1. The room for error in Raids is so minuscule that having even one mediocre player on your team can mean the difference between success and failure, and this is a sad situation because usually I like helping new or inexperienced players in dungeons or fractals, but raids do not allow for this friendly community behavior because of how extreme the difficulty curve is and how toxic it can cause your raid group to become.
The difficulty of something can have no relevance on how toxic a community is. This forum was littered with thousands of posts of inexperienced players complaining about being kicked from dungeons because they did not know how to run them quickly. You’re trying to correlate bad behavior with difficulty, yet it’s prevalent everywhere. An inexperienced player stumbling into an open-world PvE farm and “messing it up” will earn them tons of harassment.
I’ve cleared the raid, and yet I still PUG it for fun to help others when I’m bored. Just because you’re unwilling to doesn’t mean others aren’t.
Despite ANet’s attempts to sell it as a no wait, jump in and go game mode that results in instant fun, the reality is far from that idealistic vision.
Class balance is not the same team as the raid designers. Every class should ideally be able to fulfill any role. If they don’t (and they don’t) then the people you complain to are Skills and Balance, not the raid designers.
Gating exclusive rewards behind challenging content further alienates your playerbase… Unlike legendary weapons, which can be acquired regardless of what game modes you play,
I’m really curious if you’ve ever talked to a WvW-exclusive player that’s tried to make a Legendary weapon. You cannot get dungeon tokens for the gifts… My point is that exclusive gear has existed before, and yet now that it exists somewhere else you’re trying to say it’s a problem? Maybe the difference is that now you’ve fallen outside the circle of players who can attain it.
Firstly, I think Raids should have a scale-able difficulty curve, like fractals, with higher difficulty levels offering more rewards.
Fractals is probably the best example to point to as to why scaling difficulty is really bad. It’s impossible to balance. Either a scale is too easy, or one’s too hard. The truth is that players will PUG whatever difficulty is the least amount of effort for the most rewards, so instead of seeing LF10,, you’ll see LF16m or whatever it is. This happened in World of Warcraft.
Raids should be split up into five and ten player archetypes.
In short, this won’t work because having a Healer + Tank + 8 damage is different in ratio from Healer + Tank + 3 damage. Most of the bosses won’t translate well into 5-man encounters. The mechanics also wouldn’t scale well, as some have 3-5 things happening at once.
At the moment, Raids force certain builds or group compositions, which once again go against the “play how you want” policy.
In short, you’re misquoting the “play how you want” quote. It doesn’t mean “everything is optimal”, it means “everything can maybe be viable.” You’re also quoting somethat that was said before raids were conceived.
It’s not a raid problem, but a skills and balance problem.
I really don’t have the time or energy to spend on raids.
I found the problem. Raids are doable by anyone who is willing to do what it takes to raid. If you are unwilling to do what it takes to play, then why do you expect to win? I have fun in raids; maybe raids just aren’t for you. They’re a small part of the content in the game; a very small one.
(Source)