Guild Wars 2

ekarat.1085:

What is your source?

It was told to the community by an ANet developer during one of the recent AMA sessions they hosted. We are definitely going to need 6 Gifts of Craftsmanship.

Rednik.3809:

We can see how Blizzard doing exactly same thing for balancing various difficulties for raids, and its not something very different from original encounter. More generous enrage timers, less damage overall, less boss health. Encounters are already balanced and tested, reducing their difficulty requires only some numbers tuning.

I hate to state the obvious, but ANet is not Blizzard. ANet’s architecture supports some things that are very hard for Blizzard, and vice versa.

I think 150 is too much given the rate at which they’re obtained. The time gate on legendary armor is massive in comparison to any other legendary anything currently, and it doesn’t make sense for it to be. Four months of killing every single raid boss is simply more than is reasonable, especially in comparison with the month time gate on Gifts of Craftsmanship.

Rednik.3809:

For some reason, fractals have exactly same thing and don’t have any of your “problems”.

Au contraire, Fractal development is a much slower beast than raids by a lot precisely because raid content doesn’t have difficulty scaling. If their new Fractal content release track record weren’t already proof enough of that, I don’t know what is. Having to balance the entire raid twice for two entirely different groups of players along with the other necessary interface and reward changes is a massive undertaking.

Please change it to use the male armor set for female Charr and Asura like with all other armor. It is incongruous to the entire style of those races to use the female versions as they currently do.

I’m glad they finally listened to the community! I’ve reminded them about this in every single report I’ve sent in since they were added to the game! Now if only they’d listen to me about adding the trails to the Staff/Scepter/Focus/Warhorn/Speargun…

Malediktus.9250:

It was promised as a feature of HoT/raids. Now all 3 raid wings are released and we are only 1 collection closer to the legendary armor. Seems like an insult to me.

We should wait for people to actually finish the first collection to know how to progress in collection two (or whatever) before complaining.

STIHL.2489:

But, yah, I am entitled to Full Access to the Gear, Content, and Aspects, in a way that I enjoy, and if that means I don’t want to deal with elitist jerks, then so be it.

This is pretty impressively myopic. ANet is not in any way, shape, or form obliged to create the game that you enjoy. You bought it fully understanding how it was, or how it was going to be, and if that isn’t good enough for you then you can ask for a refund. If you don’t want to buy future expansions for the sole reason that some of the content in those expansions is beyond your skill level, then so be it. If dealing with other humans (who will be cruel no matter how easy the content is) is too much for you as well, then I’d recommend playing single player games instead (or focusing on the content areas where you don’t need other people).

Anyone have any tests of power Reaper with standard raid builds vs. test golem in the special forces arena? I’m curious what it comes to these days.

I’m stuck in a Catch 22 of sorts. I love Stronghold, and I would play it more often… if more people played it. I don’t want to sit in 10m queues just to get a match against a full premade from a higher division entirely that wrecks house.

The only thing I dislike about conditions is that they persist on a player when you res them from down state, so condi cleave on corpses makes them completely unable to be ressed and kept alive. Otherwise I just think people need to be smarter about their 1v1 and try really hard to make sure they have a decent Ele on their team to help counter the pressure.

I’ve suggested before to them that it needs to be purchasable for an extreme amount of Pristine Fractal Relics. We’ll see if that comes to pass in future seasonal updates.

Palador.2170:

I’d expect that workflow to change as we draw closer to the release of the next expansion. There’s never enough time on things like that, so I’d expect some of the people that help the raid team to be too busy with expansion projects.

They have a lot of time to plan for that, though, and I expect that scheduling the time of the audio/music group (for example) is something they’ve already incorporated into their workflow. I can’t speak for them, but I think they were taking it into account already.

They’ve never said legendary armor was available exclusively to raids, this is just how they’re first introducing it. I would expect it to show up in other game modes down the road, and I’m all for that. More unique legendary skins to encourage playing different content is always a good thing.

Not to discount your experience, but last night I pubbed Matthias because my guild missed a raid night this week… And we killed it on the third try with everyone being really good sports and encouraging eachother after the first couple wipes. It was a memorably positive experience.

Why am I sharing this? I’m sharing this because I don’t think singular anecdotal experiences tell us anything about the community at large. If you wanted to say “I had this bad experience, and therefore the community is toxic and elitist” I would disagree. You should be forthcoming about your experience level for what you’re doing, and particularly seek out training runs instead of experienced runs or blank runs.

Not much would change if you removed PS, nor do I think they should remove it while we’re discussing it. PS is ideally situated and is a great and active trait that makes for a fun Warrior build. Maintaining your rotation is critical because if you screw it up then might will drop to 18 or even lower, causing a huge teamwide DPS loss.

Razor.9872:

How about 1 or maybe 2 raids per-year?

They said in an earlier Guild Chat that at their current workflow they have the ability to produce a raid wing every 3-4 months.

Ohhh, yes, that would make sense! I’ve always liked that trait and I could see how it would be useful!

timmyf.1490:

I’d recommend the Soothing Mist trait over auramancer. SM ticks for like 1k+ and can be maintained on the whole raid.

Soothing Mist is a minor trait and you get it for free when you take Water Magic as a specialization. You can have both Soothing Mist and Powerful Aura, for instance, letting you be an Auramancer with huge aoe healing.

+1

Keep making raids, raid team! Meanwhile the fractals team can keep making fractals.

thewaterguy.4796:

People (including me) aren’t kittened off because of the raids coming out consistently and being great, thats not a problem, thats awesome, the problem is its only good IF you are part of the very specific elite minority of players that actually do raid, and make no mistake, most GW2 players don’t raid, hell I’ve played the game semi-regularly for 3 years and have full ascended, and I don’t raid for several reasons, the problem is, raiding is the ONLY place that is getting consistent content updates, if your an average GW2 player that just wants Living Story or Fractals, yeah your kittened, unless arena-net adds a “practice” mode to raiding to let everyone manage to play it (something that tons of people are super angry about the idea of because…reasons) Raiding will never be enough to keep people playing GW2, and that can easily be evidenced by the massive drop in player retention since HoT

• I play fewer than 6 hours of GW2 in an entire week.
• I spend 4 of those hours raiding.
• I have a casual guild full of extremely introverted people, 90% of which don’t have ascended gear.
• We decided “let’s yolo raids and see how we do”.
• We killed VG after a great deal of practice, and it was one of the most rewarding experiences for us as a group of friends since release.
• We have gone on to beat every single raid encounter thus far.
• We are now much better players and you probably couldn’t distinguish us from the “elite” anymore, whatever that is.

Anyone can raid if they’re willing to put in even a modicum of time into it. If you’re playing GW2 for 30 minutes a week, sure, you probably won’t be able to raid (but neither could you do much of anything else in-game either). Outside of that, all it takes is the will to keep trying and the right, cooperative attitude. You’ll be a better player for it, and if you enjoy GW2’s combat system at all you’ll find it surprisingly fun.

Don’t forget that a lot of what we’re currently seeing in these raid releases was developed by the raid team well before HoT was released. It’s not entirely truthful to assume that they’re churning out everything back-to-back with no prior work involved. They were staggered very intentionally to ensure that a constant stream of raid content was being released periodically.

I expect we’ll see a ton more content in other areas of the game come the July/August summer seasonal update. We know for a fact that at least 1 new Fractal is coming out this year, for instance. Just hold it together until then.

Talking isn’t important, but listening is. More than 3/4 of my raid group never speak on TS, but really all they need to do is listen to me so we beat every boss regardless.

Fay.2357:

Why on earth would people start grinding boss failures if killing all 9 bosses 1 time each would cap?

If the shard cap were raised by what some people are requesting that might not be true anymore. The OP’s suggestion might not hit that limit, but then again that was only one of my reasons for personally liking a 100 shard cap per week.

Just make sure that you’re actually as good as the LI ping suggests you are, or you’ll really have a bad time. In general if you’ve never actually experienced the encounters (despite watching videos) you should be forward about that with your groups so they know what to expect.

Also, protip: join a raiding guild that does teaching runs!

I think what people are trying to say is that with only 5-6 people specifically 100% dedicated to raids, which includes the designers and also an effects and creature artist, they’ve managed to do great things. Teams like the sound team certainly contribute to raids with new music, and Bobby Stein from storytelling is very heavily involved as well, but it’s not nearly as massive an undertaking as, say, the Living World teams. In that context I think the raids team is doing an awesome job.

I’m not an “admin”, but I do know that it’s perfectly fine to use those codes. Just don’t be surprised if you get yelled at by the group and then kicked if your experience level doesn’t match the experience the group is demanding.

I wish this would happen to me, heh. I’ve been stuck dead-middle in Ruby for something like 40 games.

Gaile Gray.6029:

Hey guys,

I just want to point out that Rising Dusk is giving his opinion of what may take place in the future. Maybe even a “wish list” for Raids.

Our forum specialists are not privy to confidential information such as forward-looking, unannounced plans. They represent our forum members, and they do it well. Their perspective is of particular value because they are looking at the game as you do — as members of the player community. To keep that clear perspective, we don’t expose them to internal testing, NDA-bound info, private/internal communications, or that sort of thing.

I wanted to make this clear so that no one is under the mis-impression that there has been a “leak” or that our specialist is “dropping hints” about future raids based on private internal communications. They are simply sharing their thoughts and opinions, which is perfectly fine.

On a personal note, the guilds I belong to are really enjoying raids, and several members have said, as Mireles Lore mentioned, that the new content is reinvigorating their gaming.

Yeah, I noticed this getting traction on Reddit suddenly and made a very nearly identical comment to yours there after being struck with massive paranoia that I may have misspoken or something.

Hopefully no one took this the wrong way!

I stand by that 100 shards per week is a good cap because it limits the frequency that things like ghostly infusions enter the market and also maintains the value of rewards like ascended armor that can be obtained through other means. A lot of players also play specifically to hit the cap, so if the cap gets raised people will go back to what was happening with only 1 wing out and grind failures of bosses to hit the cap, which is not what ANet wants.

Cyninja.2954:

While the raid team does a great job, I have a feeling that Arenanet will be moving away from raid content design. It just doesn’t attract enough players compared to the ressources it consumes.

Best result would be a new raid per future expansions but I doubt new raids will get added outside of those.

I don’t have exact figures, but internally to ANet the raid team is lauded and praised for being a massive success. I am under the impression that there will absolutely be more raids, potentially even very soon as a component of LS3 (they said this was a possibility, so no guarantees).

Both auramancer and water camping staff healer are viable healer alternatives to a Druid. Druid offers a lot more offensive support than these other options while healing, however, but both can be great if you have friends or a guild willing to support it.

Zenith.6403:

Such un-interesting poll. Can’t you people there at Anet decided these things for yourself? Ask us for grand directions, not some server mixing micromanagement schedule.

I very much appreciate the ability to help decide how ANet handles these sorts of lower-level items in addition to the higher-level items. There is no downside as far as the userbase is concerned with them asking for more feedback from us.

You’d think I know what I’m talking about or something!

P.S. My body is ready.

I never care about class composition in Fractals. The encounters are easy enough even at 90+ that you can pretty much yolo anything so long as the players know what to expect.

I think if I could make every Fractal pub know one thing alone, it would be for them to know patience in the face of mistakes that inexorably get made. The only time I hate my life in Fractals is when people flip out unnecessarily; just leave if you really can’t stand the group.

I am fairly confident we’ll hear more information either this week or next week unless something unexpected came up (ie. critical bugs) in the raid wing’s testing.

Tentonhammr.7849:

Sounds like a perfect reward for collecting all the gold skins.

+1

Druid should stay in melee to keep Spotter/other buffs on the people who need them. The Elementalist healer can escort.

They know that this instability is awful (and some others as well). In the last AMA I asked if it was a priority for them to work on fixing these, and they said that it was. I would expect some headway to be made on these in the coming seasonal patches.

The story makes perfect sense to me, and the bosses make sense too. I actually think the raid story thus far is more compelling than the base HoT story itself!

Hey all! We’re still recruiting if anyone is looking for a guild! Everything in the OP is still totally true about us, though of course activity has died ever so slightly due to there being little going on. We have a very solid raid group that raids weekly, we do other PvE things like guild missions weekly, and a number of us also PvP fairly frequently! If any of the things we do together as a guild sound good to you, send me a message in-game and we can chat!

This thread really takes me back.

timmyf.1490:

I strongly dislike both AR-gating as well as the instability system. Will Fractals fulfill my 5-man end-game content desires?

(I know the answer to this, I’m just pointing out that there are reasons to dislike Fractals beyond just the encounters. The systems used in Fractals range from “mostly ignorable” to “relatively unfun.”)

As far as instabilities, they’re updating them and will be removing some of the dumber ones and replacing them with better instabilities. I asked them this during the most recent AMA and they confirmed they have plans to improve instabilities substantially.

For AR, it’s really hard to say. AR was such a non-issue for my personal experience in Fractals that I’m surprised that so many people feel so strongly against it. It is certainly a difficult to grasp system, but the gating itself is very easy to overcome if you actually play the content and progress. By design, you are not intended to be doing 90+ out of the gate.

By my understanding, all of these things will get better with seasonal patches in the future. Fractals now more than ever are the supported end-game content for 5-player groups, and the team is hard at work ensuring that they actually do get more enjoyable for a wider audience.

Thaddeus.4891:

I still think that I would have more fun with a super challenging 5 man content than the current 10 man raid. Even if I prefer the 10 man raid, than no challenging content like before.

For reference, the Fractals team has been interfacing with the Raids team with the eventual goal to convert every Fractal into a much more compelling experience with greater depth of difficulty at high scales. We saw this first with the Cliffside revamp, and will continue to see it in more Fractals in the future.

Fractals are ANet’s intention for end-game 5-man content, whereas Raids are the end-game 10-man content. Once everything gets to a good place with Fractals, it should fulfill your desires there.

I have reported this to ANet on innumerable occasions for years at this point. If they’re tracking it at all, they are never going to address it.

Bandit Trio is terrible, yes. They’ve received that feedback from me and numerous other sources, so I highly doubt they will ever make a ‘boss’ like that ever again. That said, I don’t think they’re going to go back and make any sweeping changes to it at this point.

As for Slothasor and Matthias, I find them extremely compelling bosses. Matthias is far more complicated overall than any other boss from SV, and definitely more difficult. Slothasor is great fun, personally, and I really enjoy the way he ramps up and how you have to move him. I’m definitely not disappointed in the second wing.

P.S. Gorseval is still my favorite boss, though!

Someone on Reddit suggest a Slothasor Plush. We need a Slothasor Plush badly.

Also, apparel with our guild logos on it would sell like hot cakes.

Zenith.7301:

I agree with the use of masteries like gliding and mushrooms. I would not agree with requiring multiple end tier masteries or all of them.

Some of the end-tier masteries aren’t even possibly usable in raids (ie. Exalted Gathering). Furthermore, adrenaline and speedy mushrooms are there to make things easier but aren’t required. That kind of optional mastery usage is also a very effective way to validate masteries, which is all I asked for if you reread my original post. For instance, they could have a big bad Chak be a boss in Wing 3, and then Nuhoch Alchemy would be useful but not required.

Get the mastery or don’t do the raid boss that requires it; there are other raid wings and bosses in the third wing which don’t require the mastery for you to play if you don’t want to get the mastery. It’s really that simple.

If you’re opposed to the concept of masteries being required for raids, my opinion is that I disagree with you because raids are end-game PvE content and masteries are like leveling up skills for use in PvE. It makes perfect sense to me to incorporate masteries into raids, like the Speed/Adrenal Mushrooms in Spirit Vale, the Updraft on Gorseval, and now Ley Line Gliding in wing 3. I personally wish they’d validate even more masteries by using them in raids either optionally or otherwise.

Nafets.1238:

There is no information regarding anything in that thread. Only speculations.
Watch out before you post! Ty.

There is no information to be had at all about Envoy Armor insofar as what you’re asking, and no developer is going to post in this thread and show off everything to you. They won’t spoil it until wing 3 is closer, and they’re likely to give the details in a blog post when it does come.