Guild Wars 2

TheArtOfMouts.7468:

Oh and PUG have no incitative to do do 76+ Daily Fractal if it not Swampland or Molten Boss.

I have pugged every single T4 Fractal daily thus far and one-shot it every time with no one dying. The quality of player out and about in the Master tier right now at least is very high.

Both Engineer and Necromancer are very strong right now. Necromancer scales better into some encounters like Sloth/Sab due to Epidemic bouncing, though, so if you were going to only make one set I’d make it for that.

I prefer what we have now both to what we had before and to what we had before HoT. 3 random Fractals was always a pain to me, particularly with the time commitment all at once. Now I can do 1 Fractal at a time of the daily list on my own schedule and come back and do the others later if I want. It’s great now.

To be honest, this change has me running Aetherpath more frequently than ever before. I consider this a pretty intelligent way to boost interest in an otherwise annoying to pub path.

Yes, please keep it on Monday! I vastly prefer that reset since it lines up better with my guild’s raid nights.

It’s a little disappointing that Narella is intended to be such a frustrating (not hard, frustrating) encounter. The first two bosses being trivially easy and the last boss randomly chaotic just fuels my dislike for the encounter.

Just remember that even if they’re considering an easy mode raid, they’re not going to trivialize the rewards of the standard mode. I would be very surprised if you could earn Magnetite Shards at the same rate or Legendary Armor components in an easy mode if it is ever implemented. Also keep in mind that if such a mode does come to pass, it won’t drop sooner than the Summer seasonal patch in ~3 months. Lastly, don’t forget that they said that the focus of the next seasonal patch would be new content, not revamped systems, so I’m not sure when an easy mode patch would surface.

Anyway, I’m glad that my questions were answered during the AMA, and I’ll continue sending everyone’s thoughts to the raid / fractals teams as we move forward. (Even those I personally disagree with!)

They said that a new fractal would be released this year, but not when in the year. They also said that new fractals will only be released with seasonal patches, never between them. Based on this information, I was personally expecting it in the Fall patch, but we’ll see for sure as we get there.

They acknowledged this on Reddit and are looking into it. It happens on both VG and Gorseval.

lagrangewei.8516:

honestly the LFG for raid just suck. it has been greatly improved since launch but it is still flawed, forcing the rise of raid guild which serve no purpose other than addressing lfg inability to list raid schedule in game.

You should download the new patch and try it out. I told you all it was coming.

While I think this may be a little extreme, ANet doing it this way will absolutely get me to run it a bunch of times to get the skins. I’d also be curious to know what sample size we’re talking about here. One run with everyone getting it still could be plausible with ~20-30% chance of drop.

I got my first ascended item ever from a raid yesterday (Gorseval Shield). For context, I think I have like 100-something insights, but I don’t even really keep track.

It’s a GM account. He probably lost the buff when he went immortal but kept the FGS skills. I wouldn’t read into this too much if I were you.

[VZ] is still recruiting!

I wanted to mention here, but we’re looking for backup raiders who would be interested and willing to learn the bosses, but wouldn’t be mad if they didn’t get to come every single week. We’re a casual player group and we’re very friendly, but we clear the bosses each week so we’re definitely capable of beating the content effectively. Experience not required, though it definitely helps!

If the things we do as a guild interest you, definitely contact one of the officers in the OP!

Be bold. Watch videos for VG and learn all of its mechanics as best you can. Go suicide against the trash before the boss a few times. Once you’ve done that and are very comfortable with the mechanics, join a PUG and try your best. Alternatively, you can look in the guild recruitment forums and find a guild that does raids and is flexible. Good luck!

We don’t really know what shape the next raid will take after Forsaken Thicket Wing 3, but Anet did mention somewhere that they’d consider implementing raids as part of Living World. It’s possible we might get something along those lines in September-ish when Living World Season 3 has started back up!

I’m very happy we got to play SAB again. I finished the blue, green, and yellow collections finally and have given dozens upon dozens of gameplay hours to the content. I hope that the metrics show everyone at ANet just how important SAB is to us, and how badly we want W3.

Cheers, ANet!

I’m happy that we have a diverse DPS meta consisting of both condition- and power-based builds. I remember a day when we begged for the kind of diversity that we now have on these same forums, and I’m very glad we finally got it.

My assumption based on their past release cycles is that wing 3 will come out in June.

Easiest
1. Bandit Trio
2. VG
3. Gorseval
4. Sabetha
5. Slothasor
6. Matthias
Hardest

My body is ready.

NoTrigger.8396:

as far as i remember they said up to 6 raid wings per year would be possible. so where did you get the information from that the plan is only one full raid in HoT?

if that is true tho -> RIP gw2.

When they said that, they made it sound like that was a pace they operate at. It’s possible there could be another raid lumped in with LW3 or something, and that’s why they don’t treat it directly as “part of HoT”, but it’s anyone’s guess at this point. I think my previous posts maybe sounded a little too much of “this is how it is” and less of “this is how I understand it”, which is more accurate. I do not have any special information about their development cycle for raids.

I appreciate the comments in this thread thus far. I’ve been following along with it, and I think it’s spot-on. I don’t think Anet will revitalize dungeons at all. I do think we’ll see a reward update ‘eventually’ to at least make the content seem worth doing, but we won’t see any actual updates to the paths themselves. That said, I believe that the Fractals team has “gotten the picture” and is working on the right stuff to move it in the right direction. I can’t make any promises, but my reports seem to have been met with “That makes sense, we’ll work that stuff” so I’m hopeful.

I’m not sure what timeframe we can expect to see updates, though, but I know we’ll at least see new Fractal content before the end of the year (either in October or in July for one of those seasonal patches). Along the way I expect an update to the way the daily system in Fractals works to encourage more than just Swamp, and I expect an update to the way instabilities work “at some point” (to actually change the way the encounters are played rather than simply punish players and make them brute force through it). Hopefully we hear some more solid information from them as to what their exact plans are, though.

Hypairion.9210:

I’m happy that the legendary armor will stay behind raid to motivate people to get better, but I’m a little disappointed if no more wings are added (but maybe fractals and dungeon will compensate this)

We still have one more wing to get in the June time frame, which is pretty exciting. We’re also definitely getting new Fractal(s) before the end of the year. They’re working on them one-at-a-time, and I think we’ll see the first new one either in the summer seasonal patch (July) or the fall seasonal patch (October). It depends on how quickly they move. Either way I think for instanced PvE content we have a pretty good pipeline of new content coming up not even considering the eventual second expansion.

Absurdo.8309:

Both solutions can be an appropriate answer to the problem. I still see an increased shard cap as superior because it increases the incentive to run a boss multiple times in the same week. That increases the player pool for those who raid on the weekend.

Maybe, but there’s a big incentive for ANet to keep the shard cap lower because it encourages people to keep coming back week after week to play raids. The way they currently have it provably improves player retention, which is a big thing for an MMO. If people would run raids repeatedly every day because the shard cap keeps rewarding them, they’d end up the way of dungeons apparently where people get bored of them very quickly.

For those asking for the current legendary armor to be made more accessible, ANet will not be doing that (I can say this safely). The Forsaken Thicket legendary armor is a big component of encouraging players to get better at the game and tackle raids, and ANet recognizes that. That would be like making the PvP back piece legendary more accessible to PvP players who can’t progress past Emerald, which they simply won’t do in order to encourage devotion to the game mode.

randomguy.1283:

Wait are you saying they’re going to stop making raids after the third wing all the way until the next expansion? This is NOT what we were told and I’m very disappointed to hear this, but with the whole legendary weapons thing I guess I can’t say I’m completely surprised.

The plan has always been thus:

• One complete raid per expansion.
• Each raid contains three raid wings, each delivered within ~3 months of one-another.

I think it’s possible some people (yourself included) may have taken “a new raid wing delivered every 3 months” to mean that a second full raid would be coming with Heart of Thorns, but that is not the case to my knowledge.

NovaanVerdiano.6174:

Then what they have to do isn’t upping the shard cap, but the boss kill rewards instead.

Bingo.

Astralporing.1957:

If we’ll need to wait years for those alternate options, then they might as well not exist for the purposes of discussing them.

No matter what, new legendary armor will not exist before the second expansion. Even if they decided to add it to alternate game modes today, it still wouldn’t arrive before the second expansion.

Dinosaurs is absolutely correct on all counts and saved me the effort of posting a long essay.

Adrenalin.5719:

What you just described is sth that almost any combination of chrono-tank + a dps can do better. Except perma-protection (which isn’t mandatory at all and only really usefull for bad groups).

Suffice it to say that none of the higher DPS classes optimally bring even half of the CC that a DH brings, a DH is arguably a DPS class on its own with its ~26k benchmark (beaten only by Tempests and Daredevils), and you’re already bringing Chronomancer(s) anyway. The support that a DH provides in addition to the Chronomancer(s) in the raid group is invaluable and makes runs so much smoother and easier overall.

Some thoughts:

• It’s fine if there are other sources of legendary armor. What matters is that the particular legendary armor available in the Forsaken Thicket is only available in the Forsaken Thicket. This is just the first place that it has been introduced; I expect it to show up elsewhere and in raids in future expansions.
• The raid team operates almost entirely independently from other groups barring involvement from the lore / narrative team and the sound team. They are very efficient at their work, and have a proven track record thus far of both listening to the community and making very high quality content.
• Raids are very active and are contributing to player retention.
• The current plan is to have a raid in the next expansion. This may change, though given the success of the team I seriously doubt it.

Note: I do not speak for ArenaNet, but I do speak with them, sometimes in-game. I am not bound by an NDA, but I also don’t want to throw any devs under the bus if they talk to me. Suffice it to say that as far as I understand, ANet considers raids a resounding success both in their impact on player retention and in keeping raiders raiding, and at this point they expect the next expansion will have a raid.

ButterPeanut.9746:

Vale guardian is another fight where condi thief shines, unless you absolutely need a ranged DPS. It can very easily break his bar every time in the rotation phase which can keep other classes in their max DPS state (Rev not going to staff for example)

One downside is that condition classes generally end in the range group, where the Thief underperforms. Furthermore, venoms can be wasted on seekers if you’re not careful, essentially gutting the class’s DPS. I’ve tried it, though, and I can still get really good phase times on kill runs, so it definitely isn’t bad.

Thaddeus.4891:

Ya but you understand than when the 3rd wing will be in the game, you will be able to do only 2 of the 3 wings once before you hit the cap and the 3rd wing you gonna want to do will give you zero shards right? And do you consider that a good design?

You still get the ground chest for every boss once a week, with relatively high chances for good loot. Furthermore, any ascended gear you get can salvage to 60 shards and any minis can be sold back for 40. I would still consider it wholly worth it to run all 3 wings even if you cap on shards. I still think the liquid rewards for the bosses could be better (2g for old wings is terrible), but overall I still find it worth it.

I think asking if this is good design is the wrong way to think about it. In my mind, the shards from the kills are “extra”, so whether I get 10 or 20 or cap at 100 doesn’t phase me. To me, they’re serving as a hedge fund for when I want things but didn’t get the drop I want. For that function, I find them very well designed.

I want to clarify that just because I don’t personally think the shard cap should be increased, I do in general find rewards for raids really bad and agree that they should be better. A single mostly useless exotic, 2 gold, and a guaranteed rare item is very, very weak for the difficulty of the content. I would much rather see the core rewards for raids improved than have the shard system mucked with, but that’s me.

Dahkeus.8243:

I’d love to see Thief buffed enough to be competitive with condi. Venom share basi is decent utility for break bars, but there’s just too much else holding the class back in condi. =(

VenomShare hits 24k on a single target sustained under ideal circumstances in my testing, which is great. This also lines up very closely to expected DPS in DEKeyz’ rotation calculator. Its downsides, however, include that cleaving multiple targets burns venoms and lowers overall DPS a lot. This means it’s overall fairly sub-par in raids given that so many bosses have adds. It does have a lot going for it, however, including very, very high evade uptime (and thus sustain) and arguably the strongest single skill break in Basilisk Venom.

Sorry for not bumping for a while, but we’re still recruiting!

We finally cleared all of Salvation Pass with our raid group, and have otherwise been doing missions as normal and a lot of Super Adventure Box. We’re super casual, friendly, and respectful of others, so if the things we do in the first post sound good then please contact one of our officers to see if you’re a good fit. Good luck out there!

It will land between the spring seasonal patch (April) and the summer seasonal patch (July). This lines up very well with a May or June release date.

Thaddeus.4891:

Sorry, but that’s a complete lie. I respect you dusk, but that’s just non sense.

I have a number of raid-primary friends and their guilds who grind to 100 shards and then do other things with their week and time. They’ve repeatedly told me that if the shard cap were higher, they’d feel ‘compelled’ to do it. It’s the same reason why so many people like the 15k daily AP cap; when they hit it, they feel able to do other things.

Let me reiterate, though: The shards are not the rewards, the once-per-week chests are. The shards are simply so people who have bad RNG can still get shinies eventually. Obtaining shards is, by design, not supposed to be a grind or something to be farmed. It’s supposed to just happen so that over multiple weeks you’ll be able to buy your item. If you want to repeat bosses multiple times per week, that’s your prerogative. If the sole reward of helping a friend beat a boss isn’t good enough for you to help your friend, then that’s that.

I strongly feel that this is one of those cases where people who want higher Magnetite Shard caps don’t properly understand the intent of the system and the psychological impact on the players that comes from increasing it. The entire purpose of the 100 shard cap is so that completing 2 of the 3 wings with no failures will cap you out, and so that if you struggle a bit and need extra tries you’ll get it on just 1 wing. Those numbers are very specifically chosen, and they’re working as-is.

Once we have another expansion and another raid, it will use a different currency and have its own shard cap. When we get to that point, people who want to raid exclusively in GW2 will have even more option for rewards before capping for the week.

EDIT:
@ deSade: I do agree that having no other means for Viper’s trinkets (or other HoT-exclusive stat combinations) is garbage. Raids should not be mandatory for purposes of gearing out a character.

Honestly? I think all festivals should continue to get development associated with them and not just be regurgitated the same way year after year. W3 and W4 SAB is something I want more than a lot of other things in-game, and hopefully metrics at the end of the SAB event show that lots of people played it and would like to play new stuff associated with it.

Flail for all weapon color variants, please!

Look at how it works already. People grind the raid multiple times just to hit the shard cap. If they raised that cap, people would grind more. The intent of Magnetite Shards isn’t to be a grind, and it certainly isn’t to make it a fast process to do so that you can buy rewards. Raising the cap actually heightens the grind because people want their shinies, and the more people grind the quicker they burn out on the content. I actually think 100 shards per week was a very good strategy by ANet to extend the life of their content while still giving people the ability to get rewards if their RNG is terrible.

I don’t mind the 2nd option presented here, though, but since the skins are the ‘ultimate’ rewards ANet likely wouldn’t buy into it. I, honestly, believe that the skin is what you’re paying 600 shards for and they give you the ascended weapon for free.

It’s not like we’re getting other legendaries beyond the Short Bow and what we already have, so if you don’t like those just destroy it.

This is one of the most disappointing things I have ever read regarding GW2.

The legendary weapons and precursor collections are some of the most impressive and greatest experiences I have had in-game, and I was looking forward to the rest of the Heart of Thorns legendaries more than anything else in Heart of Thorns. We were promised that we will get new legendary weapons for every single land weapon types, and that was a major part of why I wanted to get and participate in Heart of Thorns. With that loss, I lose a major part of what I was excited about with this expansion, and my love for this great game dwindles a great deal.

This is a bad business decision.

When my company has problems meeting deadlines and getting things done, we hire more people. We don’t cut out the exciting projects that people were excited about. Do you know how many people have been sad about the dungeons team getting absorbed by the LW team oh so long ago? A great deal. I read thousands of posts a month on multiple community outlets from unique players who tell me that they loved dungeons and miss them. You are making that exact same mistake here, except now it affects literally every player in the game.

The work of the legendary/precursor team is something to be commemorated.

You guys worked really hard, and as sorry I am for myself and my fellow players that we will not get what we were promised for these legendaries, I am sad for you. You poured your hearts and souls into this content, and despite the minor flaws along the way, you have made something great. You deserve all the recognition for this achievement, and I wish nothing more than that you could finish the job, get a few more people on your team, and move it along quick enough that the current game director would support it moving forward.

I want LW season 3 very much, but not enough that these 6 developers have to stop working the new legendary weapons to get it. I want what I bought Heart of Thorns for. Thank you.

BloodyNine.7504:

*With their budget and current level of development.

Plenty of games do dungeons just fine. Anet just put their priorities elsewhere. That is fine. That doesn’t make dungeons “unsustainable”

Dungeons are unsustainable. The way they are implemented with the dungeon team from pre-launch makes them nigh impossible to support in their current form. The company’s tech has improved substantially, but dungeons are isolated from all of that and would require incredible amounts of effort to bring back up to snuff and maintain. It would require so much effort, in fact, that it would negatively impact schedules for other things that they need to do in order to keep afloat as a company. So yes, dungeons are unsustainable, and ANet has put their priorities elsewhere as a result of that fact.

Vayne.8563:

To be fair, there are things about those maps that some casuals hate, such as having to spend two hours or so to get through dragon stand. That’s two hours all at one time. That’s not very casual at all.

Sure, nothing’s perfect and I agree that those things should be fixed (and they will). Not even raids are perfect, and I’ve written numerous reports to make sure the team is aware of the issues there for the intended audience. What I take issue with is people judging ANet’s vision for the game based on the tangential success of one team within ANet irrespective of the things every other team is working on.

It’s like going into a food court with a really good sushi place and many other types of food and then blaming the food court for not catering to the non-sushi-eating customer.

Manthas.6234:

It’s really easy to understand the posts you quote, since those 6 developers managed to produce more content than the rest of the company.

Raids are not more content than the entire rest of Heart of Thorns. Think of the other things that came with the expansion what you will, the HoT maps took far more effort than raids did due to their sheer size, interactions, and the scripting involved. It only seems like raids are a lot of content because the raid wing releases are staggered and didn’t all come out with HoT.

Beldin.5498:

I liked mostly all of the initial ideas from GW2. For me it is no longer great because
with HoT the shoved them all into the trashbin

Esquilax.3491:

I still have no idea why they’ve decided to drop the one design philosophy that made this game unique and drew in their initial audience (lots of open world friendly group content) in favour of adding more generic, elitist crap like raids.

Beldin.5498:

Next expansion will only consist of 10 new raid wings. Why new world content ?
You know what the raiders always say .. you can still play the old content.

These posts disturb me a lot because it tells me that there’s a sharp disconnect between what ANet is actually doing and what people like you think they’re doing. I will point out that there are four new maps released with Heart of Thorns intended for open world gamers, a whole new story that casual players got to enjoy, and that the only reason you’ve seen two raid updates so far is because the entire raid wasn’t available at HoT launch and they staggered it instead. They’re not suddenly transitioning their game to be about raiding; there aren’t even a half-dozen people making raids out of the 300+ working on Guild Wars 2 currently. You’re not forced to play raids, and if you seriously care about the story ANet made it so that you can enter a friend’s cleared raid instance, experience the whole story, and even replay any cinematics therein.

They haven’t dropped their casual-supporting philosophy, on the contrary they specifically stated from the get-go that the players who desire a challenge in-game (re: not elitists, just people who like a challenge) had poor retention and they wanted to add more end-game content. This is why things like raids were introduced, and why fractals were and continue to get revamped, and why the difficulty of the open-world HoT maps is marginally higher than other open world maps. This is not a departure from their original philosophy, simply an addition to it. Future expansion packs will feature new raids in addition to all of the open world events and maps that get added; Mike O Brien confirmed this both in the recent AMA and in the past before that.

Let’s not forget that they completely redid a world boss to be casual-friendly and more exciting than it used to be. The Shatterer update is a great example of ANet catering to the casual crowd, and that is the trend you should expect to see in Living Story 3 and forward (which will be coming later this year).

If you’re still upset even after having read this post, then I would suggest you look into managing your expectations appropriately. It’d sure be nice if every month they released a new open world map or something like that, but such a development schedule is unsustainable and ineffectual. You’ll get more things that cater to the type of player you are, you just need to be patient. And remember, you aren’t paying a subscription, so feel free to take a break and come back when the next expansion comes out. Playing GW2 and other games are not mutually exclusive endeavors by design.

They never promised three bosses per wing. They only promised three wings and three bosses in the first wing. Anyway, I’m pretty sure they do internally consider the prison event to be a boss-like encounter. They likely even intentionally made Slothasor and Matthias harder than any Spirit Vale boss to compensate for this fact.

SAB = Super Adventure Box

They won’t remove dungeons because they’re at least playable, they’re just not supporting further development on them. There is another thread on the main forum discussing this exact same topic, so I’ll quote my post from there.

Rising Dusk.2408:

Dungeons are strung together with difficult-to-parse scripting and are very hard to diagnose when issues come up. Fractals create an environment that’s much easier to simply drop in a new Fractal, whereas dungeons require massive amounts of terrain design and map locations, and require lots of very specific custom skins associated with them. In the case of Fractals, a lot of these things are much lower impact.

I’m not surprised ANet dropped dungeons, honestly. They were an unsustainable system.

Hear, hear! I look forward to my casual, guild runs on a weekly basis and they’re always a blast. It’s great content and is something I’m super happy ANet is supporting actively.

Stand The Wall.6987:

none of these suggestions or the ones in the other forums will either..

Don’t be so sure of that. At least some of the Fractals suggestions already posted in this thread will come to pass. I have the ear of both the Raids and the Fractals team, too, so if there’s a lot of public support for something I’ll make a convincing case for it.

This kind of thread can be very productive and helpful for the development team, though, so definitely keep posting your thoughts!

Dungeons are strung together with difficult-to-parse scripting and are very hard to diagnose when issues come up. Fractals create an environment that’s much easier to simply drop in a new Fractal, whereas dungeons require massive amounts of terrain design and map locations, and require lots of very specific custom skins associated with them. In the case of Fractals, a lot of these things are much lower impact.

I’m not surprised ANet dropped dungeons, honestly. They were an unsustainable system.

This won’t and shouldn’t happen for a lot of reasons.

• The developer investment to both create and maintain the easy mode is substantial and would require a substantially larger raid team. You may think that this would be ‘easy to do’ but it’s not, especially not on the timetable that they’re making raids (3 wings per expansion).
• The net ROI from an easy mode raid is very low. So more people can experience the raid and crush it with ease, what have they actually gotten out of it then? They can already experience the story with friends’ cleared instances (by design), so really all they’d be getting is some easy boss kills. Raids already go very fast if everyone succeeds first try, so it wouldn’t even be very meaningful added content for casual players especially on a weekly timeout.
• If the rewards are the same but with just a lower chance of dropping, it still significantly guts the prestige of any of the rewards. This would not be something they would do, so all rewards would have to be gut with the exception of some gold and maybe a pathetic amount of magnetite shards.

The combination of these things makes an easy mode raid very, very unlikely and very, very hard to effectively justify.