Guild Wars 2

Thank you for fixing the Berserk Transition.

The traits I will have to mess around with for the next beta, but I see more potential with now that Headbutt isn’t giving Warriors ‘Concussions’

Torch changes I can get around, I like that you increased the range to assist with landing the cripple on a fleeing foe.

Burst changes are really interesting though.

Arcing Divide is comparable to its non-berserk Slice, but 450 range is triple the range of 150 that Slice has, which anyone even remotely close to the Warrior will get cleaved down.

Decapitate is a good change, a coned Eviscerate with slightly toned down damage could make for some interesting play (Axe Mainhand has always been on and off competitive).

Flaming Flurry was a needed buff.

Gun Flame…got changed to a moving Killshot that no longer hits around 20+ people. What’s NICE about this change is a moving Killshot is probably a good compromise on the overall explosive impact that a single rogue Gun Flame could do before. Instead, the Killshot can be channeled while moving to maximize at least where you shot goes through, and not into a Wall of Reflection. I will like this change more than the previous incarnation.

Mmm, I can see where Hammer Primal Burst now would fall into play, shifting between a hard CC that gets countered by Stability or a hard CC that gets countered by cleanses or Resistance. It’s a nice choice, but I will miss the displacement slightly.

Nice QoL change for Scorched, however I will still have to test how well it burns compared to Combustive.

Skull Grinder was probably applying too many layers of conditions, this was an acceptable change.

Rage Skills hmm…

Blood Reckoning will require a full retest once again, however a passive 25% crit chance uptime during its duration will be fun to mess around with in the stats department.

Shattering Blow, unless if I am mistaken, still might suffer from a reflect that lasts too short for rooting in place. I will really have to put it through the ringer.

Leap got buffed. 250% damage increase with a cripple? Alright, you got my attention!

Overall, you did get our feedback with a couple of clunky and funny bugs, and I will probably have a more entertaining time lining up a mobile Killshot with Michael Bay.

KotCR.6024:

Sykper.6583:

1) Add a trait allowing for Spear of Justice’s Tether, when it fades to pull the tethered enemy to the Guardian.

Why? Well, aside from the familiar control abilities a guardian has, it would be a nice way to force the enemy into your trap at 1200 range. Oh boy actual synergy!

That’s actually a really good idea, I like it alot. I’m not sure I’d be willing to take it as a trait on it’s own (as it’d be useless against defiant or breakbar foes), but if it offered something else small in addition aswell (such as a reduced CD or a few stacks of vulnerability on F1 use), I’d definetly be sold on it.

Make it an additional effect to Big Game Hunter, have it compete with the support heavy ’Hunter’s Fortification’ and the push-based ‘Heavy Light’. Though I think Heavy Light might need to be tuned better to compete with the altered BGH.

Ohoni.6057:

@Ononi, the reason Outfits aren’t being spoken about is because of your own reasoning would deny it, because it would be an exclusive reward behind content that doesn’t satisfy everyone’s wants.

No, check back a few posts. I specifically listed a way that Outfits could be used that at the very least I would be comfortable with, and I imagine most players would be comfortable with. Outfits don’t bother me specifically because they lack customization, you can’t mix and match them. Even if I’d unlocked all 18 Legendary Raid pieces, the chances of me wearing all 6 on a single character are fairly small, and the chance of me wearing all 6 on three different characters is almost impossible to imagine, but if previous sets are a guide, then I’ll likely want at least some of the pieces on various characters, for example the Lumi set, where I have all of it, but only wear full Lumi on my Mesmer, two pieces on my Guardian, three pieces on my Warrior, and none on anyone else.

So to people who value the aesthetics of the costuming, Outfits are of significantly less value, but to people who want to “show off how awesome they think other people should think they are,” an Outfit would have the same value as a full suit of the armor (which of course you would also get, and owning the Outfit would make clear that you also owned the armor).

You can read upwards for a more detailed explanation, but the idea played off the “Precursor/not Pre exotic” mechanism, to allow raiders to get armor pieces, and non-raiders to get identical armor pieces, but only the raider version could be converted into a unique outfit, that would look different than the base armors, but would only be available in Outfit form. The player Legendary armor would still look “legendary,” it would just be slightly different, so that you wouldn’t confuse the two.

Certainly Outfits trade customization for a mostly coherent set of gear (there’s a few outfits that carry clipping) but again just because it won’t bother you doesn’t mean the outfit wouldn’t carry as much worth as individual pieces would to players. And this wouldn’t just be another outfit, it would be something visually stunning, as per Legendary Quality.

And the finished idea you suggested, might even be More Exclusive and probably more problematic as players who don’t raid might have big issues with how the outfit just meshes better to the character than the individual armor pieces. And then there’s the issues with how to scale the individual pieces across the whole game…

Overall your solution sounds like a huge overhaul for the minimal effect on attempting to normalize Legendary Armor.

1) Add a trait allowing for Spear of Justice’s Tether, when it fades to pull the tethered enemy to the Guardian.

Why? Well, aside from the familiar control abilities a guardian has, it would be a nice way to force the enemy into your trap at 1200 range. Oh boy actual synergy!

2) Wings of Resolve won’t break channels, meaning for instance True Shot, although acting as a brief pause, continues to channel at the intended target and even so far as firing the shot in the air while you perform Wings of Resolve. Does that mean timing the Wings and True Shot to do an elevated True Shot into a group of foes? Oh absolutely. It also adds just a bit more mobility to the ‘pause and move’ style the Guardian Bow has, as well as other weapons. (With respect to animations, might be a bit tricky to make them smooth…)

That’s all I got.

@Ononi, the reason Outfits aren’t being spoken about is because of your own reasoning would deny it, because it would be an exclusive reward behind content that doesn’t satisfy everyone’s wants.

We are all expecting these Legendary Armor pieces to be not just useful but to have a unique take on Armor not yet seen in game (I believe they heavily hinted at the armor being more ‘alive’). So a Legendary Outfit would be just as wanted by players much like yourself even though you strictly want Legendary Armor.

It’s not a solution, it’s just showing you just really want Legendary Armor, nothing else.

xarallei.4279:

Ohoni, just curious….what would you consider an “appropriate” alternative to get the reward exactly?

He’s already described it, an equivalent amount of time spent doing something else that attracts a player as opposed to one piece of content.

If they could put a scale on how many Bandit Crests could amount to how much time the average raider would spend in the Raid in question, that amount of crests would be the cost for the same Legendary Armor.

That’s his proposition, of course perhaps it doesn’t have to be Silverwastes, maybe it is Jumping Puzzles, or perhaps Dungeon runs. Anything else that makes it less exclusive than tying it strictly to a raid is something Ononi wants. That’s the only ‘solution’ he has suggested.

Ohoni.6057:

Maybe, but then I would expect each raid attempt to include multiple sections with their own rules, so chances are that players who are not good “all-rounders” will have parts that they struggle with in all raids, they might get past the first bit easy but struggle with the second, or struggle with the first but if they can get by it the second is easy.

Pretty much up in the air at this point.

Ohoni.6057:

Yes, that is WAY too much time invested to chalk up to “oh, stop complaining and just do it.”

6 hours is too much? Well maybe, 3 might be the most I expect any given person really going for the raid-based armor, that’s over an entire week mind you. A week of gameplay, and only 3 hours put towards raiding, in which that 3 hours might start becoming less and less as the raid group gets better and faster at the content.

Ohoni.6057:

Yes. I probably spent a grand total of less than six hours working on my Legendary. I mean, if you’re counting World Completion that took longer, but 1. it was something I would have done even without Legendary weapons (and yes, I support them providing alternatives for those that don’t enjoy world completion), and 2. I did it over a period of about two months, about a year or so before I made my Legendary, and only did about a half-hour to an hour of map clearing per day, alongside other activities. There is no time in the past three years where I’ve spent more than about three hours in the game in a single sitting. I honestly doubt that most GW2 players have spent more than four hours in game at a time, aside from very special events.

You need to include all the time spent on getting the items, even as you were doing various other activities. ALL of those resources you might have been gaining while World-Boss Training, some SPvP here and there, ambient critter killing to get that Powerful Blood. THOSE activities that you might not have considered part of your Legendary Weapon Crafting at the time didn’t take you a solid 6 hours to make. 2000 T6 mats alone won’t be earned in 6 hours, unless you swiped that card for gems.

Ohoni.6057:

Sure they do, they still look the same. To most players, that’s all that matters.

See below shortly.

Ohoni.6057:

But you can gain those levels through all sorts of means, exploration, questing, grinding mobs, crafting, etc. Options. That’s all I’ve asked for, not that I shouldn’t have to earn the thing through hard work, just that the method of hard work should be flexible.

I could have chosen a better example, but my point is that the underlining condition of the weapon was that you needed to put some effort into leveling, something some players might really despise and not want to do. Would you extend the same level-exclusive weapon to those players who just want everything at level 1, much like how you want a raid-exclusive weapon to players who don’t want to raid?

Ohoni.6057:

They aren’t the only ones who matter. If their wishes are for other people to not have things, then those other people’s wishes should typically supersede their own. Hardcore PKs want to be able to slaughter new players outside starting towns, they can’t be allowed that because it would make those other players’ experiences worse.

Apples and oranges, Open-World PvP is different because a player is directly interfering with the experience of another player, not indirectly like wielding an exclusive weapon or armor from a raid the former really does not want to do. There’s no way then that one player’s wishes supersede another, especially when their wishes for certain content to exist that drops exclusive rewards hasn’t existed yet.

Ohoni.6057:

Yes, but there are dozens of ways to earn gold in the game, so there are dozens of ways to “earn” infinite light. That’s what I’m asking for, multiple methods of earning Legendary Armor.

That’s fine to ask for multiple methods for Legendary Armor itself, but the legendary armor skin that comes from this upcoming Raid should be unique and exclusive to that Raid. If Arenanet has a Heart of Thorns Legendary Armor Recipe drop (or better yet, sell from a mastery vendor) in the open world that players can craft, I am all for that skin being unique in its look as well.

Ohoni.6057:

That’s very sad. I feel the exact opposite. I couldn’t care less whether someone has a particularly hard to come by piece, all I care is that they have the right combination of pieces and dyes to make it work for them. I just complimented someone on their appearance in game, but as near as I can tell it was all pretty common stuff, it just looked great on her.

Certainly there’s a certain appeal to fashion wars, I am always going through it. But I am always wanting something that makes me stand out, more so than just an outfit or the same Luminescent Shoulder piece. I am already considering how to get those exclusive Legendary Back Pieces which not only look amazing, but carry a certain unique look and effect not seen yet in the game, and I know those players who have those pieces put a lot of time into whatever mode they worked at to earn those pieces.

It is a bit sad for players wanting to stand out more. These days the only thing amusing me would be all the occasion ‘Joker’ and ‘Hulk’ looks.

Ohoni.6057:

Source?

Continued from above.

Same source you have been using this whole time. I said ‘Major’ rather than ‘Majority’ because I don’t think there is a 50%+ group of players really wanting one thing or another. It’s probably more like 28, 22, 18, 16- etc. Player interests are all over the place, I ran into someone today at the TP that I recognized from meeting about 14 hours ago still there in the same spot. He probably logged at some point however I asked him what he’s been doing the whole time, 10 minutes of back and forth later amounted to me finding out people spend hours in this game just doing buy and sell orders as well as investments. Going to assume he’s probably part of that sub 1% portion.

Ohoni.6057:

That’s my point, since stats don’t creep up, if there are demands made to “increase difficulty,” then that would only widen the skill gap between what the average player has and what he would need, whereas in other games you can compensate for some of that by just gearing up better than is expected by the content. This makes it even less likely that lower skilled players will ever be able to actively participate.

Not quite what I meant, without any numerical difference what will matter is mechanics correct? Mechanics mean a lot of things, it is easy enough just to make “Alright last time we had you jumping off the platform for a huge attack that will instadown you, now not only will you jump off the platform, but you gotta dodge things while flying wee! New mechanic!” However, that would be a direct mechanical increase, and although it is something many raiders would be familiar with it would be rather familiar and a bit boring for players to see a recycled mechanic made a bit harder.

Rather, what would likely happen is that each encounter and every new raid going forward will have a fresh, new mechanic not seen yet. How this mechanic is received will be entirely dependent on the player, so it’s possible after this 1st raid, new mechanics in the 2nd raid might be either easier or harder for the raiders at that time. Someone who struggled in this upcoming raid, might end up carrying more weight in the following one, just because the mechanics are something easier for that player. By that same notion, a player who knows the ins and outs of this first raid might have an abysmal time in the second raid just because the mechanics are harder for that player.

I don’t think the difficulty will rise, only that the required ‘skill-set’ to do the encounter correctly will change from raid to raid. At least that’s what I took from Colin’s presentation, hence his reasoning that the raid will still be quite challenging even after more raids are released.

Ohoni.6057:

Yeah, but that was only changing up your play style for a little bit (I knocked mine out over like an hour or two total in EotM), so it’s not a big deal, but imagine if instead you had to do that for several hours a week, for months at a time to earn the thing you wanted. There is a point where “close your eyes and think of England” just isn’t enough.

It’s not that we won’t have other things to be doing, it’s that these other things won’t do anything to unlock these armors, so raiding MUST become a part of your life if you want to unlock those armors. That’s the entire thing I take issue with.

A player spending…more than 6 hours in raiding every week is a pretty conservative amount especially during ‘Launch-Learning’ phases (Essentially when no one knows a thing, and people die reading new debuffs and buffs lol). Thinking of how much time you spend in game already, having one afternoon spent a week at least attempting to progress in a raid if you so choose isn’t an awful suggestion given the quality of gear you are trying to attain is Legendary. If it were to be compared to making a regular legendary weapon, how would the time invested be any different?

Actually that’s a good thought, have you made a Legendary Weapon yet? How long did it take you? Because Legendary Armor could be considered to take at least that long I presume.

Ohoni.6057:

No, the intrinsic value has nothing to do with the scoreboard marker. The intrinsic value is what the thing would be worth if it were easy to get. It’s what people value based on the appearance alone, without even considering the rarity. There are very rare skins with very low intrinsic worth, and very common skins with relatively high intrinsic worth, like the light armor starter miniskirt.

A scoreboard entry has no intrinsic worth, it would have zero meaning if not to show that you have earned that high score. This is why you can’t use the two interchangeably, a skin has a potential scoreboard element (or not, entirely the dev’s choice on any given skin), but it is not just a scoreboard.

Fair enough, however remember that although items do have an intrinsic value as you put it, quite a few players have put additional value on skins based on their attainability. The easiest earned skins, however intrinsic their value, offer no ‘value’ to these players when they share the same look as their more (lack of a better term) lazy friends.

Ohoni.6057:

But it is still an obstacle between me and my goal. You can’t characterize it as anything other than that.

Wall, Challenge, Block, etc. Think the metaphor died some time ago, my point being is that rather than finding a way to deal with something that will clearly Not be going away any time soon, people apparently want to just have that content made obsolete and pointless. Because ‘Carrot and Stick’ reward structure is how any game has marketed progression in any form since RPGs existed. Want to use the level 10 sword? Well you got to be level 10, which means you have to level! Oh no what a trial!

Ohoni.6057:

You shouldn’t disrespect one customer to please another. If they want to add raids, that’s fine, but don’t lock exclusive rewards behind them.

Then you are disrespecting the players’ wishes which the content was created for.

Ohoni.6057:

As I’ve said time, and time, and time, and time, and time again, “exclusive rewards in other areas” do not balance out exclusive rewards here. That is not a solution, that does not make it right. Exclusive skins are never “equal” to each other, they all have subjective value, so if the one that you want is locked behind content you don’t want to do, then it does not improve things in the slightest if some other skin that you don’t want is locked behind content that you do want to do. It’s like saying “no, you can’t have any ice cream, but you can have as much broccoli as you like, so it’s even.”

Yet here we are, doing pretty well so far even though that same reward structure has been in the game for years. Did you know you either need an atrocious amount of money or high-value materials (interchangeable really) for Infinite Light? No other means to attain it! Boy isn’t that a bother? Why couldn’t I just put in 1000 Badges of Honor?

I want to say I pay some amount of attention to various players and what they wear. Some things catch my eye until I get a clear picture and realize that the charr is actually just wearing a piece of Barbaric gear and I shrug. Whatever intrinsic value he puts into looking like a very brutish Charr, never really impresses me as much as seeing the not-so-often seen Yellow SAB Shield, those were around more frequently back then but to see someone with that skin brings back both a nostalgic vibe and an understanding that the player in question went through a lot of trouble to get that skin. Not quite to the point of me whispering him ‘Nice Shield’ but I do acknowledge it, even though some people might find its intrinsic value far less than I do.

The truth of the matter is, on the scale Intrinsic value matters less to a major portion of the playerbase than exclusive value. Enough that Raids are getting this exclusive gear against your plights, weighing out many factors I presume such as if this will make players leave the game if they can’t get a single armor they want from this game, versus retaining PvE veterans.

Astralporing.1957:

Sykper.6583:

No, the raid isn’t stopping you from getting it at all, it is content that gives a reward when you complete it. If you can’t complete the raid you don’t get the reward.

Well, if i can’t complete a raid, then it means the raid did stop me, did it not?

The raid didn’t kick you out, or take away your legendary armor physically did it?

Let me know when it does that.

Sykper.6583:

I imagine that for someone like you who values their personal skill level so low that the sheer concept of the raid’s prestige is dependent on whether or not you can do it, then obviously the balance wouldn’t be in your favor.

It’s not personal skill required that i find problematic. What stops me enjoying the raids are other requirements. Namely, number of people required (it’s not easy for me to gather 9 of my friends at the same time to do the same content) and possibly (if raiders from this topic will have their way) time requirement. Not only the times when i could participate in several hours long events are long over, but the longer the content is going to take, the more the chance of fulfilling the previous (numerical) requirement decreases.
[/quote]

This is true, which is why one of the things I hope for with the raid lock-outs is something close to tracking your progress so you can do the same raid over the course of the week. However there are several metrics and issues I am not sure of quite yet that might impact that possibility. I am more than certain though that with the lockout being a weekly basis players will find a time during the weekdays or more likely weekends to work on their raid.

A lot of questions float around in my head with concern to the GW2 raid, but those will have to be seen when it launches.

Ohoni.6057:

But see, that would not be satisfying to players who might want that difference in appearance, but not want to difference in difficulty. There’s no way to “split the baby” on this one, any attempt you make is going to leave some people upset.

It’s still probably one of the better methods that attempted to compromise with parties that had difficulty with the raid and those who wanted a real challenge. But I agree, there will be never a solution that will appease anyone, no one has come up with it yet.

Ohoni.6057:

To some degree, there will be more players to “carry” the weaker ones, but keep in mind a few things. First, this effect will be weaker than in some other content. It won’t be as strong as in Teq, for example, because the number of players is lower, and the amount that 5-7 “veteran” raiders could help to carry the other three “newb” players would be less than the amount that 50-70 “veteran” Teq players could carry a less experienced map. And that’s for one relatively simple sequence of actions that takes about 15 minutes, not what we’re all assuming will be multiple complex encounters over 40+ minutes.

Second, as players do “lower the bar” on the first raid, they will begin to demand harder and harder new content, which means the bar will continually be raised, each time making it harder and harder for less skilled players to keep up. At least with gear progression, all you need to catch up is to get carried through enough content to have the appropriate gear, if it’s skill-based progression, you’re going to have plenty of players hitting their “hard cap” on skill well before the frontline players are satisfied.

Agreed, in a 10 man environment every person has a larger role than in a 100 man environment. But effect is still there, only the rate which players get better will be slower if anything.

As for harder and harder content, that’s an interesting subject as GW2 doesn’t use vertical scaling in its design, meaning that it likely won’t revolve around the tank needing better gear. Rather, I believe raids in GW2 will revolve around mostly mechanics and environment, each raid might be utterly different in difficulty for even the raider culture that would come from this. I am extremely curious about how Arenanet will create these encounters and keep them fresh without a powercreep. Well, with things like Glider Mastery I think they might have some creative ideas rolling around.

Ohoni.6057:

I have good memories of playing sPvP, things that happened that were fun and surprising. That does not mean that my overall sPvP experience is a positive one, or that I would not have rather I had been able to do other things with that time. I would have had other positive experiences doing something else. I’m sure people who don’t like raids but are strong-armed into them will have the occasional positive experience, but that doesn’t mean that they will not resent having to do the raids to earn the gear they want.

There’s a lot of things I might not have had the best experience doing. The WvW Mist Hero skins for instance weren’t necessarily hard to attain, but there’s only a certain set of things I really like doing in WvW that weren’t on that list to do for those skins. I still did them though, because I wanted the skins. Would I like them attained elsewhere? No, because it changed up what I do normally in the game, I did something other players actually love doing so interacting and working with them was interesting enough, and it wasn’t something I would be doing 100% of the time everyday for.

Raiding won’t be the fixation of all of our efforts, the hardcore PvE players won’t stick to raids, they have other focuses as well like Fractals and leveling up masteries and other potential open world events that will come about with Heart of Thorns. If there was JUST raiding and nothing else to unlock everything in Heart of Thorns, I’ll have my own pitchfork.

Ohoni.6057:

Armor has some passing similarities to a scoreboard, but also some very clear differences which make it unsuitable for the comparison you’re insisting on. If you want better ways to show off your titles, achievements, or leaderboard position to others, then that’s fine, push for that, but armor skins do a poor job of filling that role, because they have an intrinsic value to them, regardless of their value as a scoreboard marker.

The intrinsic value became the scoreboard marker however, because of how this game was designed. It’s not stats but skins that we progress by, and compare each other with. You wouldn’t be able to make an MMO successful if horizontal progression was only achieved through time, that’s not an MMO, that’s a mobile game in the making.

Ohoni.6057:

Assuming that they look up where that particular armor comes from, maybe. Most people just wouldn’t care. They would perhaps see armor that they thought looked cool, but they would have zero interest in how the player got it, aside from wanting to know how they could get their own.

People do care, they should care and that’s a problem. There’s is a scarce amount of skins in the game that people actively questioned and wanted them for. Nothing really takes anything to earn, but time, and that sucks so much, it kills GW2. If the LA that comes out is impressive enough, people will begin to care, and will do the content. Some will enjoy it, some won’t, but at least they know they will get it if they do the content. [/quote]

Ohoni.6057:

And doesn’t give me the reward if I don’t. You can’t argue that it’s not stopping me from getting the reward, that’s like saying that a locked vault door is not stopping me from getting the money inside it. Sure, if I can break the vault door then I can get at the money, but until I break that door, I’m not getting that money.

A locked door doesn’t care what gets through it, it serves a single purpose of being a locked barrier. It’s not capable of stopping you, you from breaking it apart or finding the key.

Ohoni.6057:

I’m not that bad, I could probably do the raid content about as well as most, I just have zero interest in it. The challenge of it does not add to my joy, it is not something that would make my gaming time better, and the hassles involved, of getting a party together, and setting out for what is likely to be a long dungeon run, none of that sounds at all interesting to me, even worse having to do that multiple times. It’s not that I don’t think I can do it, even though I’m sure there are plenty who would fall into that boat, it’s that there are so many other things I’d rather be doing with that time, so the idea that the game would force me into this particular activity if I want that reward is offensive to me. It is disrespectful of my time as a customer.

And it’s respectful of players who have been demanding it for so long. You aren’t the only player who plays GW2, and they haven’t forgotten to have other skins exclusive to other areas. I probably won’t get the super awesome skin from Raiding if it comes from a Vendor in the Magumma Jungle who will sell it if you have enough Mastery experience with them. The only thing that Arenanet needs to provide is the means for players to get said reward. There would only be a conflict if Arenanet made individual accounts impossible to receive some rewards given to other players, I mean 100% restricted, you can’t buy/earn that drop ever.

Ohoni.6057:

Yes, and again, armor is not scoreboards. Raids can have scoreboards, the scoreboards can be exclusive, armor should not be.

But it is, we are all valuing it even now. Armor is the only thing you can show off realistically in this game in other areas (Titles need a revamp to be mentioned in this category) ergo Legendary Armor is the scoreboard! Stop trying to deny that skins, being the measure of horizontal progression and thus the fruits of our effort in this game, are measured by time and effort. And if players can’t put effort into getting one skin of so, so many in this game, they won’t get the skin. Thus the skin is exclusive and valuable, and the want of many players who want that challenge, who will take that challenge time and time again to earn it!

And the rewards for raiding should be balanced to be worth it, but it should come in quantity of loot, not in exclusivity of loot. And if they want some imagined “prestige” then it should come in the form of titles, achievements, and scoreboards, not in the form of exclusive weapons or armor.

No, it has to come from exclusivity and likely quality of loot! Because it is a part of horizontal progression! There’s no imagined prestige, when another player who sees someone wielding that Legendary Armor walking around LA regardless of whether they are jealous or in awe, they know that person was involved in something grueling and came back successful! It might inspire them to go test their luck as well, you create a healthy community for that activity when you do so! I still get asked about my Green SAB Sword, and although sadly the response from some of these F2P is “What’s a Super Adventure Box?” makes me sad inside but I know they want the skin! And when SAB comes back (It will I know it!) they will try to get the skin there as well!

Ohoni.6057:

And the raid. If the raid isn’t stopping me from getting it, then where would be the “prestige” in completing the raid at all? Wouldn’t you prefer a raid that is actually difficult to complete, that not everyone can do it?

No, the raid isn’t stopping you from getting it at all, it is content that gives a reward when you complete it. If you can’t complete the raid you don’t get the reward. I imagine that for someone like you who values their personal skill level so low that the sheer concept of the raid’s prestige is dependent on whether or not you can do it, then obviously the balance wouldn’t be in your favor. I still think that players can improve on practice and time spent, and maybe at some point in the future you will get that LA piece if you put enough time and effort into it. But those who give up on it too soon won’t get that particular armor piece anywhere else, and that would be enough to add the necessary value to the Legendary armor.

Ohoni.6057:

Personally I think there’s just a bit too much stigma associated with Raids. I am a bit more optimistic about how they will be received just because of how subtly the game rewards you for being a cooperator rather than a competitor in the PvE content for nearly all the content. When this game went F2P, there were so many videos of PvX guilds just being overall friendly to new players, players going out of their way to welcome and help newbies and each other out.

I do not think that it will be possible to design a single content type that would both be appealing to raider-type players AND appealing to non-raider players at the same time. If it were possible, they would have done it with Fractals years ago. I think that the idea that this content could exist is right up there with carnivore-friendly meat substitutes.

I agree mostly, it’s almost a pipe dream to see that kind of content. The only instance where I saw something really close to this was an old WotLK Raid in WoW, Ulduar. This raid was as brilliant as Karazhan, so how the raid would function is that many of the bosses in the Raid, aside from having specific achievements tied to doing or not doing certain things which made the encounter difficult in one fashion, had a ‘hard-mode’ switch tied to the fight. In fact Mimiron literally had a huge red button behind the boss that toggled a difficult enrage timer and lots and lots of fire everywhere during the fight, it was one of the most difficult hard-mode fights in the game at that point!

However, the raid if you did not want to do the hard-mode, you did not need to, you could play the whole thing normally. It was a moderately difficult raid, more close to entry-level but the fact that each boss could theoretically play out differently based on how the raid felt they could perform on that boss. That Raid, had additional levels of progression than just finally killing a boss for the first time, Ulduar was a crowning achievement in my books.

The caveat of the Hard-mode fights is that you got a slightly stronger set of gear (vertical progression) from those bosses, of course each piece unique to each boss. If that were translated to GW2, it would be something between an extra ‘horn’ on the shoulder-piece or maybe a glow effect. Still that system was amazing back in those days.

there’s going to be content for everyone even if the LA isn’t for you.

The Legendary Armor is totally right for me, it’s just the raids that likely won’t be. [/quote]

We will see, the whole playerbase I believe will get better at the first raid over months and the bar, artificially by the playerbase getting better, will become lower. Not to mention whether or not the raid is fun for people, even in the case of failure memories were had in old raiding.

Ohoni.6057:

Have to simplify the analogy I suppose, the scoreboard and those on it represent the armor.

Scoreboards are not armor. GW2 raids can, and should, have leaderboards. Nobody is asking that everyone be allowed to place highly on these leaderboards regardless of skill, only the best should be on them. But armor is NOT leaderboards, and not only the best should be allowed to have the cool armor.

I am not literally comparing armor and scoreboards, 5 (I think its 5 for Tetris) people won’t be wearing the armor at any given time, and end up having to give that armor to someone else who surpasses them! The scoreboard however is WORTHLESS if every player regardless of their individual skill can get the same score if they spend an equal amount of time on the game! Why bother playing Tetris normally when you aren’t getting a better reward for your efforts, rather spend extra brain cells and reflexes elsewhere playing with my phone, man Tetris got boring all of a sudden.

A reward given universally undermines and diminishes any and all harder content from the easiest form. Players who want a challenge, and want a greater reward for risking their time on such a challenge aren’t masochists! They might even earn LESS than the ambient Silverwastes farmer if they fail! But at least they know that if they keep going at the Raid content they will get paid off in the end! That’s how you properly reward players for doing challenging content, for people doing anything ever!

Ohoni.6057:

The point is in having the Legendary armor. If you don’t care about the armor itself, then don’t worry about getting it.

And you will have the Legendary Armor if you can do the specific tasks set before you. Done. It’s there you just have to go get it when the Raid opens! Nothing is stopping you but yourself!

Astralporing.1957:

It’s not supposed to be unique. You can have more than one person with it. In fact, there’s no hard limit to how many of those are there.
It may be exclusive (which is a different thing). Which is an arbitrary distinction.

Also, nobody’s asking to be able to get legendary armor without effort. All what we ask for is for the effort to not be limited to a single type of content.

Because otherwise LA is not a reward for effort, but a reward for liking Raids. Or at least for containing your dislike of it for long enough. Oh, and being in a big guild.

Twisting my words on unique isn’t helping, you know what I meant. There’s no truly ‘unique’ skin in this game based on what you defined it here (There isn’t one Sunrise in the game after all). Unique implies the skin in the raid can’t be earned doing another raid or another form of content. I suppose you could interchange unique and exclusive in this context, but I’ll keep using the former.

I agree to a point on limiting Legendary Armor. I would not want Legendary Armor as the tier of gear to be only limited to raids. Rather there should be Legendary Armor available in other mediums, likely requiring some barrier to overcome. However the Legendary Armor Skin(s) which will be in this new raid coming up, should be specific to that raid only. The system they have for the SPvP and Fractal Backpieces are a good example, independent pieces for two utterly different types of gameplay.

Personally I think there’s just a bit too much stigma associated with Raids. I am a bit more optimistic about how they will be received just because of how subtly the game rewards you for being a cooperator rather than a competitor in the PvE content for nearly all the content. When this game went F2P, there were so many videos of PvX guilds just being overall friendly to new players, players going out of their way to welcome and help newbies and each other out.

I think these kinds of guilds are definitely on the radar for the Raid content, well, we all will be getting acquainted with the new enemies in Magumma (which are consequently a bit tougher than what we have been dealing with for a while) so it’s my belief that if Arenanet can pull off helping the playerbase get better at playing the game, without those really against improving themselves to have fun, to the point where the Raid when it releases is still challenging but fun for a lot of players…

That is what will make or break this content. It might be too easy to just make the raid overwhelming even for the extreme players, rather the wall the Raid needs to be ought to encompass allowing players to earn their LA as they get better at it. We also need to bear in mind this content is very small compared to the full extent of HoT, there’s going to be content for everyone even if the LA isn’t for you.

Ohoni.6057:

Take only pictures, leave only footprints.

Which mean entirely different things to those people. Though objectively different from physical rewards, the end result is a reward not many people will earn, not be entitled to.

Ohoni.6057:

Tetris doesn’t have any unique armor at all.

Have to simplify the analogy I suppose, the scoreboard and those on it represent the armor. Normally people who put the most effort and time into Tetris get better and earn a higher score. This nets them on the scoreboard, a visual marker of their achievement. That means that if Tetris were made into the example I proposed, a system where only Time really factors into success, then the scoreboard is filled with any single player who plays for any amount of time on any difficulty. Which, in turn, renders the entire scoreboard meaningless, what’s the point of tracking score when everyone can get the same score?

Kind of like what’s the point of getting Legendary Armor, which is supposed to be unique, when everyone can get it by just playing the game, effort be kittened?

Torolan.5816:

I am not saying that you have to like this, but hard content is bound to become easier over time, either with practice or by other means. The casuals just have to wait for it until they can buy it or when it has lost it´s novelty and it´s price has to be lowered.

I don’t disagree at all with the prospect of people finding their ways around a difficult objective. In fact Arah P4 runners selling their spots for gold is a perfect example of this. But I doubt they will remove the novelty, the Legendary Armor whether it be for the very slight convenience of changing stats to perhaps its impressive visual effect whatever it may be will still be a good to be earned or bought. I believe Colin also mentioned how raids won’t be any different in difficulty a year from their release, they will still retain that same bar of success and failure. I’ll have to go find that clip in the Raid announcement…

Does that mean 9-man guildmates selling boss runs in LA? Perhaps. It still signifies that players are putting a solid effort to doing the work, and this could hold especially true if the raid is tightly tuned so a 1-man handicap is extremely tough! Solo Lupi runs are a prime example of how players are more than willing to hop through hoops for a challenge, but that novelty has had years to mold, these players need something new to keep them around.

Windsagio.1340:

I’ve never ever ever heard an actual professional designer use cute card suite metaphors for player types.

Is that supposed to dismiss those ‘player types’ listed above? Because it doesn’t.

Edit: Forgot link.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Bartle

phys.7689:

mountain climbers get a unique reward, an experience and view that most never see, which cannot be duplicated in any way.

that said, i really dont think mountain climbing is a good example of game design, in fact its probably a pretty poorly designed game.

Not to mention the climber could either leave a marker behind or take something back with them from the whole experience.

…Oh wait, that wouldn’t be fair, we need to make mountain climbing easier since not everyone is gaining that same reward since the task is impossible for some very capable people.

Anyone who dismisses effort as part of a formula for rewards should stop playing games that have this as part of their design or accept the fact that effort has always been fundamental to video game rewards since inception.

Imagine if Tetris were like this. There would be a checkbox for the normal game that would appropriately get harder and harder the higher score you got with the lovely fast falling blocks, and if you unchecked it the game would play out on the easiest, slowest falling blocks only difficulty and scaled up the score based on how much time you put into the game until like the normal game you maxed out the score. Of course the ‘leading scoreboard’ at the end would still be there, plug in your three initials and presto you got a high score! Everybody’s a winner!

I wonder if we would even like that game, or remember it.

maddoctor.2738:

LucosTheDutch.4819:

maddoctor.2738:

The legendary armors will be “exclusive” to raids because the armor precursors will only be available there, the rest of the items needed to craft the legendary armor won’t be only in raids, just the precursor pieces.

Yeah but that would still make the legendary armors exclusive to raids, as in, you can only get them if you do the raids to get the precursors.

maddoctor.2738:

I’m not an expert on WoW but my google searching skills are quite good if I say so myself and according to this list (just an example):
http://www.wowhead.com/guide=1240/mop-pve-gear-guide
best in slot PVE gear in World of Warcraft does not drop from the final boss only. Instead each boss rewards best-in-slot raid quality gear. You pick which item you want and go for it.

True but the really rare and unique gear (that’s not better than other BiS gear but still sought after for their rareness, unique skins or value) only drop from the final boss.

I doubt legendary armor will be like that because legendary armors have a lot of pieces. A lot of pieces can drop from a lot of bosses and leave one of them (for example the chest piece) from the final boss. And btw with 3 wings we can’t talk about a “final boss”. Each wing can have a final boss.

Here is an interesting thought though. They said they will add 3 new legendary weapons and more will come when they add new content. 3 Legendary Weapons. 3 Raid Wings. More raids coming in the future with more wings along with more new legendary weapons. Coincidence?

Thinking the first wave of Legendary Weapons will stem from the various ‘Mastery’ races if that were the case. I would be rather impressed if Anet made more raid content a mere 6 months after the last wing of this first raid opened. Heck, a bi-yearly increase in end-game cooperative PvE content, toss in some occasional open-world bosses (think we are getting 3 with the expansion speculated by the Mordrem Guard post) and there will be a plethora of stuff to do for all these new players!

Of course, SPvP balance and perhaps some more WvW unique skins ought to be another agenda, need to provide the nice trinity of game-modes this game has in check.

It’s cringe-worthy, how NOW people are up in arms about an exclusive piece tied to a certain kind of content. Three years and counting we have had releases of content and rewards tied specifically to that content, yet now some of us are relenting, why?

It certainly ISN’T because it is unfair, because further down the line Arenanet releases something new that looks better in one person’s senses than what they wanted before. It’s also because there are a vast myriad of skins one could earn in this game, that a single set of armor won’t completely make you give up on this game.

The main crux of everything comes down to something brought up before:

Is a skin’s value based on its looks, or how one earns it?

…It’s both. This is a real fact not based on conjecture but based upon actual evidence! Look at both sides in this thread, both sides have different values on what skins they would wear in game, and that is measured on how much they value the look of the skin or the prestige of gaining the skin in game. If that isn’t enough, go in game, ask how people value a Legendary Weapon. Many will say something about hating that Legendary Weapon’s look, some would dismiss Legendary Weapons as a non-prestige item, others might hate how much it costs, you catch my drift. You get so many different answers, but what you can infer is that there is no small amount of players from both sides. And that was a significant amount to warrant Chris from Arenanet to make CDIs, some specific in their nature to find out any issues with the game.

What was the consensus? Raiding, raiding was a topic for many vocal players much like ourselves in this very thread to speak about. They talked, a lot. So many people and guilds joined into the conversation, throwing ideas back and forth on how to create a successful PvE end-game for GW2 which would fulfill a certain void the current game has. And of those incentives for raiding, unique skins were probably the most vocal as well as challenging content, guilds of all sizes and interests wanted this.

So now we are here, talking about a single set of skins that comes from a single fresh new unreleased content never seen in a GW2 setting and people are throwing their arms in the air wondering why this content in particular gets something special, which we can’t even affirm the quality of the reward will remain special in the future.

…It’s more disappointing than insulting really. GW2 was perhaps one of the first large-scale games to carry the concept of Horizontal Progression rather than Vertical Progression. The idea was that rather than stats, the skins themselves would carry value instead, that is what it means. When you start universalizing skins, attainable anywhere with the same amount of time, you kill Horizontal progression because the players won’t take any other more difficult routes more than once before sticking to something really easy to do. That’s why it would be unsustainable, a MMO would die off quickly, unable to retain many players who seek a carrot on the stick for content they enjoy, but not when there is an easier route to success. That’s not just the nature of how Horizontal Progression works, its our nature to find the most efficient and easier route.

So then it becomes “Well then if I have to do something I can’t enjoy, it turns into Work, and I came to have fun!” Well I have bad news for you, despite how successful GW2 has been in really trying to cater to many different types of players, MMOs…aren’t just mindless fun, this isn’t Mario Party here. It’s a social game with a lot of time spent likely doing something in a repetitive fashion to gain a certain reward. What makes an MMO fun can be how many varied activities you can do to pass the time, could be the people, could be the challenge (something GW2 lacks right now for a lot of people), could be anything! But some rewards, in a game where skins are the value and not their stats, need to be behind certain content to create longevity, reduce staleness, and foster a healthy MMO.

Ohoni, I am sorry but although there are some points you and I can agree on (tokens versus RNG-jalkfjsdalkj sorry, I hate it so much lol) I don’t see any MMO ever considering a universal means to everything, not just because developer resources into new content would have to measure against the easiest content to spend time on, but because the vast majority of players would get bored of having to do the most efficient content, and see no reason to bang their heads against content they might enjoy but not gain the same rewards as they would doing the fast way. There would need to be a proportional reward not just based on time, but effort of content, and although I extended a hand with such an idea you outright rejected it.

I don’t think we can ever see eye to eye on rewards in MMOs, I am going to go with what Arenanet comes up with since they actually have the metrics and input from the very community all of us keep bringing up time and time again.

Astralporing.1957:

No. The primary functions of MMOs are social and entertainment ones. In the case of the latter, it is doubtful that raiding increases fun for more people than it takes away (especially in GW2). As for former, Raiding fosters social exclusivity and separation, and as such it is in fact inferior to other forms of content.

I like how you use ‘doubtful’ as an absolute here. It’s also wrong to assume GW2 Raiding will play out the same ‘social exclusivity’ that other MMOs with raiding have done…in whatever sense you think there is. I can care less for your personal bias against raids, but don’t play it out that GW2 Raiding will split the community, this community of all things.

Astralporing.1957:

If taking Raid route to reach a goal would take considerably shorter time for experienced raiders than other options, then it would be a shortcut.

…Which would be the case if any of the raiders (which GW2 has none as of yet, we are all going into this green as grass) had prior experience with GW2 Raids, which don’t exist. I am going to assume therefore that the GW2 raid coming up will take a lot of time, and a LOT MORE EFFORT than any PvE content in this game yet, even more so than Tequatl and Triple Wurm (hopefully).

Astralporing.1957:

Ohoni is rather obviously talking about material rewards – so, drops. As i understand it, he means that if raids drop some big rewards at the end, then it should also be buyable by tokens, which could also be received (albeit in lesser quantity) from the partial checkpoints within the Raid. Or something to a similar effect.

Sure…well except for the potential impact on the economy, exceptional rewards for exceptional effort in raiding could cause an staggering inflation.

Astralporing.1957:

Ah, i see it. So you think that running a raid a few times should be equal to dedicating all of your time daily for several months in a row.
No, i don’t think this is an equivalent effort at all.

Certainly! Especially when the full Raid rewards are on a weekly lockout! It evens out perfectly in line with what Ononi suggests for proportional rewards!

Ohoni.6057:

It’s sad that you believe this, but it’s obviously not true. Raiding is just one way to play, it’s not better or worse in any way than any other way of playing the game, even Silver Waste farming. If you enjoy it, then that’s great, but if someone else doesn’t enjoy it, that does not make them a lesser player than you, or deserving of lesser rewards.

No need for the patronizing ‘fact’ you seem to believe in.

It may be in your opinion that Raiding is ‘just one way to play’ and that’s fine, people are free to do whatever they please in this game. However the amount of effort a player puts into being a successful raider versus a successful farmer is Heaven and Earth here. That doesn’t mean the player farming is a lesser player, the activity in question is of a significantly easier design, which means the rewards for your efforts and invested time must follow proportionally!

Ohoni.6057:

I couldn’t say what the actual rewards would be, but by “rewards even if you fail,” I mean that if we have a raid where say there are five steps between start and finish, and each step takes maybe ten minutes if you have it down, fifteen if you don’t, and each ramps in difficulty, then perhaps only the last step would reward the “special” reward, progress towards Legendary Armor or whatever, but each of those sub-objectives should have their own reward, piles of gold and junk gear like one might encounter elsewhere in the game, and the quantity of that loot would be equivalent to around 15-20 minutes of “farming” other content. So basically, even if it takes you 45 minutes to reach the third tier, and you fail out, you’ve still made as much generic loot as someone doing any other content in the game would have, you are not “behind.” by any significant amount.

If the other content does offer progress towards the “best stuff” like Legendary Armor, then these checkpoints would also offer partial progress.

Raiders are not masochists, Raiders want greater rewards for greater risk. Making the system dis-proportionally reward non-raiders at the same level as raiders for doing mundane tasks, doesn’t create a stable Raid Environment, Raid Content would be a waste of resources and time. The raid content would die out after every raider does it once, or even does one encounter maybe, because GW2 is all about the Horizontal Progression.

Ohoni.6057:

And persistent raiders could run the raid several times a day, whatever. No, hundreds of VW runs is still entirely ridiculous. You just want to punish people who want an alternate route, by presenting one with unreasonable conditions on it.

Again, weekly rewards. Anyways it is not punishment when you yourself said that rewards should be available to all content, and rewards can be provided they are appropriately scaled to the effort it takes to do the content! How is that unreasonable? Someone who really likes Vinewrath would still be able to do Vinewrath and get what they want!

You can’t even be fair, even with your own system and you know why? Because you nor I have a clue on the metrics of the populace and what people REALLY want. People are afraid that Raids will tear the community apart, I doubt that by the severe interest from not just PvE guilds but PvX guilds, and ambient players who wouldn’t mind something new! People can hate exclusive rewards, but exclusive rewards have been around since launch. Did you raise a fuss about Liandri’s Mini and Title? Not nearly as much as you have been for the past month about Legendary Armor.

Ohoni.6057:

Yeah, it should be fairly close, they’re both players playing the game, you wouldn’t want one of the activities to present an unbalanced level of reward, and you wouldn’t want anyone raiding because they see it as a “shortcut” to the best rewards, even if they don’t enjoy it. It’s not like raiding is some “superior” type of content entitled to superior rewards.

But Raiding is in every function of an MMO superior, you socially need reliable teammates and you must have mechanical understanding of your profession and what your allies bring with them. It would be unbalanced if the progression towards it was equivalent to any other PvE sector in this game. By that extension it can’t be heralded as a shortcut, as the difficulty would be a considerable timesink for many, even raiders!

Ohoni.6057:

Well, that’s why at least some of the reward has to be paced along the way, so that even “failed” attempts will typically be as rewarding as playing other content for the same amount of time. You make the end rewards enough of a perk that people will want to hit that point as often as possible, but you also reward them along the way so that they don’t walk away empty handed.

Explain what that reward is, what is the reward for effort put into a raid versus other areas of this game.

Ohoni.6057:

That is completely insane. You’re basically saying “there can be other methods, so long as they are completely pointless to pursue.” You understand that if someone did kill the VW every singleday under such a system, it would take them a year and a half to complete that objective?

Sure if they could only be capable of doing it successfully once a day, dedicated VW players might be running coordinated maps multiple times a day, and those who really like the content will likely do it more than once a day if possible. The most persistent VW players who run it three times successfully a day will get it in a couple months, that’s not bad at all for that content!

Ohoni.6057:

Perhaps, but this starts to get very complicated. Would it have to be the same group each time? If so then every member of the group would need to be available at the same time each day, which may not fit their schedules. If you can switch groups for each portion, how is that tracked? The more convenient they can make it, the better, but it’s still fair to say that the raiding lifestyle will never be for everyone, and it’s unreasonable to assume that everyone will raid, or that those who don’t raid should have to do without.

Eh, the thought still matters, I was just postulating ‘what-ifs’. Any amount of work they can put into making raids work around people schedules won’t impact how difficult the raid is, but allow for easier access which is never a bad thing.

Ohoni.6057:

The hinted mastery requirements don’t seem like they will be a big deal to me. Just over the past two betas (with severely limited zone progression) I earned three levels in gliding and two in shrooms, I imagine between HoT’s launch and when the raids launch I would have a dozen or so different masteries unlocked, and I would expect those of the raider mindset to have far more unlocked, so unless they require the absolute highest end stuff, and I doubt the first raid will, at least, I don’t think it’ll really hold anyone back.

I am in agreement with this.

Ohoni.6057:

Ok, first, it’s hard to compare RNG to a token system. Ideally in this scenario even raids would involve some sort of token mechanism so that if you don’t get the drop you want after X tries, you can still afford to just buy it instead. But setting that aside, You say it would take an average of 30 hours for a flawless group to earn the reward. Can we posit that a reasonably successful, but less flawless group could take perhaps 40 hours in total?

Sure, 40 hours sounds reasonable. Given the Raid won’t reset when everyone wipes and waypoints to the beginning to run back to whatever they fell victim to, some reasonably successful raids I can see 10 hours at the maximum ‘extra time’ put into honing their level of skill.

Ohoni.6057:

If that’s the case, then someone doing the Vinewrath, to completion, could perhaps expect to earn it in 50 daily runs, taking a total of maybe 50-70 hours and with possibilities of failure along the way. Now keep in mind, this would include some slight changes to how the map gets rewarded, it would require that the player run the entire event chain from near the beginning, not just map in right as the VW starts and kill it, that would, if anything, offer a significantly lesser amount of reward, and I believe the daily requirement would help limit the grind aspect. But yeah, about 50 kills would be good.

I…see. You understand that’s a near 1 to 1 metric to the end-game PvE right?

Ohoni.6057:

It’s also worth keeping in mind that the raiders would not be getting nothing aside from the Legendary. They would be getting plenty of reward packets along the way, so that their total rewards would be comparable or greater than what the VW player would be earning even if we factor the Legendary out of the equation. Their time would be fully valued by the game.

I think this might not be a good enough compensation. You mentioned the proportional rewards, but the Legendary Armor does seem to be the centerpiece behind the Raid in question. The reward packets you mentioned would have to be extremely extravagant rewards to even warrant the Raiders pursuing the raid. Raiders do value their own time as well, and if the Raid doesn’t at least grant them some amount of timely edge over those who would stick to Silverwastes then it diminishes their experience of wanting to do the Raid more! The Raid has to be the fastest method of acquisition in your system given that the content, although you can literally ‘walk in’, might prove too difficult to complete for the less-than-average players without spending lots of time on it and maybe even downright impossible for the lowest. It has to be a good proportion in your system!

I can barely imagine anything under 500 VW kills as a bare minimum, start to finish, to warrant the persistence of doing that Vinewrath content the player in question loves. That is around 500 hours of flawless VW runs, which we could grant the same value of ‘some not being perfect’ so the number will come around the upper part of 600s. And yes I know what those hundreds of game hours mean. From those who do VW once a day to three or more times, will likely spend months or even years working at it, but they will enjoy it at least!

Ohoni.6057:

If the conditions to form a raid are so onerous, then the solution is to make them lekittenous, not to further reward the players for accomplishing it. If a person’s time is so valuable to them that a long raiding session is an inconvenience, then that should not be raiding. The only people who should be raiding are those for whom raiding is the most fun thing they can think of to do with that block of time.

I don’t necessarily agree with the bolded statement, I don’t know how raids can be implemented in GW2, but raids carried lockouts and tracked progress during the week in other MMOs. Maybe a system can be in place where an casual group of players can raid together…maybe a half hour a day and still be able to make progress each week towards completing the raid in the week. That’s not taking away from the difficulty of the raid, but if that functionality were implemented it would be a huge extra step towards lending a hand for players of most play-times. …But we don’t have that right now, so that’s a moot point, would be nice though.

The biggest hurdles for raiding as far as we know in GW2 though are the heavily hinted mastery requirements, the heavily hinted role/gear requirements and the difficulty which is up in the air. Also, I couldn’t translate what ‘lekittenous’ was meant to be, I apologize if that lead to a misinterpretation of the quote.

Ononi, a thought-experiment if you may.

Let’s presume for a moment that a system extremely similar to what you suggested was created. The rewards in the Raid are categorized into different levels of ‘difficulty’ in terms of acquisition, and then spread across all types of gameplay in GW2, from WvW to SPvP and PvE, even so far as Daily Activities. Everything in the Raid, including the legendary armor, can be acquired elsewhere.

Now, each exclusive item that comes from the raid, like I talked about before, has a certain threshold of difficulty earning it in the raid, making it either shorter or longer to get in other activities. Perhaps a unique exotic skin that drops off Raid Trash, versus a much more common drop that comes from the boss encounter, things like that are put into these ‘difficulty’ categories I discussed.

Thus, I don’t think it would be too far to suggest the Legendary Precursor Armor piece (and therefore the Legendary Armor Piece) would be at the hardest level, it seems like the crowning ‘achievable’ piece you can get from the raid.

Now, as much as I hate speculation, let’s presume that the Legendary Precursor is a rare drop from a weekly chest that involves completing all three wings of the raid in question…I think I can hear everyone moaning at this mere thought thankfully this is hypothetical and I hope not to see RNG…

Let’s then say on average RNG (We don’t know the number, this number could vastly fluctuate) of the drop for any one person would be 10 full runs of all three wings. Again, more speculative numbers, each wing takes an hour in a flawless group, so 30 hours in a Raid Setting to get your precursor drop. Woohoo, yeppie.

What…given these obviously silly numbers would you say the average person in Silverwastes working on Vinewrath runs, who enjoys butchering that Flower everyday and the ambient loot in the area, would have to spend proportionally to meet the requirement at the same chance at that drop?

1 to 1? 1 to 5? 1 to 10? 1 to 50? Are the conditions for forming a successful raid so difficult that it is 100x EASIER just to run Silverwastes forever? Is a person’s time or effort more important in this case, or perhaps time = effort?

We could go into discussing other areas like SPvP or WvW, but from a simple event farmer in Silverwastes who adores the zone, what scale would they measure against a raider who has to flawlessly do the raid would you say?

I uh…

After using it for a while, Gun Flame…is…close to balanced.

Hold on hold on let me talk I can explain.

Ahem. So, we all are fairly acquainted with how the Rifle functions right? The advantages and…disadvantages of the Rifle have essentially forced it to be a very, very niche weapon.

So, now we get Killshot, with a bit less base damage, that will cause a small AoE around every target it hits. Picking up the Piercing trait is almost mandatory if you want to use this in a zerg-busting setting…and as aB EXT pointed out above, the results of a successful use of the Gun Flame are very impressive!

…Notice I said successful, as in the conditions for it to happen have to be timed just right.

A single ambient reflect from some pug in the zerg you are targetting into could ruin it.

The Gun Flame Projectile can bug out into the small grassy knoll you swore was flat.

The Gun Flame Projectile could also fly above the raid from the person being targetted jumping at that time! (Interestingly enough, Gun Flame’s Projectile is smaller, meaning it will fly over Downed players to hit your target behind them, even if you make the line perfect)

Don’t get me wrong, the damage is Brutal when it works, however a Staff Elementalists Meteor Shower or Ice Bow is Brutal on a zerg caught standing still for longer than 2 seconds. Power Mesmer Triple Shatter with Mind Stab is Brutal on anyone caught in it. There are underlining conditions for making such beautiful cases.

For every single beautiful Gun Flame aB EXT made in that video, (no offense as I don’t know the reality of your experience) but it was likely there were probably some whiffs, or maybe just one target got downed (as Killshot does when it lands anyways), thus making your Berserk feel a bit wasted.

So what then would Gun Flame serve if it more or less does Killshot’s job? I think Gun Flame makes a Zerg Rifle Build…Viable. It makes backline Warrior a possibility, a different source of ranged damage than Meteors and Wells. It takes quite a bit of insight to find the right moment to squat down and line up the shot, the smallest change in elevation can mess it up horribly!

I think it needs to stay, and if it does get nerfed, they can either reduce the pierced targets from 5 to 3 thus impacting the exploding damage substantially, or slightly touch the damage. 11k Exploding damage, even if the targets were glass and you had 25 stacks might, is a little too much. The Base Damage (not the ratio) could be tuned down a teeny bit.

But I love it. Because of the underlining additional condition of how Berserk works, I think Gun Flame is in a great place! I would even say don’t touch it, as the nerf-bat can sometimes hit something too hard and blow it out of viability. Gun Flame is definitely viable now. RIFLE is viable now!

Some Enemy Feedback…

Hyleks:

- If the feel behind Hylek is that they are supposed to be annoying to fight, then for the most part that feeling is set. However I don’t mean annoying in a bad sense, rather some of the mechanics behind fighting these mob variations ends up making you think outside the box and build, and if you don’t have a right utility you will have a rough time, but not a frustrating one.

- For instance, ranged damage players will despise the evading ranged Hyleks, however a simple discourse of getting close at a good time (not when they do their shotgun arrow fire, that hurts) will make your hits land. It is probably best to have a CC to lay into them first with before blowing them up. Their health is moderate, so a single hundred blades from a berserker warrior won’t be enough to kill them outright.

- ‘Hammer Bro’ Hylek I feel is a few steps shy from being an entertaining mob. The first issue is that it has a stronger Breakbar due to its mechanic, it seems to take twice or even thrice as many CCs to topple one of these guys than the others of the same level and catagory. I think the Breakbar needs to be toned down slightly but as a buff, grant the mob perma-quickness when you break it the first time. Actually, make the mob have permanent Vulnerability when you break it as well, let’s call it a ‘Berserk’ of sorts for breaking the mob’s armor.

Saurians:

- Smokescales, as others have pointed out, have some solid design points but a critical issue. I am not sure if this has been pointed out yet, but the smokefield they make has an interesting interaction. Any projectiles and attacks that go through it will miss their target 100%. This was probably obvious, however this also means if the Smokescale is outside the smokefield on the other side away from you, and you fire a shot through the field to hit the creature, it will MISS. This is a troublesome mechanic that requires baiting it out of the field manually rather than finding a way to force it out. My suggestion would be to reduce the size of the field a bit, and allow certain push and pull effects to work as long as the caster isn’t in the field. I do like these mobs though.

- Tiny Raptors (dawww ERMAGAWD MA FACE!) I also don’t mind, they are the tiny swarming damaging mob with low life and suspectible to AoE everyone loves. What would be a cool concept is perhaps a stronger single mob capable of ordering these raptors to mark certain players to be prioritized until dead. Hylek Raptor trainers, that’ll be an interesting thing.

Modrem:

- Tormentors definitely do live up to their name. Their torment spam with the slow homing projectile is nightmarish, but they do go down fast. They are only a real issue when you aren’t just fighting them one to one, they are nearly glass.

- Cavaliers are beefy, mobile and actually fun to fight one to one. Their charge spam could get crazy with many of them moving at once and it can get difficult to melee them. I haven’t tested this, but if their charges can be blocked, can we have a special interaction if the player blocking the charge has stability? If the player has stability while also blocking a Cavaliers charge, have the cavalier suffer a stun like they do when they hit a wall. THAT would make for some interesting play, just don’t apply that same thing to the larger saurian from the BWE1, those things are massive and I don’t think the same interaction should exist for those.

- Snipers…might be doing a bit too much damage, but I can explain. Throughout this Beta Weekend I have been testing my Dire Condi-Berserker (because I love me some warrior) and even though I have had something around 3.2k toughness with a nice bit of vitality, those snipers still hit like a truck. Yes, they are supposed to be high damage mobs with around 10k life (seriously I think it it literally 10k for a level 80 normal sniper), however I think the problem is more a toughness issue than a mob issue. Can we have a look at the value of Toughness?

These are the mobs that stood out most for me. I probably could go into more detail but I would like to keep testing Berserker

I almost feel like this is a troll thread. Pretty sure the design of of say smokescales completely outclasses those generic DAoC creatures you clearly haven’t seen anywhere else…except any fantasy MMO ever. Heck SWTOR has more originality in monster design than the examples you just showed.

Hyleks are an uncommon mob-type, I run into them more in D&D sessions (Frogkin) than anywhere else. But hey you keep rooting for that ‘Tangle Weed’ which looks like it came from the N64 era.

Lord Kuru.3685:

If people were going to sell raids, they’d either

• do it like dungeons now (at last boss, buyer just gets final reward), or if that’s not possible due to tweaks in the reward system (perhaps you have to hit boss to get any credit),
• ask buyer to stand in specific location and only autoattack enough to get credit.

Teaching will just add time to the transaction — not to mention, sellers certainly don’t want buyers to screw things up (dropping the wrong combo fields, for example). People might learn from videos that elite guilds put up, but I don’t think there will be any learning from raid selling.

But the real problem is that with Legendary Armor locked behind raids, everyone is going to want to do them — and if they turn out to actually be hard, it’s going to be a problem as most players aren’t cut out for raids (not necessarily because they’re bad players, but maybe time issues). This will lead to a lot of rage. And that’s when Anet will give in and make them easier (they’ll probably call it “more accessible”).

Agreed on the first point, we don’t know as of yet how the raid will reward players. It could be something on a per wing or boss basis, perhaps a full run is required that is up in the air.

How the player interacts with the encounters depends on those hosting and how the reward is spread. I do imagine ‘tagging’ of some sort will come into play, however depending on how the encounter works (which could be either a tuning or mechanical dilemma) they might request the pug to do more than afk attack for their credit. If I were a demon of a raid designer, I would make the encounter in question actually get harder if someone dies, such as a damage buff in the simplest context.

My impression thus far would be that, due to the 10-man constraint and the potential of GW2 mechanics, the ‘extra’ will likely need a bit more skill to get his/her reward and complete the encounter successfully. In other MMOs, you could bring in a tank for instance that was at a much higher gear-level for the raid than required and have a ‘carry’ mentality going. The mentality behind GW2 raids is that they will persist in their difficulty practically forever due to the non-vertical gear curve, the Magumma Raid in question will be as challenging to new players as upcoming new raids will be.

With concern to ‘Rage’ or Frustration issues, that is not necessarily a bad thing. It sets a goal for the player to go forward on, to improve and work with others in doing so. There are plenty of players and guilds in this lovely community who will find nothing better to do than play with said ‘engaged’ players and help them along. It is likely similar to the same sensation you feel in WvW, fighting off this guild group that has been decimating your forces for hours or even days. To finally win an engagement is something that makes the player feel accomplished!

Atticus.7194:

There’s so much solid feedback in this thread, you guys are amazing. +1000

As to the Berserk itself it suffers from a fundamental flaw, it’s trying to rework warrior into something new without bothering to really give us anything new. Other classes got a ground up new form of gameplay that allowed Developers to build out new kits for them to flesh out the new niche they occupy, see Reaper/Dragonhunter/Daredevil. Warriors just got well… more of the same. Berserker doesn’t fundamentally change how people play the class and in fact makes it far more clunky to do so.

Not to mention it feels like very very little thought or testing went into this class; the damage, the practical utility, the skill/trait synergy none of these feel solid at all. Berserk is clunky to activate, clunky to manage, the primal bursts tied to it are usually far worse and less useful than what we already had.

Rage skills are massively unnecessary, seriously they’re just new flashy physical skills no one asked for, they’re in no way anything needed.

Right now without being overly dramatic almost every single aspect of Berserker needs to go back to the drawing board and Developers need to ask themselves if really adds anything to the class and/or if it’s worse than what we already have.

Also since no one has mentioned it how about adding something into the spec that allows you to slow down your adrenaline decay for a whole “hulk always angry” sort of thing. I mean warriors are still crippled by the hamfisted way adrenaline decay was changed a while back so doing something to help address that would go far in making the spec desirable.

I am going to have to disagree. After getting a strong feel for it, Berserker appropriately acts as a two-edged blade for the Warrior.

Yes, there are fundamental number issues with the skills (burning durations on a couple attacks need a substantial improvement for instance).

Yes, there are a few clunky instances of what I like to call an ‘animation and effect’ issue. It is remarkably similar to how Daredevil has dodge-rolls that interfere with their play rather than enhance it, a lot could be smoothed out.

However…

The biggest misconception about the Berserker is that Berserk…is not supposed to be an improvement on your burst skills, it is supposed to be treated as a temporary change in how you play for the duration. Warriors profession mechanic right now has always been the management of our normal Burst skills, whether we use it or not. Berserker adds depth to that choice, it forces us to determine from our current weaponset what Burst might be more appropriate to use at the time.

Now we have to ask ourselves the following then:

- What does Berserker given its status want to open up to us when we use it?
- What downsides are there to using this traitline? Are those downsides required or perhaps they inhibit the intent of the traitline from viable use in any setting?
- What mechanically can be changed?

That last question I actually have another feedback for. Torch 5 burns 2 conditions and creates a fire field that pulses 4 times before exploding. Could it pulse 3 times, applying longer duration burning, and each pulse remove a condition for a total of three conditions?

Lord Kuru.3685:

After a few weeks, when everyone is done with the open world PvE, if people don’t shift to raids and population starts to dwindle, Anet will follow the metrics and make them easier.

I doubt it, simply because their model for Raids seems to cater towards players and guilds working together towards those challenges. There’s nothing stopping a hard-core raiding guild (those will come, probably from the same people doing speed-runs of current dungeon content) from advertising in map chat full-runs of a Raid Wing for a certain amount of gold.

This has two benefits, one is that the guild in question which has gotten the raid down to a science, gets an ‘enhanced’ challenge by bringing in someone utterly new which could complicate and make the raid artificially harder, and the one who comes into the raid can finally get to see how the raid works, the mechanics and so forth.

What this surmounts to is that Raids likely won’t be tuned down at all once knowledge and strategies start spilling forth to the public and as players themselves get better at understanding and executing mechanics, the overall ‘skill-level’ of players at raiding will improve to match the challenge.

Ideally, the raid wings could just enter farm status with a majority of end-game PvE guilds at the same time they announce a new raid coming forward. That way a cycle of end-game PvE content begins. The only difference is that there won’t be a vertical scale of gear progression, meaning that if they want to increase the difficulty of the following raids, A-Net will have to improve the difficulty of AI, Mechanics, etc.

…Given that they are capable of making Dragonhunter a thing, I won’t deny the creativity isn’t there.

I actually just want new combat music for the region.

I imagine we might see new music for the Raids, however not having ambient combat music for the Heart of Thorns area does seem to take away from the immersion of the expansion, especially with the stronger overall enemies lurking within.

meow one twenty.4376:

Sykper.6583:

Well if you moa a ranger, he actually becomes harder to kill.

:)

You should Moa his pet instead.

Moa his Moa Pet to a different color.

How about that counterplay?

Well if you moa a ranger, he actually becomes harder to kill.

:)

lighter.2708:

Longbow primal burst has to be changed, like i said in post long ago.

this thing is worth nothing..

It does a pretty stellar job at putting massive fire fields straight into an enemy zerg, the burning damage is tight and the combo finishers from those fields are impressive.

It would probably be too good for if the burning lasted longer, and broken if it were unreflectable.

Still testing, there’s definitely some promise here.

- Going Berserk into a Primal Burst Skill should NOT have a second delay, it feels clunky and defeats half the purpose of the 2 seconds of quickness you get from Berserk.

- It is also difficult to pull away from Stances or even some Signets for the Rage Skills, Signet of Fury in particular allows me to fill my adrenaline bar to go into berserk without the need to run Headbutt as an example. Though both skills do different things, from a build perspective the 20 second Elite really only helps close-range builds, and interestingly enough Gun Flame (Rifle) and Scorched Earth (LB) are some of the more powerful Primal Bursts from my observations thus far, and they like Range.

- Torch 4, if possible, could it have its range increased to 600 from 400 but still allow the same amount of hits from the hitboxes? It is definitely strong pressure on a downed foe and their rezzer however I find many enemies just outrun it.

I am pleased at where it is right now though, it isn’t too far off from what I think would be a good spot for release. There just needs to be some numbers changed around.

Ohoni.6057:

Yeah, basically the raiders create an impossible logic loop.

Sure, let’s hear it.

Ohoni.6057:

The Content should be so difficult that only the best can achieve it.

Uh, no. We want the content to be challenging enough that those skilled enough to get it earn it sooner than those not skilled enough at that time. Gaining knowledge, changing your strategy, and refining what you do during an encounter which can be anything from timing a CC to removing mistakes are fundamental to raiding successfully. It’s called learning.

Ohoni.6057:

The Best Rewards should only flow from this content.

You mean A unique reward flows from this particular content, not ALL the best rewards. I doubt I will make much progress crafting a Twilight from Raiding (presumably unless RNGesus grants me many a Dusk from ambient loot, the odds are unthinkable). It also depends on how you value the reward, Legendary Armor carries a pretty nice convenience but certainly isn’t going to make me beat everyone. It could also be aesthetically pleasing or atrocious to look at, we don’t have specifics. Finally we have no idea IF Legendary Armor in the future will come strictly from Raiding, only that the first instance of it will be arriving from this Raid coming up now. Pretty solid incentive to start raiding huh?

Ohoni.6057:

If people want the Rewards, then all they have to do is “git gud” and beat the Content, anyone can do it.

Uh yea. If you weren’t skilled enough to complete the content you don’t get the reward yet until you do. This means learning to raid. If players don’t want to raid, they just won’t get the reward I don’t see the issue with this. Anyone can go into this raid, and most will probably fail for quite some time. But I do imagine players who consistently raid and start learning how to deal with the obstacles the raid sets forth will get their well-earned reward eventually!

Ohoni.6057:

The Content should be so difficult that only the best can achieve it.

And back to square 1, so “Uh no. We want the content to be challenging enough…”.

Ohoni.6057:

If you poke them on one of those points, they retreat to the previous one as a defense, but taken all together it cannot hold as a functional model.

It can, because it has. Because Raiding has been a staple of PvE Content since that Black Sheep you talk about so much. The only difference is, GW2 Raiding is already looking more accessible (hngh…Attunements so bad) and requirement of manpower is extremely low (10 people! Sweet!).

Ohoni.6057:

What is achievable for some players is not always achievable by all. Furthermore, what is theoretically possible for someone is not necessarily something that they would enjoy pursuing. Do not project your own experiences onto other players. Just accept, as completely incontrovertible fact, the following points:

1. If the content is designed in a way to be remotely challenging to the very best players, then it will be immensely challenging to the median players.
2. If the content is remotely challenging to the very best players, then it will be completely impossible for the sub-median players, unless methods exist to essentially carry them through it, so the best case scenario is that they will merely be a burden on all other players.
3. While each player has the potential for growth as a player, each player also has functional limits on their potential. Not every player can become the very best player, regardless of how much time and effort they spend in that pursuit, and for some it comes much easier than others.
4. Just because some players enjoy the experience of failing against difficult content until they eventually surpass it, many others do not.

1) Humoring your thought-process that somehow this raid will be only for ‘the best of the best’, sure, it will be quite challenging to the median of players.
2) You do not know that it will be completely impossible. That is because players are human, they learn and adapt. Why this fixation that anyone in the ‘impossible’ zone can’t get good enough after some period of time to get to the ‘median’ zone which according to you, makes the content challenging but not impossible to complete? The burden bull needs to stop as well, many a raiders won’t take the mentality of blaming their allies. Especially in this community where players have cooperated since this game’s inception on content. You will see more ‘We all live or die together’ than that hogwash you spewed.
3) And that is where we disagree the greatest. This is the biggest absolute problem with your entire mindset about this. You think some people can’t get better ever. What a load of negative doo-doo that is. Do you where some of the best moments in raiding come from? When your guildmate or friend of so many years finally ‘clicks’ with this really difficult boss after so many months of sometimes horrid play or the close-calls. Giving up is the worst thing you can do. The only time functionality of gameplay actually comes into balance is when there is a real, physical or mental ailment wrong with the player that inhibits the necessary movements to meet the requirements. I am talking missing limbs, mental kittenation, quality of life issues that don’t just impact the player’s experience in GW2 but ALL things.
I will not humor a discussion on real Quality of Life problems that your entire 3rd point would actually match up with.
4) You won’t know how many players will like raiding even if they keep failing at it. It’s entirely possible the Raid could be engaging even after months of failing at it just because it was designed so well.

Ohoni.6057:

Given these absolute facts…

Well played, I fell out of my chair laughing.

And the rest of your point I pretty much covered before.

So, been thinking about how GW2 would do its raids, how they would prompt diverse builds, thinking outside the box…

This are a couple of things I think they are hinting at:

- We already know about the Breakbar, and we can all assume at some points during the encounter people will have to ‘PRESS THE CC’ together to stop some raid-wipe attacks. That’s nothing new. However, I can see something where the Breakbar acts differently with the encounter boss channeling a different action. For instance, during the boss’s frontal cone that cleaves everything in front of it, breaking the bar will not quite CC the beast but make it suspectible to TAUNT, thus said Taunt player, let’s call him ‘Not Wearing Berserker’, will taunt the boss away from the rest of the raid for the duration of the channel and take the cleave and possibly live. It’s not tanking its Control, you control the encounter so you don’t fail.

- Support is practically everything from buffs to offensive support like blinds or reflects, etc. Perhaps some phases you will need to have a few ‘reflectors’ go to certain points on the map to reflect a projectile back at the boss to make it vulnerable to attack. Maybe even have someone, Guardian with Shield (Just bear with me here) will have to use a Shield of Absorption to cover the raid for a very long barrage of attacks coming from above rather than a line in front of the raid.

- Damage is well, I don’t even think we need to talk about that.

I guess we will have to see. The key to all of this is that despite the ease of access to raiding, you have to make the raid enjoyable. I don’t see these boss encounters being too rigid in their attack patterns, they will probably mix it up quite a lot.

Sweet adorable kittens guys! Just stop, pause please for a moment.

…We calm? Good, let’s talk for a moment.

For the past 3 years since launch, GW2 has broken many typical standards that were in MMOs. Questing, Resources, Loot/Tagging and even the holy Trinity have been more or less revamped towards one goal: Cooperation. Every single PvE activity we do, it is non-competitive, we work together towards it.

Many, many things at launch were difficult when this game launched. Dungeons were back then Arenanet’s original inception of end-game PvE content. Actually, a lot has changed since then, but the overall focus towards creating an environment to foster a friendly community rather than a selfish one continues to exist even now!

Raiding will NOT break any of this down. This panic is based on pure speculation, Raiding in GW2 should not be expected to follow the same principles we ALL fear.
- Loot is not competitive, we aren’t rolling on the same pieces.
- Attunements will not be there, those were…for a lack of a better term, absolute kitten and even former Raiders like myself admit it. What a load of bullocks.
- ANYONE can go into raids. From fresh new players to hardened veterans, bring 9 other friends or strangers it doesn’t matter! We all want the same thing!

…My point being, this game has done so much for every kind of player out there. Yes, there will be players that vehemently disagree with, or rather stick to whatever elitist moral compass they want. Who cares.

Raids are there as group content for everyone to participate in, to fail together, to win together, to cheer as someone gets something they really needed. To FINALLY take down that fiend who bars your way. There is no need to burn bridges, forge them instead. Raids are a chance for you and your allies to grow as players.

As a former top 1000 NA Off-Tank from Pre-BC WoW to End of WotLK, I have seen so much of what I haven’t seen in GW2 yet. However there has been a lingering…want for something like a Raid in GW2, with its combat that I absolutely adore. I may come off a bit sarcastic in game, but I am always willing to lend a helping hand (Ambient people who come to revive me from down-state helps with the humility). Nothing would make me more happy than to hear tales of victory from players who have never raided once in their gaming careers finally take down a boss that has troubled them so. The experience, and emotions are so just in that regard.

Thank you for taking your time to read my appeal to you all.

Keep this simple.

If you can beat the challenging raid, you get the rewards.

If you can’t beat the challenging raid, you don’t get the rewards.

It is that simple, I don’t care where the players who beat the raid, which is legitimately challenging and hard, come from or how long they have been playing this game.

I got it!

Nerf Ring of Fire.

Bring back Fresh Air!

I did it guys!

You took that post from someone that wasn’t the OP of that reddit thread. In fact the OP defends his post from that statement.

Element Two.7316:

Sykper.6583:

Calling it now, well before we know anything.

There will be one encounter where you will need to have your warrior put on a hammer in the off-set to have enough CCs to break the defiance bar to stop the boss from killing your raid in one shot.

No because that means there is a party compisition requirement to complete the raid, which A-net is against and believes 10 Settler’s Necros should also be able to complete their challenging content

I think there’s a misconception here.

I believe they want people going into raids as whatever profession they can.

However some encounters will have certain role requirements met, such as my example of a defiance bar needing to be broken. Some members of your raid in their current profession will likely need to put on a weapon or utility that applies a daze, fear, stun, knockdown and so on. This is a role that needs to be met everytime the mechanic comes up, or the encounter can fail.

Quickfoot Katana.8642:

Sykper.6583:

Lord Kuru.3685:

They said there will be three raids coming. They’re probably already in development. I’m calling it now: there will be at most one more new raid after those three.

Anet will then move on to the next big thing while people are left hanging waiting for the next raid (see dungeons, fractals, guild missions).

To be specific they said there were three raid WINGS coming. The only metric used with raid wings I believe was just WoW, where each Wing would have more than 1 boss encounter.

Let’s assume then that there are at least 6 extremely difficult bosses then, given that they want Raiders (Weee we get to use that name now!) to start raiding a few weeks into the first of three wings, perhaps we can assume if the wing was too easy for another wing to open up the patch after (2 weeks) or perhaps a month after.

Yes, there are a lot of assumptions made, my point being is that I…am of the side that thinks Arenanet likely has only just this raid fully conceived with perhaps the next raid starting to form, but that raid won’t be mentioned at the very least for 6 months after HoT release.

Each raid will contain only 3 bosses, not 6. It’s on the blogpost

kitten.

Well, turns out reading blogposts late at night is a great way to have your eyes skim over details.

They seem confident though, that’s a plus right?

deSade.9437:

People will tell you “this is better than x”. No one can force you to run what is best, though. Suggest? sure. Enforce? nuh.Only tryhard pugs and a few overzealous guilds would ever enforce full ascended or HoT traits on old content, seriously.
I bet not even the new content will require any of that. If it should or should not, that’s up to personal opinion.

P.S. Yeaaaah, “impartial”. Ah-hah? /forced i-bit-a-lemon grin
P.P.S. Opinions are like cow pies.

/coughs heavily. Also /looks other way while whistling innocently.

Celtic Lady.3729:

So, GW2 is now just like every other MMO on the market. We’ve degenerated into raiders vs. non-raiders, the haves and the have-nots, the best gear (stat-switching anytime, particle effects) on raiders and crap on everyone else.

Cool. Figured this would happen eventually.

Everything you have just said, in your heart of hearts, was a complete and utter lie.

Even before Raids have been released you are thinking players are going to as you put it ‘degenerate’ into Raiders and create conflict.

You even went so far as to consider stat-switching and particle effects something of an elitist stigma.

…Please tell me this was an elaborate troll, no one is this disingenuous.

Zuko.7132:

I dont think f2p is a bad thing i think its great im just polling people on their opinions of smurfing. There’s nothing that can be done about it just want to know what people think.

My apologies.

But yes the next step is balance.

Personally I think it is possible to balance for both SPvP and PvE, but it is the more difficult path. The biggest benefit of normalizing effects/damage in SPvP and PvE is that both work the same on the engine they run on.

However, contrary to reason balance in SPvP hasn’t been optimized yet, I won’t even cry out in anguish about DD eles in this regard since SPvP balance is actually pretty fickle atm. Shoutbow got nearly negated from a mere 30% heal per shout. I bet if Ring of Fire got reduced to 2 stacks from 3 stacks, which would seem like a small change, people would complain less about it.

…I also apologize because I diverged from the topic. Sorry

So, again to preface just because this (as far as I know) has come up many times before.

When Heart of Thorns launches, with the new Elite Specializations and all, it is very likely the meta builds will change. GIVEN the likelihood of the changes:

- If someone is running the old meta which does not include the specialization in non-Heart of Thorns content like Fractals or old Dungeons, will there be an inclination to suggest they change their build to the new, potentially better damage meta containing the new specialization or stay as is since it should not have been touched too much (pending any and all balance patches from now)?

- Do you think Heart of Thorns specializations, if they produce builds of better quality PvE DPS in old dungeons, should be a necessity in every single run regardless of the difficulty of the content?

I realize these questions can be tilted, however I want an honest opinion without any sort of conflict from those who care enough on the forums to grant me an response. Ultimately it is a little selfish to ask but at this juncture I am curious about what people think.

style.6173:

ANET has said that locking this type of gear within one game mode is a bad idea. They learned that lesson with fractals and ascended gear when it first came out.

That said, legendary gear should require components from all 3 game modes (PvE, PvP, and WvW). If it is just about grinding, it will be boring and not within the GW2 manifesto.

TBF, I don’t think any legendary required SPvP. But yes I agree with the notion of badges of honor for the Gift of Battle as a requirement still with the Legendary Armor announced.

I don’t see their legendary gear to be purely able to be obtained in PvE.

Lord Kuru.3685:

They said there will be three raids coming. They’re probably already in development. I’m calling it now: there will be at most one more new raid after those three.

Anet will then move on to the next big thing while people are left hanging waiting for the next raid (see dungeons, fractals, guild missions).

To be specific they said there were three raid WINGS coming. The only metric used with raid wings I believe was just WoW, where each Wing would have more than 1 boss encounter.

Let’s assume then that there are at least 6 extremely difficult bosses then, given that they want Raiders (Weee we get to use that name now!) to start raiding a few weeks into the first of three wings, perhaps we can assume if the wing was too easy for another wing to open up the patch after (2 weeks) or perhaps a month after.

Yes, there are a lot of assumptions made, my point being is that I…am of the side that thinks Arenanet likely has only just this raid fully conceived with perhaps the next raid starting to form, but that raid won’t be mentioned at the very least for 6 months after HoT release.

I haven’t heard of smurfing since LoL.

I wonder how that turned out as an ESport…

Don’t paint F2P as a negative for PvP, it was needed if Arenanet wanted their PvP to be serious.

Of course, the next step is balance- ahaha, sorry that gave me a chuckle. That’s probably the hardest step.

…So this discussion has turned into more or less the same locked discussion from a week or two ago.

Can we not do this again? Both sides have said their piece and none of this needs to be reiterated. Of course I did contribute to this particular thread once before, but now that it has turned out this way…it is pointless.

People will be for the exclusive legendary armor, people will be against the exclusive legendary armor. Nothing is more conclusive than this.

EDIT: I meant twice, not once. Sorry.