Why do some professions have more weapons at their disposal?
MMOs are a large project and no one person built this game. The answer to that question is entirely dependent on whoever designed the profession you’re talking about. It could be for theme and lore but it also could be mechanics; probably a bit of both.
But when you have 8 different kinds of conditions on you plus the 20 others you will get from the 2 other enemy players, it becomes a bit ridiculous. How is this even fun? How the hell is this an enjoyable mechanic?
If you have that many conditions on you, you’re probably dead either way because you’re being outnumbered in a team fight. (1v3 or worse) Losing and dying is not meant to be fun or enjoyable.
I like the idea of revenants being able to buff allies, but how do you counter infinite buffs?
There are plenty of ways to either remove or corrupt them. The last season of PvP had many Necromancer builds which did this pretty often.
Don’t get me started on the match making….. 4 guards in one game, really?
I don’t think match-making really takes profession into consideration because you can swap your class before the match begins. If it did, people could game the system. For example: If I have low MMR on a Thief, I could queue up on a Thief and then (in theory) be queued against people who have low MMR as well. Then I could swap to a profession I’m better at, which wouldn’t be very fair.
This will be another thread that has been derailed to fixate on Legendary Armor or other raid-specific rewards. I thought one of the rules of the forum was to remain on-topic?
Our Philosophy:
Stay on topic
It’s really disrespectful to the original posters and anyone actually interested in the topic to push your own personal agenda at every opportunity. It makes posting on these forums pretty pointless when pushy people quote you to death with walls of texts.
For anyone genuinely trying the raid and having issues with accessibility, then please be more specific as to what your problems are. Saying, “The raid is inaccessible” does not give any information.
What you might perceive as “DPS” issues might actually be problems with your support, control, or your general strategy.
Example: Having poor control on Slothasor is going to lower your damage, because it takes 0 damage while sleeping and it also can put the boss in unfavorable positions. A group who interrupts and moves him poorly might wipe at 60% on this boss, with 3 minutes remaining. Someone might extrapolate this data incorrectly and come to the conclusion that they need to “increase their DPS” when in reality they just need to fix their strategy and their control.
This game, even before its very launch, has stated the game’s soft trinity is damage, control, and support. If your raid damage is poor, then you deserve to fail. Likewise, if your control is bad you’ll also fail as you also will if your support is bad.
Also: Pay respect to the actual topic of this thread. Stop trying to selfishly derail it with your own agendas, as some of you have done in two other locked threads.
In the Underground Facility, do the Dredge Powersuit and the Rampaging Ice Elemental bosses have the same health? Sometimes it feels like the Ice Elemental has more.
Changing the day the raid resets isn’t going to solve the issue the original-poster brings up: “The quantity (and sometimes quality) of people in pick-up-groups goes down by the time we raid on the weekend.” It’s just going to move this problem to another day in the week.
Maybe there could be more reasons to raid outside of the weekly lock-out? (Like rewards)
Now I would love to believe that is was isolated, but, it’s really an ongoing and widespread epidemic though this and it’s sister topic.
I’m not trying to drag you back into this discussion (I checked out of it myself), but I just wanted to say that it’s not fair to conflate toxicity with raiding because people in this game are (and have always been) toxic about everything. Kill one of the Octovines early (eve with 8-minutes remaining) and watch /map chat lose its mind. Remember what running dungeons was like? (Necro=kick) People are toxic even in the most trivial environments: Remember the Queensdale Champion train? God forbid you killed that troll “at the wrong time.” It was so bad that ArenaNet removed the Champions from the starting zones to get those people out of there.
It’s not really that big. One person is making up about half the replies in this thread by repeatedly restating their opinion and dismissing anything to the contrary.
A completely random group of non-min maxed average joes who skipped proper Exotic, AND Ascended gear tiers, with no strictly defined roles and builds, to be able to finish the Raid means absolutely no effort to do the content.
False.
I don’t know what world you live in where you can have content be interesting for the “average player” but still be beatable by a group of 10 guardians in green gear spamming staff 1. Either the latter group will fail, or the former group will be bored to tears.
The quarterly update will include changes to Fractals, and among those will be changes to the tiering structure. We’ll have to retire two of the current achievements, Casual Fractal Hero and Core Fractal Hero. While we’ll introduce new achievements to replace the ones we’re retiring, any progress made toward the old achievements will not count toward the new ones. If you’ve been working toward the old achievements, you have a few weeks or so left to wrap them up.
The phrase in bold is a bit vague to me. I understand that Casual and Core Fractal Hero are being removed and will not be obtainable again but the part “any progress made toward the old achievements will not count toward the new ones” makes wonder what’s being changed exactly. Can this be elaborated on a little bit? I can make some assumptions about this, but I’d rather have more clarification.
His point was to discredit any prestige associated with earning the legendary armor (since you cannot just buy it from the trading post) by bringing up the fact that you can do unofficial transactions through deals with other players. (i.e. buying and selling raid spots)
It’s too bad you didn’t catch what my point was though: You can pay people to do this for anything so it’s a meaningless thing to bring up in any discussion. You can pay people to carry you in PvP, achievements, or even pay people to play your account to farm Nevermore. It’s completely and utterly pointless bringing this up.
I find that it’s more useful to have multiple sets of Ascended armor on different characters rather than several sets on just one. In the current balance of for PvE, the most I’d do with Legendary armor on a class like Guardian or Elementalist is slightly adjust the stats between Berserker and Assassin attributes depending on whether or not I have a Drud in my group. (for Spotter) I can’t change my Scholar Runes out easily, so the set is going to keep fulfilling the same role for direct damage either way.
It might be more useful for a class like Chronomancer to adjust the amount of toughness you have between raids for tanking. There just simply aren’t many opportunities to make full use out of this system though, not without templates and the ability to change our runes easily and cheaply.
Personally I was never bothered by SAB rewards because I thought that the blue ones looked great, and that the yellow and green ones were awful looking. I got all the blue weapons I wanted and then some. If someone runs around with those I’m not in awe, I pity them. Now if the default colors had been yellow, and the rare colors had been blue and maybe red or purple, oh, there would have been a firestorm.
I find it amusing you pretend in one post to be advocating for the “good of the game” when another post like this so transparently shows all you care about are things you personally find shiny.
Just going to throw this out there: This is exactly what happened to the dungeon team but the difference is that this time Mike O Brien actually told us right away instead of learning about it long after the fact. I’d also like to point out that while dungeons was content that was way more popular than Legendary weapons, the game still survived just fine.
And no matter how much work you think it may take to implement, it can’t be more work than actually implementing brand new content, so it’s a workload savings too.
I don’t know why you insist on making any sort of reference to how hard or easy something is to implement when you were specifically told not to. Are you deliberately trying to mislead people, or are you just forgetful?
Gaile Gray.6029:
With all due respect, unless you’re a developer for GW2 you are not qualified to make a statement about the time needed, difficulty involved, or feasibility of such a feature.
All I’ve been asking for is an ALTERNATIVE to that, which allows for players to experience the existing raid content in an easier manner, if they want to, and to have a slow but steady progression towards the same rewards. How is that not a fair compromise?
Depending on how they would implement something like this, I probably wouldn’t care. I want more people raiding and excited by it, not less.
The Excitement of Raiding:
One thing I wouldn’t like to see though is to have the bosses turn into boring slogs because it can and does harm the content doing this. While I have a static group that farms the raid, I also often play with other guilds still progressing or just join pick-up-groups. It’s always really amazing to see how thrilled and happy some people get when they finally kill these bosses.
Maybe you are not the kind of person who plays for these moments and that’s perfectly fine. To assert though that, “They can just not do easy mode, it’s fine” is not actually a true statement and I say this from experience. I’m sure you’re going to flame me for mentioning the dreaded “World of Warcraft,” but for as much as you protest me using it as an example it actually has exactly what you’re asking for: Raids with multiple difficulty modes using the same bosses, mechanics and story but rewarding inferior loot.
Some players who play the easy-mode do not feel compelled to do the harder modes in that game because they have received most of the experience, even if they are more than capable of doing so. The harder mode’s difficulty becomes more negatively reinforced. Wiping to a boss looks exactly the same with similar but more difficult mechanics, especially one you’ve just killed on an easier mode, does not feel worth it anymore to some people. It feels much worse than this boss only existing in this difficulty setting.
Thanks for posting this, Sabetha’s music is probably my favorite track. I think the best thing ArenaNet did with music was during the Battle on the Breachmaker during Season 1 when the music changed per phase. Final Fantasy XIV does this with most of their bosses, and I think it adds quite a lot more excitement.
You have your own idea of how GW2 works, I have mine
Only ArenaNet controls how Guild Wars 2 works, irregardless of what idea it is you or I have in our heads about how we want it to work. Maybe you just don’t understand what raids were supposed to be, but a good place to start to understand them is from their own words in their introduction blog post: (Link)
I suggest you start using that as your source material, not some video they made almost six years ago. That video is really showing its age as some of the stars of it don’t even work there anymore. (Colin Johanson, Jon Peters)
Ohoni: Basically you’re trying to compare the content of the raid to that of something like Queensdale or any other open-world map. I’m sorry, but that’s just ridiculous. It’s not what raids were meant to be.
I suggest you just read this blog post if you want to understand what the goal and premise of raids are. (Link) I’m sure you’ll cherry pick something out of there to say how wrong it is, but the spirit of the blog post is very clear:
You asked for the ultimate challenging content in Guild Wars 2—challenges that would put your skills to the test and push you and your friends to the edge to achieve victory. Now the answer is here. Today at PAX Prime, we announced that the “challenging group content” that we said would arrive with Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns™ is Raids!
That hadn’t been my experience. The group I was playing with, any time the green circle hit, almost everyone would be on their backs, except me, and that was only because I was a Reaper with auto-shroud at the time. So if you’re right, it would still need to be tuned down a bit from its current level, but would still be a threat to less-than-optimal groups.
Distributed Magic (aka: The “green circle”) deals damage in two ways:
When 4 (or more?) players are standing in the circle, they take a strike of damage. (I think it’s between 3k-4k) This can be reduced through a number of ways such as damage reduction (Protection, Oakheart Salve, etc.), damage absorption (Phantasmal Defender), damage nullification (Endure Pain), invulnerability (Mist Form), blocking, etc.
If you do not have 4 (non-downed) players in the circle at the time, the entire raid will take 80% of their health in damage. The only way to reduce this damage is by using an invulnerability skill.
It is possible to kill the raid bosses in pick-up groups, but your mileage will vary. I think the raid (like most content) is best experienced among friends though regardless of them being in your guild or not.
I recommend you try to find a pick-up-group on Monday when the most groups form.
You are arguing agains people that ask for greater accessibility of legendary armor.
What you’re linking I was just me saying that exclusive rewards were nothing new. As far as the accessibility of the armor goes, I said they could make the armor or the precursor something that can go on the trading post. (Link) That way, people could just buy it and then finish the legendary on their own time. I really don’t care about the armor being some exclusive to the raid; I actually don’t care much about the armor at all myself, they could add it elsewhere for all I care.
Not sure why you felt that first statement was addressed to you specifically and responded as if you were the person i was responding to.
You personally are indeed one of the least combative people in this thread. Even if you do seem to try to tell me what i shouldn’t be rewarded with.
When you start generalizing people and say things like, “You raiders! You want to do this and that” when I am someone who raids, then yes your comments are directed at me, and everyone else who raids too. Just because someone generalized you doesn’t excuse you doing the same to others.
At this moment, the complaints aren’t about raids getting it first. They are a result of Anet strongly suggesting that other options aren’t even considered.
Why are you thinking this? What’s the source on this?
I’d be happy to. As soon as raiders will stop telling me what i can and what i cannot get as rewards in my sandbox.
I’m not telling you what you can or cannot get. In fact, the only “demands” I’ve seen are those being made by you.
If the argument is that “this is locked behind content I don’t want to play,” then this has been in the game for a long time: Since launch. Hall of Monument rewards are exclusive to people who haven’t played Guild Wars 1. You can’t actually ever earn this unless you pay real-life money for those games and purchase them.
Glorious Armor is exclusive to people who play sPvP. If you do not PvP, you will never get this armor. Season 1 had exclusive rewards which might not ever come back. The Green Skins for Super Adventure Box cannot be earned without playing Tribulation Mode. (If this content ever comes back…)
Ascended gear was first added to the game exclusively in Fractals. I played WvW pretty heavily and I knew many players upset by this. Other means of acquiring them were added inevitably.
A fair point, but maybe they determined that they were worth it, not because of their longevity ratio, but because they so fully engaged players that even if they didn’t repeat them, they would feel more connected to the game and want to play other game elements more. I don’t know what metrics they take in, but perhaps they determined that people who played LS content were more likely to keep playing other content for longer. The LS is a foundation that gives added life to the rest of the content.
Considering their major restructuring of their teams the live team this year to be split more evenly, I’d say that they have probably determined it wasn’t that worth it.
You’ve seen in past years that we went through times when the whole company worked on one thing. In 2013, the year we shipped 21 Living World updates, pretty much the whole company was working on Living World.
We have about 120 devs working on the live game, 70 devs on Expac2, and 30 devs on core teams that support both. Within these groups we have cross-discipline teams with focused missions. For example on Live we have the PvP team, the WvW team, the Fractals team, the Raids team, the Living World team, the Legendaries team, and a couple others.
Again, no, because . . . Look, you do understand the idea that the majority of the population deserves the majority of the resources, right? I mean, this should be common sense, but you really seem like there’s something about it you aren’t getting. Where is the disconnect?
A major disconnect was WvW and sPvP; in terms of the content-to-population ratio you’re describing, this was way, way off. Another was Fractals, their “supported” 5-man content was just neglected left to stagnant for long stretches of time. Meanwhile, in Living World land, they were spending a majority of their resources for content people rushed through in 1 hour every two weeks.
Most of the content being produced by the Living World team was very, very poor in terms of replay-ability and longevity. Many players don’t even bother with the achievements to those stories, and the few that did now have no reason to ever go back. Anyone who took a break from the game also has to purchase Season 2 from the gem store, which is another absurd joke to me. Don’t even get me started with how wasteful their temporary content nonsense was.
They had two years of Living World to find a system that actually improved the game in a meaningful way, and after all that time all we’ve gotten really was one zone where people farm (Silverwate) and adding Sinister gear.
I went back to look back at the wording ArenaNet used in their blog about raids and this armor: (Source)
“Secondly, raids will introduce the very first ever set of legendary armor.
The raids are introducing the first set. They did not say it will be the only set ever.
I can’t speak for everyone, but if it made people less upset I wouldn’t care if Envoy Armor’s precursor or the legendary itself was something we could just sell on the Trading Post.
Some argue that the stat swapping makes legendary better. Maybe you should tackle that argument first.
Stat-swapping is useful, but it’s being overestimated a bit. You won’t effectively swap from a full-healer to a full condition damage dealer without replacing runes. Your build will be ineffective at one of these, or you’ll have to burn six runes. (Also: LOL @ Upgrade Extractors) This is how Legendary weapons work, and we can only assume it’ll work the same for the armor. It’ll be nice for things like being able to adjust your Precision or Expertise a bit more accurately.
The question becomes where the resources to build an easy mode will come from. I’m not going to argue about how much effort something takes since Gail Grey specifically said not to. (Link) The only designer who has done anything like that was Josh Foreman. (Kind of curious as to how many people used Infantile Mode and how much effort it took to build)
I still am sad recalling how all of of Josh Foreman’s effort’s didn’t stop the toxic backlash from the community when they weren’t satisfied with World 2 though, despite him making three different difficulty modes.
I really don’t understand this push to attach “exclusivity” to “difficulty” that’s been going on for the past few pages. The issue simply is that the raid is too hard for some people; that’s it. Why not focus on something productive, such as providing clear and concise feedback as to what makes raiding hard for you to get into? (Some have done this, but many have steered things way, way off-topic)
Can we please stop this charade that Hard does not mean Exclusive. We all know it does.
Are you going to argue that PvP is bad content because it will eventually exclude you from high level play if your skill level cannot compete at top tier? You aren’t entitled to always win just because you purchased this game; you’re going to lose at times. For some reason this is deemed acceptable in PvP but highly offensive and outrageous in PvE. I’ll never understand why people think this is.
My point simply is that we don’t know what the Legendary Backpiece will require in its entirety, so any argument using it as a premise is built entirely off of assumption.
I went to one of these raids a few days ago. 7 people that had never killed Gorseval (some of which who never stepped foot in the raid before) were grouped with 3 experienced players, and we managed to kill Gorseval. Pretty cool stuff.
Dungeons are strung together with difficult-to-parse scripting and are very hard to diagnose when issues come up.
I think this is something many people are underestimating. The only difference between AC paths 1, 2, and 3 is the NPC that follows the player. So many Explorable Modes will progress their path from the NPC (Hodgins, Detha, etc.) crossing over triggers. For anyone who has ever done multiple paths in one run, you’ll come to the realization that the separation between each path is very, very brittle. I imagine in whatever tools or editors they use to build this content, it must be some kind of nightmare to see all these different paths and scripts overlapping one another and trying to make any sense of it.
Is there even anyone left at ArenaNet that originally built the dungeons still there? Without any experience with how they were originally created, I’d be afraid to touch anything in those places in case they end up breaking even more.
We actually still run into some issues with relics of old dungeon design in the Aetherblade and Molten Facility Fractals with how some of the progress of those places are still frustratingly tied to NPCs.
With all due respect, unless you’re a developer for GW2 you are not qualified to make a statement about the time needed, difficulty involved, or feasibility of such a feature.
You’re welcome to discuss the situation, and we appreciate that you want to do that. We welcome the conversation! But please participate by sharing what you’d like to see, and why, and don’t be misled by individual, external assumptions about the feasibility or practicality of such a request.
I could totally understand your points if this were a significant overhaul, with some skilled removed entirely and other skills added to replace them with different effects, but this really would be “copy->paste, subtract 30% from the damage on this ability, subtract 10% from the damage on that, etc.”
Asking for a new mode with a different level of rewards, disavowing them from achievements, having a different mode to zone-in from, properly distinguishing the two different modes so players don’t get confused, adding different lock-out timers, and rebalancing the bosses to work with easy mode (outright removing or redesigning things like Firestorm, World Eater and Sacrifice) and applying this to every raid released sounds pretty significant to me.
