toughness. Whatever you’ll do, the player mindset is already driven towards the current meta. To change it, you must give some incentive, otherwise people are just going to keep using what already works so well.
Congrats on the initiative. US could really use much more guilds like this, our raid scene is a veteran wasteland compared to EU right now.
It’s not easy to get into raids in this game and there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s the “last resort” of people in order to find challenging content here and it shouldn’t be a go to thing for just about anyone (e.g people who don’t care about their stats shouldn’t look for raids before they start caring about it).
It does a disservice to newbies claiming it was easy to get into it when Raids first came out, though. By that time there was a lot of buzz and guilds were new and actively looking for players rather than the other way around (no admission proccess for the most part and no need to look on forums/post on LFG, etc.). It also meant that everyone was learning together as opposed to now that there are vets and not only do vets expect to have to teach newbies, newbies also expect to be taught rather than learning by themselves. There is also the matter that most people with legendary armor/300+ LI are rightfully insensitive/fed up with the content in the sense that they don’t treat it with the same novelty a new player will. This all contributes to that feeling so familiar to new players of “you need experience in order to acquire experience”, because while everyone could potentially collaborate and make their own groups in order to learn just like the veterans did, individually it is a much better option to sneak in and be carried/learn content with the more experienced players, leeching oneself out of the initial struggle that would change the “being a newbie” mindset.
Last but not least, we do not have a population that is large enough to support large scale raiding with teams of 10 people (Anet themselves have at least hinted at discussing this as an issue). Playing pugs will quickly get you to know most other players who are active raiders within only a few weeks. This is specially true for US players, where the LFM chat has a lot of “downtime” with only guilds selling runs, with EU being a little better in this regard. Even then, the raid scene is not only elitist (not necessarily a problem) it is also awfully small in relation to total in game population (a major problem as number of raids increase spreading out population, and new players have even less potential of seeing any particular raid).
You can draw a comparison of Inquest to Google’s (the company) over arching intent of containing and indexing every bit of information there is inside the universe.
Too bad raids are so inaccessible. You wouldn’t turn a second eye to Jennah’s shielding if you went through Xera’s twisted maze. Mesmers in general have been (lorewise) grossly overpowered in relation to GW1, and I see no reason for Jennah having to be someone else rather than just being herself (an overpowered mesmer).
Raids in this game are insanely easy as it is. I am suprised there are so many people who fail at them. Things like Samarog CM should be the baseline difficulty and not a one time challenge mode if you ask me.
Things like Samarog CM will never be baseline, and possibly will never appear again as long as we have LFGs demanding 300+ LI for “insanely easy” raid.
Sadly a lot of people fail the easiest mechanics or do less DPS than NPCs in living story instances. You have to weed out the trash tier players somehow when pugging and starting at the LIs is the best place to start.
Even more sad perhaps, is that out of so many trash players many of them are only bad at min-maxing the particular current meta and would do just fine with their preferred class (with proper damage builds of course). Consider how many “trash” players are struggling to learn/succeed with elementalist when they would have the DH rotation down in 3 attempts and would be drowning in LI’s by now.
Raids are easy, so easy in fact that it’s kind of stupid to demand of someone in a pug to be doing a perfect elementalist rotation while minding every mechanic around when they could be bashing skill buttons as a Daredevil or some other faceroll class and land much more damage than they would otherwise. The timers are very lenient and min-maxing only holds back the average player who could be raiding as if it was T4 fractals. I don’t believe most of these people are trash, and I don’t think from my experience that they are failing mechanics enough that it hinders their progress.
I’m curious as to precisely what does it mean that such food was “hurting the game’s health and players’ health”. Do they mean it was somehow toxic? I’ve seen many complaints about all kinds of things concerning raids but never about people not walking around enough with their seaweed. And when it was obvious that they couldn’t do it, we would always politely drop a TP merchant so they could buy other food that would actually make a difference.
The food is also particularly not viable for me as I have high ping from living far from the servers, as well as minor FPS drops during raids and WvW. No one has ever forced me into using them or demanded that I leave because I wouldn’t.
Raiding with pugs is kinda strange in GW2 really. If people were really worried about benchmarks (using proper DPS meters and such) they would end up nearly always taking DH’s and Daredevils, because the average player has a much easier time with their rotation than with elementalist, and this decision alone would probably stop people from pretending “this is not supposed to be done on pugs so pugs can’t do it easily”. Well, if they can’t you can be sure it’s not the content at fault here (unlike raids in other game, notably Wildstar and WoW).
It’s also strange that things are so much simpler than back in WoW yet people treat it like you had to study in order to master the content. Finding guilds is hard because their schedule is very tight and they “don’t carry people around” so even if you’re on a guild you still have to join the training runs, they’re not taking you to the actual thing (whatever that means since it’s always the same boss). I feel like the weekly rather than daily rewards are in the wrong here, as whoever has done their experienced kills during reset has nearly to no incentive to repeat bosses. There are good souls here and there commanding runs later in the week but the burden of teaching content should not be on the players; if Anet wants that stuff to be played and wants players to enjoy being challenged, they ought to give incentive for that, but I do realize turning Raids into a farm might end up killing them instead, it’s not a simple matter of increasing rewards.
So, to summarize, you’re probaly doing the best thing you can to find more groups: just play the healer (EDIT: it was not OP who said he was leveling a healer but, well you should). Other than that, you won’t find any path without some level of struggling, which is exactly what the veterans will remind you of all the time, even though Anet themselves recognize accessibility is not on an ideal level with raids.
(edited by maxwelgm.4315)
I believe the current amount of experienced players are enough to help others, however (and it’s not their fault) the tight schedules of peak raiding times (after reset, tuesdays, mostly on European time, etc.) are a huge no-no to a lot of newbies. Anet could definitely intervene in the sense that there could be more incentive to taking new people to raid. But that’s harder to do without breaking the game (e.g adding shiny rewards for bringing first timers would not help much if people just bring them in to leech and get their freebies).
Also there are many players that attempt to learn the fight beforehand and are very well prepared even though they never did the encounter or never got the kill but tried a few times. These players do not benefit as much from a training run where the commander spends several minutes explaining concepts they may or may not already know and having everyone rehearse their roles/food/etc.
Sometimes I host “practice” runs for these people that are experienced but not quite there yet, so we can just join in and attempt a kill but without the usual pressure a experienced PuG would have. Basically training but without the introductions, and assuming you know what you’re doing but wants to do it without others expecting you to succeed 100%. It’s always a huge success training-wise but my playtime is less and less and I wish others would also try doing this.
I think Marjory and Kas work fine as couple, and regardless of whether or not I think they have annoying personalities (what with all the bickering) they have valid, humane personalities nonetheless. Their current tie to the human gods arc that is apparently a thing now however, is not so cool. Anet is trying for the second time now, after the dragons turned out to be underwhelming, to establish a bigger-than-us cosmic horror thing in the story. Which is great but very hard to do specially with a MMO, so I hope they don’t make the gods look goofy of all things.
Do not forget the single biggest “return” that should totally be a major character in the next Crystal Desert based expansion, Koss, descendant of the legendary Koss
Thing is, usually Taimi is never wrong, is she? She’s the walking Deus Ex Asura. I’m pretty sure whenever she says “I have a theory…” the developers are already hinted they want to go there.
If you’re already enjoying the free version, it’s a matter if you’re ok with spending the extra or not. You’re not gonna “lose” your time or anything, because as you probably already noticed whatever you get in GW2 is cumulative. You won’t lose skins by switching weapons and you won’t lose out on content if you don’t play it because equipment stats are hard capped by ascended. On the contrary, whatever titles, items, etc. you get will only accumulate towards your collections.
Consider also that if you stop playing right now and pick up whenever the next expansion arrives you’ll be “good to go” and will not be required to go through all of the previous content to access it. So buy it now only if you want to enjoy the content available right now, as it is not really a requirement for the next content (and, they will most likely include HoT within the package for the next expansion).
This is such a loose concept and it’s so back there in the history of Tyria (before Tyria even came into play actually) that they can basically do anything they want with it, or do nothing at all. If the games lives up until they bring back the gods into play it could be a raid thing I guess.
From a design standpoint, raiding should at least match the overall design philosophy of the rest of the game. And clearly, that philosophy is one of making it as accessible as possible. GW2 works so well because you can be either a Korean mad farmer with 5000+ playtime hours in bank, or a family mom/dad playing 6 hours/week doing your dailies and dressing up your char to be the most fabulous plant in the garden, and in both cases you can more or less “see” the entirety of the game. There is no “whole portion” so to speak that you can’t really go to (e.g there are many jumping puzzles to pick from if you like them but can’t do SAB tribulation, there is extreme mode if you think Mordremoth should be a real boss and there’s T1-T3 fractals if you can’t be kittened to do the hardest fractals).
They are already trying to do the same for raids actually, however the current way is not pleasing anyone, since they made W4 have a easy-to-hard progression of bosses and now half of people are angry at the first two and the other half are angry at the last two. The green mote idea is definitely good and goes along with what happens in the rest of the game. I’d even argue that, by merely removing the progression of legendary armor collections in any way whatsoever through this tutorial mote, you’re already damping the rewards enough to justify people wanting to progress to normal raiding, while still not feeling left out.
Also, tweaking numbers like boss health and damage while not changing instakill mechanics would make plenty of sense given that people would still use the current meta. You could train Sabetha’s cannons and flame wall without worrying about if your healer is good enough to heal you, train the poison rotation at sloth without being zerged by slublings, Xera training runs would actually be a thing, etc. I see no harm done to either side by doing this.
Finally, for the “developers will not develop new raid content if they have to revisit what was already there” argument. Consider that, the earlier they revisit this, the less things there will be to revisit. If the next raids already come built in with this tweaking in mind, they could both increment more juicy lore knowing that more people can go through the fights and save the actual long time they would take to revisit the current number of raids plus every raid released after that, if they don’t revisit it now. Just take a look at Fractals, it changed basically 100% from what it used to be for the sake of structure and it’s now 100% better than before. Do not think raids will never have to be reviewed and its structure modified to fit population declines (it’s already suffering from population decline: you can log into the game any time of the day for a quick daily fractals but for raids you better be online at peak time or get ready for a long sitting), they ought to do it now for it just increases the amount of work that will have to be done if they take longer to do so.
As said above for the easy bosses, and I’m going to claim it works in general, if you believe a certain boss is hard, try going for a non meta comp instead, specially if you’re 10 people who already play together regularly.
The meta is optimized for fast kills/speed runs with several minutes remaining on the enrage bar. This is achieved with a combination of properly moving around during key moments of your rotation (with seaweed food) and everyone performing their rotation to the letter with nearly to no mistakes. If you still have to deal with learning the mechanics though, why push yourself into a speed run?
Take guardians instead of Elementalists for example. Ele is too hard to rotate with and any DPS meter will show you how much most people don’t even know how to trigger the seaweed buff properly. It is also very squishy and puts pressure on the druid to bring extra protection and search and rescue to resurrect your sorry kittens. By bringing guardians you put less pressure on the druid (he/she can now bring burning with spirit because you supply prot, for example) and adds actual damage to the table, because the rotation is so easy and hard to mess up. It is even easier to practive the seaweed buff because most of your attacks will not halt your movement by channeling and you don’t have to worry about overloads and such.
If you’re the tank, you also don’t have to bring full berserkers at all, as your damage will always be small, and there is no incentive to give that extra edge to a team full of guardians (that will 80% always be competent enough to deal enough damage for a kill). You can go on full Minstrels and leadership runes and I doubt anyone will complain about the extra healing, and that allows you to focus on your boon uptime. It also doesn’t hurt to pick an easier rotation (or come up with an easy one yourself) even if it has less total boon uptime, because there is nothing worse than a Chrono trying and failing the optimized rotations and giving us no quickness at all. If you can give less but at least give some, do it.
Lastly, for the healer (as PS war is so simple that it just works in any setup), keep in mind that if you’re a druid healing is secondary to keeping Grace of the Land up. The extra % in damage is that much worth it that you should actually go into celestial avatar everytime you can and spam your team with heals in spite of them being already full. Do not wait for low bars to do it, as the real advantage you bring as a druid is the damage from stacking Grace. Also, by bringing a sword/warhorn and/or the sylvari hound, you can heal solely by stacking high amounts of regeneration (complemented nicely by the guardians). Should you actually want to play a healer and not a damage buffer, bring an elementalist instead. Whereas they are hard to do damage with, they are the absolutely best healing class there is (albeit not much in the way of buffing damage).
Raids prepare you for raids. Fractals are a 5 man content, and if you think they’ll make you better at raids, you’re wasting your time. And fractal devs should probably concentrate in making 5-man content unique.
If anything Nightmare CM is the best example of the difference in high level gameplay between 5 man and 10 man content.
Yes, they can make you better at dodging, dps management, and etc., but so does the rest of the content in the game.
The rest of the game doesn’t do much for teaching anything, actually, because it can all by bypassed by overhealing, hit and running, etc. It can also be argued that the kind of individual skills you get like managing your dodge bar, keep up rotations, etc. are actually more important than anything else during raids.
Matthias for example is not considered one of the hardest bosses in the game because he takes a lot of teamwork (even if he does, mostly for breakbars) but because any one player can make or break the whole thing. You died with a poison well? gg. You dropped a well of the profane on the middle of the temple right before water phase? gg. You messed up reflect twice during Abomination phase and a ghost just ran through you? gg. What you do as a player contributes to failure or sucess more than what the rest of the team is doing, because most mechanics are targetted at one player at a time. And this is also true of fractals, therefore they are much more alike than it first appears. What you claim as the difference between challenging 5 man content and 10 man content is merely a number difference: it is more likely to have more players failing their individual mechanics during raids, simply because there are more players there to fail!
The enrage mechanic makes more sense the way Anet applies it. A boss should never become more powerful and wipe away at the entire party after taking what amount to literally millions of fireballs and scratches. Whereas here, what happens mechanically can be justified by what happens to felines and such: you cornered the boss for a few minutes, he worked up an adrenaline rush and is now giving his last shot at surviving (rather than pulling a deus ex machina and sending you back to lobby).
Druid’s healing is actually a secondary role. Most people playing Druid do not realize/know this, but keeping grace of the land up is the single reason you’re playing a Druid to begin with. Healing is a mere bonus and the damage from GotL great surpasses that small bonus (basically all you really do is keep high stacks of regeneration up and burst Celestial whenever it’s up, but because of GotL first, and only after for heals).
This is also true of other classes and the true reason why they are not taken (as hinted by OP). Elementalist with healing power on water attunement is actually the king of heals and any team can stay up if they got an ele watching their backs. But the extra damage from druid keeping GotL up is just that much more to pass on.
Actually, you could say that outside of raids (where the mandatory damage ticks more or like require some kind of regen), healing power is just as out of place as vitality and toughness. It does nothing more than allow your team to take more hits before dying, but if they are failing mechanics and taking so much damage (specially true in fractals) that means they are probably also getting cc’d and losing overall DPS anyway.
The real issue is deeper than individual classes but in the very way combat works; it is heavily action oriented so you never have to wait for your turn or count on some evasion stat to not take damage. You either press that evade/block/invulnerability button or you don’t, and the game heavily decentivizes you to ever actually take a hit (again, except for raids and couple other areas, with green circles and all that). This result in a clear and easy message to all players: defense is a matter of only skill and damage is a matter of both skill and equipment, so you should only equip yourself for offense, obviously.
In the end it all boils down to how much a single person can influence the whole fight. Matthias for example is arguably the hardest raid boss because the level of personal influence is [perhaps too much] high, in the sense that failing one of the many single player mechanics may result in failure of the team as a whole. It is actually very hard to recover from two people dropping well of the profane right on the middle of the arena, let alone if someone else simultaneously go down due to not reaching fountain (because druids were busy with well of the profane folks to begin with). Sloth, Sab, etc. all have examples of this too.
The only difference from Fractals then, is the scaling of such events: having 10 people perform at their top game and not fail mechanics is clearly less probable than having 5 people do so, and considering it takes only 2 or 3 out of 10 to fail in order for it to be a wipe, the odds are heavily stacked against players. Note though that none of this calls for any strict kind of “teamwork”. In fractals you have mechanics like dropping lava on the Underground Facility boss, that require a single player to do it while another draws aggro, and the rest simply DPS. The group is severely hindered if any one of these two players fail to play out the mechanics, but this is actually less likely to happen simply due to how content is tuned. The whole thing is scaled down so that 2 out of 5 failing is actually less important than 2 out of 10 failing during Matthias, but the individual performance factor is still there on both cases.
Looking at it like this, we can infer that, in reality, Fractals and Raids are conceptually very similar, with the only difference being a mere fine tuning of mechanics. This is also how it turned out that Raids can be pugged (and are, a lot), rather than being content exclusively for static teams. Individual performance is still the most important thing for raids, and it can even be carried to a certain point. When people think of Raids being the pinnacle of teamwork they might compare it inside their heads to what a sports team would be, with a lot of training resulting in high player synergy. However, both Raids and Fractals are more akin to playing in a band: you memorize the notes for your instrument, and practice synching with the other members; practicing with the same person will result in more harmony, but in principle you can sit down with just about anyone, at any time, and play the same songs as with your band, as long as they have also practiced that song before. That would make Fractals being a garage show with mainly pop songs and 5 band members, whereas Raids are a Jazz supergroup where everyone has to play a solo during the concert.
This is all good really, because it means Fractals can act as that “stepping stone” you mentioned that Raids do not have. Doing fractal 100 CM everyday will not teach you the specific boss mechanics for any of the wings, but it will raise the bar on your individual performance as a player, making you more aware of your actual contribution to DPS/healing/buffing/not screwing up things. And this general awareness of yourself is the single requirement to raid properly, both as a static team member and as a pug.
TL;DR: Fractals and Raids have the same core concept, it’s just that Raids are purposefully tuned to be harder. The 10-man requirement plays a key role in this increased difficulty, but only because mechanics are fine tuned to increase a single player’s contribution to success/failure.
I think the Jade Maw could more or like retain its mechanic with the addition of more interesting mobs inbetween (like it was done to Snowblind maybe). What really kittenes me off is the running to the boss part. Either turn it into a you-must-fight scenario like the Molten Fractal or have no mobs at all I think.
This fractal is a good opportunity to have that GW1 Factions feel to it, maybe by having some Luxon or Kurziks around instead of solely elementals and annoying otaku wind riders. But the boss itself could just use a faster pace, with next to no changing of mechanics.
P.S it should by no means take focus out of new fractals indeed! lol
I do not believe it is a good choice to allow the same item (sans the general ascende boxes with default skins) to be acquired from two different kinds of content. You want that legendary armor? Go raid. You want Golden Fractal Weapons? Well, go for fractals. Same goes for legendary backpieces and basically every weapon. Having different exclusive skins to different content gives that content a particular value that stimulates the most of the playerbase to play the most of the content. One of the main handicaps WvW has is precisely this lack of updated, interesting rewards and attention to detail.
However, it is a very good criticism that we should never have a single set of legendary armor for every weight that is only available through raids. And in spite of Anet’s plea that armor is the largest development bottleneck (mainly due to testing out every mix and match possibility before release), I do not believe they should use this as a reason not to release more legendary armors at an acceptable pace. A random reddit thread for example shows art for what would be an interesting fractal armor set. Frankly I don’t think they should worry that much about clipping (if they did manage to avoid clipping, there would be no Charr anyway…), and release more sets at a steady pace. We are severely lacking on the Fashion department of Fashion Wars 2, and I’m not willing to compromise having the same skins be available on different content, instead of new skins.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/5jwlpq/fractal_armor_concept_light/
New Current Events is awesome and I hope it goes permanent like the Bloodstone Creatures hunt. It also rewards you with 5 different ascended weapons as long as you have 5 characters that completed HoT (I had 2, and now have good reason to complete with the other 3).
If according to the Dev’s themselves, raids are a way to tie loose ends not contained within the main story, then it is definitely fair to question whether or not they are accessible to the majority. After all, this is Anet’s specialty: we have loose ends that go all the way back to GW1 (e.g Wing 4 itself). There are enough of these so called “loose ends” to make GW2 a full blown raiding game while the main story goes on in parallel. It also happens to be that, some of this stuff is what actually gets players curious and thrilling about, speculating what might have been.
While I enjoy that some things remain a mystery just for the sake of it being a mystery (like the Wizard’s Tower), one could argue that GW as a whole actually has more loose ends than it has actual “begin and finish” storylines. That means raids are getting the juicy stuff, the bulk of the GW lore, regardless of some specific plot point being the main narrative.
What should we expect from raids then? The fate of the human gods? Malyck’s Tree? The Seers and Forgotten? The Scepter of Orr? All that awesome stuff and more, only for hardcore ™ players of discerning talent?
@Everyone: You can’t really use the LFR experience for WoW as example (either good or bad), because raiding here is another story entirely; to begin with, what the OP is proposing is nothing like LFR there, because LFR is severely downgraded as far I know. There are even cases of many mechanics being removed, to the point guild raiding is the “normal” mode whilst LFR is a mere “introduction”. This is akin to the easy vs hard mode thread and this is NOT what this one is about. This one is about setting up queues so that groups of like-minded players get filled faster, instead of waiting for that one guy to take the lead and come up with a LFG invite.
You absolutely can, especially because the difficulty and rewards of LFR changed over time to try and accommodate and satisfy the players, and the social aspects around it.
I assure you that this is not just “right now” LFR that people compare, but rather the full history, which tried various things, and eventually settled out to the milder, low challenge, low reward structure that is currently is play.
While I do acknowledge the LFR back on that other game changed to accomodate users, I still can’t see how the raids themselves are even close to being similar to their iteration here, aside from also being called as raids. Raids there had to change because Blizzard for some reason decided it was all about raids anyway, so everyone had to get into raids (the main story even plays out inside raids).
Anet has no compromise to make here. If they come up with a queue the hard mode vs easy mode folks will still complain. Anyone else who simply wants to hop into the game and start their raiding schedule will join up and attempt to do the bosses as they would normally, and that’s the group who should be adressed. Because raids are neither tied to the main Elder Dragon plotline nor required to obtain specific stats/gear quality not obtainable elsewhere, a queue does not have to be downgraded in order to be populated.
It just seems to me that, whenever I pop up LFG, I see many individual players looking for certain bosses with their LI/classes data posted. And more often than not, players are looking to do the same bosses and their LFG is up at the same time, yet they apparently do not meet up and become a 2-man squad to further look for more players. I am not claiming LFG is empty, as a queue would not fix this at all. Quite on the contrary, I’m claiming a queue would be a boost of sorts for the current LFG tool (a very primitive one anyway if you think about it) , which already has plenty of players like me starting their own groups .
And finally, it is not of any relevance that Raids on WoW work this or that way because of the difference in focus mentioned above. Blizzard tries to sell WoW as a raiding game, Anet absolutely does not seem to be selling GW2 as any of the kind. Whatever they did there, be it difficulty tiers or downgraded queues, is not applicable here, because Anet can have this content remain the “Elite zones” like they had back in GW1 with no harm done to the main line of content, whereas for WoW, the raiding population actually dictates the do’s and do-not’s of the developer team.
@Everyone: You can’t really use the LFR experience for WoW as example (either good or bad), because raiding here is another story entirely; to begin with, what the OP is proposing is nothing like LFR there, because LFR is severely downgraded as far I know. There are even cases of many mechanics being removed, to the point guild raiding is the “normal” mode whilst LFR is a mere “introduction”. This is akin to the easy vs hard mode thread and this is NOT what this one is about. This one is about setting up queues so that groups of like-minded players get filled faster, instead of waiting for that one guy to take the lead and come up with a LFG invite.
@OP: This is not a bad idea, really. As you said, it would not hurt raiding for whoever has a static team by now; they can keep doing their reset schedules the same way they used to, and I’m pretty sure people will still look at LFG from time to time to fill eventual spots. In fact, this should only do good, because I’m pretty sure that starting a group is what keeps most wannabe raiders from actually being engaged. By wannabe raiders I mean people that have the right mindset and the right builds, yet for some reason (which we can judge but cannot condemn) do not start up their own group or decide not to join other, single players who are up there in LFG (they want a more or less formed team and not start from scratch with just one more wannabe raider).
Queueing solves things for PvP. Imagine if all you could do was set up your own arenas and make up your own teams (by inviting others) in order to actually start a match. It would probably be more of a desolation than it is now, because all people want is to get into the fray right away. The same happens to wannabe raiders, they got ready and just want to go into the thing test out their skills. Having to wait more than an hour to find that last PuG due to guildies leaving, or spending 2 hours trying to micromanage a full PuG into becoming an actual team, before even starting a fight, is very disheartening. Within a queue system, if you find fail teams for 2 hours straight, which by the way is unlikely (Fractals are so fast and free from gear check, that it actually showcases how a queue would work), well at least you were playing the game instead of waiting the game.
EDIT: to complement on the social aspect matter (how we would all become cold kittens and not interact within a queue system): WoW accomplishes nullification of the social aspect by downgrading mechanics so much that you don’t need any teamwork or synching to succeed at Raids. The queue OP proposes as I understand it, would keep raids untouched and as they are right now, there can be no success without working together. This queue is not like the one in WoW, it is meant only and only to put people together faster. They will still have to talk to each other and to decide what builds to use and whatnot. In ranked PvP sucessful players still interact with each other in spite of being a solo/duo queue, and I see no difference here (except that the interactions are going to be even stronger for raids). It is all about getting together with a group of adventurers for, well, adventure. The only difference is that you meet people in battle instead of in town while looking for a guild or talking stuff in TS/discord.
(edited by maxwelgm.4315)
Toughness doesn’t help much (they have significantly butchered armor due to no PvP/PvE split), and specially on fractals, you’re better off with the extra HP really, that is what is going to give you an extra second to stop the ticking damage from killing you.
Also, although Magi’s do not bring much power into play, you can easily proc effects from traits and sigils with the extra precision, and as you said, there is no reason not to go full blown support on fractals. It’s better if your DPS can not worry about his/her health at all and can focus on their rotations than having to share the burden of overall healing with you (e.g no one else has to bring defensive traits if everyone can dodge and stay close to you).
I don’t know what is wrong with KC but it is the single most bugged boss ever. You’d think something like Xera or Matt with all the phase shifts would be the greatest offenders, but no, here we are at a silly DPS check boss and it’s soooo badly bugged every patch.
This fractal would have failed so hard if it was released back then, but now? Fractal team has shown it is more than capable of doing justice to one of the most influential characters in all of GW. I wish it was part of its own thing though and not the ending to Arrk’s storyline (unless his story extends to much more than just 3 fractals).
They could actually pull this off in a long series that would ultimately tie into where the gods came from and what brought them to Tyria, as well as what caused Abbadon to decide “giving out” magic to the world (they could even come out with the “Elder” gods that were never explicitly mentioned like Arachni). The last raid storyline and the following salt from forum loreheads about it being so much better than the rest of lore goes a long way in showing that the best thing Anet can do to enrich storytelling is to close the loops that were left back then during the times of GW1.
@Jubilan: Does/should Anet actually think like this though? It is ok for you to believe gaming is not a trivial activity. There is real sense of teamwork in doing something for so long that you get in synch with your teammates and can accomplish what none of you could by your own. I do believe it is just as rewarding as any other teamwork stuff that most people would also not consider “trivial”. However, Anet does recognize there is an accessibility issue, and it lies precisely within that mentality.
You see, concerning most things, most people are not willing to give up their leisure to go for a big shot at anything really. Committing “time and effort” is just as uncommon ingame as it is everywhere else. But Anet depends on people committing, because their revenue lies upon players being there for the gem store (dailies help a lot with keeping people in, for example). That doesn’t mean people do not want to obtain the results from that time and effort either. They just can’t be kittened to do it for some kind of gaming sense of teamwork (on top of having cared about whatever else during the rest of the day as well). As you said yourself, there is nothing wrong with that, but still, there kinda is, if you’re on Anet and wish that everyone was more engaged with your game.
What I’m getting at is: the raid population will spread out as more raids release, and many will not be as thrilled as you for so long, and will leave; you said it yourself that there are few gems out there wanting to commit and start raiding, and these people might not be enough to make for a healthy influx of new raiders. Assuming the trend continues, raids then are a dying mode, even starting from its conception. So what can Anet do? They are already trying something with the help of Fractal team: nightmare T4 is definitely a stepping stone, and the challenge mode is a full blown 5-man mini raid. This still did not translate into clear growth yet (at least from my US time LFG anedoctal experience!), and if it doesn’t work at all, what would be the next step? Bear in mind, whatever we think about people and their expectations won’t help much here. What Anet has to ask themselves is what to do regardless of what people think right now (e.g I don’t want to train/change my build).