Guild Wars 2

RemiRome.8495:

Dungeon accessories to dungeon vendor (hahaha) as well please <3.

Or take a middle ground and add them to commendation vendor. The inconsistency (and ridiculous laurel gate) hurts.

It does hurt, but those are acting as-designed by ANet. They don’t want ascended gear acquirable through dungeon running like that, with the sole exception being the completion of the collections associated with those dungeons.

These raid accessories being missing, however, when they are already lootable in the dungeon is definitely an oversight.

This is something I’ll report up to them this week. I strongly agree with this idea and believe it was an oversight that they weren’t present when the raid was released.

Overall combined drop rate for weapon/armor ascended chests from 51+ daily is ~15% or so from my understanding. Obviously you’re not going to see one daily, but you should expect one every week or so that you finish the daily. I know that lines up with my experiences.

I watched the videos in the OP and my takeaway is that I vastly prefer GW2’s combat system, raids, Fractals, and even dungeons to the things I saw in those videos.

rchu.8945:

Unless Anet is planning to royally screw the WvW community, the next big release should be the WvW revamp.

They are completely different teams and are being worked simultaneously. Both will be released when they’re ready.

This isn’t an exploit, and ANet has already balanced it how they want to. It won’t and shouldn’t change.

Both of these exploits have already been reported up the chain, and both will be resolved in the early new year.

I think it’s a good achievement with just the right amount of difficulty. If nothing else it shows that a player can and has actually beaten the entire raid wing at the highest possible level (no one dying).

Hey all! We’re still recruiting, and we’re all having a lovely holiday season too! Our server Tequatl group will be starting back up with a new schedule featuring some HoT meta events come January 3rd, and otherwise we’re still chugging away at guild missions, raids, fractals, and other guild events as normal!

If the guild sounds interesting to you in the slightest, talk to one of our officers and get a feel for if it’s a good culture fit. We’re really easy to approach, I promise. Happy holidays!

savacli.8172:

Scorched Earth looks like it was deliberately broken up into multiple parts so that it could hit multiple targets and/or multiple hit-boxes.

This is not true. It was done for simplicity since they didn’t originally think to have it like Wildfire. I think this will, at the least, be made to respect target cap in the January balance patch.

TheFamster.7806:

Couldn’t they have made it like Tempest’s warhorn 5 skill in fire?

Yes, but that required more work than they had time to put in when they made the change. I suspect it’s something they’re actively working now that they’ve had time since HoT’s release. I wouldn’t expect any traction on this, though, until the January balance patch.

They made the F1 create multiple fire fields because it was an easy fix at the time with limited repercussions that they could see. The goal was to make it a square AOE instead of a circular AOE. I think, ultimately, what they’ll do is make it one long AOE like Wildfire or make all fields have the same AOE limit tracking (so it can’t hit the same target multiple times).

I’ll be sure to include this in my next report anyway.

Phew, holiday season but we’re still recruiting! I also wanted to take this moment to call attention to the fact that we have two brand new officers! They are veterans of the guild, but idealize the casual-yet-good attitude that we like people to have. They’re chatty, but also acknowledge that there isn’t a requirement for people to be social. Thanks to Sharpe and Accid for being so awesome, and I hope you like the fancy new rank icons.

Cyninja.2954:

You need 2 Balls of Dark Energy to finish step 1 and craft the first backpiece. But essentially, yes.

Yeah, you’re totally right.

Don’t forget that you get 9 from salvaging Upper Bound and 5 from salvaging Finite Result. You need 14 total, and salvaging those two along the way gives you 13, so you really only need to salvage 1 ascended weapon/armor to pull it off.

I hate the sound, but I don’t want it removed. What I want is a sound option that I can turn all the way down to disable the sound without having to turn off all special effects sounds and ruin my nominal gaming experience. Call it “Player-Based Sound Effects” or something and have it include the Hero-Tron backpack too.

Wethospu.6437:

The idea of “exclusive” is not that it would be impossible to do or get something. The idea is that there are requirements. And raid definitely has some requirements, especially on pugs.

The requirements, however, are simply that you be willing to coordinate and that you be mechanically decent (not even great) at the game. If you aren’t willing to do either of these things, I don’t think it’s unreasonable for you to be unable to complete the content.

ANet has no plans at this point that I am aware of to create an oceanic server, and this has nothing to do with raids; they’re not going to trivialize the content or widen dodge opportunities just because of ping. I’m sorry, but this thread doesn’t even make sense in this forum. If you want to try and get visibility on the topic by the people who can actually make server decisions like that, you will need to try the general discussion forums.

NovaanVerdiano.6174:

They could also just give us random fractals back, which would be really great.

That would actually be very bad. Variable times for finishing the different fractals means people can’t commit if they don’t know how much time they have to spend. Regardless if anyone likes it or not, making the fractals we play predictable was a much needed change.

After much work, we defeated the Vale Guardian and have secured our loot! We’ve done it twice at this point, and are now working our way to defeat Gorseval. We’re also thinking about having a third day during the week for raids, which means more people will be able to participate (maybe)!

We’re also still doing all of the other things that make being in [VZ] fun, so if what we do and how we are sounds like it could be a good fit for you let one of the officers know! We’re always excited to meet new people.

Pandabro.8743:

Necro can pretty much solo most of the breakbars in the fight though. With Golem + Shroud 5. Something to keep in mind.

Totally! They’re a great asset. The trick is that their CC’s aren’t as effective against seekers so you have to make up for that with other members of the green circle group.

Also, I want to voice my agreement that Transfusion is really incredible in that fight.

Gorseval definitely reuses some of GL’s mechanics, such as consuming spirits for a damage boost. Otherwise, though, I like GL being in Arah—It gives me a reason to go back and do it periodically for fun.

NikeEU.7690:

My experience is condi engie is actually fairly bad in that fight since you spend a lot of time sitting in a green circle where you cant use blow torch or fire bomb on cool down which kills your DPS. Necro’s skills are all ranged and you lose 0 of your potential DPS while you’re far from the boss. I don’t have a DPS meter parse for necro vs engie in that fight but I definitely don’t agree that engie is a blow out winner.

I think they’re both very good for different reasons. Necromancer can definitely sustain higher ranged DPS numbers while in the green circle group, but offers little in the way of valuable CC to keep seekers away from the green circle. Engineer, however, brings Air Blast, Big Ol’ Bomb, and Glue Shot which are incredible in that role.

Astralporing.1957:

They clearly said however, that this content is not meant for pugs. And LFG-made groups, no matter how experienced each individual player is, are exactly that – pugs.

That has also apparently been misinterpreted. Lack of TS, lack of team build planning, lack of class structure, and little experience are common features of the PUG, and those uncoordinated groups are what raids are not designed for. They’re designed for people who are willing to organize. When serious groups get together using the LFG tool, they are still winning by using TS / proper builds / proper builds / etc. Those groups are not what they were talking about.

Astralporing.1957:

Are you sure? Because from the dev statements so far it seems we don’t have LFG tool for raids because devs didn’t want us to have one. Remember, that they have said clearly that raids are not for pugs. Which, by the way, means that “not casual friendly” was one of the design goals.

The developers never said they didn’t want an LFG for raids, they said that they did not want a raid finder. Colin then went on the clarify on Reddit that he was speaking about queuing up for a raid and being given a random group, like some other MMOs. That type of raid finder will never exist in GW2.

I, obviously, do not speak for the ANet staff, but in talking with them they recognize how requested and valued a LFG section for raids would be, and they know that the “Open World” section is currently a mess and they want to do something about it.

Blaeys.3102:

This same topic is covered in at least three other threads (with the exact same people making the exact same comments).

Believe it or not, it actually matters that the topic comes up frequently. Either way, I fully agree with the OP (who’s surprised?).

Thaddeus.4891:

WOW that’s a lot of toughness. Our tanks have between 1400 and 1600 toughness.

The tank in my group runs 1134 toughness and it works out just fine. The only reason we even do that is because one of our condition engineers doesn’t have full viper/sinister and is still using some rabid gear. As the Druid of my group, I am running 1000 toughness and about 1000 healing power, and that’s enough to compensate for the errors other members of the group make.

Exactly, spoj! I’m glad my message isn’t completely lost.

The better solution is to just make it not contribute to capture point control. You don’t need to change the skill in any other way.

Mireles Lore.5942:

Casual content is when you can log on, grab your buddies that happen to be online, without having a degree of planning to your comp, and go enjoy something of moderate difficulty that takes maybe an hour.

I disagree, but with your definition of casual being very extreme and mine far more middling that doesn’t surprise me. I will absolutely say that raids are far less casual friendly than dungeons are, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t casual friendly at all. Raids in their current form afford so much flexibility in player makeup that I can’t believe anyone would be truly convinced that they’re totally casual unfriendly while having also given it a real chance.

kim possible.9406:

does that basically mean mesmer should be the #1 priority on any team comps right now?

Chronomancer is pretty much the bee’s knees right now.

savacli.8172:

This pretty much goes back to the fact that there’s no LFR or enchanced LFG tool to help facilitate this.

I want to iterate once more that this will happen but it is not easy for ANet and will take a lot of effort. Additionally, there are always a breadth of people LFR in the LFG tool for all roles. They may not always be great, but if you find people with the right attitude consider adding them to your friends list and whispering them for future groups. You’d be surprised how easy it is to create a “steady” pub group if you take the initiative in organizing like that.

Hakuryuu.8634:

It is literally just a tab named “Raids” within an existing interface that people can post in. I would have agreed if you said they needed time to revamp the whole LFG interface at once.

You’re incorrect because the LFG doesn’t support squads at this point in time. ANet doesn’t want to implement a half-baked solution as you’re suggesting because that creates more work in the long term, and so they have to develop the tech for squads to use the LFG before they will add a raid area. Also, assuming that “it is literally just a tab” is very dangerous; the system is a lot more complex than that.

If you open a support ticket and explain the situation to them, they will (potentially) replace the item for you. I know a few friends of mine had success with this.

Fixing forum bug.

There are certainly diverse stretches as to what counts as ‘casual’ or ‘hardcore’, but to seriously say that having ten friends in a video game is hardcore sounds very extreme to me.

There are definitely people who play for ten minutes a week and have no friends, but it doesn’t make sense to design raids for those people. Raids are group content, and group content requires…. well, a group. If you don’t have or want to spend the time to even form a group, let alone coordinate with that group, well then I don’t think anything ANet can do will enable you to play the content.

I will bet gold that it’ll be December 15. They won’t release during the holidays because people are taking PTO, and the 15th is when Wintersday will go live. It makes sense to be then.

Lord Kuru.3685:

The reality, however is different as raids have turned out much easier than Anet anticipated.

It’s right in-line with what they expected. Furthermore, they knew people would want LFG for raids, but the tech wasn’t there for it and it would’ve taken a lot of time to get it done. Rather than hold raids until the LFG was done, however, they released raids and will likely work the LFG issue into a future release.

Hrm… Well it could be that maybe the minions are dying and that is causing a lower toughness value? I’m not sure. The trait may also not be consistent, either. Maybe relying on base gear toughness to achieve aggro control is a safer bet. Sorry I can’t be more help!

Gewd.8125:

Astralporing.1957:

IllegalChocolate.6938:

And you are aware that 5 hours of wiping on your first clear is actually super fast right? People literally spent weeks on their first Vale Guard kill, 5 hours is GODLIKE on first kills.

…then it is not casual friendly. People willing to spend weeks failing a specific content just to learn how to do it are not casual players.

This.

I am definitely not in agreement with you two. My friends and I play for a scant few hours a night, sometimes not every night, and over a few weeks with probably 7 hours spent overall we beat a boss. We’re all running exotic items, with as few as 3 of us having ascended loadouts over 50% complete.

This may go back to what Zania was saying earlier: everyone has different definitions of casual. For me, being willing to at least give the effort a serious chance and being dedicated enough to at least coordinate with your team at the most basic level does not make you ‘hardcore’. I certainly feel I fit the ‘casual’ description because I am not rigorous on strategy and belong to the school of thought where “if it works, it’s fine by me”. I laugh with my guildies when people get teleported by VG’s blue circles and get destroyed, and we have an overall fun time of it as opposed to making it a trial. We beat this content, and are actively working to beat further encounters. We’re family people with very little free time, and we managed to pull it off. I think any group like us can do it, too.

If the Necromancer(s) are using the Death Magic specialization and are using Lich Form to build up more minions over time, there is a trait that will gradually grow their toughness potentially to levels that would overtake the tank’s toughness and cause an aggro shift. I only mentioned the Revenant’s trait earlier because if that one is affecting aggro, the Necromancer one might be doing the same.

I discovered recently with my guild that things like the Revenant’s Hardening Persistence trait was affecting aggro. What we do is run everyone at 1000 toughness (pure DPS) and have the tank run marginally more, and we were finding that when a Revenant had upkeep sufficient to put him over the tank’s toughness it caused aggro issues. Of course, this also meant that the bosses were bouncing between targets as the Revenant would change toughness constantly.

I think you just need to be careful with these traits as they definitely are affecting boss aggro.

Ertrak.9506:

This is what I don’t understand when people say the raids are “casual friendly”.

How exactly are casuals, let alone new players such as my self, even supposed to get experience to be able to join teams? And that’s ignoring the gear requirement.

Even with the small exception of players that will allow someone to join with exotic, people are more and more requiring people to be experienced to join (from what I’ve personally seen, that is). Even guilds are requiring their members to “register” to even form a team.

I can’t even raid with my own guild (assuming the off chance happens that someone can’t be there) without fear of kittening people off simply because I’ve barely been able to attempt raids (2-2 hour sessions at best). How am I supposed to get better…?

First, if your guild refuses to take you along because they haven’t given you the opportunity to learn, I would recommend finding another guild that isn’t so unnecessarily restrictive. I have made it a point in my guild to include everyone who has directly asked me to participate. What we’re doing is trying to train up a core group and then introducing one or two people a little newer to the fights so that they can ramp up and get that experience.

Secondly, what I would recommend you do is the exact same thing I did—Just get together with your friends and try it out, pub the last few slots if you have to and tell people that you’re learning. You’d be surprised how many helpful and skilled players would be happy to come along and help out. Make your own LFGs; that always works in my experience. In my case I had a guild of casual friends who I pulled together and inspired to get involved, and we just trucked through failure after failure until we nailed it. That was really the whole point of this thread; I was hoping to inspire people like me and people like you to keep trying and not give up. I truly do believe that casual players with little time can beat the entirety of this content given sufficient dedication to the cause. You just have to be willing to go outside your comfort zone for the good of the group and you’ll crush it!

Andraus.3874:

Raids are casual friendly if the “casual” is:

1) determined
2) level headed (not having kitten fits, which disqualifies a bunch of people in this thread)
3) adaptable
4) skillful/competent
5) geared

These things are definitely true, but I feel that even being geared isn’t necessarily key. You should absolutely have the right stat combinations for your role, but you can have them in exotic rarity and do just fine!

Satenia.9025:

I would love to hear how your casual guild is progressing against that one. As was already pointed out in this thread, an ascended weapon is something like a 5-ish% damage increase over an exotic one, trinkets add a few more. This is a significant damage-increase with will really matter at bosses like Gorse. The only area where the difference is really small is with the ascended armor (<2% I think?). Lastly, advertising exotic gear for raids based on your druid example is again pretty misleading. I’m fairly sure your druid didn’t get picked primarily for its dps-capabilities.

Only 3 people in our group have full ascended, and the rest are in essentially only ascended trinkets with exotic everything else. Very nearly all of our DPS is running around in exotic gear. Furthermore, with the maybe 3 hours we’ve spent on Gorseval so far we’ve gotten him to 50% health with enough time and updrafts on the clock to finish it. The hardest part for us has been learning tells to dodge the knockdown, mastering the 4-spirit phase transition, and managing to kill the spirits while cleaving down the walls to get to the updraft. Essentially the challenge for us has been the mechanics and not the damage itself thus far. I have no doubt we’ll win in a week or two.

Satenia.9025:

Combined with the above point regarding gear stats, if a player cannot fill a specific role, they cannot successfully raid. Simple as that.

Absolutely. One of the necessary keys to success in a raid is the willingness to change build and class to do what your group needs. If you’re not willing to perform that most basic of team coordination, you definitely will not succeed. Being willing to make those changes doesn’t suddenly make you hardcore, however.

Satenia.9025:

Let me ask you, how much else did your group of casuals do on these evenings? All those extra daily reward chests found across various activities? How do the few shards you get for a wipe at VG compare to all the (daily) rewards you could have gotten from far easier activities instead? They don’t and that’s precisely why it’s not casual-friendly.

Fortunately, with all of our attempts we very nearly cap on magnetite shards weekly, so we feel pretty well-rewarded with ascended thus far. Lots of people got shiny ascendeds and minis from the boss chest, too, so people have felt pretty good about it! I’ll admit that the first couple weeks of learning we were all in the red for gold because we weren’t winning, but we were okay with it because the experience was fun and it felt great doing it with the guild.

Satenia.9025:

So far, every weekly random reward I got from boss kills was complete garbage, aka 1 worthless exotic and a few other items of even lower quality. How do you plan on motivating the casual players to keep doing raids when – as previously illustrated – they can get better rewards elsewhere for the same (or less) time-investment. Legendary-armor? Oh right, that’s for casual players now, is it…

Yeah, I guess we’re playing raids because we enjoy playing hard content together? We’re all working on legendaries, and raids certainly aren’t winning awards for getting us there super quickly, but people are really happy with the exclusive rewards. Everyone who has gotten a mini is using it, people really want the skins, the minis, and then ultimately everyone feels that through magnetite we have a pretty good guaranteed means of earning ascended items (which feels way better than crafting them). About the only slightly annoying thing is the magnetite shard cap, which I’ve seen echoed by lots of players here on the forums. Will definitely feature heavily in my report.

Satenia.9025:

How much fun exactly is it going to be to wipe and wipe again? Because it really doesn’t matter if you yourself figured out the raid mechanics. The raid group is as strong as its weakest link. Meaning that whenever you take a new guildmate with you into the raid, you will immediately notice the overall performance going down the drain. Again, exactly how casual friendly is this?

Well, we beat the VG again last night too, and we brought someone with us who was on a subpar class and who wasn’t with us before. What we found is that he was willing to learn, willing to change build, and open to feedback with a positive attitude. He did fine and ultimately we won again!

I guess my point is that only bring newbies along as far as you can within reason. Maybe don’t bring 4 newbies at once, and definitely keep them in the DPS and non-critical roles so they have room to breath. It doesn’t seem so bad for us,

Satenia.9025:

In conclusion, I believe that raids are clearly aimed at the dedicated player-base with both the skill and time investment at their hands. While VG might be more forgiving than other bosses in some regards, this boss alone doesn’t justify to generalize the raid content as a whole as casual-friendly.

Nothing in Gorseval so far has dissuaded my group.

Satenia.9025:

Lastly, I wish to point out that there may be some readers who might mistake your posts to carry some additional weight due to your forum title/role. As a result, they might not bother to look beyond the misleading advertising of your thread (title) and simply take it as hard facts. As such, I would consider it beneficial for the readers if you did indeed take your time with raids beyond a single boss and corresponding kill before you decided to advertise in the way you did now. Thanks for future consideration.

Regardless of my personal experiences, I have spent an inordinate amount of time studying raids because of my forum specialist role. I firmly believe that casuals can beat the entire raid, and I fully plan to prove it with my guild as we work through the remaining encounters. I think the big thing goes back to the first quote in this post, though—You can’t mistake determination for being hardcore! Casual players, people playing for only a couple of hours a day if even with limited time, can still be dedicated and determined to win. All it takes is the right attitude and I am convinced that any casual group can beat the Spirit Vale.

Thaddeus.4891:

I agree with 99% of what you are saying Dusk. But not on that. You said it yourself. Someone can play ranked, unranked or even hotjoin depending on what they choose. But they all can experience conquest PvP on their level. Nobody is telling them go in EoTM for easy mode PvP.

That’s fair, it is different in that they’re still playing conquest just at a much different level. I’ll concede that wasn’t a good analogy.

Thaddeus.4891:

And I disagree that would diminish the value of the effort we make. Lets just give you an exemple. Back when fractal was lauch, people were putting video of them doing level 80 and it was impressive and those people had pride of doing it. The fact that some people were doing fractal 10 didn’t devalued that.

You’re misinterpreting what I’m saying. Beating easy mode raids won’t devalue beating a higher difficulty raid; that doesn’t even make sense. I’m saying that the lower difficulty raid won’t require nearly the same level as iteration as the higher difficulty one, and thus the people beating the easier one will experience the elation of overcoming a difficult activity because they’ll just breeze through it. That is against the design paradigm of raids; the whole point was to create difficult content that feels personally rewarding to beat.

Regardless of that, though, I think balancing everything against two different difficulty modes for raids will add far too much time cost to the developers. It would limit their ability to create new raid wings to support it, and I don’t think that’s a good idea.

savacli.8172:

Some of you would see that and think, “That’s just motivation for that guild member to get better.” when in reality I’ve seen fewer and fewer people return because they don’t think they’re good enough. That’s the part I don’t like about Raids. In any other content I can help someone through the content, and have them walk away making them feel accomplished and empowered. But what the kitten do I do with people who I see time and time again giving up on themselves while they see others succeed. I expect that from other games but not GW2.

I think it really depends on the person. I hate to be that guy, but I don’t think everything in the game should be designed for everyone. I know a ton of people who avoid unranked and ranked PvP like the plague because the expectations are so high and the stress runs high. They’ll never experience those close games of team versus team in the intended conquest format, and that’s okay. They can still experience PvP in hotjoin however they like should they choose.

The same is true of raids, where people can still enjoy team instanced PvE in Fractals or even dungeons (technically they’re still there). In my guild, some people do give up on raids. They just lack the ability to meet the mechanical skill requirements… and that’s okay! We bring them along to fractals and stuff, and they have a blast! Part of it is working with the person as an individual so they’re doing the things they want to within their ability, and part of it is, well, the expectations of the player.

I have friends who spent weeks throwing themselves at the Mad King’s Clocktower failing and never winning… Does there really need to be an easy mode of the jumping puzzle to cater to them, or couldn’t they just go do another jumping puzzle? I mean, that’s what they ended up doing, and it all turned out okay. Ultimately, though, the people who persevered and finished it had that moment of satisfaction knowing they beat the hardest JP in the game… and that’s a critical GW2 memory for them. This same architecture is everywhere in GW2 already, and to be entirely honest I think it’s great.

MadRabbit.3179:

When I beat Diablo 3 on Inferno Difficulty, I didn’t let out a long sigh and proclaim “IF and ONLY IF this game contained this singular level of difficulty that exlcuded players I have never met from completing the game at a level of their choosing, THEN AND ONLY THEN could I start to begin feeling satisfaction from completing this challenging difficulty and begin to enjoy the exclusive loot I received by doing so.”

Not every game has difficulties like Diablo 3 where it’s so cleanly delineated. In those cases it’s easy to say “Well, there’s content for everyone at every difficulty scale”. GW2, however, does the same thing but across different content.

There is an entire open world with dozens of maps and dozens of world bosses all designed with the casual player in mind. There are fewer events that would pique the interest of a “difficulty seeker” than you can count on one hand. So where are the challenge mote / super difficult versions of all of those? The answer is that ANet doesn’t feel it is worth the massive time investment to develop that content and would rather create new content specifically tailored to that challenge-seeker crowd. The particular note was that the crowd has, for years, requested instanced challenging PvE for smaller scale groups. That’s exactly what ANet did; they created challenging content aimed at that group and for the experience those individuals want.

MadRabbit.3179:

So if this social phenomena where everyone just automatically stopped having fun at higher difficulties because of the introduction of lower difficulties didn’t happen there, why would it happen here?

Firstly, I never said that people wouldn’t have fun with easier difficulties. Secondly, the social phenomena happens everywhere. Dungeons are dead, and do you know why? Because why would people do dungeons, which are medium difficulty, for those rewards when you can do much easier content for better or similar rewards? Dungeons are fun for a lot of people, and yet thread after thread after thread get posted by people who feel they can’t do it because there’s no one to do them with and their friends lost interest. That’s exactly what will happen here with raids. You introduce an easy mode, and even with reduced rewards most players will just do the easy mode and now suddenly you have fewer people doing the hard mode, people can’t find pub groups for it, the pub groups that do it have harsher requirements for players, and casual guilds (like mine) shy away from the more stressful, harder mode.

I can speak for my guild when I say that if you added an easier difficulty people would want to do it instead of the current difficulty. They would no longer push themselves to get better, they would no longer tweak their builds or change classes for the good of the group, and that moment of immense excitement at overcoming the hardest PvE content in the game would no longer be there. It’s not the same as Diablo 3, and while I’m sure ANet could make it work to not lose players and make the general reddit polling numbers happy, it would hurt my experience and the experience of the hundreds of friends I have who do this content with or around me a lot.

MadRabbit.3179:

People, including myself, who have posted on this subject are doing so from a place of increasing overall player satisfaction and introducing more choice to fit people’s playstyles. You have decreed this is nonsense, because of your subjective assessment that it’s really all just okay and we’re all wrong.

It’s not nonsense, I just don’t think you’ve given the content a fair chance. You’re right, though, that having more modes would make more people happy. More is always better. I don’t think, however, that it is a valuable use of the developers’ time. I would rather they work on future raid wings aimed at the challenge seekers and allow the other dozens of content teams at ANet to handle creating content for the casual crowd. This simultaneously helps address the issue I presented above. The best plan of action is for ANet to stay the course.

Glad to hear this is ringing true with lots of you all. Thanks for the posts.

savacli.8172:

First off, our in-game LFG tool doesn’t work that great when it comes to filling up 10 man teams. What we have now is a person or two breaking off from the squad to post an LFG and having people join on the parent squad. Though after a few trial and errors said person is locked out of LFG from too may posts so someone else has to fill the recruiting role.

This will be addressed, I am willing to bet. There is no tech for it right now, but they definitely know we want it.

savacli.8172:

What about the casual player who doesn’t have the same luxury of being able to be online as much be it playing the game or just being able to read up on it: a student who’s slaving away at dozens of school hours a week, the travelling business professional, or the parent who just recently had a child?

Interestingly, I am the “traveling business professional” you pointed out there. I spend less than 30 minutes of time on the forums in a day, and play for fewer than 2 hours a day if I play at all. The difference is, ultimately, in attitude and willingness to learn.

savacli.8172:

I’m not saying that Raids have to be scrapped entirely, but Raids don’t really work well with folks that have scheduling conflicts. I understand that Raids can eventually be completed by everyone with practice, but that can take hours upon hours. As exaggerated as this sounds, not everyone is going to be able to put in the time commitment to overcome to skill challenge.

I want to point out that in my guild’s case, we have invested 1-2 hours a day on assorted different days of a number of weeks to get to where we are. We’re not scheduling 4 hour sessions, we’re just playing for an hour and change when people are most available. It’s been pretty easy, and we have people with children, full time jobs, the works. The difference is that we all want to participate in this content together, so we’re motivated to find some time. If a person isn’t motivated or doesn’t care that much, well they won’t find much success in raids or a lot of things in games.

savacli.8172:

Why not design something like Challenge Modes/Motes where the initial difficulty is somewhere close to Fractals, but the rewards accrue at a drastically slower rate if not limiting reward availability compared to what “Hard Mode” offers. That way there’s less pressure to devote so much time (for the folks who honestly can’t afford it) while still offering an incentive and fair compensation to those that put in the time and effort to improve their skill and gameplay.

Because then the content is trivialized and less exciting when you do win. It’s just a thing you do with little thought or incentive or excitement associated with. The anticipation of doing this super hard challenge way out of our normal skill range as a group is my guild’s favorite part. I know if there were an easier mode, they’d all want to do it because “path of least resistance”, and then we wouldn’t have nearly as much fun.

FogLeg.9354:

Hardcore players should really stop posting about what is or is not suitable content for casual players. The fact that you can finish something under a minute, naked, with one hand only and wearing blindfold, does not mean it is doable for average casual player.

Honestly, my takeaway here is that I’m flattered at being mistaken as a hardcore player!

FogLeg.9354:

The average casual player never reads forums btw, so arguing with them in forum is fairly useless. If they don’t like the content, they simply stop playing.

You say that, and yet I can count a dozen threads in the top two pages of this forum with dozens of individual posts from different people complaining about raids on the grounds of being a casual.

I would expect the rest of these gifts to appear as obtainable sometime in January, personally. I think the December patch for Fractals was originally intended to have them, but because they had to shift up the rewards and scaling the legendary components are getting pushed back. I do know it’s all being worked, however, and once the fractal leaderboards come out we should be able to finish the legendary.

My assumption at this point is that the leaderboard will work a lot like the adventure leaderboards where your completion time for each fractal will be tracked. Similarly, there will be bronze/silver/gold rewards and we’ll need gold or silver rewards on several of the ‘fractal adventures’ in order to make the remaining two gifts. That’s my gut instinct talking, though, so we’ll see how accurate that ends up being.

I’m super excited to finish it too, though, trust me. o_o