Guild Wars 2

Evan Lesh.3295:

Someone needs to make a Glicko test program that uses rules from the wiki and post it online…

I’m assuming you mean https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/PvP_Matchmaking_Algorithm – how up to date is it? Parts of it appear to be referring to the old pip system for ladder rankings.

Differences are much more noticeable, well done. Personally can distinguish between the old ones, but I can see how it’ll be a problem for others.

This seems to be a common issue that people seem to be having, and I’m seeing a good number of posts along the lines of:

“I won 2 matches 500:400 and 500:300, yet match A was only +X MMR, and match B was +Y MMR” where X or Y is higher than the other. Actual numbers don’t really matter.

By my understanding, how much MMR you gain or lose depends on your MMR, your team’s average MMR (possibly), and the opposing team’s average MMR.

Examples (I think this is how it works, relatively):
Your own MMR is 1350 for all of the following scenarios:

1) Opposing team’s MMR is 1400, and your team wins. You gain, let’s say, 30 MMR.
2) Opposing team’s MMR is 1500, and your team wins. You gain, 50 MMR.

Why is scenario 2 higher? Well, the opposing team’s MMR is much higher than your own, and presumably, your team’s MMR. The odds of actually winning that match is low, but you won it anyway. You should be rewarded more for it.

3) Opposing team’s MMR is 1300, and your team wins. You gain, let’s say, 15 MMR.
4) Opposing team’s MMR is 1200, and your team wins. You gain, 10 MMR.

Explanation: If the opposing team’s MMR is much lower than your own, the odds of you winning is higher. It’s basically a stomp. Should you be rewarded more for stomping the team when it’s an obvious win?

Let’s look at some losing scenarios:
5) Opposing team’s MMR is 1400, and your team loses. You lose, let’s say, 30 MMR.
6) Opposing team’s MMR is 1500, and your team loses. You lose 10 MMR.

If you lose to a team that’s significantly higher than your own MMR, which is expected by match prediction, your penalty should not be as high as if you lose to a team that’s closer to your MMR.

7) Opposing team’s MMR is 1300, and your team loses. You lose, let’s say, 30 MMR.
8) Opposing team’s MMR is 1200, and your team loses. You lose 50 MMR.

For scenario 8, the reason you lost more MMR was because the opposing team’s MMR was significantly lower than your own. Matchmaking predicted that you’ll win the match, but your team didn’t, so you’re penalized quite heavily for it. If you lose to a team that’s only slightly lower MMR, your MMR loss shouldn’t be too high.

These are all hypothetical numbers. We don’t exactly know the details of how MMR changes are calculated, as Glicko2 has multiple steps to determine that (excluding modifications made for 5v5 matches).

Since skill rating is now visible, two things would be nice to have:
1) MMR changes shown in match history. Evan already mentioned that this should be doable now that skill rating is visible. Perhaps even include things like your team’s average MMR vs. the opposing team’s average MMR (without revealing MMR of individual players in both teams, although it’s easy to add players on the opposing team and see their MMR).
2) Some details on how the MMR changes are calculated, to give a rough idea, particularly, what factors affect the change in MMR.

Note: Team score probably doesn’t play a direct role in calculating MMR changes, but it does give some indication of your MMR relative to the opposing team’s MMR. Example: if your MMR is 1200, and you win 500:400 against one team, and 500:300 against another, you can infer that the opposing team’s average MMR was around 1100 in the first match, while the second match’s opposing team may have been 1000 average MMR. (Again, hypothetical numbers).

Evan Lesh.3295:

Our amazing UI artist has already made a pass on these and they are much more distinguishable and bright.

Are these changes live, or saved for a future update/hotfix?

If Season 6 introduces a new back piece, they’ll also have a way to earn The Ascension achievements. If Season 6 doesn’t introduce a new back piece, it’ll be the same as Season 5 – they’ll still count towards Year of the Ascension.

It depends on how different your team’s MMR is compared to the opposing team’s MMR.

EG1: your team MMR is 1700, opposing team is 1600. You win, you gain 30.
EG2: your team MMR is 1700, opposing team is 1680. You win, you gain 10.

(numbers may not be exact, or may be reversed)

If your team MMR is lower than the opposing team’s MMR, and you win, you gain more. If you lose, you won’t lose much. If your team’s MMR is larger than the opposing team’s and you lose, you’ll lose more MMR.

How much you gain or lose depends on your team’s MMR, opposing team’s MMR, and whether or not you win or lose.

This was my experience personally:
2-8 on placement matches, with a starting MMR of 466. On first thought, I’m terrible, which I admit is true, as Season 5 is my first serious dive into PvP. On second thought, maybe I’m placed too low, and I could slowly climb out.

Today, I played 5 matches and ended 4-1, with 583 MMR. The matches were won by a significant margin, the last of which my team severely outplayed the other.

I do feel like I’m gradually improving, and hope to at least get to Silver, and optimistically, Gold. My performance from here on out will let me gauge that.

Bardly.2571:

No offense taken. Because, not being as good as someone who belongs in a ‘Good’ division isn’t the same as being in a division with ‘Bad’ players. There is no space between for the people who have experience, but aren’t the best. Right now were all mashed together with new or bads which makes it hard to not just move up, but keep from moving down on a string of bad matchups.

Partially agree. Yes, a good player could end up stuck in a group of new or bad players, but that doesn’t necessarily mean the good player will remain stuck there all season. It would be the case if they’re the sole good player stuck in a large pool of bad players, but it’s entirely possible they’ll encounter equally good players who are stuck in a lower division, as opponents or teammates. If enough good players end up on the same team in the lower division, they’ll advance higher. The more that happens, the more likely they are to get out of the low division.

New players aren’t inherently bad either. Yes, most are. Others may be good at PvP in general, but are just new to GW2, and could pick up quickly.

It really depends on the proportion of truly bad players to good players stuck in a low division. Anecdotal evidence may lead us to think that the good players stuck in a lower division are a minority, but we don’t have the raw numbers to make that claim.

Well, I’m not sure how accurate this is, but my understanding:

Let’s say, pre-season, we have players ranging from 100-2400 skill rating, or MMR. Obviously the higher skill players at 2400. Also, forget the old divisions, as being Legendary in the old system didn’t mean you were anywhere close to 2400 MMR as MMR was previously hidden.

The soft reset brings everyone closer to the average, in this case, 1200. New players start at that too. Lets say, hypothetically, player A with 2300 pre-season gets reset to 1400. Player B was 1200 pre-season, and remains so with the reset.

During placement matches, depending on how closely the players are matched, Player A and B could see each other. Furthermore, players who were high ranked being soft-reset close to 1200 will also encounter Player B, who is “average”. Due to unfortunate matchmaking, Player B could encounter many matches where opponents are highly skilled (players who were say 1800+ MMR pre-reset) and could get steamrolled. Their MMR tanks as a result, and the placement matches puts them in a very low tier, along with other average players who don’t necessarily belong there.

Other players could have opposite experiences. An average player at 1200 MMR matched with former 1800+ MMR players as teammates could potentially steamroll the other team, which increases average players MMR, putting them in a higher starting division.

Now, post-placement, this is how it could play out:

1) A player placed in too low of a division could encounter other players who are also placed too low. Combining their efforts, they can win matches consistently, pushing them out of that low division, and close to a skill rating where they actually belong, with other equally skilled players.

2) A player who is placed in too high of a division could end up being far out of their league, and end up losing many matches until they get pushed down into a division where they belong, where they’ll meet people at their skill level.

Of course, these are two particular scenarios. Most players may have had better luck with their placements, and the placement matches put them in a division where they belong. At that point, matchmaking will keep pitting them against equally skilled players, and they may or may not rise out of that division. It all depends on how much the player improves over the course of the season.

I experienced scenario #1 personally, although I’m not good at PvP. I lost 8 of my placements and got put in the lowest tier of Bronze. Since then, I’ve won 4 out of the 5 matches I played today, by a good margin, which gained me +120 or so MMR. If that continues to happen, I can foresee ending up in Silver or Gold by the time the season ends, which I would be pleased with as a player (and it shows improvement).

You can buy gold relics for 3g and 12 Pristines each. Then, you can play the RNG game by throwing 4 of them into the forge.

The more guaranteed option would be to buy the Gold weapon crate from BLING. 30g and 120 Pristines per weapon, and you get a maximum of 15 Pristines per day.

Fluffball.8307:

Vinceman.4572:

Logic failure at it’s best!

160-176+ MPs don’t imply that those people are raiders.

You can’t get more than like 168 without raiding. I was playing with people over that limit.

The mastery track unlocks with any raid encounter that gives LI. People either got carried through VG/Sloth or did Escort to unlock it. I know people with 176 MP who have never raided beyond their first VG kill.

Lunaire.9741:

I hope its around March. Jan seems to busy considering holidays and winters day.

Wintersday will likely end after first or second week of January. Late January is plausible.

Just out of curiosity, what is considered “acceptable range” for Staff Tempest DPS?

maddoctor.2738:

Just a flesh wound.3589:

For those who missed it, this is the post that the OP is referring to

DPS meter in game

Gaile Gray
ArenaNet Communications Manager

Hey guys,
We have a lot of tools that we use in the development of the game, but not all of them are available or supportable in the live game. Adding tools to the game that would require continual updating and maintenance would not be the best focus for the team. So while we’re aware that some players would like to see an official DPS meter — and clearly the community is divided on this topic — you should be aware that the team does not intend to add one to the game.

If you notice, the objection appears to be to the continual updating and maintenance required.

I think that objection is easily overcome if they allow the combat log to be written in a text file then it’s up to the community to figure everything else.

Unless of course writing something to the disk isn’t within what the game client is allowed to do, if I recall there was some talk about text files in the old discussion about build saving. There are “issues” if they allowed saving builds to a text file, like in GW1, so maybe the client can’t be given access to text files so easily.

Screenshots.

Those are written to disk. Writing combat logs to files should be well within reason.

Having a weekly achievement would be nice, resetting with the raid reset.

For now, I’m just keeping the decoration items in my inventory, with insights, as a means of keeping track. I main Tempest, and occasionally swap to other characters for different roles, so it’s not too hard to keep them all in my inventory and put them into my bank at the end of the week.

What we know: 2 bosses are done and balanced. remaining 2 are in the final stages of tweaks/balances.

Optimistically, next week (if we get a trailer this week). Barring that, the next “big” patch will be Wintersday in the third week of December (we could see the raid released with it, but unlikely). After that, the earliest opportunity is first week of January (6th or 7th iirc).

When I first started raiding, I had only a small amount of experience. 2 VG kills with a guild that did training raids for my casual guild at the time. After a while, I took a long break because I was overwhelmed by the amount of content in HoT and also disappointed that I didn’t have a regular group to raid with.

Fast forward 6 months, and some of the initial issues still existed. My main concern now though, was “what if I wasn’t good enough?” I knew I was a decent player, capable of doing T4 fractals with ease even as a squishy class, but I didn’t know how well that’d transfer to raids. I also still didn’t have access to a guild or group that was willing to give me the time to practice. I practically had to beg one particular guild (most of them split off from my casual guild to form a WvW/Raiding focused guild), but they wouldn’t take me because I didn’t have experience, even after I assured them that all I needed was a quick exposure to mechanics to pick things up.

Eventually, I found a guild. A very friendly group of players who ran regular training raids. Two weeks with them on Sabetha, VG, and Sloth/Trio, and I knew without a doubt that I could hold my own with an average group. It didn’t take me much longer to get other boss kills too, and I got my first Matthias kill at around 18-20 insights.

Within about 3 weeks, the guild I had begged to give me a chance started inviting me regularly to their static runs. I don’t play too many professions, but I do play Thief, Revenant, Elementalist, all at an average or above average level, and am beginning to dip my toes into Chronomancer and tanking. PS Warrior, Dragonhunter, and Druid are high on the list of classes I want to gear and learn to play.

TL;DR – my fear was mainly under-performing. Once I got a group that was forgiving of mistakes, I learned the necessary things to perform at an adequate level, and eventually picked up on the more important roles.

Razor.9872:

Ranael.6423:

Crystal Reid.2481:

A few development updates for you guys since there are some things I can clarify here.

While Forsaken Thicket was 3 wings that encompassed a complete story line, that does not mean all raids will be 3 wings. We’ll do that where it makes sense, and sometimes it will make sense to release a stand alone raid with 1 wing if we think we have an interesting story to tell there that doesn’t need to be stretched out over multiple releases.

Sorry to hijack your answer but if you think you can break the cycle by having a raid only composed of one wing, do you also think that now bosses could also not live in circular rooms/platforms ?

Slothasor? Trio? Escort?

Sabetha is technically octagonal >.>

Join a raiding guild. Forget LFG. Once you’re raiding consistently with a raiding guild, then look into LFG.

Galtrix.7369:

Surprise, surprise…. Mesmer is at the bottom again.

Their contribution to overall group DPS makes their low personal DPS inconsequential. Don’t believe me? Try not using a mesmer in any raid encounter.

Mireles Lore.5942:

The dev quote from the reddit was so super vague, I have my doubts that he knew what he was talking about or even was cleared to comment on it. It seemed like he pretty much said “it should be in future raid releases” just because he heard “envoy collection” and thought raid.

I was more thinking along the lines of:
Envoy II will still be open world stuff to match the current theme of open world/fractals objectives. However, the items themselves will become available in a future LS3 episode, maybe one that coincides with a raid release (I wouldn’t be surprised to see a side story of LS3 appear in the second raid, as the first raid was a partial precursor to LS3 and Bloodstone Fen borrows heavily from the raid wings).

The other possibility: 6 items left over coincides with one wing too (Envoy I was 6 items per wing). One way to do that, and the raid team has said they’ll do it if necessary, is to release a raid with only one wing.

The Raids team is already working on the next release. Previously, it’s been about 3.5-4 months between wings, and we’re just approaching the 2-month mark for Stronghold. We could, in theory, expect the next Raid in about 2 months, roughly coinciding with the next LS3 chapter.

That raid may complete Envoy II, granting the precursor, followed by the armour in a later release. Once the Envoy II collection is done, the recipes for upgrading it to Legendary are known and already in game, just not enabled.

Devs are aware of it. Probably an oversight as not many people go for any higher than +11 , since it was most cost effective to get 2×11 and 3×10.

Remove all of your infusions.

Downgrade all of your +10 infusions to +9 infusions. You’ll have 10 +9s. Buy 3 more +9s for a total of 13 +9s.

Downgrade 7 of the +9s to +8s, giving you 14 +8s.

Place the 6 +9s into your armour, and fill all of the remaining slots with +8s (should have enough for trinkets, backpiece, and both weapon sets).

That should give you 150 AR.

Trade in your excess +7s for Fractal relics.

If you really want to get into raids, throwing away your insights is a poor decision. Even if you don’t care about Legendary armour. Insights aren’t the best indicator of experience, as you can get lots of them just by farming the easier bosses, but they are a good measure of dedication, which sets good and bad raiders apart.

A good druid is important to a raid group. You had zero experience, you would definitely have weighed the group down. Druid is a class you’d want to play in raids after you’ve gotten a good grasp of the boss mechanics and are familiar with the best practices of healing (there’s no set “rotation” for it). PS Warrior, Revenant, Tempest, Dragonhunter, and Daredevil would probably be much better professions for learning boss mechanics on.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/4pe4jy/can_we_get_a_directory_of_guilds_that_teach_raids/

pranker.3748:

And as for CC, its ridiculous with Basilisk Venom.

1125 breakbar damage potential with one skill makes me feel giddy. Icebow, even with a second person picking it up, doesn’t come close.

Revenant’s Staff 5 might be the only other contender.

Sadrien.3470:

Rev – mostly useful in pugs

Even with a Chronomancer with 100% boon duration, the fury uptime from Revenant is nice.

Rev+Chrono, 2x Druid (2 Condi, or 1 Condi/1 Magi), 2x PS, 4x Tempest is a pretty powerful composition. The 2 PS and Druids double up on useful buffs. Substitute Tempests with DH, Daredevil, Reaper, etc, as needed.

Shadowmoon.7986:

Raid have been out for 8 months, and the grand carrot on a stick is still not done, and is looking like it will take another 6 months to complete. How many outfit have been put in the gemstore in that time.

Most raiders don’t give two kittens about the carrot on the stick.

If you don’t cash in your +7 infusions for Fractal relics, 12x +9 and 6x +7 (combo B ) would be roughly equivalent in cost to the above combination (6x +9 and 12x +8, which is equivalent to 6x +9 and 24x +7 for comparison). Combo B works out to about 137g if using only Agony infusions, the combination in the OP, if my math is roughly correct, is about 117g (will double check tomorrow).

There’s another post from a dev stating that the armour is in final stages of development.
It may be a bit longer than their 3.5 month release, but the next raid shouldn’t be too far off.

Pifil.5193:

There are no more raids planned for HoT. The plan was always to produce three raids wings.

There will probably be another raid in the next expansion but for now I think they’ll switch focus to fractals.

You have absolutely no source for that claim.

TexZero.7910:

Rashy.4165:

TexZero.7910:

Rashy.4165:

TexZero.7910:

I dont think its physically possible to do it in a cleared wing.

It’s something you have to do before its cleared otherwise those doors block your path.

You can do it after clearing the maze, it requires a bit of creative jumping. You can’t do it if you leave a freshly cleared maze and come back in (unless someone holds the instance) as the doors will be closed – making it completely inaccessible.

That’s what i said….

The way I interpret: a “cleared maze” means you’ve done the maze event and gotten the reward chest. You can still get all three chest after you’ve “cleared” or “completed” the maze fully, including the one by the line of statues indicated in the OP.

By saying “you have to do it before it’s cleared” implies that you have to open the chests before finishing the maze event.

Your post was ambiguous, so I provided more detail.

Cleared wing….cleared wing….cleared wing. Not once did i say cleared maze.

Except, you can still do it in a cleared wing.

Clear maze, then clear Xera immediately. The door is still open and all chests are still available. Until everyone leaves the instance.

Once you leave a freshly cleared instance, only THEN does the door close.

TexZero.7910:

Rashy.4165:

TexZero.7910:

I dont think its physically possible to do it in a cleared wing.

It’s something you have to do before its cleared otherwise those doors block your path.

You can do it after clearing the maze, it requires a bit of creative jumping. You can’t do it if you leave a freshly cleared maze and come back in (unless someone holds the instance) as the doors will be closed – making it completely inaccessible.

That’s what i said….

The way I interpret: a “cleared maze” means you’ve done the maze event and gotten the reward chest. You can still get all three chest after you’ve “cleared” or “completed” the maze fully, including the one by the line of statues indicated in the OP.

By saying “you have to do it before it’s cleared” implies that you have to open the chests before finishing the maze event.

Your post was ambiguous, so I provided more detail.

TexZero.7910:

I dont think its physically possible to do it in a cleared wing.

It’s something you have to do before its cleared otherwise those doors block your path.

You can do it after clearing the maze, it requires a bit of creative jumping. You can’t do it if you leave a freshly cleared maze and come back in (unless someone holds the instance) as the doors will be closed – making it completely inaccessible.

qT’s max number is 30k with all buffs and food. The best I’ve been able to do is about 24k without food, and somewhat optimal rotations (still a bit iffy on swapping to Jalis for Vengeful hammers).

Practical DPS in a raid might be below 20k (15-18k, probably), as you’d want to withhold some of your abilities for critical moments. I also rarely swap to Jalis for Vengeful hammers, and use it only for stability on Slothasor (I like to leave Facets up as long as possible and even have Facet of Chaos in the event that I need it for the CC, although with a good group, I don’t need it).

You’re not really there for the DPS though, only Facet of Nature (boon duration) and some really strong CC.

5 Necros.

Or at least one necro and just about anything. Fractals aren’t really strict on composition unless groups are having trouble on one or two bosses.

The SFTA is being iterated on (dev was answering questions on raids in a Twitch channel, asked about it, pretty sure he responded to me). We could see some changes make it to the July 26th patch. More golem options and a cleaner interface to spawn them would be nice additions, along with a PvP-like build system to quickly test armour/weapon/rune/sigil/food combinations, have it override your current equipped gear like PvP.

Heat room can be easily solo’d by most classes. Learn how and practice it a few times. Collider lab can be duo’d or potentially solo’d and it’s not always necessary to use a shield (I don’t bother picking one up as a daredevil, I just dodge and blink my way to the end and can usually hit the first button, have someone do the second, then finish it off myself).

Sarrs.4831:

Isn’t the mote system what is already in place for the early phases of the Legendary backpiece achievement track? IIRC you have to activate the mote and go fight Mossman at <80% rather than Bloomhunger?

The reshuffle shouldn’t affect the motes much. Most of the listed fractal level requirements for those are minimum requirements.

There’s no “conflation” going on here.

The GW2 playerbase is the entire population of players. The reddit userbase is a sample. These are standard statistical terms.

While the sample doesn’t necessarily and accurately represent the entire population (due to bias – again, another statistical term), it’s the closest approximation we’ll get to the actual numbers (only ArenaNets metrics will reveal actual numbers for the entire population of players).

The only way we’ll know actual numbers is if the survey was sent to every player upon login and completed in game, with the numbers revealed publicly. That is about as close as it gets to a census (since you can’t guarantee every active player will complete an in-game survey). The other option would be for ArenaNet to flat out reveal the numbers.

Astralporing.1957:

Any content that’s not being updated will lose popularity. Let’s see how well raids would do in 3 years if anet were to abandon them now.

They probably abandoned dungeons for a simple reason: they weren’t built with updates in mind. All they did was remove a path and add another one. Dungeon paths also overlapped with each other quite a bit, so adding new paths to existing dungeons would be problematic. Adding entire new dungeons would need to be situated in a suitable location, with a story to go with it (it won’t tie in with the Dungeon story since that follows Destiny’s Edge). The stories of the dungeon (both story mode and explorable) are too intertwined for it to be updated (any new path will need to be integrated into the existing dungeon’s story).

Fractals made more sense for expandable 5-man content. Each Fractal was an entirely self-contained story, and was completely isolated from every other Fractal. Some fractals are related in story, but do not overlap, unlike dungeons. The difficulty scaling can also be taken advantage of (easier to deal with that hard-mode dungeons). There’s also more of a sense of progression to Fractals through personal reward levels.

With raids, they’re taking a different approach with story. Each raid has more of a skeletal story (or in other words, open-ended story), meaning that future additions (wings) can be more easily integrated. Forsaken Thicket is situated in a physical location, and explores the lore in that area (heavily Bloodstone related, as that area was the location of a Bloodstone in GW1). Future raids could follow a similar trend and expand on lore from GW1 for a particular area, and would be one way to expand unexplored regions of the map (along with the addition of new zones).

Neox.3497:

Rashy.4165:

Ayrilana.1396:

Anet has stated that raids will have themed legendary armor. This was before release during one of their live streams. The insights are pretty generic so there’s no reason to assume that they’re just for this raid only. This particular armor will not be able to obtained outside of this raid due to the raid specific collection.

And it makes sense to continue with that pattern – Precursor from a themed collection, Legendary crafting process kept identical.

And I know there are a lot of naysayers saying “Lol, good luck seeing another raid any time soon”, but I have faith in the raid team that they’ll maintain their release pacing.

I remember they said that raids can vary in size. So they might also add duo or single boss raids.

They’ve said that they may release a full raid with only one wing, if the story necessitates it. Of course, that could still mean fewer than 3 bosses (technically, Wing 2/3 are 2 bosses and one “encounter”).

Ayrilana.1396:

Anet has stated that raids will have themed legendary armor. This was before release during one of their live streams. The insights are pretty generic so there’s no reason to assume that they’re just for this raid only. This particular armor will not be able to obtained outside of this raid due to the raid specific collection.

And it makes sense to continue with that pattern – Precursor from a themed collection, Legendary crafting process kept identical.

And I know there are a lot of naysayers saying “Lol, good luck seeing another raid any time soon”, but I have faith in the raid team that they’ll maintain their release pacing.

Sarrs.4831:

atm i would expect them to be switching out fractals which are currently duplicates within a tier with the new fractal

They’ll likely keep doing that until we get to the point of 25 unique fractals with 4 difficulty scales each (every 25 levels like Mai Trin).

Greymarch.3291:

Also Arenanet heavily discourages sharing your API codes with others you do not know. Cause they are tied to your account.

You don’t actually have to share the key to see info, GW2efficiency doesn’t reveal the key.

I think it’s kinda janky, and not entirely sure which bloodstone shards are counted. I know the two at the start definitely count as I’ve lost stacks to those (which is effectively pointless since I don’t have many stacks at the start). I haven’t personally had to try the shards on the arena during the fight. I would imagine the shards during the teleport phases should also count. As far as I know, the ones during the 50% phase don’t count either.

Either they all remove stacks, or none of them do, imo.

You also need Forsaken Magic for the effect to be meaningful (destroying bloodstone shards removes 10 stacks). In the mean time though, avoiding getting hit is a good start. If you’re reaching silver by 50%, you’ve taken too many hits. Frankly, I don’t reach silver until the last little portion of the fight.

Shovel Face.4512:

Rashy.4165:

The second collection lets you pick the precursor armour (that’s where the weight will matter). You also get recipes to craft all three weights of the precursor armour for Envoy II, so even that choice doesn’t lock you in.

Technically, the only way you’ll “need” the experimental envoy armour for the legendary armour is balls of dark energy (for cubes of stabilized dark energy), but you can get those by salvaging any armour/weapons. Experimental envoy armour is yours to keep.

Ah ok. And about the recepies, so they’ll give me recepies to make the experimental envoy armor? Totally forgot i wanted the skin for the medium set. kitten , I don’t want 2 medium ascended armor sets #FirstWorldProbs
Edit: Ah nvm. Unlocking the Refined armor also unlocks the experimental armor.

You get recipes for making the Refined Envoy armour (precursor). Unlocking the skin for Refined Envoy automatically unlocks the Experimental equivalent (just the skin).

Eg. craft Refined medium armour -> unlock medium Refined armour skin -> auto unlock Experimental medium armour skin.

Neox.3497:

blazinfury.8504:

I’m all for that. Forget the tryhard meta that says this is the most effective way. I don’t care about the most effective way, I just want to have fun with it.

Do you also like failing over and over and over again?

My initial experience was the same as OPs (when raids first came out) with one difference: my guild put in at least 2-3 weeks of attempts at VG. Among the issues we were having: people refusing to adapt, people refusing to change their build, change tactics, blaming others for mistakes instead of seeking to fix mistakes, people taking criticism too personally.

The constant wiping got to most people. The constant negativity brought the group down. We’ve tried multiple times to get a guild raid team going, but all of the above issues haven’t been resolved yet. It’s gotten to the point where it caused too much drama (it really shouldn’t have) that the guild leader made the decision never to raid as a guild.

I moved onto guilds with like-minded individuals.

Going in blind is completely fine, but prepare for all of the kittenstorm that comes with it. Many people don’t like failing for too long.

150 LI is nothing for people who like raids. They don’t raid for the LI, they raid for fun, for the challenge, whatever.

Raids will continue to exist for a lot longer than you will.