Guild Wars 2

Guts.5019:

So what’s the point to make an EASIER mode than that ?

Because Anet is not a charity company. Easier mode will satisfy wider audience in comparison with current raid population, and hard mode will satisfy just a narrow part from current raiding population.
There is no reason to make hard mode.

More sliders also welcome, imo.

Yes please.
+15 charrs

apharma.3741:

Lol PvP has a lower population because it’s a stale game mode, I’d be willing to bet outside of the league seasons WvW is more played than PvP. That’s without mentioning class balance atm which is pretty horrific in both those game modes.

I also think it’s a little rediculous asking for legendary armour for fractals, they’re little pieces of content you can run for a bit of fun and a little reward like dungeons used to be. A unique fractal armour skin that isn’t too flashy similar to the ones linked above would be nice especially as PvP has the glorious skins and WvW has its own unique skin too. However if you broaden it to include all of PvE there’s far more skins in PvE than either PvP or WvW.

Not every game mode and type of content needs legendary armour and considering the huge amount of work that’s going into designing them to be worthy of the legendary status I don’t think we should have any more than 1 set.

These “little pieces of content” are more popular than pvp or raids, and most probably are more popular than both of them put together.

Xevv.9175:

Fractals are also a very reliable way to get ascended gear boxes.

If you ignore people who do the daily 3 fractals and thats it for the day, your population is going to go way down. Thats not too different from raiding just to get legendary gear…

And since when ascended gear is unique for fractals?

OnizukaBR.8537:

Because its exclusive reward, they need a WvWvW legendary armor, and maybe fractals but not the same armor.
If they would add the same armor for fractals, so why not the fractal legendary backpack is in the raid vendor too?
Every mode having exclusive rewards make that reward feel more unique.

Raids have too small audience to be something representative for pve, so they don’t really have any reason to have whole class of items locked behind them. Titles, achievements, skins – sure.

Miellyn.6847:

Which boss other than VG and maybe 2. Boss in Bastion has been 4 manned?

Boss in bastion has been soloed.

Rising Dusk.2408:

Obviously raids can be low-manned and you don’t have a clue what I’m saying. Let me clarify. It’s one thing to 9-man (or whatever) a boss if no one messes up, it’s another thing when your 10th drops a Sloth poison field on top of your group, or when your 10th walks into oil at Deimos, or when your claimer gets spiked at Mursaat, or when your 10th drops well of the profane on top of your group at Matthias, or when all of your condis die pre-split at VG, or <insert other case here where one or a few people screwing up wipes a group>.

Minimum half of your examples aren’t lethal at all. They making kill harder but still possible.

That’s the difference. Fractals doesn’t have that anywhere.

Good old hammer bearer in first versions of cliffside before implementing of hammer retrievers, reworked swamp (especially before nerfs) where guy kittened up at wisp was waaaaay more dangerous than sloth poison drop, chaos bonefire run (2 deaths = gg).

Rising Dusk.2408:

• No Fractal boss except 100CM Siax automatically fails if 1 player messes up

This is an important distinguisher between the two modes. Fractal bosses, by design, are able to be carried by extremely strong single players. Meanwhile there are mechanics in almost every raid boss where if someone with a key job fails their task, the entire group wipes. In Fractals I can play a build that does respectable damage and will basically never die, and it no longer matters if other players are good. All they do is speed things up in the ideal case. This is in stark contrast to raids where players are critically necessary for a number of reasons.

Like Fluffy.1932 said, raids were really designed with high levels of coordination in-mind. That’s sort of the whole point.

Kek, this is golden. So, literally EVERY raid boss can be killed without much problems even with 1-2 guys instantly dying on start (hello low man kills and raid sells), but this somehow magically fails the boss ecounter? I guess, evil anet GM ports to you and taking away your loot? Or “key role” guy cannot be replaced?

Icetea.3204:

Idk. If i look for exp people to raid with i dont want to explain the mechanics of bossfights. If you join and exp group i expect you to know what you have to do.
I wouldnt kick you for one single mistake tho. Everyone does mistakes. Its something that happens to all of us and is just human.
If you however repeat the same mistake over and over again while claiming to be exp i´d kick you without a word.

I cannot see any “I joined super ultra exp only oneshot group” in his post. Can you?

zealex.9410:

not sure what he should tell you most likely got kicked because of a mistake you did u didn’t tell you you are not “Worthy” he told you u should get as much experience from training before going for serious runs.

You know, in more civilized and serious raid MMOs people usually telling you if you are doing something wrong, not kicking you without saying a word.

reikken.4961:

yeah
if you don’t want to play it, don’t play it
if you do want to play it, play it.

if you want the story but don’t want to play it, watch it, and don’t play it

How about people who want to experience the story but don’t want to raid? Because, you know, Anet announced them just as the “challenging” PvE experience, but now they are putting essential lore parts into them. This is not something that they are promised before.

maddoctor.2738:

Found it! Meh it’s from January 3rd, 2017 so not really old but here it goes:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/dungeons/Raid-Normal-Hard-Mode/first#post6453090

January 3rd, 2017
Everyone: 29%
0-500h: 3%
500-1000h: 11%
1000-2000h: 25.5%
2000-4000h: 44%
4000h+: 61.5%

Friday 17th, 2017 (1 month later!)
Everyone: 30%
0-500h: 3%
500-1000h: 11%
1000-2000h: 25.5%
2000-4000h: 43.5%
4000h+: 61.5%

The everyone statistic is 1% up. The 2000-4000h statistic is 0.5% down, everything else looks the same.

I might have older ones that I didn’t post on the forums. Now I’ll bookmark this and probably do an archive every month to see how it grows.

Fun question – how many of that players are active raiders? Players usually stop playing due to various reasons, like being tired from particular game mode, or being disappointed with overall direction of such mode, or just being unable to keep up, or dropped because their friends dropped.
Right now we can see only how many people are tried raiding at some point.

ButterPeanut.9746:

This isn’t really relevant as the reason it can be beaten by a “clueless party” is because of the massive power creep over the years. This wasn’t true at launch.

Except I did that by myself. We were a newbie party from wvw-only guild and that was a very first dungeon experience for us. Knight warrior, healnecro (ye, that was a thing before healing well nerf), zerk tif, power guard with his mighty GS and cant remember who was the last one. That was quite the experience.

Miellyn.6847:

The amount of people that voiced their concerns were actually lower than people that wanted challenging content.

Yes, and rapid revenue downfall even during raid releases for raid 1 was completely unrelated, because everyone asked for challenging content. Okay.

You still have to prove the bad design and how a training mode, that doesn’t do much as proven in other games and doesn’t offer repeatable content in GW2 unless you overtune the rewards, would improve that. Raids are more accessible than raids in WoW, there are zero barriers to enter them unless you expect to one-shot everything without any experience.

I don’t remember WoW raiders asking a new guy for 100+ boss kills or they will kick him. And I do remember how LFR saved raiding population numbers after Cataclysm failure. You can read and see numbers in link I gave before.

A training mode would only accomplish something if you could train a certain phase with the same damage values and mechanics as normal mode, but you wouldn’t have to play through the entire encounter to reach it, eg Matthias 40% phase. An easier mode that let you still win doesn’t teach you what mistakes would lead to a wipe in normal mode.

Story mode dungeons are a good indicator for group story instances without enough rewards.

A training mode awards you with experience of actual encounter. This working in WoW, and I still don’t see any reason why here it will work different. Story dungeon modes are unrelated, because they are different encounters, and overall, explore mode dungeon can be beaten even with clueless party so training for them is not required at all.

Timo.1065:

What do you think about new ability that you can unlock in new LS. In my opinion that is big change for T4 fractals, which make it more easier.
Now you can destroy mob, who makes finish kill after few seconds.
Was that intended by Anet?

And before LS3 you could just press 2 and achieve exactly same result.

Vinceman.4572:

That’s completely bs and you know it.

50 is never ever the average minimal number of LI for pugs.

Go back to facts instead of throwing in fake news to underline your personal feeling.

I took minimal requirement for VG and Escort, but if you want to move the plank up to 100+ then go ahead.
So, instead of 8.5% we have 5.5% raiders.

Valik Shin.9027:

This is 100% true. Without establishing what a Raider is you can’t say who big the community is

Easy. Established raider should have at least minimal number of LI that is usually demanded by pug raids. Right now its somewhere about 50.

BlaqueFyre.5678:

Can a player not create their own Raid group? Can a Player not post their own LFG? Can a Player not lead their own Group? Can a Player not look for an actual Raid training Guild? Can a Player not join a Static Raid Guild? Can a Player not group with similar minded people to them? Can a Player not take their own initiative?

Exactly that list was addressed in Bastion of Penitent topic, yesterday. No, he cannot because this list is not working.

BlaqueFyre.5678:

If there was any truth to that then Guilds wouldn’t post or refine Guides for every boss, post or refine Builds for every fight, post Training Guild advertisements, hell some even go as far as helping new raiders gear up by either giving gold or help craft certain items.

Yeah the Raiding community is doing its best to close all opportunities for new players to experience raids…/sarcasm

It’s sad that players want to take some of the only challenging PvE content and make it into Spam 1 collect loot just to increase “accessibility” when there are no actual gates to Raiding besides self imposed restrictions.

The Raiding community has done its best to make raids be easily accessible by providing a ton of information to include, guides, strategies, builds, dps benchmarks and they are constantly updating this information. They are taking the brunt of the work of Theory crafting which is the most expensive/time consuming thing when it comes to challenging content and providing it to the Community for the Communities benefit, on top of that a lot of Raiding guilds providing Raid training as well as helping gear players for raids.

The Raid community also proved that players don’t need BiS gear or Top Tier DPS to complete the raids, and showing that metabuilds are not necessary in every case(only they make it more consistent)

Just because players don’t want to use the resources available or to put effort into either looking for a static raid group (the game runs 24/7 with multiple raid guilds from multiple time zones Raiding at all hours) or into looking up and utilizing the guides/builds proven to work does not mean that raids are inaccessible, since those are self imposed limitations.

These few guilds who provides guides, strategies, builds, dps benchmarks and training runs are part of community, but rather small one. And majority of community is doing quite opposite – creating and maintaining artificial barriers. As long as 50+ LI Escort LFGs are keep popping, overall community effect is closer to negative one.

Wasabi Kitty.8247:

Raiding guilds already create multiple windows of opportunity for new players to get into raiding.

And raiding community is working hard to close them.

Miellyn.6847:

We had this and people complained and it got changed, maybe try to change it back?

Right now we are talking about different subject.

Yeah the dungeon team was removed over 3 years ago, it is still beyond me how people can live that far in the past and still complain about it. But maybe thats the reason they can’t adapt in raids.

Nightmare fractal is definitely not hastly made.

That was considered as pretty bad choice by almost everyone.
And I don’t know how else you can call fractal made literally from reused part of the Scarlet tower from LS1 and reused mobs from there.

Also, that discussion went into the wrong direction. Lets return to raids and their bad design.

Miellyn.6847:

Hmm I thought there were new open world maps with the last 4 living story episodes, but maybe I’m wrong.

They are zergy, very unfriendly to anything less than 10 man group (have fun to solo anything besides hearts) and almost pointless when you are already farmed all rewards associated with map. Also overall quality is lower than base HoT or vanilla maps, even SW is made much better.

Between Wing 3 of Forsaken Thicket and Raid 2 were 8 months.

And between last dungeon and… oh, right. But at least we have 2 hastily made fractals, from reused old models and assets. Ugh.

Miellyn.6847:

There is no incentive to run this mode ever again unless you overtune the rewards. 10% is nothing compared to the development that is needed, the team has only 6 people.
WoW needs the raid participation as raids are the main content. Why are you still trying to ignore that point?

And GW2 need raid participation because raids and fractals are only kind of repeatable PvE activity that is still getting any content updates. Actually, raids are getting most of it.

Miellyn.6847:

The difference is, people run LFR multiple times for quests and equipment upgrades.
If you don’t implement very high rewards in GW2 people that don’t intend to run normal mode will play it once and return to the most profitable farming location.

And in T4 fractals rewards are better than in T1 – T3 combined. But people still run them, even now, with AR being highly available.

Miellyn.6847:

They released a statistic, that only around 7%-10% actually advanced from LFR. Thats definitely not enough to justify a one time adventure for people that are not the target audience.
They will never remove it because raids are the main content for WoW unlike GW2, where it is niche content for people that enjoy challenging content. ArenaNet said they don’t want it to be main content.

And on every next difficulty level number of raiders is roughly 1/10 from the previous one. So 7-10% from LFR is actually amazing number.

Miellyn.6847:

And item level requirements way above or on par the items that drop.

I have game opened right now, and requirements are starting from 860, while drops for normal mode are starting from 870.

You don’t need training on every boss. Basics are sufficient.

I’d like to see how knowledge of Trio will help you to kill Matthias, or Grose tactics will help you on Sab, and so on. For GW2 raids, without battle res mechanics and with a lot of oneshot or almost oneshot abilities, encounter experience is extremely important.

Raids were never intended to be beaten by uncoordinated groups, there are fractals. If you beat your head against it for hours without any result you are just not ready for raids. If you can’t adapt or figure things out on your own it isn’t the content for you.

Currently you can see a lot of runs where experienced people are able to beat a lot of bosses without or with very little coordination, simply due to experience. So, they are doing something impossible and unintended?

My guild gets a clear for every member every week if he has time, it depends on the social structures inside the guild.

Well, it’s nice to hear that. But are you seriously expecting that every guild, or even majority of them are doing, or able to do the same?

And slowing down content for another raid mode will increase it? The ressources are not there.

I’m not sure if some copypaste, changed numbers and nerfed loot tables demands a lot of work. Especially when in return anet can get increased raid auditory and satisfied customers. Is hiring +1 guy for that work will be too much to ask?

Your beloved WoW proved that a training mode doesn’t work, even Blizzard said it. An easy mode without over the top rewards doesn’t have long term motiviation. The current raids are easy enough, you said it yourself.

I guess you missed link I gave earlier, because actually that mode saved them a lot of raiding customers from dropping the game.

Miellyn.6847:

How does a training mode that awards no LI would change that?

By creating a playerbase that can run their own groups, and eventually force all that LI nonsense to cease. Just like WoW raid groups that are 99% asking only for kill experience and not for 300 kills in your armory.

Miellyn.6847:

There are guilds dedicated to training runs, there are weekly raid traings announced on reddit, I don’t know about NA but the EU servers have more than enough training runs.

How much is “more than enough” and how much of them are making 9/9 (13/13)?

How is figuring out mechanics on your own a disastrous result? The groups before them did the same and wrote guides.

How beating your head against a wall for hours without result is not a disaster? Well, dunno, for some reason I think it is. Groups mentioned by you were mostly guild groups or premades, with good voice coordination and determination. I’m not sure if you can realistically expect same result from a bunch of random unexperienced guys from LFG.

Miellyn.6847:

Serious raid guilds that don’t need people for their rooster don’t recruit.

I’m not talking about 5-6 “serious raid guilds” worldwide tho. You can expect that in any raiding guild.

Miellyn.6847:

Other games have a gear thread mill that let you overgear the encounter, so you can just brute force it. Thats why training runs don’t happen. Equipment is more importent than experience.
The equivalent for LI requirements are item level requirements in WoW, even LFR is restricted by them.

In GW2 this “outgear” level is already implemented, and proven by low-man kills and undergeared kills. As I said before, encounters are not that difficult and requirements are not tight at all, you need only experience.

Miellyn.6847:

And stop comparing GW2 with ‘other raiding games’. GW2 is not a game with raids as the main content. It is niche content for people that enjoy challenging content, developed by a small dev team (~5% of the live team).

So that means that we don’t need any improvements? This game is always needs more content, and keeping it out of reach for majority is a bad choice.

Miellyn.6847:

Why do we need an easy mode again? Easy mode wouldn’t reward LI, so the only thing that it would accomplish is flushing down developer ressources, as you described it…

Because people need raid experience and current system fails to deliver it? Lets see:
1. Pug runs. Effectively blocked by the LI barrier. Groups with low reqs are becoming more rare with every day passed.
2. Training runs. Rare by themselves, rarely covers all encounters, often full of completely unexperienced people so you are waiting for them to learn very raiding basics, every time.
3. Make your own group. Without raid experience usually leads to disastrous results, also not everyone is able to lead, ESPECIALLY without proper commanding and encounter experience.
4. Guilds for raids. Not everyone is ready to join a new guild for raiding, not everyone have a free guild slot, and guilds often have already established raid roster, so newcomer can be benched infinitely.
Ofc these methods are works to some extent, but even all together they are not enough, not even close. I was pleasantly surprised actually when I saw community making a training raid runs because that was pretty uncommon thing for other raiding games, and was unpleasantly surprised when developers not understood this as a very clear sign, when community is struggling to do the work that must be done by raid developers instead.

maddoctor.2738:

And how is an easy mode going to help with this? Or you expect this easy mode to award LI and other rewards same as normal mode? Then it’s simple, the LFG mentality will move on to kill proof requests, or the easy mode will also give kill proof for the normal version?

I’m genuinely curious as to how an easy mode can help with the current LI situation

I expect this mode to award experience of encounter to majority of newcomers. GW2 encounters aren’t hard at all, and majority of those who got them on farm status aren’t possessing some outstandingly high skill. It’s just matter of experience and practice, which is heavily hindered by current “link pile of LI or gtfo” system.

maddoctor.2738:

Unlike WoW were Raid difficulty has ups and downs from what we’ve seen so far the overall Raid difficulty in GW2 doesn’t do that. Any group of 10 people who cleared Spirit Vale will have zero trouble clearing the Bastion, which is why there is this perception that it’s “easy”. So a training mode for Bastion is redundant, since everyone who goes to the Bastion would’ve already cleared Spirit Vale.

Additional difficulties are being requested for 2 major groups:
1. New players, because current situation for them is absolutely ridiculous – I’m already see 50+ LI requests not just for Sloth or even VG, but even for Escort (!). Getting a fresh blood into raiding, thing that must be done by itself via proper game design is absolutely failed here.
2. Pugs without proper static groups or guilds. Getting used to new encounter takes a few wipes if you are new to it, and for pugs that experience can be quite unpleasant.

Miellyn.6847:

And lets ignore that raids are the main content updates, since the release of the lastest expansion, WoW got two raids and nothing else for PvE players. Also they are part of the main story, something the Story/Raid teams don’t want for GW2.
Also the raid team in WoW is much bigger than GW2 with their 5 people.

And they will stay that way if devs will continue to flush their resources to narrow such audience, because you cannot make something meaningful that way. It will not pay off. WoW devs understood that many years ago, dropped “raids are not for everyone” design into the thrash and keeping their title of #1 raiding game for 12 years.
That experience means something, don’t you think?

Sykper.6583:

Will you stop. linking. stuff. about WoW here? I don’t know how many times we have to consistently tell you that the raiding between WoW and GW2 is so vastly different. Even the basic foundation is different from the get-go.

WoW is literally about raiding as the ONLY end-game for PvE, everything builds towards raiding, gear progression is built INTO raiding. The MAIN story is built into raiding!

GW2 has raiding as a single PvE end-game solution, not the only one, where cosmetic unlocks and Side-Stories that enhance the world of Tyria but are not required whatsoever.

I wouldn’t even say Apples and Oranges here, the difference is greater than that. So whenever you link the decay of WoW Raiding, the causes of that decay can’t be easily linked to GW2. It’s that simple, stop comparing and focus, you hurt your arguments each and every time you try to make a comparison to another raiding game. GW2 is just too different.

Yeah, raiding between WoW and GW2 is really so vastly different, because WoW is doing at least some stuff right, due to their experience and millions of players who gave them raiding statistics over years and years of the MMO raiding evolution.
But hey, lets ignore it, it’s not like gw2 raids have obvious design problems, gw2 community is split apart due to these problems, and gw2 raid devs are trying to pretend that now is 2007 instead of 2017, right?

maddoctor.2738:

Astralporing.1957:

I guess the community split is just too wide for us to even speak the same language.

I don’t know what you are on about.

Astralporing.1957:

NikeEU.7690:

I’m pretty sure it DOESNT solve the problem in other games. From my understanding from other games (DNT is a multi-game guild) most of the intro/easy mode raiders don’t matriculate up to harder difficulties.

True, but then that’s not the primary problem those difficulty modes are trying to solve (Rednik is indeed mistaken about that).

You even agreed that those who run intro/easy mode raids do not go to the higher difficulties and yet after that you are trying to prove otherwise. It’s simple, those who run the easy versions run those and won’t run the harder versions so following the initial argument (which you also said was mistaken) my initial assessment that

And adding a new difficulty won’t solve the “problem” of not finding groups for the normal/hard versions of the Raids.

is accurate. Why have we been going on and on with multiple posts since then?

Because its not accurate and not even slightly right? People from lower difficulties ARE main source of new blood for higher ones. I dunno, maybe in DnT new players are jumping out of thin air, geared, trained and ready to kill everything on highest difficulty straight away, but for everyone else new blood is coming from below, and even top-tier guilds are getting their members from less successful guilds with lower progress.
Yes, numbers of players who is moving from lower to higher difficulty is not very high, but sizes of player population on these difficulty levels are falling exponentially too, so for them that flow is very sizable.
Here is some reading for you.
http://www.mmo-champion.com/threads/1872614-Is-raiding-dying-A-statistical-analysis

Mitch.4781:

All story elements, cutscenes and lore can be found on youtube or wiki. You aren’t missing anything.

All game elements can be found on youtube or wiki. Does that mean that we don’t need to play the game anymore?

maddoctor.2738:

VG is probably the only boss without any binary mechanics, let’s say Sabetha’s Flamethrower, would you make it “slower” so players can react faster? So she can be stuck in the Flamethrower animation (she can already be stuck in it) and get damaged more than she should be (she never interrupts the Flamethrower). Or make the Flamethrower not one-shot kill you, which makes it pointless to even exist.

You DO realize that tweaking timings is the same as redoing the skill right? And it is not something done in the difficulty settings of Fractals either. It’s not even something used in Challenge Motes, since Challenge Motes add new mechanics instead of tweaking any timings or speed like what you want.

You know what WoW mechanics have A LOT abilities with damage depending from difficulty “oneshot>oneshot without survival cooldowns>very high damage>high damage” for years, and still easily keeps title of the best raiding game in MMO market? Oneshot mechanics is not some kind of untouchable holy cow, and very high damage spikes replaces is just fine.

maddoctor.2738:

And adding a new difficulty won’t solve the “problem” of not finding groups for the normal/hard versions of the Raids. Unless that’s not the problem you want to solve.

So it is solving exactly same problem in other games, but will not solve it here. Okay.

maddoctor.2738:

That’s not possible. By killing an easy mode version you are in no-way experienced for a normal/hard version. A random group will always ask for kill proof of the appropriate difficulty level that they are going to do. Multiple difficulty levels do not solve the problem of accessibility for the normal/hard version.

If you believe there won’t be “kill proof” requirements of the normal mode bosses if they added an easy version then you are delusional.

Like anyone saying that kill proof is a problem? Problem is that with current encounter design and community mindset kill proof is nowhere enough for anything.

maddoctor.2738:

So what you want is for the experienced players to get the newcomers with them in Raid runs and carry them through all the boss kills. You know those experienced players weren’t born experienced players they went through the training process themselves. Why should newer players skip the training process and get free kills?

Because in other games where raid developers are actually competent, this is never a problem except for a few very high-end raiding modes and encounters. Encounters usually made with a room for an errors, and for majority of them even few deaths are allowed. Also, if someone have an encounter experience, he is usually already knows enough to not be a burden in second killrun, so raid groups are asking for achievement only.
So, new player can always join some non-tryhard group, get his first kills and then easily do all his next raiding runs and become completely experienced raider.
But in gw2 case we have both evils – badly designed encounters and community with completely ruined segment for newcomers.

TexZero.7910:

No, you see you’re confusing two issues.

You too can raid with 0 LI’s. You just can’t join a group and expect for that group to carry you in a raid when they want people who’ve been there and done that.

Start creating your own group with your own restrictions or lack of and raid however the heck you want.

So your sentence is basically means that:
1. There is almost nonexistent number of groups without ridiculous LI requirements, so low that new players are forced to create a group by themselves, while being completely unexperienced, because there is a NO other valid choice.
2. Because of 1, community is making a training raids. Just because, you know, new player will likely say “kitten this” and leave instead of trying to smash his head against a wall for hours without a meaningful result, and without new players raiding community will die.
3. For some mysterious, and probably even magical reason, raid developers are still thinking that this situation is normal and somehow there will be a lot (hundreds? thousands?) of new raiders who is stubborn enough to farm 50+ LI in training runs and selfmade groups with zero raiding experience. Such a bright future indeed.

Rashy.4165:

Everyone in the raid community started at the same point. Some had a deep understanding of their class, others did not. Either way, knowledge of the encounters was minimal, optimal group compositions were unknown.

A new player wanting to get into raids can do just that: form their own group of inexperienced players and tackle the raids. These players are now at an advantage though, as all the theorycrafting has established optimal strategies and compositions, and there are plenty of video guides to get people started, practice, and get better. Of course, this experience can be punishing, especially when faced with 9 other players of different skill, and different willingness to improve, take initiative, etc.

Hence, training raids were born, where experienced raiders try to create a safer learning experience, with the goal that trainees, once they’re comfortable with mechanics, go out and find a static raid team.

Except that in other games everything is already set up properly, so new players can start their raiding without relying heavily on community training runs. Like, you know, proper learning curve trough all encounters, after which player can actually handle normal raiding by himself, and because of that, raiding groups are asking only for basic experience (aka achievement) and decent gear.
Unlike gw2, where you are expected to have like a 50 various boss kills to qualify for a first raid boss, and 200+ for a last one. Oh, and 100+ for a boss in completely new raid wing, because we can.

Vinceman.4572:

Sources? I mean really valid serious multiple ones?

Sources – MMO world. Feel free to bring an example.

NikeEU.7690:

Since when did people being unwilling to adapt or learn become an accessibility issue? There is literally no barrier. No gear rating, no attunement challenges, no consumable grind. Any barriers you perceive are self imposed limitations.

Community is literally forced to create training raid runs to prevent game mode from dying out due to the lack of fresh blood, thing that is literally unheard of in other raiding games.
If this situation looks normal to you and not like complete failure from raid development team to tune raid accessibility, then I dunno in which kind of imaginary world you are living.

Miellyn.6847:

Ghostcrawler also said LFR was his worst mistake during WoW.
The quarterly report has nothing to do with raids, the gemshop didn’t had many interesting items since months.

He forgot to mention that WoW already had 4 raid difficulties before LFR, and his real worst mistake was in total failure of balance system during MoP, which was so kitten up that they had to cut and remake almost everything in next expansion.

Cynz.9437:

LI requirement crap wasn’t causing enough toxicity, let’s officially support another toxic tool!!!

You dare to rez someone -> lose dps – get kicked.
You dare to run off with aoe/out of aoe so you don’t take dmg -> lose dps -> get kicked!
Welcome to WoW raiding guize, where mods are allowed and dps meters forced absolutely selfish and suicidal gameplay.

Dps-meters with full logging and analyzing features are actually good thing for pve and not a problem at all. Try them in WoW and you will see how great that tool is.
Actual problem is quite sad state of the gw2 raiding community, and devs who somehow missed like 10 years of raid evolution in MMO games.

Sky.7610:

True story.
(snip)

So we must be thankful that somebody took all our money due to AH speculations and spending them for themselves only.
I get it. Do you need my kidney too, noble sir?

maddoctor.2738:

What in the world are you talking about? Anyone and everyone can indeed get any WvW or PvP reward without putting any kind of effort, their reward systems are designed so you don’t need to actually be good at those game modes to be rewarded.

You said that the same is true for Raids because you can buy the raid kills. However it’s people like you who say that a very tiny minority is raiding, and a small portion of that tiny minority is selling Raid kills. So we are talking about a small fraction of a tiny minority. How is that tiny amount of players who are getting the Raid kills through an easy method devaluing the “prestige” of Raids?

Discussion originally started when you tried to make a statement that raids are actually require higher skill than pvp modes, and tried to prove it by comparing most basic level in them with most advanced level in PvE. Which is kinda hilarious.
Can you say that qT/DnT/SC/etc cant actually win in official ESL world cup in spvp? Or defeat some top guild like old RG in wvw clash? I don’t think so.

maddoctor.2738:

If you can’t see the difference between buying a Raid kill (how many full AB-ML to get enough for a complete Legendary Armor set?) and afking for free and getting a reward then I can’t help you.

If you can’t see the difference between very-very narrow slice of PvE and whole game modes – I can’t help you either. Because if I will stop pointing finger at raids only and start talking about nobrain farming trains and activities in PvE… well, you know that comparison will be kinda one-sided, and not in your favor.

maddoctor.2738:

It is indeed funny but that’s the sad reality of the situation. The main issue is that in WvW/PvP you don’t have to actively fight opponents. In PvP you can lose and get all the rewards, just afk at the start and boom you get nearly full Ascended armor set, and since you don’t need to reach some high division to get rewards you’ll have to fight only really low skill players to get that too. A Raid boss is a much more “skilled” opponent than the average low Bronze player, who is equal in skill to a Moa in Queensdale.

In WvW you let others do the fighting while you follow and use aoe skills to tag as many people as possible for maximum rewards. Which is the same as in the open world PvE. In both cases individual skill means next to nothing, while in most cases those “lines of script” require all players to pull their weights and it’s much harder to get carried, unless the group is good enough to low-man the encounter and carry the trash. How many groups are actually capable of doing that?

In raids you can buy 1 fullclear with AB-farmed gold, then tag stuff in training groups, get shards or even boss kills, and buy whatever you want with shards.
And?

maddoctor.2738:

At least there is some amount of effort required to get the armor from Raids, either doing the encounters themselves or grinding for the gold to buy the Raid kills. I’d love to read about an alternative method of getting Legendary Armor involving PvP and/or WvW that actually takes a tiny bit of effort and requires a tiny bit of skill, because the current reward systems of PvP/WvW do not exactly require skill.

Fourth: got some data showing that raid population is low?

You know, saying that fighting against a few lines of script is actually somehow requires more skill than fighting against alive opponents – this is hilariously funny.