Guild Wars 2

Ele Lady.6103:

This thread again. There’s no need to remove the daily cap, as it keeps the leaderboards somewhat interesting, or if it was to be removed, the leaderboards should be sorted by permanent AP value. It also retains some prestige on achievement reward skins. Anet should rather add more achievements to the game, than raise the cap.

Like anyone ever cares about leaderboards except malediktus, lol. AP from daily was only thing that was kept me logging daily. Now I literally don’t care, except doing stuff with guildies once per week. And I’m not alone.

TexZero.7910:

It’s actually why a one difficulty mode works. It makes balancing infinitely easier as there’s not 256k variables to work through to point to as the source of the problem.

But that’s neither here nor there, and you really should stop pushing the easy mode agenda.

Saying that balance must be done around one fragment of one game mode with only small minority of overall players playing it – is very funny indeed.
How about being sane developers and doing other way around?

nagr.1593:

I want to see if there’s a reliable dps meter anywhere cos i always have good rotations espwcialy on sab. By contrast, ill see other warriors that wanna play it safe on flamewall phase, so they’re just moving with grp and just AA’ing the whole time.. and idk what’s the point of that. I mean our dps itself is miserable, but most of them even fail even that so they manage to bring dps even lower.

Dinosaurs.8674:

honestly id like to know 1 thing a warrior can do without might generation. you want to kick us out of the meta too?

If warrior brought literally 0 boons it would still be in every raid group because of Banners and Empower allies. The might is a nice bonus, but might is fairly easy to come by.

And yes I would want to kick the current warrior out of the meta and raids as a whole if I could. Its current class design is awful for raids and it needs badly to be reworked. It has mediocre personal damage but insane passive group buffs which makes it relatively unimportant whether you play well or not and forces it to be included in every fight. Furthermore two of those passive buffs are utility skills so you only have one actual utility slot, which is stupid as a general idea but also reduces the flexibility of the class.

Yes I agree nerf our banners or might stacking capabilities if u must, I don’t rly care about them tbh.. but at the same time, increase our dps to compete with a thief or ele, or at least to a lvl that is manageable. Tbh warrior is just a joke on its current meta for being able to apply self-boons that keep us alive and condi cleansing that often without relying on another class, like it’s literally broken now.

I was doing lvl 100 fractal and my warrior died for not having enough condi cleanse even with one utility skill with a 40s or so cd or it, and our grp wiped also. So I swap to rev, ez pz I’m literally never downed and I’m facetanking boss the entire time. What’s the secret behind it? Oh I know.. about 60% dmg reduction for most of time (prot + jalis hammers + infinite defense pot) and that’s not all, I also got two sources of quick condi cleanse, a heal skill and swap to staff set as needed. Again, just one point to illustrate how broken warrior is in comparison to other heavy classes atm

Emm… you know that you can swap 1 trait in tactics and your offhand to warhorn, and get two amazing AOE condition cleanses on ridiculously short CD, which also buffing everyone around with swiftness and vigor?
Also if your group dying on Trin because no warrior you all doing something VERY wrong.

NikeEU.7690:

I’ve done a lot of dungeons and fractals when can I get my raid rewards?

I don’t know, I never said that you can get it from doing “PvE”. So, I’m still waiting your answer, I really want my ESL reward.

NikeEU.7690:

Raid rewards are gated behind raids. ESL pvp rewards are gated behind pvp. Even you can understand the comparison.

I did a lot of duels and unranked matches which are pvp. Where I can get my ESL pvp reward?

NikeEU.7690:

Why are pvp esl rewards gated behind challenging tournaments? I don’t like competitive pvp but I would like the opportunity to have $100,000 prize. Please introduce a pvp tournament format tuned to my skill level and support it with full prizes. ANYTHING else is an abandonment of your community and original manifesto.

So raid rewards are gated behind tournaments? Oh, nvm, you just trying to troll with meaningless post, I get it.

BlaqueFyre.5678:

Oh really where is your proof of this number? Anet has never stated such a number, enlighten us, and again not everyone is in Gw2efficiency so those numbers aren’t accurate.

So, 100k+ accounts is not good enough slice for you?

maddoctor.2738:

See this one:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/dungeons/An-issue-raids-and-their-accesibility/page/4#post6387453

Basically, although there is a good chance an easier mode will increase the amount of raiders for normal mode, there is also the potential of making it worse.

I rarely read his posts Because His Posts Have Too Much Words With Capital Letters. But again, model with less damage works in WoW, and its pretty natural to understand that if this ability is almost killing you on easy difficulty, hard version WILL kill you, so better to pay attention and avoid.

Miellyn.6847:

Exactly this won’t happen. It was proven in multiple games that most players won’t advance through the difficulties.

Currently we have less than 5% of players as constant raiders. Even if this number will rise to 10% that will be huge improvement.

maddoctor.2738:

So I was wondering, after 5 full pages, how is an easy mode for raids going to make the normal mode of raids more accessible? Or that’s not a goal at all?

Pretty obvious. More people with encounter experience → more people in normal raids and less people without experience in normal raids → less wipes in normal raids and more groups with wider diversity → normal mode becoming less frustrating and pug demands becoming less ridiculous → even more people are willing to try raid and so on. This is positive feedback loop.

maddoctor.2738:

The majority of actual raiding guilds don’t even touch the easier modes and the vast majority of players who do play the easier modes do not touch the higher difficulty modes. That’s very easy to check if you see the world first clears are on hard mode versions while the number of people who finish the easy modes are a lot more than the people who do the harder modes (no shock there). Or you were talking about something else because I think I got lost around there.

Ehm… what? Literally every guild is making regular runs on lower difficulty (like – if guild is progressing trough mythic – they do hardcore mode clears, if they progressing trough hardcore – they do normal runs) to gear up alts and teach new members.

maddoctor.2738:

And I never said new abilities wouldn’t work, they can add (or remove) abilities from raid bosses and call them easy or hard mode any time they wish. But in your version of Easy Mode you posted in the first pages (or was it in the other thread) you didn’t exactly do that but instead nerfed the current abilities to the ground.

Only toned down. Whole reason of teaching is teach, not wiping everyone because someone made a mistake. To show abilities, how they looks, what they do, when they fire. Ofc someone can ignore everything and try to facetank, but for what purpose? Training mode is mentioned as stripped from all ascended loot and legendary armor quest items, so doing it for loot/profit is pointless, fractals are much better.

Just a flesh wound.3589:

I don’t care at all about the leaderboard or anyone else’s place on it. I don’t respect (or disrespect) any player because of their AP (what a silly concept). What I want is to be making steady, reasonable daily progess towards each next chest. Because after all, that’s the point of getting AP. It’s reaching the next chest or the next title. If ANet doesn’t give the AP points that allow this, (and they don’t. They’ve been miserly on event AP) then after you reach cap the chests are extremely far between. 10 points a day plus the content points was very reasonable progress, but then ANet decided to favor the completionists who begged for ANet to control them since they couldn’t control themselves. In doing so they affected all the players who can control themselves.

But after the 15k cap was put in the game the dailies were changed to 10 points max. And this max means that the 15k cap is pointless as the dailies themselves are now capped so that completionists have the cap there to keep them from needing to do all dailies.

I think ANet needs to reconsider the 15k cap. The reason it was put in has been removed with the 10 AP daily max and they should also consider that it’s affecting most strongly those who have been the longest, and I could argue, the most loyal players. And maybe a cap that affects your most loyal players isn’t what is good for the game.

So much this.
P.S. Also, add “I’m Maledictus” option so he will stop derailing thread.

maddoctor.2738:

Second: I take some bosses from one of the WoW raids, that also have a guide. Most WoW guides have a very nice sector called “Differences From Normal Mode”. It’s eye opening to this!

For those who do not want to read any, the differences between Normal and Heroic versions usually are:
A) Bosses in Heroic do more damage and have more HP
B) Bosses in Heroic have completely NEW abilities

Some rare bosses have improved abilities so players can’t “cheese” them, as in ignore the mechanics of the fight by various means, including a soft enrage timer if things aren’t done properly. But those are very very few indeed. The vast majority is an HP/damage scale and some EXTRA abilities. No changes to existing abilities whatsoever, no faster projectiles, no more people required to touch certain areas, no increase in attack speed, no nothing else.

I only checked some raid bosses in Siege of Orgrimmar in a random guide. Feel free to check some other Raids and find an encounter in which the actual skills and abilities of the bosses are changed. I won’t bother to check every single boss of every single raid, checking a few is enough to prove how bosses Scale in WoW

Yes, and even with NEW abilities it works, because importance of being accustomed to encounter is HUGE, even if it have some differences. Amazing, eh?

maddoctor.2738:

Stop arguing that and stop generalizing like a broken jukebox. I even provided an EXAMPLE of how the EASY MODE AS YOU EXPECT IT WON’T BE USED FOR TRAINING. Notice the AS YOU EXPECT IT part. Notice the SPECIFIC EXAMPLE I GAVE. I’m not saying that an EASIER mode for Raids cannot be used for training. I’m saying that changing how the most important mechanic based abilities of bosses work will make it USELESS for training. And I even GAVE AN EXAMPLE about it. Want to lower the boss HP? Want to lower their attack damage? The number of adds? The damage they deal? Their hit points? Lower the enrage timer? FINE. Want to change how fundamentally a skill works then it’s not FINE. It’s not the same encounter anymore, it has zero value for any kind of training outside your let’s “play pretend make-believe”.

Except that it already works just like that in WoW, and works fine. I don’t know why people here are trying to oppose against proven and working raid models with empty theories straight out of their heads.

Sykper.6583:

Thank you Absurdo for finding the quote.

It’s far more relevant and specific than just tinfoil ‘evidence’ with the faintest references to raiding and more strongly points to other issues.

Raiding as of right now is by far the most successful part of the expansion, the Music is probably the only other thing I can think of that has been a resounding success. The map alterations, HPs, Legendary Weapons, Story, all other things that have been changed or improved upon…they are more culpable in why HoT had issues.

Dismissing those issues and stating that Raiding is the sole cause is being insincere and foolish.

They gave people raids and don’t gave anyone anything else except some grindy maps. People want to play the game and they see…
1. Old fractals. For almost four years. With ONE new one, being a ragtag mix of old ones.
2. Old dungeons. With nerfed rewards just because.
3. Old pvp. Oh, no, actually less than old, because they removed soloQ, paid tournaments and almost whole hotjoin system. But hey, you can grind play seasons for a backpack.
4. Slightly updated WvW. Hey, 2 new maps over four years!
5. Open world maps. You can grind zerg events over and over again, yay!
6. Raids, great and shiny, with more exclusive items than pvp and wvw together. Oh, raids are slightly hard for you because small community and hard to start doing them without experience? Too bad, go to something previous.
So, only real new things to play are raids and open world grind maps. Both have serious problems if you don’t have a particular mindset, and judging by financial result, majority of players lack it.
And they are staying there, watching at “successful raids” and “new maps are here, why you are not happy” and all asking one question – “Where is my content, dude?”

Absurdo.8309:

@Rednik

You blame raids, but the devs said it performed above their expectations.

You have zero evidence to support your claims. You could easily blame HOT maps, lack of legendaries, the wvw map,the pvp season, fractals, living story,

… or whatever else, when you have no evidence.

- We have population problems, because, despite raids being good, we have implementation problems, as…
- YOU SAYING THAT RAIDS ARE BAD
- Where? I said that they are good, but here is list of problems…
- YOU SAYING THAT RAIDS ARE BAD
- Can you give me a citation please? Here is all arguments again…
- YOU SAYING THAT RAIDS ARE BAD
- …

Seriously, I can’t discuss anything with people who refusing to read. Do some, and then return back.

maddoctor.2738:

Are you still ignoring BSF and EB, the new maps released with 2 episodes of living world content? Aren’t those repeatable enough for you?

Emm, no? These maps have literally zero replayability value, after initial story there is only few zerg farm events and nothing more. Farm for tiny fraction of rewards that was already introduced in raids.

Sykper.6583:

Will get you the dev post about ‘better than anticipated’ numbers at some point today, I haven’t enough time this morning to do so.

Get yourself a minute to check NCSoft earnings releases, gw2eff LI owners percentages and curious reddit activity statistics.
http://global.ncsoft.com/global/ir/earnings.aspx
https://gw2efficiency.com/account/statistics/statistics.legendaryInsights
https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/53dyfn/rguildwars2_post_statistics_and_graph/

Miellyn.6847:

Where is the proof that raids caused it? Where is the proof that easy mode raids will fix it?
Unless you have any of this you will just waste a huge amout of ressources, slow down the content production and make the problem worse.

Easy mode raids with reduced rewards are no new content and no repeatable content, just look at dungeon story modes.

Or at WoW, the radiant example of multiple difficulties, and their annual content drought despite a bigger team and subscription money.

Proof, like people leaving the game is not enough proof for you? Everything is allright? And again, where I said that raids caused it?
Again, problem is not in existence of raids, problem is uneven content distribution. Raids in current implementation are too hard to jump in, and other new repeatable content is almost non-existent, which is obviously shows that Anet is unable to pump out content for everyone. And solution is either start developing en masse repeatable content for majority, by sacrificing raid development, or change raid development paradigm to cater both hardcore and casual crowd, like fractals did before.
People can repeat their “but raid team is so small” mantra, but reality is – when this “small” team developing new content, others are not getting anything.

Sykper.6583:

The above implying that raids are bad right now. Reality is currently showing the opposite.

Like who? Can I have a citation?
Raids are good. Raids being narrow-targeted and at the same time only new repeatable content released – bad. Current state caused all-time low game population, and it must be changed, one way or another.
Anything else?

Hypairion.9210:

why are you saying raids are disastrous for general population? actually, all i see are the same people ranting about them on general forum, but no where else i see a negative impact on the game (no rant in map chat etc…). so i guess you’re just projeting your own opinion for all the general people that don’t play raid. I will do like you, and for my point of view, raids are great, and i know a lot of people who would have stopped playing without raids, so raids are good for the game population.

How about reading posts that you quoting before writing an answer? Or maybe you are be so kind and show me where I said that raids are disaster instead of their implementation?
Negative impact was for game population. People are just leaving because no content to play, because Anet made raids, but never bothered to make anything to help majority of players start doing them. And without proper repeatable and rewarding content to do – population dying. This is not opinion, this is a rule for any MMO. Raids are rewarding but too hard for starter without experience and pug community is making things a lot worse. At the same time, dungeons are literally dead and abandoned (woo, lets nerf rewards, surely this will do good for everyone), fractals was in nearly abandoned state (woo, golden weapons and backpack. What is new fractals?) and living story was postponed again and again (Biweekly updates? Quarterly updates? Hello?). And don’t even start on new maps, outside of some starting quests they are grind and nothing more.

Sarrs.4831:

We have multiple cases of developers or VIPs on the forums stating that the raids punched above their weight, including “more players raided than we expected” and “raids are helping player retention” and “raids are wildly successful”. The resources that were spent on the initial release seem to have paid off.

With this in mind, why would you draw the conclusion that an increased audience is necessary for the mode to carry its weight?

Except that monetary statistics says otherwise. Raids ofc turned out to be great quality content by themselves, and 5-3% of constant raiders is probably more then they are expected, but for general game population that focusing on raids turned out to be disastrous. And by complete absence of repeatable content outside of raids we can say pretty clear that anet devs are unable to keep pace on all directions. So as I said before, it will either turn out as dropping raids like they did with fractals after first year and focus on releasing more casual content, or they will make future raid content way more diverse and fit for casual audience to jump right into.

Sykper.6583:

What an upset! Nearly a quarter of the populace you took your accurate sample information from have killed at least one raid boss. Man, you got me, after all I set the low bar of 5% being an acceptable number for a few dedicated raid devs.

…If anything you defeated your own argument there, a quarter of the accounts you pulled LI information from have an LI, that’s insane participation, that shows wild success. Even if you were to assume an absurd 50% deviation where that nearly 25% could fluctuate to as low as only 12%, that would dedicate themselves to raiding every week, that percentage is still much, much higher than the threshold raiding would have to work with given the dedicated staff.

Furthermore, they did say they had only around 5 members dedicated to the raid staff, whose primary purpose much like the other dedicated devs for SPvP, Balance, Living Story is fixated on that content only. There’s music development, Terrain creation, Art and Design teams that get shared by all teams involved, and that’s how content is made! Those other teams that come in require a direction from the dedicated teams, or else we would have some rather odd music choices in content. Last time I checked, I doubt it would be a good idea letting the Music development put in ill-fitted music in some areas.

If you want to play a number games… well, feel free to visit https://gw2efficiency.com/account/statistics/statistics.legendaryInsights and see by yourself. How much a “dedicated raider” is raiding, more than 3 months? Because people with 9*4*3 LI is already less than 4.5%. You still think that this number will encourage dev team to stay and develop same raid model as we have now? Or maybe you will try to see it in more realistic light?

maddoctor.2738:

Even if, which is a huge if, they bring multiple difficulty levels, they will probably apply to the second Raid only because it will made in a way that supports them. Spirit Vale doesn’t.

And second problem with multiple difficulties is that the community and those who ask for them on these forums haven’t reached an agreement on why they want the multiple difficulty settings in the first place. “Add an easy mode for raids” isn’t a valid argument because there are a bazillion ways of making raids easier but all of them work in a completely different way.

Do you want the easy mode to experience the story?
Do you want the easy mode to train for the normal mode?
Do you want the easy mode to access legendary armor achievements?
Do you want the easy mode to get access to all Raid rewards but at a reduced pace?

Which is it?

Obviously one that will keep raids from dropping from development board by increasing their auditory – a training one. Everything ascended and legendary quest items could be removed from loot table, except maybe shards (or they can even make last wing boss still drop one LI, to motivate experienced guys actually do this mode too).

Sykper.6583:

I wonder if the next wing in that case might be even harder, I can imagine they were impressed by how quickly the raid community grew in just a year. They can keep the raid development team small and focused, and have the majority of the Arenanet staff focus on everything else. If even 5% of the playerbase were actively doing raids thanks to around 5 devs focused on raiding, that’s still an amazing attendance.

Hate to shatter your rose glasses, but when I looked at percentage of people having at least one LI for first time, it was like 28%. Now it’s 24.5%.
Also, for “small and focused team”, they never said that any wings was actually MADE by small team, only “they worked on them” before release. Zero instanced content in HoT outside of raid and story also hinting on that.

Vinceman.4572:

Hahahaha, and Astralporing is imputing conspiracy theories to me.

Rednik, sorry but the speedrun dungeon community which was the only little bit organized active part as your mentioned minority never called out for raids.
We wanted challenging content and we got it, that’s nice. But none of us was satisfied in the first place they treated dungeons and also fractals. As an active reader and writer you should know that.
On the other hand I don’t see why a team of 5-6 ppl for raid development should be the reason against new innovations in fractal development. The fact that they are working on fracs – see 3rd or 4th rework of them – is a proof against your populist statement. These reworks should be final for the next years so all what left is the start of bringing out new fracs.

And raids aren’t a failure. Maybe for you personally but not for the raiding audience enjoying the content every single day.

Raids are not failure by themselves. Way they was implemented is, which is turned into all-time low mark for a game. And it was so hard that they even were forced to drop second raid. Remember all their brave reddit posts about how raids are great and how they happy to make more and able to? And then suddenly monetary statistics from NCsoft is released and its all gone. Then we suddenly getting a LS3 (which was postponed again and again before), instant new fractal which looks suspiciously ragtag composition from existing ones, and after all bright raid announcements – only single wing, to finish legendary collection.
Call it a tinfoil hattery, but I predict some news in future. Like either changed raid development paradigm, with different modes, or even raids going same road as fractals after first year – forgotten for years with only cosmetic changes. Personally I prefer the former, because I don’t want to see raids to be dropped and forgotten only because their auditory is narrow and development resources are finite.

Vinceman.4572:

But ok, let’s have a straight look: Where are the 4 month intervals in presenting us new fractals?

Answer is very simple actually. They listened to loud minority and made their stake on raids. And failed hard.

Vinceman.4572:

The bottom line stands: They aren’t able to develop a fractal within 4 months. They neither were back in the days nor are they at the moment.

That’s all what needed to be said.

So they said that they can make a huge raid wing in a 4 months with like 5-6 people, but cannot make a fractal map. Riiiiight.

maddoctor.2738:

I think you got your dates wrong. WotLK introduced a tool to form raids, not an easy mode difficulty for them (still in 2009 btw not 2008). They had 2 raid varieties, 10-man (normal) and 25-man (heroic) Raids at the time but that did not also mean difficulty. The ACTUAL easy mode (Raid Finder) was introduced in 2011, which uses a new (lower quality) loot system. Which is the “mode” we are discussing here, or so I thought, an EASY mode. WoW and raids is a really really confusing thing.

Emm… you not played it back then, right? 10 man WAS an easy mode, much easier than 25 one. And it had lower ilvl loot because of that.

maddoctor.2738:

Is lots of developers time going to waste? I think we’ve already seen posts on how much of Anet is actually working on Raids, and is a very limited proportion of the company. The question is, is it equal to the “tiny minority” that experiences Raids?
And btw I think you need to define what you mean by “tiny”. Is it 2%? 10%? Or anything that isn’t done by the majority of players is called “tiny” now?

In this expansion we got 3 raid wings and another one incoming before next expansion. And one fractal for everyone else. Also, how about raids having more exclusive stuff than PvP and WvW combined?
And this you can call proportional, when less than 10% of population raiding regularly (if you can call 20LI per year “regularly”)?

maddoctor.2738:

When they did (2011) the game was near the peak of the population and then started progressively dropping. Then when they added even more easy modes (2013) it started dropping further, only spiking during expansions.

I’m not saying that the easy modes resulted in population drops, but that they did implement them because the pop was dropping.

And before you say “So they should implement easy modes to keep the population from dropping”, ask yourself the question: Which thing will keep the GW2 population happier: LS3 Episode4 or Easier Spirit Vale.

I don’t really understand why you trying to change 2008 into 2011. It was very beginning of WotLK when they implemented that, peak and unmatched record of MMO popularity.
Also easy modes have nothing to do with population drops, it was a method to introduce a wider population to raiding, because no one was happy with lots of developers work going waste because only tiny minority can experience raids. And WoW had exactly same arguments as here “blah-blah join guild, blah-blah make your own raid, blah-blah you are not trying enough, blah-blah raids are not for all”, and devs finally realized that they all was pointless and wrong.

maddoctor.2738:

How did you reach that conclusion? I say the raids should either continue being limited in scope, or if they want to make this into an actual Raid game where most of their focus will be on Raids (and not in the open world) they’d need to rethink their raid strategy. And yes rethinking Raid strategy might also include multiple difficulty models, since we’ll have dozens of them instead of one, and the entire playerbase would need to take part in them since there would be limited amount of anything else to work on.

Also you are saying single difficulty was “proven inferior”, yet easier raids weren’t a thing in WoW for quite some years.
Looking for Raid tool was added in 2011, 7 (!!!) years after release and when the game had 19 Raids already.
Flexible raids were released in 2013, 9 years after release and when the game had 22 Raids already.

For SEVEN years they did just fine with a single difficulty. We are just 1 year after the release of Raids and have just a single Raid available. You need to get into perspective here.

Do you know if they plan on doing 2.5 Raids each year, or turn the focus from the open world to Raids?

Except that they started making easier raid mods in 2008, and since then only made this approach deeper and wider. I suppose that developers of must popular and successful raiding game ever made in history (even now, after 13 years it’s still number one) know that they are doing and how different difficulties are affecting player experience.

maddoctor.2738:

The “but WoW does it” arguments really need to stop.

World of Warcraft was released in 2004 with 2 Raids. They added 1 Raid in 2006, 6 Raids in 2007, 3 Raids in 2008, 2 Raids in 2009, 5 Raids in 2010, 3 Raids in 2012, 2 Raids in 2013, 2 Raids in 2015. I’m not counting Raid wings or how large each Raid is for simplicity, the above count is not accurate by any means.
Total: 26 Raids over 12 years, that’s slightly more than 2 Raids per year.
We only have 1 Raid in 1 year since raiding was added and 1 raid in 4 years in GW2’s entire lifetime. I think it’s perfectly clear where the focus of each game is, and why a game really focused on Raiding might need multiple difficulty tiers while a game that has raiding as a side project does not.

Now if the game ever becomes more focused on Raiding than it already is then you can give the “but WoW does it” argument again and there would be merit for discussing it. The argument against more tiers of “it will take development time from Raids” will probably be worthless if the devs start releasing more Raids, more often, with a much larger/expanded team so the two sides might see eye to eye better. But it’s a rather big IF

So you admit that GW2 must either change raid development behavior for future raids, or stop developing them in current shape at all, because single difficulty model is proven as inferior by specialized raiding games.

Blipp.5206:

…

tldr: “this will not work because I said so”
Except that WoW have exactly that mechanics and it works. So, is that WoW have that special kind of people who understands that “ability that almost killing you on lower difficulty WILL kill you on higher, better avoid that”, or you think that GW2 have even more special kind of people who unable to understand that?

NovaanVerdiano.6174:

Not if it takes 4 times longer to develop, for example.
Also, it’s nice that you always come up with those numbers but they might not be true in the slightest.

Even if there was an easier mode, the raid would still have to be challenging to a degree, which might still be too difficult for some. Then there’s also the no-reward fact (or heavily lowered at least), which will put people off from clearing it on low difficulties more often than necessary.

A lower difficulty merely gives people throwaway content, so there is no point in pursuing multiple difficulties.

Feel free to visit gw2eff and see numbers by yourself.
Also, looks like you don’t understand a purpose of tiered difficulty. Lowest difficulties are not intended to be farmed, hence their low rewards, they are made to bridge a difficulty gap for starters and saturate higher tiers with a new blood. “Muh training runs/muh training guilds/start your own group/l2p” is a band-aid, and it’s not working.
People desperately need repeatable content to play, and making it only for 10% of players… well, you can go to NCSoft website and see it by yourself.

maddoctor.2738:

I mean if 10% of the community is raiding, is allowing access to 30% of it considered acceptable? And if the first iteration of easier raids allows for 30%, will we see more of these “make raids easier posts?” Do we then make another even more easier version to increase the number to 50%, then an another one for 80% and so on? How many versions do we need?

Ultimately they are all questions that only the devs can answer. But it would be very helpful if someone who asks for an easier mode for Raids tries to address at least some of them.

If only 10% of community is raiding and we are not in game where these 10% are paying for 90%, then what exactly must be made to distribute content evenly? Stop developing raid content until 4 new fractals, 4 new pvp maps and 2 new wvw maps are made? Or maybe somehow widen raid audience instead, because value of content for 30% of players is 3 times higher than same content for 10% of players?

Absurdo.8309:

How many players do you think pvp or wvw?

Feel free to go at gw2eff and see by yourself.
At least 50% of players have 200+ pvp games. At least 40% of players have 100+ wvw rank.

NovaanVerdiano.6174:

Reasons have been mentioned plenty, in this thread and everywhere else. See some of the other responses.

And yes even if you might not believe it, it increases the development time by a huge amount and the raid devs do not want to sacrifice time for multiple difficulties in order to cater to a group of players that don’t want to raid anyway.

Every percent of players who started to do raids actually increasing value of development time spent on raids. Currently with less than 10% of players raiding regularly I have no idea why someone can even thought about raids being developed further than 4 wings total to finish legendary collection promised on HoT release. Developing content for tiny minority instead of majority is a pointless waste if development time, unless this minority is somehow paying money for everyone else.

Reaper is still staying fractal pug meta. Nerf do hurt raiding reaper a lot ofc, but raiders are too small minority to really make an impact on fractal comps.

Lord Darghaz.2314:

Because players performed better in “old days” and “new age” people cant play video games in its intended difficulty?

Because after that developers realized that “3% who ever seen Naxxramas” is not worth development resources, and single difficulty model was dropped.

maddoctor.2738:

If you add numbers where they do not exist then it’s not the same encounter. Even if a skill hits you for 99.99% of your health instead of defeating you instantly then it’s not the same skill (Flamewall, World Eater etc).

Only purpose of that change is to teach player to avoid dangerous mechanics without wiping the raid. Instant defeat is bad for that. Instant down may work tho.

maddoctor.2738:

You can practice on the actual thing, especially on bosses like VG which have training build-in to them.

Implementation of that “training” is quite poor and not reflecting actual situation during boss fight.

Lord Darghaz.2314:

Raids are meant to be challanging. But there is no exclusion. If you dont want to raid in its current form, its not the content to blame.

Players with enough interest will always find a way to complete normal mode.

Yeah, this is pretty good motto for raids in 2005. Even for 2008 ones. Too bad that now is 2016.

maddoctor.2738:

So you create an entire different fight that doesn’t work like the original one. There are so many fights that you must break the breakbars of the bosses or you wipe, if you make those attacks not killing people then there is no training here, just look at the Legendary Wyverns that nobody ever breaks anymore. You think if there was a “hardcore” Wyvern that wiped everyone if you didn’t break it, that all those auto attackers would suddenly become competent and learn that is bad and break it? I seriously doubt that it would ever happen.

There is absolutely nothing different in encounters except numbers, which are tweaked to create training environment instead of punishing one.

maddoctor.2738:

An “easier” Raid WOULD NEVER be used for training.

Because you said so? If you remember, I already said about all legendary and ascended loot removed, and without them this mode nets you less gold than any openworld farm or dungeon. There is literally no purpose except practice.

OnizukaBR.8537:

Kill mechanics force player to learn, because you learn or you dont pass, take green circles for example you have to learn to gather 4 people there or you will die ( one people missing and its not a wipe you may still heal thorugh). Now you saying people that cant learn to go to green circle now that they will kill the party will learn if the green circle does way less damage?

They will learn how green circle mechanics work, and that it’s dangerous, but without instant wipe for everyone. Because why melee or tank guys should be punished hard with wipe on training run when mistakes was made by ranged group? Purpose of training encounter is learning doing your role, not dying because someone else made mistake once.

You are joking right? right? Its pretty obvious that these people will just tank through it with heals/vit, will learn nothing and actually be worse at actually raid because you know they completed the other version so they know what they are doing.

Again, they will learn what green circles are, how and when they appear in fight and how you must act to counter them. And when they go to normal raid, they only need to know that all mechanics are same but more deadly, so they must pay more attention.

maddoctor.2738:

There is a big difference between an attack that 1-shot kills you and an attack that deals damage. If an attack 1-shot kills you and then someone for some weird reason wants a nerfed version that it doesn’t, then it’s not the same attack, not the same mechanic, not the same fight at all. I hope it’s simple enough to understand and you don’t want me to paint it next time.

Reason is pretty simple – beginners mode is for teaching, and “this is a wipe, start again” is a pretty stupid method to teach anything. Big damage shows everyone “this ability is bad, don’t get hit, mmmkay?”. They will learn that, and will try to avoid.
Pretty obvious. Or maybe you are one of these weird people who not stops touching fire until your hand is completely burned?

maddoctor.2738:

So you want it to be regular champion difficulty or something? You want it to be a “regular” press 1 and win kind of encounter? You want players do actually DO the mechanics or ignore them completely? Because with your changes it will be as if there are no mechanics in the Raid bosses at all. Just stand still, spam 1 and win.

No, I want to allow players actually learn boss abilities without “exciting” experience of hours of wipes, falling apart groups, “experienced” RLs who have zero idea how to lead but loves their kick button and amazing LFG writing skills, and “raiding” guilds with already formed statics who barely cares to train and lead new players. Because current raiding community is not healthy in any sense, and it’s shrinking due to lack of new blood, regardless of all attempts of people here to lie to themselves. Gw2e numbers are fact, not speculation.
Also, you noticed loot nerf and separate CD part, right?

maddoctor.2738:

I can think of some encounters: Vale Guardian, Gorseval, Sabetha, Slothazor, Bandit Trio, Matthias, Escort, Keep Construct and Xera

All these would require HUGE efforts to remake instead of simple number tweaks. I’m not sure about the rest though, someone can help with the others.

1)-50% floor damage, -33% green circle damage, slower seekers, -20% HP
2)+50% world eater phase length, -33% spirit HP and speed, -33% orb aoe growing speed, +1min to enrage, -33% to breakbar
3)Flamewall damages 50% of max hp per second, -20% hp to Sabetha and all adds, +2s to all bomb mechanics (big bombs, jump bombs, sticky bombs), -25% to all non-npc damage to players (bombs, cannons, turrets), 2 cannons instead of 4 (optional).
4) +2s to volatile poison debuff, bigger mark and louder sound for it, -25% to volatile poison damage and aoe growing speed, -33% all special boss damage abilities, special marks on transform mushroom spawn points, -20% boss HP
5) -20% boss and adds HP, special color marks on special mechanic stuff (oil, hives, cages), special marks on saboteurs.
6) +100% hp on sacrifice victim and +50% on ability length, +2s on poison debuff timer, twice as long hadoken animation, -25% damage on all special boss abilities and mechanics, -10% boss HP.
7) -25% warg speed, -20% mobs HP, mines are instant downstate instead of oneshot, -1 mob on towers
8) -20% HP, -25% projections speed and HP, ley rifts buff 100% damage instead of 75%, fail in green circles deals damage 90% of max HP instead of wipe, -25% damage form rotating AoE and bombs.
9) +50 to derangement stack limit, each destroyed shard is -10, -33% to all bloodstone HP, -33% to breakbar and +33% to breakbar window, +2s to ancient magic & deadly attack window, big mark on player with buff, -20% boss and adds HP.

Here, now you can call it a “Beginners mode”, cut out achievements, all ascended and legendary collection loot and drop to live servers on separate CD.

Hypairion.9210:

Are you a dev hidding among us, to know exactly what can be easily done and what can’t ?

Oh, maybe you will name some encounters that require these mythical HUGE efforts to remake instead of simple number tweaks?

OnizukaBR.8537:

Where are your proof of that?? You just show that you know a kitten about balance. First of all they have to scratch out mechanics just because it cant translate to easier mode, all the mechanics that they come up with they need to think that will fit the easier mode, so it make it a LOT HARDER, than making two raids without thinking of mechanics fitting all tiers.

Care to name such mechanics?

Dungeons are a proof that content dies without good reward, easier raids would have bad rewards ( and before you say dungeons are too old, old fractals and maps like SW are too and still played a lot ).

That’s why fractals died out, easymode levels 1-50 killed them. Oh wait, they are still alive and most played instanced content in game. Weird.

Players that like GW2 and dont like raiding will keep playing for a lot of reasons ( Fractals, LS, Open World, WvWvW ) a lot of repeatable content, raids are too. But you trying to trash it with difficulty raids.

Care to name repeatable content introduced since HoT? Oh right, few open world zerg farms and one fractal after three years. And raids, but raids are nono, because small group of players wants to have them exclusively for themselves.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

Adding tiers or difficulty modes increases the amount of time the devs need to spend on raids, thus diverting resources from elsewhere. Thus fewer raids or fewer changes to fractals (including new ones) or slower release cadence for living world or…

Raid team is not fractal/LS team. And resource-wise 40% of players able to play 1 raid is much better than 10% of players playing 3 raids, though making more difficulties for one raid will certainly take MUCH less resources than making 2 more new raids.
Repeatable content is one of the main reasons that keep players playing the game, and everything that making such content available for more players is good.
P.S. Average % of players with 1 LI on gw2e already fell below 30% and becoming lower and lower every week. So much for raid popularity.

OnizukaBR.8537:

So after the topic of “Easy mode raids”, “Training raids”, “Story mode Raids”. Its the time for the “Fractal like raids” so we can bring the same argument over and over again. Modes should start merging this topics.
If you dont have anything to bring to the table besides the “i want” stop creating topics like this. And do some research and will see a lot of bad reasons why this is not a good idea.

You mean, a lot of good reasons? Because all that he can find against is “we don’t need because I don’t want to/devs must make more raids for me instead of modes for you all/l2p n00bs/who cares about statistics and other games, we don’t need it”.

Sykper.6583:

“To be clear, the goal of getting more players into raiding is a good one. But the way Raid Finder turned out removed, IMO anyway, a lot of the epicness of what made raiding raiding…”

Do we really need to say anything else?

Of course not. He clearly admitting that LFR expanded raiding community, and only downside was loss of “epicness”. I guess, by epicness he means 2% of vanilla raiders who ever seen Naxxramas.

OnizukaBR.8537:

Your argument is invalid the moment you start comparing GW2 to other mmo because not having vertical progression is not a minor different, its a world of difference.
So because of that you cant compare raids of other games to GW2.
And people dont buy GW1 because the game is really old , and we have GW2, but the folks that still play GW1 still do FoW and UW

I can repeat it again – there is no successful examples of such raid model in modern MMOs. None. Zero. Null. Regardless of progression, subscription model and moon phases.

OnizukaBR.8537:

Or you know like GW1 FoW and UW was a huge sucess and people play it to this day. GW2 will follow the same and raids will always be played.

Oh, you mean ones released in 2007? Yeah, back then that raid model was still alive, along with WoW vanilla and first wave of BC raids. Too bad that now we live in 2016 instead of 2007, and this model is not working anywhere in modern MMOs. And I don’t see crowds of exalted raiders buying GW1 to enjoy FoW and UW experience.