Funny how many of the people claiming to love meters and/or claiming they dont add to exclusions, have actually posted reasons why they have added to exclusions and reduced build versatility.
Without meters many exclusions were based on generalized and vague information. Some classes sufferd blanket exclusion, necromancer, while others excluded you if they didnt saw a certain weapon or buff. With meters those exclusions expand to everything but a few select builds. If they see anything that hints that you arnt using the meta build, you’re excluded… for most classes, exclusions jumped from anyone using this one weapon or skill to everyone who isnt using this one build. That is a MASSIVE increase in exclusions, and it was caused by meters.
Does everyone who uses a meter base exclusions on what they personally see in the meter? No… nor are all the exclusions comming from people using meters. But the reasons for the exclusions are directly tied to meters. Someone somewhere recorded X weapon/skill/whatever to be extremely weak, so now everyone using it is excluded… someone else somewhere recorded X build to be the strongest for the class in this role, so you must use this build or be excluded.
Wrong, on so many levels.
First, pre-meter meta was largely decided on what was perceived to be best. In other words, on qT golem benchmarks. Nevermind that so few people could get close to these benchmarks and even less so would maintain decent performance in real raid scenario. The game was filled with wanna-be dps eles who thought camping fire and pressing ‘2’ and ‘5’ off cooldown makes them do 40k dps.
The introduction of the dps meters is what largely debunked this illusion. There were also the ele nerfs and condi buffs in general, but ele builds still remain in the ‘top tier’ dps potential. The difference is, a lot of people now see they can perform as good or better a lot more reliably by playing a simpler build. This increased the build diversity in the actual group compositions.
Of course, there are still the ‘top builds’ which get picked more often than the snowflake ones. This however is a player issue, not a tool one. It’s just what meta is and it’s just how players play games. If anything, dps meters mitigate the issue, to an extent. People experiment, create and play builds tailored to a specific encounter, because it is now very easy to evaluate their performance. This, again, increases the diversity of builds people actually play.
I thought the Trebs were only supposed to be below where the engi farm was.
Well, then the engis would just move a bit, wouldn’t they?
Why there aren’t Bloodstone Rubies in the list?
Funny thing about it being a people problem is, if we carry on the board game analogy, a lot of the more recent board games have been taking deliberate steps towards obfuscating the information that is available to all players about other players’ current capabilities in an attempt to prevent this backseat playing phenomenon. Just something I find kind of funny, that board games are attempting to become more opaque to try prevent/manage the people problem, while computer games, which have such a head start on being opaque over board games, are becoming more transparent to feed into it.
(I’m not against meters by the way, but I am against how some people who defend meters choose to portray/charicaturise the points of view on the topic that don’t completely align with their own).
That’s an interesting observation, however I wouldn’t attribute it to tackling the “people problem”, rather having an… let’s say “additional layer of difficulty”. Having more information available can make planning (and therefore the game) that much easier, which kills part of the fun.
This, of course, is only my own interpretation. I might as well be wrong.
There is a very simple reason why people hate meters. It hurts to have a bad feeling about your own underperformance being proven to you by accurate numbers and statistics.
It hurts even more to have your mind blown if you didn’t even realize you were underperforming or to know that other player will see all of that information as well.You know when you’re playing a cooperative board game and there’s that one player who’s telling everyone what they “should” be doing with their turns instead of letting them actually play the game themselves?
In my experience, that’s why people “hate” meters/meta/whatever.
Then add in the sociopolitically distasteful “pulling your own weight” diatribe that gets flung about by these backseat gamers, and you can begin to understand one of the many alternate points of view on this topic, and why allowing meters might be viewed as legitimising what some see as an unhealthy environment.
This… a million times this… I play this game for enjoyment… I’m not here to be told “you have to do things this way or GTFO”. I get enough of that at work, I’m not here for work, I’m here for fun and relaxation. There are enough headaches in the game from unnecessary and quite frankly stupid restrictions, adding on being required to play your meta builds and meet your ever growing DPS minimums is one headache I and many others would rather not deal with. Unfortunately, nearly any time we decide to go do some group content, we get that kitten forced on us by everyone who’s running around with a meter.
Funny. I’m running a meter myself since they became legal. I only remember a player (and it was not me) remarking on another player’s DPS once. A lot more often I see “wtf, why are you using weapon X”, or “why do you have only Y AP”. A LOT more often.
You want to have fun? Sure, go ahead. Nobody’s stopping you. And neither are the dps meters. No matter how terrible your dps is, there are a lot of groups who wouldn’t care. And no matter if we have dps meters or not, there are a lot of groups who would care, blame and flame you. You can’t avoid that, except to leave such group when you find one. DPS meters aren’t the issue, players are.
Full zerk is the best choice. If staying alive is an issue, you can consider running some Marauder parts. Condi is pretty much useless on staff, not enough damaging conditions to make it worthwhile.
The problem isnt the builds, the builds are fine. The problem is the player thats so vapid they cant think to change utility to suit them better. Like ele’s that dont take rebound on KC, instead of FGS.
I stopped taking “Rebound!” on KC long time ago. It really isn’t much good tbh. The only thing that wipes us occasionally is when we fail to kill spirits and CC the boss fast enough to cancel the big circles attack. And Rebound doesn’t save us as it only mitigates a single hit.
My pedanticism satisfied, in general you’re right. There isn’t “one build to rule them all”. You’re always better tweaking something here and there to match what the fight needs. Rebound on Xera for buttons, Gale Song on Sloth for the free stunbreak, Tempest Defence on KC for the extra damage and so forth. Heck, I still take Lightning Flash when doing Sabetha cannons. I’m fully aware it’s suboptimal to do so, but my group has the dps to kill her anyway so I don’t see a point risking the fight just to be “optimal”.
tbh I don’t want someone who has done it to train me, I don’t like being told what to do. But I don’t see any other way of learning how to do raids.
Here’s an idea: set up your own group. I bet there are many players like you out there. Gather them up and figure the fights out yourselves. I personally enjoyed the experience when I did it with my guild on W4.
DPS is also still so much required because the higher DPS is the more you can ignore the mechanics
This only works if you’re already familiar with the mechanics. You can’t do that with a bunch of players who entered a raid for the first time. And as such, it is irrelevant to the discussion. And it also doesn’t make the dps required. It makes it rewarding.
Crutch? its an armor set. As for Zerk the only people who care about that set are those that min max for a raid. Outside of a raid Zerk is useless beyond giving bigger numbers and less utility/support/heal/condy/defense.
Personally i switch between marauder/celestial/trailblazer as my mood fits. Choice is much more enjoyable.
Berserker’s gear doesn’t just produce bigger numbers, it clears faster. I used to run Marauder, so I know. The difference isn’t large, but it exists. And at some point it becomes boring to swap gear back and forth for no apparent reason. Power/condi swaps I can understand. Marauder and zerk serve exactly the same purpose, except zerk does it better.
We just wait for the first block to expire maybe auto attack a bit and than burst.
This only works with full buffs (quickness, alacrity, might, fury).
DPS is a way to make Subject 6 faster, but it is not really required to kill it. Deal some damage, kill some oozes, wait for the shield to expire, repeat. You can do it with autoattacking. The problem usually is players get stuck on “deal some damage” phase, get swarmed with oozes and can’t manage them fast enough which makes the boss heal and stomp you. When I get in a group like this I switch my focus completely on the oozes.
It has higher number total, but lower values for each stat. So if you can’t take advantage of them all, it’s equivalent to having lower stats.
With the introduction of dps meter’s it is apparent that player versatility is narrowing, i.e. if you see a thief running dual pistols you immediately know they bring little to the table whatever game mode they are playing (pve/wvw/pvp).
I disagree. You can judge a bad build by just knowing the game. I would guess most of the people running dps meters already are familiar enough with it to make said judgement. Also people in general are now more tolerant toward different classes/builds filling in certain roles, especially dps roles. Partially due to the balance changes and partially due to dps meters. It’s hard to argue build X is better when you see the hard numbers and the player clearly performs worse on it.
Marauder is a fine alternative if you don’t mind spending some gold for essentially a crutch wheel. Eventually you’ll want to get back to zerk, if only to avoid constant swapping back and forth between gear.
Nah. You can do it easy mode with proper power comp, but it only allows you to skip mechanics. With pug group just kill the oozes and cc vets.
It’s not like 100 CM has high pressure anywhere. I’ve done it in a no-healer groups with my full glass meta zerk ele. Granted, it is faster/easier to just get a druid and rely on her heals instead of paying attention. Granted, you’ll hardly notice any difference in clear speed if you’re running Parasitic Contagion or Invigorating Precision over the respective full dps builds. If you feel safer or more comfortable, by all means, pick them. Just don’t think that’s high pressure. Matthias is high pressure.
They’re more realistic to achieve in a timely manner than the new WvW reward skins, that’s for sure, and they’ll only get easier to achieve with the more bosses that get added to the game.
Like someone pointed out (perhaps on reddit), there’s a difference between the raid and the WvW reward skins. The raid ones are primarily locked behind effort, not so much time. For the WvW ones is the other way around. You don’t need any specific skills, you just need to play hours upon hours of WvW.
It was because even with a stat selection that focused on healing and tanking we were able to still be top dmg.
Riiiight…
Hence my topic title: raids & legendary armor unrealistic for casual players.
Except by your description you’re not a casual player, you’re an almost inactive one. It strikes me as most unrealistic to expect the most challenging content, designed for the most active players be accessible for someone who doesn’t log in often enough to not get kicked out of a guild.
So, no… It’s not the raids or the armor that are being unrealistic, it’s you.
Everyone of those mechanic failures results in dmg to the player, so reducing that dmg does give leeway. You have mistaken dmg reduction or modifier for only a dps check.
Except not. Failing to protect the cage at trio, or Sabetha’s platform, or Glenna, results in immediate failure. There’s no damage to the players, you’re just failing the objective. Same goes for Gorseval’s World Eater, by the way. Same goes for getting knocked into spears by Samarog.
But even if they all did result in damage to the player and nothing else, reducing the damage would solve nothing. It would either be reduced enough to ignore all the mechanics – turning raids essentially into world bosses, thus defeating their purpose – or it will make mechanics that directly wipe you into ones that only pressure you. Increasing the pressure, however, will NOT help players to deal with said mechanics. Or the rest of the mechanics in the fight, for that matter. It will only make things worse. You’d still be wiping, just a bit later, after you’ve lost several members of the team and everything has fallen apart. It’s pointless.
No modifications required. Kill mobs faster = they hit you less times (if at all) = more survivability.
I’d advise running a power build tho. It has better burst, meaning the above survivability plan is more efficient.
Nah, the game just crashes randomly. Crashed for me twice in Bitterfrost Frontier (not doing anything in particular) and once in the Special Forces Training Arena.
Sort of, yes, as I see them linked. When you say mechanics, which ones are you referring to?
The ones that make you fail. You know, like not CC-ing the wargs at Escort, going through the whole squad with poison on Matthias, failing to go to VG greens, missing a bomb throw on Sabetha… need I give more examples?
My two cents: BFF situation is worse than Doric farm (which is actually supposed to be a farm) and I’m surprised they took care of the latter before the former.
I’m sure something is going to be done to stop BFF as well. For now I just make the point of reporting every single AFK farmer on my daily berry run.
Also, none of these zones have any value to the game beyond their story and maybe the odd item someone wants, if not for these farms.
If they’re not supposed to have that, why even have the zone be permanent? :s
The problem isn’t the farm. The farm is intended, in either case. The problem is the way it is farmed.
On the question of why these areas exist – as an easy way to get ascended trinkets.
An interesting question arises:
Should higher-level/-difficulty content by default give better rewards? As in, should the game artificially add meaning to tackling challenging content? Or should the content inherently be rewarding enough to overcome?
Where should the motivation come from, basically?
You can’t rely on the content being a motivation by itself. This motivation exists, but it is exhausted MUCH faster. To make content creation cost effective, you must provide some additional motivation. In other words, grind. It’s always there, in any MMO. The only question is what should be the end result of that grind. Virtually any other MMO answers with “power”, whereas GW2 answers with “fashion”. Apparently, both approaches work. Obviously, there will be the player who prefer one and those who prefer the other.
So, is this new treb destroy-able?
And i think A-net miss-diagnosed this. we’re not actually afk. We’re just not moving.
You can’t actually be afk there. You need to replace turrets fairly often.
I personally feel like they went the wrong way with how to handle this. But we’ll see how this will go.
Nevertheless, it’s a silly and boring gameplay which should be nuked from orbit.
I still find it funny that some think that making a story (easier) mode would somehow be detrimental to the game. It could literally be a mote that gives non-standard boons (think outnumbered in wvw)…no substantial development time needed. A small amount of dev time would open up raids to a lot of players that otherwise wouldn’t participate in the content.
Right. What about balancing this? Still think “no substantial development time needed”? Because if you do, you’re wrong. I’m saying this as a game developer.
Ahh, I see! So it’s a trick used by game companies to add new challenging content that rewards your efforts! That must be why GW2 adds in lots more casual content with no point or reward then. Thanks for clearing that up!
See, I used to play Diablo 3, which is arguably the biggest gear treadmill out there. In no way is the content “challenging”. Scale the gear stats, scale the monster stats and guess what, the gameplay experience remains exactly the same.
Though, I’d have to question why GW2 has the 1-80 grind, the copious amount of gear upgrades you’ll get along the way, the grind for the best gear, the grind to unlock specializations, the gear to unlock all the new HoT stuff(gliding, jumping, lore, mushrooms, etc), the crafting grind, and so on. If being on a treadmill is something other companies use to trick their playerbase, then why does GW2 have any of this? Why not just give you a max-leveled, best-geared, min-max’d toon so you can just play the game? Why have any of that grind to work through?
Or do higher stats only have a place when they suit your argument?
Levelling up exists as in any other game, to teach you the basics. It’s also optional past your first character (I power levelled all my alts). Same holds true for masteries and crafting, except masteries aren’t even optional, they are strictly once per account. It’s important to point out none of these is in any way difficult or RNG-based.
In no way does this game have a power grind. It has a fashion one.
I find it crazy that, even if I worked up to fractal scale 100, and completed every raid, I wouldn’t get a single item that improved any of my stats.
That’s because this game is specifically designed to avoid the power grind you see in pretty much every other MMO. And it’s a great design. It lets you play all you want, when you want. It doesn’t make you feel like you’re in a race you can’t possibly win, because there are professional players there, playing 12+ hours a day. Basically, it lets you play for fun.
But if a grind is what you crave, then there’s grind enough. Only it’s optional and it rewards with skins, not attribute points.
Raids were always meant to be high end content for people who wanted challenging content. So it stands to reason since it is “harder” than regular content it should be rewarded differently which it isn’t.
You’re missing the point. The reward in raids is the legendary armor. It’s essentially the same as the grind for any other legendary, except it’s more challenging. It follows the same design principles as the rest of the game. Which it should.
(edited by Feanor.2358)
Are you are saying the “average” player can’t remember 3-5 mechanics per fight or play their class in an average manner?
Remember? Possibly. Remember and execute? Now, that’s something completely different. And you are severely overestimating what constitutes “playing the class in average matter”. Unless you have some really nonstandard definition of “average”.
It’s not “completely different”, it’s just a matter of practice. I doubt there are many people who can “remember and execute” on their first try. And even if you’re one of them, you’ll still likely need to do the practice as not all of your group mates would be.
Now, the strange notion you should somehow be able to execute all the mechanics flawlessly on your first attempt aside, the mechanics of the raid bosses in this game are simple enough. I’m pretty confident the vast majority of the players can handle them – remembering and executing – if they made the effort. It’s not an issue with the mechanics. It’s an issue with the vast majority wanting to skip the effort part.
You can stay on switches with just earth elemental and blinds, using the full glass zerk meta build.
They used to be the most challenging content in the game. But ever since raid was released, it’s no longer hard for me. Because raiding has improved my gameplay drastically… and forced me to go beyond what I thought I was only capable of doing.
If you find it difficult, consider being a healer with clerics gear. I always use my druid when doing cliffside, volcanic etc. It makes things go faster, and nobody dies.
(Some groups on lfg will not want a healer because they think having 5 DPS will make things go faster… but in my opinion, having 1 healer is faster because people can worry less about dodging or ranging to stay alive).
You’re completely right. I always prefer to be in a “proper power comp” for T4 and 100 CM. It’s not that it’s necessary, but it makes the experience so much smoother.
That’s not how I remember it.
I can agree with this. However, focusing on dps should only come after you’ve mastered the mechanics. Otherwise it’s simply pointless.
Wouldn’t just removing enrage timers help balance the meta? Then time becomes a convenience instead of a necessity. You could make the bosses do more damage with telegraphed attacks encouraging a variety of gear but not punishing you for taking your time. DPS will always be meta as long as timers exist. They are counterproductive to the thought of anything else.
Timers have zero relation to the meta. There are no timers in fractals or dungeons and people still play meta there and meta existed there before raids. Timers or no timers, people like to go the most efficient way. That’s not going to change. There will always be meta and it will always be dps-centric. Technically the developers can enforce a different type of meta by making players have to play defensively, but they won’t do it. Because for the most players the resulting gameplay will feel sluggish and outright bad.
Too bad raid bosses do not use these much.
Does it really matter all that much what way your outgoing damage is displayed above the boss? Because frankly that’s all the ways in which condi and power differ in raids.
No, but it does matter what I do to produce it. I actually have no issue with condi builds per se. My issue is with the rise of simple to play overpowered builds. They happen to be condi, because condi is what gets buffed recently.
(edited by Feanor.2358)
Maybe it’s down to individual playstyle, but I have never had an issue with vulnerability in an FA or staff build because I can safely distance myself. Any issues I have with the Meteor Shower root I’ve always dealt with by simply teleporting while casting. I have a much harder time with the new condi build because consistent dodging in melee is a challenge in the group melee of fractals and some raid bosses unless you have flawless vigor generation.
I can agree with the issue of mistakes being easier to correct, but only in the case of minor mistakes. a major mistake in condi means you are dead whereas in staff I typically have arcane shield on my bar or some other oh-kitten button that there simply isn’t room for in condi
I get the impression you’re comparing a very suboptimal power playstyle with the optimal condi. Optimal power doesn’t have space for Arcane Shield or Lightning Flash either. It’s too much of a dps loss. And while we’re on it, distancing yourself is one, too. You step outside of wells, you get less buffs, less healing, less GotL, less everything. And you still need to close in for the overloads.
So if you want to be efficient, you simply need to stick in melee range. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve done all of the above except taking Arcane Shield. I simply forced myself in close range and learned to play there, partly because of team tactics and partly for it being a more rewarding playstyle.
Now, if you compare the “optimal” ways to play both, there’s no real difference in regards to survivability. You’re full glass in either case. There is difference in performance, however. Condi loses a lot less from imperfect rotations.
Raids require a good amount of efficiency and synergy. That is about it. They do in no way require you to play perfectly or bring a perfect “meta group” that can squeeze out insane amounts of damage and blow everything up without any mistakes.
We have had this talk before. There are “non-meta builds” and “non-meta builds”. Just because people have completed raids with three Bearbows doesn’t make it a good build. It simply means the other seven players had to try much harder to make up for everything the other three were lacking.
However, just because something isn’t exactly meta doesn’t already make it a bad build either. A lot of stuff works. All you need is to hit a certain amount of synergy and efficiency which will then lead to good DPS and a good amount of survivability.
Thrag is right about the strategies. The “meta set-up” is build around the “meta strategies” people use. This means those set-ups might not even work that well for your own group if you variate from the “meta strategy” too much. But you might find it hard to use those strategies if you insist on variating from the “meta builds” too much.Let’s be honest, the raid encounters are forgiving enough (in the DPS department) that you can go without any of the big three (PS, chrono, druid). You will simply have an increasingly harder time meeting the required amounts of DPS with each of those that you end up excluding.
This and the fact that you have the expect the worst with pugs in general is why people insist on bringing a squad that could theoretically reach 200% of the required numbers. Considering how often the worst happens in pugs, nobody can blame them for doing so.
You’re still focusing on DPS, which is beside the point. The point being, you will likely have the required dps anyway. Mechanics are much, much more important. Mechanics are why people fail at raids. Yet I’ve never seen anyone obsessing about mechanics the way everyone is obsessed by dps.
“dps metermentality” isn’t something introduced by the existence of dps meters. It’s just the way players are. It’s not going to go away.
As for having viable options, I fully agree. So far we’ve seen an alternative to one PS, which is a nice start. Ventari rev can’t really compete with chrono, not just because of the alacrity but also the quickness. Nobody stacks this stuff as good as chronos, and it’s incredibly important. Giving some other profession a reliable source of quickness for the party will help greatly there. Druid is the next offender, which only needs its group buffs upped to 10 people. Obviously with all this we will likely still need 1 PS, 1 chrono and 1 druid. But it will help a lot with comp diversity.
In every patch we had since raid release the balancing of skills and trait is 90% focus in PvE and 10% on pvp with really soft impact on it.
It has always been like this, it’s not something changed with the introduction of raids.
If they were going to focus on pve, then they shouldn’t have ever had a pvp or wvw at all.
Why not? The combat system works. These modes are byproducts of the game, but they both work. Especially WvW works quite well and is quite fun to play.
Right now I’d like to say that GW2 for PvE has a meta but it’s a very strict meta and I would like to say it is because of not having a trinity. Mostly the timer for raids i feel makes it a dmg sponge race and the only way to do it is to follow this current meta. I feel as if this strict meta has basically controlled what people do for endgame content instead of thinking for themselves and learning how they want to play which is what GW2 intentions were right?I believe people play a class to learn everything about that class instead of following a straight line that will eventually get nerfed in another patch or major update.
You’re wrong on a few points.
First, and foremost, the way players play is more often than not dictated by what’s most efficient. That’s what meta is. It’s not there because it is required. It isn’t, even in raids. It’s there because it’s efficient and it means you get most reward with least risk/effort involved. Obviously, there will always be those who prefer to play off-meta because something is more fun for them. But the more players get involved in a specific activity, the higher the chance someone will be more interested in the reward rather than every individual participant’s idea of fun. And the more likely it becomes for meta to be sought for that reason.
You can observe this in many different aspects of the game. Many people prefer to speed-run dungeons and require specific knowledge and builds for that. There are no timers in dungeons. Nor there are timers in fractals, yet meta exists there as well. It’s a natural product of any game.
Now, the “trinity” is just a part of this, a result of the optimization process. You can’t really have a game with no trinity, and GW2 is not an exception. We do have tanks, we do have supports and we do have damage dealers. The meta is only rigid because some professions are just too good of a match for specific roles. Chrono being the prime example. It’s not that other professions can’t tank. It’s that the overall result would be worse, because of how good of a support the Chrono is while tanking.
Not really. The events are quite rewarding, and the amount of materials required for gen 2 legendaries is high enough so it is unlikely these maps will die. Heck, there are still plenty of people doing temples and champ trains in Orr.
I’d rather complain about legendary collections requiring specific events to fail. Now this can be a real annoyance.
Too bad you’re not in EU, you’d be a perfect fit in our Team 2.
A small counterpoint:
An optimal condi ele build is no less braindead than any FA build or power staff build that has dominated the dps rankings for the past year for elementalists.As an elementalist main, I actually think that condi ele is harder than both. The reason I think that is because in FA or staff you have room for defensive utilities and are able to stay at range to keep you safer and give you more room for error. The new condi build leaves absolutely no space for error as you have no room for any defensive utilities or talents and are required to be up close and personal at all times.
The rotation itself may not be very difficult, but it’s not less complicated than most of the other builds, and actually has a high degree of risk associated with it since ele’s were already the squishiest class in the game.
As another ele main, I disagree. FA or staff builds are a LOT harder. Staying alive is really a non-issue. If anything, it’s only ever an issue with staff, because of Meteor Shower rooting you in place. Staying up close is a non-issue. You always need to be there or lose a major part of your healing, boons and subsequently dps. On top of that the condi “rotation” requires much less attention, therefore letting you focus more on what happens around you, meaning it’s easier to stay alive. On top of that, it is more forgiving, you lose less dps from mistakes and there are fewer mistakes to make.
Story telling in a video game requires experience, it’s keen esthetic. It’s not the same as reading a book.
You’re on to something here. It’s a different media. It relies on different approaches to create the intended emotions in the consumer. Challenge is one of these. Although I fully understand the gripe of the casual players who feel raids (and subsequently their story) are inaccessible to them, I honestly don’t think an easy/story mode of the raids would be a good solution. For the above reason. You’d be losing a major part of what makes you involved/emotionally invested in the story.
Range is an ele’s best friend
If you want to lose a major part of your damage output. Ranging can keep you alive – for some time – but will also make you inefficient. In fractals you can generally burst down everything.
Don’t fool yourself. This game has never been “PvP aimed”. Just compare the amount of content available in PvP and PvE. And compare the amount of PvP content available in GW2 vs a real PvP game.
And you keep missing the point. I never claimed the majority raid. The majority PvE. Therefore, PvE being a focus is a necessity. Raids only come as a sort of balance proving grounds because they exist. It doesn’t matter if they’re played by 70%, 7% or 0.7% of the PvE population. They are just the most efficient indication what’s wrong in the game mode. Once your focus is PvE and you have raids being the high-end content in the game mode, it makes no sense to use something else for the purpose of balance.
(edited by Feanor.2358)
It doesn’t matter if the majority play raids or not. You cannot disregard them, because it will simply end up in really broken meta which will not be healthy for the game in general. By the way, a lot of players who do not play raids still follow the meta.
ESports is a different talk, but in general I’d say GW2 can’t really compete there. I don’t think you can have a game which features great PvE and PvP any more. The standards for PvP are just too high now, following the rise of the MOBAs. You need to be designing a PvP game to make it good enough to qualify for ESports. But it will be a different game altogether and it will either don’t have PvE at all or it will be a poor one. By the way this is why I think Blizzard backed off their intention to put PvP in Diablo 3. The game is just focused on PvE, just like GW2.
What I’m saying is basically “you won’t see PvP being the driving force behind balance changes because this won’t accomplish anything”. It won’t make PvP great, it will just spoil PvE. Which is where the majority of the players are. Remember, this isn’t about making “the perfect game”. It’s business.