Guild Wars 2

What you’re looking for is the first boss of wing 3: McLeod. He is considered to be the easiest raid boss and will unlock the mastery track for you.
If you want to pug it though, make sure you meet the requirements. Even though it’s easy and doesn’t have timer, most people will still want you to have at least exotic berserker gear, not your super awesome underleveled green mix of carrion+knight gear. :P

Shadowulph.4586:

I would raid if the community did not judge your gear & skill level, for those of us who have never raided we need to learn. I have tried for months to get into a raid but get kicked out if I don’t have the right gear or know the run.

As mentioned above, those are kinda the things necessary to complete a raid. Without having your class geared properly or being able to dodge, you can’t ever hope to beat a raid boss (unless you want to leech a group of much better players, which you can’t expect people to be okay with).
I’d say your best bet is to start with fractals. They offer a smooth learning curve and are the best place to learn your class. First few levels are easy, but you will eventually get to a level of difficulty that is not far from raids. You will also collect ascended equipment along the way, which is a welcome bonus (some raid parties will require it).
After you feel comfortable clearing T4 fractals and can perform your rotations blindfolded, you are ready to become a useful and contributing raid squad member.

To be honest I was always wondering whether the humans and the norn were biologically/genetically compatible. Their physiology seems really similar, there’s just difference in size. And even though you can’t see it in game (because I guess engine doesn’t support it or maybe noone at Anet even though about it), it is perfectly possible via random mutations to end up with an individual whose size would be completely off the charts (like 2.5m tall guy IRL). So you could have a human of the size of an average norn and vice-versa.
As for any of the other races of Tyria, I highly doubt they could ever produce living offspring, just like you can’t cross a dog with a cat.

Actually thinking about it, Tyrian genetics doesn’t have to obey our world’s rules. I mean in a world where you can get attacked by a sentient floating pile of rocks, I can easily see myself meeting a Charrsura or any other horrific freak of that sort.

I have no stories of this sort about myself since I played perfectly ever since my first day in GW2 (kappa). Though I have one about when my friend was starting. He kept complaining that he often dies to enemies and everything feels too hard. So I decided to help him.
“Okay let’s sort this out… lemme see… what are your traits?”
“My what?”
“Traits.”
“Oh I never used that thing, it seems too complicated.”
“You were running all this time without a single trait? I found out the problem buddy.”

Gotta agree with most stuff said here. IMO elementalist/tempest fits you the best. It is a bit harder to play than necro, but does way more damage, is shinier and good looking, very strong in every type of content and thus most sought after.
Go necro if you’re really worried about your ping, but I think you should definitely give ele a go. Necros are pretty good for really hard content because they give bigger margin for error, but they are boring and brain-dead and extremely inefficient in short fights (because it takes some time to build up conditions).

Warrior has better passive defenses (high armor and health), thief has better active defenses (dodges). As a thief you have the option to heal yourself with your attacks (a trait), which will basically make you immortal unless you get stunlocked by enemy.
In group play, warrior focuses on buffing the party (banners, might, EA), while thief focuses pretty much only on DPS. Both classes have pretty good CC and the BEST mobility in the game (with thief’s mobility being partially reliant on having targets to shadowstep to). And of course thief has good access to stealth, which can make parts of the game really easy.
So I’d say that thief would be better for solo play and warrior if you mostly do group content, but both can be very good at either. Ultimately it comes down to which playstyle suits you the best.

UnbentMars.9126:

My ideas:

An actual Defense-oriented dungeon where you have to hold out in VB night against increasingly difficult waves of foes in order to defend the survivors of a pact wreck that were unable to escape with the rest of the injured refugees and unable to link up with any of the Pact forces that continued on into the jungle.

Yeah, because everyone loves time-gated events in dungeons.
The only way I can see this kind of dungeon NOT being extremely frustrating and painfully boring is that it would dynamically change based on your group’s performance: If you kill a wave of enemies really quickly, next one spawns sooner so that you don’t have to wait AND you have the option to just summon all enemy waves at once if you feel brave enough to take them out and survive.
Otherwise I agree, dungeons are my favorite part of the game and I’d like to see more of them implemented in any shape or form.

I can’t see any glitch at all, everything is working as intended.
Since there is 2 of you in the instance, Mordy’s breakbar is scaled to TWO people, not one.
Your friend somehow managed to get himself killed, so that when the rift opened, only one of the 2 players in the instance interacted with it and thus only did about 1/2 of the breakbar damage.
You have 2 options in this scenario:
Either you wanna carry your bad friend, in which case you need to bring enough CC to break the bar on your own. Keep in mind that you are solo breaking bar that is scaled to 2 people, thus you will need a good amount of CC.
Or you can just do the instance solo, then it will be scaled to you only and interacting with the rift will break Mordy’s bar.

4-3-2-1
A simple variation of the usual 4-4-2. We just take one of the tempests, put him into his own group and have him take healing gear. This gives us 3 sources of healing (2 druids and the tempest) and is much more defensive comp. Amazing against encounters like Mattias, where DPS is a non-issue, but the group is under heavy pressure. Sacrificing just a little bit of DPS (we still finish with like 1 min left on the timer) allows us to have much smoother kills and make up for potential mistakes. Can’t remember the last time we wiped on Matt with this comp. 1st try kill everytime.

It just takes a little bit of practice. Learn enemy attacks and avoid lethal ones. If you’re physically unable to dodge or activate your skills properly, get tankier gear. It will take you longer to complete, but you will eventually get it done. In my experience every class can comfortably do it solo, but some are easier than others, especially for a noobie. So if you’re having trouble completing it on one class, try another one. I had a lot of fun on my necro, didn’t take much effort at all.

If you can name which exact part gives you trouble, people might be able to provide you some insight. In my experience gliding part gives people the most trouble, especially when playing for the first time and they don’t know what’s coming. For that, I’d recommend:
1) Get to an updraft ASAP. If you don’t get blown upwards, try pressing F (or whatever is your interact key), I think it might force the updraft to activate. After you’re in the air hold spacebar until your glider opens.
2) Mordy throws boulders at your predicted location (based on where you’re moving towards). It helps if you change your direction often and quickly fly back and forth.
3) If you happen to get smashed to the ground, it’s not lost yet, you can still get back up. Follow step 1.

LazyDad.2037:

ehh warrior is not selfish Tara.. You are wrong about that.

That said, for the duo, Herald is solid, Druid is also good pick. And as others said a Guardian.

Doubt it, as a warrior main I should know.
Tell me what does warrior bring into a duo setting that other class cannot (and even better)? Might from PS is nothing, you can stack that on ele along with 2 mitnues of fury. EA or banners are pretty much meh. Good for party of 5 players, but won’t do so much for duo. Ele can do CC, and has superior damage. Thief has very good damage, mobility and can provide stealth for long skips (combos well with ele for blasts).

Don’t get me wrong, warriors are good. They are a necessity for group play, pretty decent solo and okay even for duo, but there are other classes who can do it better.

As I said. If you want to be optimal, go for either ele/ele or ele/thief. If you want to just have fun, then don’t worry about the class at all and just play whatever you like.

If you want to duo difficult stuff and be optimal about it, don’t do it with a warrior in the first place. Use optimal classes like ele/ele or ele/thief. If you simply want to have fun with your friend and don’t care about efficiency, pick whatever class you like.
There’s no way to complement a warrior, because it’s a selfish solo class. No matter what you pick, it won’t have much impact.
Here are some recent and well executed duos:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DoOX0kBMW1I
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ji6wkBWL7gE
The trend in class choices should be obvious.

I think they already have this thing, but we’re not welcome there because we’re not huge on youtube or twitch. They only invite a select few individuals based on that and don’t care about truly dedicated players, who’d like to help too.

Your gear definitely is not the problem. Exotic gear is more than enough for most types of content, ascended is an expensive shiny thing that provides a tiny stat increase for players who are going for maximum efficiency as an endgame goal.
In case you still want to go for ascended, best order would be trinkets, then weapons, then armor (considering how difficult to obtain they are and how much benefit you get).
Also you don’t need any fancy HoT stat combos, you will do just fine with core tyria ones. Of course some of the new stats will make you play more efficiently (higher condi duration for condi classes, higher boon duration for mesmer), but they definitely won’t have such impact to make the difference between game being playable and unplayable.

A major thing would obviously be skill. Being able to dodge on time has always been crucial in the game and even more so in HoT. Enemies in HoT were intended to be slightly harder than in core game, but again, the difference shouldn’t be completely gamebreaking.

Also, don’t forget to count experience. If you play for the first time, it is to be expected that you will get smashed. You’re not familiar with the enemies, don’t know what to look out for or what works best against them. As you play more, you eventually get to know how to counter particular mechanics and it won’t seem so hard anymore.

It will still happen sometimes that you die, HoT enemies hit quite hard, but if you give it some time, you will get accustomed to it and won’t die nearly as often. Get to know every enemy, learn their attacks, learn which tools your class has to counter them and try to get better timing with dodges. Nobody is good at first, but you’ll get there.

Elena.3642:

Without enrage timers, the dps requirements for a lot of raid bosses would be much lower. Is that a good thing? That is debatable. In my opinion everything that allows players to get away from current Berserker meta which is common in most builds is a good thing. Being able to not just go full dps and have some survivability (as not all players are good at dodging and have good enough reflexes to survive as glass cannons) would seem like a welcomed break. Requirements for pug groups would also probably be bit lower, though I am sure the best of raiders out there would still go for runs that take less than 10 mins instead of hour-long fights of slowly wilting down easiest of bosses.

Are you being serious? Do you really think that “players who are not good at dodging” even deserve to beat a raid boss? Raids were announced as an elite group content, there is nothing elite about it if someone who can’t even frikkin press a key at a proper time can beat it.
Where’s this entitlement coming from? Just because GW2 is a stupidly easy game, doesn’t mean that everyone must have access to everything. If you can’t even meet the super low bar GW2 set with its encounters (raids included), then you don’t get the rewards. There’s plenty of other content in the game.

People have managed to beat most bosses with half the amount of people. If you can’t deal enough damage within the time, it means you’re doing something wrong. Either you have a bad build, or you’re playing poorly. Those special snowflakes like Nemesis always used to claim their builds are just as good (or even better) than meta builds, well guess what…. now they’ve been proven wrong. Yes, you can deviate from the meta slightly if it fits your style, but you can go only so far before you stop being able to play the game efficiently. Your PTV flamethrower engi or signet of the hunt longbow ranger who pewpews from 1200 away simply won’t be able to coplete the raid, and it’s good it’s that way.
If you personally are good, but your guildmates are dragging the team down, simply cut off the dead weight. You might actually have a shot at beating raids, but not with them. They have useless builds, they know it full well (since it’s obvious those builds perform poorly in raids, and for that matter – everywhere else in the game as well) and yet they refuse to change them up.

Edit: Thanks Vinceman for pointing that out, but not even with the amount of time I’m spending around these forums I can imagine myself reading through this whole thread. I’m glad to hear that OP has come to his senses, others will hopefully follow. May this thread be an example that most complaints about raids are being made by uninformed people and that the difficulty tuning is perfect just the way it is.

I’d say either Herald or Necro fit your style the best. They both have decent sustain (Herald has heavy armor and dodges/blocks, Necro has a huge healthpool and minions) and do reasonable damage. For herald, power builds are most common, so it will feel similar to daredevil. They are amazing for any kind of PvP (i.e. WvW included) and pretty versatile. Necros are usually played as condi, so you will have some ramp up time => killing trash mobs slowly, but they are very good for taking down champions, especially when they have high toughness (high level fractals).

6AB542C9-4925-485E-B5C2-15BA7972AF72:

I’m a new player as well and hope it is ok that I tag onto this post (seems like helpful people here – and there are lots of posts like this).

for 80 boost, I’m choosing between revenant, elementalist, and warrior.

I’ve leveled each to between 15 and 28 to get a feel for each class. But, I’m fairly lost on how to interpret the meta game – there are many skills and boxes listed that i don’t have yet. I like to pvp to dailies and to level, so i do have some sense of level 80 stuff, but can’t form a vision of what a true level 80 geared out toon will perform. I’d say that i understand the revenant the least – i’m pretty clear at least on the play style for the others.

so, if you were picking from rev, ele, and war and wanted a toon where you felt you could contribute to teams fastest without embarrasing yourself, what would you pick for your 80 boost.

Revenant and warrior are similar in that they’re slightly more tanky, making them easier to play than elementalist. Elementalists have much higher damage, but it comes with a cost of being too squishy. The rotation is about equally difficult for all 3 classes in my opinion. It’s fairly easy once you get the hang of it.
So if you’re worried whether you’re gonna perform well, I’d suggest either warrior or revenant. They’re both amazingly similar in what they do, so just pick the one you like the best.

You didn’t provide much information, but I’m gonna go ahead and suggest guardian to you. It offers a very intriguing playstyle that will be somewhat different to your current classes, it’s very versatile and allows for many different roles. Usually people will want you to do damage and provide some buffs or reflects, but you can also tank if you wish to (keep in mind though that tank is rarely useful in the game). Guardian will be good for the type of content you do (open world events), because you can tag stuff easily for loot, move around reasonably quickly and take some beating thanks to its heavy armor and multitude of blocks.

The superior class for tanking would be mesmer, but the way it’s done is probably different from what you’re expecting. Instead of building up passive defenses (toughness, vitality) and completely ignoring dodges or boss mechanics, mesmers take advantage of active defenses and require very skillful play and familiarity with the particular enemy. Because of that, they’re in high demand for raids, they have unfortunately very little use outside of them though.

Thief is a pretty good class. Does very high damage, has decent survivability (again thanks to active defenses like dodges) and can move around really quickly. You won’t have any decent range option and will have to use melee weapons all the time. Easier to play than elementalist, but still not as easy as guardian or revenant.

Deepcuts.9740:

Did several runs with 4x Necro and me, the Druid.
Some went butter smooth because people knew their stuff and they were stacking (when possible)
Some went terribly bad, because everyone was running like mad and I could not get buffs or heals on every one of them, for one and like always, there are always more bad players then good ones.
IMHO, player skill trumps class.

100% agreed. I’ve found out that class matters very little in high level fractals. If someone’s bad, his (or others’) class can’t carry him. It usually comes down to personal skill.
This new trend of “necro only” has brought many bad players into T4, because they think they can cheeze their way through it without any effort. That’s not true. I’ve seen these “meta parties” fail horribly because they ignore mechanics or can’t even dodge properly. Then I finished those fractals way quicker in yolo parties of 3 warriors, because they at least knew how to play despite not having optimal party comp.
To be fair, there are some good necros out there as well, but pugging T4 has been more RNG now than ever and frankly I don’t even wanna pug anymore unless I have at least 2-3 guildies with me.
So yeah, player skill trumps class.

leftyboy.9358:

It just seems crazy to me. Why wouldn’t U want to give back on experiece and knowledge u’ve gained to help the next generation come in , stay exited, and help those after them?

It’s just seems crazy to me. With the tools anet has given us to take on some kind of role in leading and 95% of folks just look for a comm or say screw it.

I learned everything by myself, by watching and reading guides. Nobody told me what to do, nobody spoon fed me like a little baby. Why can’t others do the same? Why can’t they do the research before they join an event? Most of them are really easy anyway and don’t require any preparation. If they do, people usually write instructions into say and map chat. If the newbies wanna learn, they will listen to the chat and do what others say. If they’re just stupid griefers who wanna ruin the event for everyone by purposely doing what they shouldn’t, well… I can’t do anything about it.

Also, if people are frikkin sheep who refuse to give an event a try just because they don’t have a big shiny tag to follow, I’d rather not have these people at all. If you have a small party of strong independent (yet cooperative) people, it goes much smoother than just a bunch of headless chickens following a comm tag and you have good feeling that everyone is contributing just as much as you are.

2 years ago I used to patiently explain everything to new players, but after you get asked the same question for the 20000th time or see people doing the same BS again and again, you kinda become cynical about it and rather find some other group/map to do the events with.

You should choose a profession that has non-crucial role, i.e. boon bot or damage bot. Those are warrior and revenant for boons; ele, thief and necro for damage. Out of these ele has the lowest survivability, so you should probably look more into the other ones.
The two professions you wanna stay away from are mesmer and ranger, their performance is what usually decides your fate and they absolutely need to know what to do and stay focused the whole time. As long as you play a non-crucial role, there’s very little chance of your group wiping because of you and any decent group should be able to carry you and make up for your mistakes.

As far as individual encounters go, McLeod (1st boss of wing 3) and Trio (2nd boss of wing 2) are considered to be the easiest and would be a good place to start at.

Sykper.6583:

The mere concept of an ‘Interesting but Easy’ Mechanic is an oxymoron. It’s contradictory, it cannot exist.

And yet you speak of some open-world bosses as interesting. THAT is an oxymoron.

I agree with some of the stuff you said, but definitely not this. I think an easy mechanic can be very interesting (also keep in mind “easy” can be very subjective and so does “interesting”), which is what makes it possible for some open-world bosses to actually be interesting. Otherwise they all would be brain-dead and boring, since you can easily ignore their mechanics and still succeed without much effort, knowledge of the game or a proper build.

SoV.5139:

Its also kind of odd that the game trains players up to 30 to use recovery abilities when leveling because mobs will damage the character but not kill in one hit. Then when I load up on recovery abilities and do a dungeon I find out I never need recovery, because dodging = living and not dodging = death.

If you are getting oneshot by every single attack, then you’re doing something wrong. Perhaps the game didn’t “train you” enough to repair your armor? Because if it’s displaying a broken red shield, your armor doesn’t give you any protection (of which the game informs you and suggests to find a repair anvil). Even then I’d doubt you are getting oneshot by mere autoattacks.
Also don’t forget some healing skills (such as defiant stance) can work as straight damage mitigation rather than healing, and other skills can provide useful side effects (such as blast finisher from arcane brilliance). They are far from useless no matter what’s your playstyle, skill or experience.

You clearly have underleveled character, poor gear and poor knowledge of the game. Stop judging game mechanics until you’ve learned them.

SoV.5139:

With one shot kills, no need to have healing abilities. Full HP = no heal needed. Dead = no heal needed. With nothing in between, what abilities to spec for?

The deal with one shot kills is that they’re very clearly telegraphed to you and give you a lot of time to react. They’re also usually on high cooldown and you get hit by regular/auto attacks in between them. That’s why you have a healing skill.

As long as your group’s okay with it, you can spec for more defense (i.e. swapping a few berserker gear pieces for knight’s/soldier’s) to make your survival easier and allowing you to bait attacks that would otherwise one shot you. As you eventually get better (hopefully) and learn to dodge these attacks, you can slowly start swapping back to your old offensive/berserker gear (which is without doubt more useful for your group).

Arah storymode doesn’t exist. It is now a part of personal story (and as such is tuned so that even the most casual players can comfortably solo it).

If by “PvP queueing technology” you mean something that will pair me up with people of similar skill level and experience, I’m 100% up for it. Yeah, I know, it’s a silly dream, but I would love it anyway.

@Breakbar: I know this is cliche, but this seems more like l2p issue. Or maybe inability to adapt (i.e. take more CC). I have never failed to break his bar and I usually do it solo (as a warrior), while the rest of the group focuses on their stuff. I actually wanted to thank Anet for making his breakbar so small and easy to break, so that you can carry your group if they have poor reaction times (or don’t swap skills as needed).
Yeah, most of the time slotting a CC skill is a DPS loss, but frankly that’s only an issue in top tier groups, who minmax every tiny bit of damage output. For an average player, losing 3 seconds on a boss is totally worth it if it saves you from multiple wipes.

@Melee hate: I kinda agree here, his AA does a little bit too much. I’ve always prefered the idea of bosses doing very little damage with AA but having some hard hitting skills on high cooldown, which you have to dodge. That kind of design promotes skilled play much more than just having crazy autoattack and no diversity in skill pool.

Here’s my feedback after blasting through the whole update:

Storytelling has improved a lot and the plot is very intriguing. Unfortunately though, the amount of content is a bit lacking. I finished every achievement within one day of the patch and none of them was even remotely challenging for me to feel I’ve actually accomplished a challenge. Encounters should have been more difficult and there should have been some really hard achievements to keep players engaged in the living world. This is pretty much just one day of content. Content quality is amazing, but quantity not so much.

The new fractal is awesome. Enjoyed every part of it. Not much else to add, this is exactly what I want from fractals.

The QoL was perhaps the best addition in this patch, I loved it, keep it coming. Can’t stress out enough how immensely helpful “salvage all” option is. I won’t be able to live without it anymore. There are also some further QoL suggestions from other people, I would like to see them adressed in the next couple of patches.

PvP I don’t play at all, but this new map (especially since it has new achievements tied to it) might actually get me interested enough to give it a shot. Since I don’t really understand the intricacies of PvP, I won’t be sharing my feedback on this.

Overall I’m very satisfied with the content quality, map design and dialogues, but I’m kinda disappointed in the difficulty tuning and length. It would be amazing as one of your bi-weekly updates, but absolutely won’t be able to keep me occupied for the next 3 months.

Shovel Face.4512:

Lol I just thought this would be a funny story. Guess not. Seems some of you got b*tthurt for no apparent reason. Sigh

No no, this absolutely is a funny story. Hilarious. Just not in the way you thought it would.

Ohoni.6057:

Eh, in a sense. I’m more upset with the sense of superiority and entitlement that they enable. there are plenty of raiders out there that think “hey, I like to raid, therefore I deserve to get better loot than players who don’t like to raid, I’m better than those players,” and I think that sort of attitude is toxic to the game’s community. I don’t think the game’s systems should encourage some players to feel that they are “better” than their fellow players, we’re all just playing a game.

It’s not about whether you like to raid, it’s about whether you’re able to raid successfuly. Nobody thinks they’re a better person than someone else just because they’re better at a game, but they might think (and rightfully so) that they’re better gamers. After all, competition has been around as long as gaming itself was. And someone who can complete a challenge in a game does deserve better rewards than person who cannot, doesn’t he? That’s kinda the point of games. Trying to overcome a challenge. If there’s no chance of ever losing, then there’s no challenge.

For dungeons warrior is a pretty clear choice for reasons explained above.

For high level fractals, you might indeed consider MM necro, since they lift a lot of pressure from your group. Be careful when running DH. You might think it will buff your group’s defense, but since enemies steal boons, bringing DH (especially an inexperienced one) might be counterproductive. If you feel good enough defensively, warrior again would probably be the best choice. Enemies can steal the might he creates, but they won’t be able to steal those sweet banners and EA.

Edit: For dungeons with harder skips thief would be a good choice. Most of the time you can get away with blasting smoke field created by druid’s smokescale or having chrono do the skip with its own stealth and port the rest. But in dungeons like CM or Arah, your stealth won’t last long enough for the longer skip sections and thief would come extremely handy. Of course you can choose to kill the enemies or skip without stealth, but that’s usually longer and harder.

One of the points OP presented is that other games feature multiple difficulty levels and it would be good for GW2 to do so. Even though this might be unbelieveable to some, raids in their current state are about equivalent to most game’s easy mode. There’s a huge room for error and you can complete a whole raid wing (= 3 bosses) in just under 30 minutes after you get some practice. If there was another difficulty to introduce, it would have to be way harder with much less forgiving timer, which I don’t think those “99% of people” are asking for. Be glad we have super easy raids and enjoy them.
Don’t even mention the difficulty tuning of central tyria open world maps. That’s beyond easy, it’s impossible to fail at any level and provides extremely relaxing and casual environment so that you only have to pay like 5% attention and enjoy doing something entirely different. Raids on the other hand are meant to provide a challenge. The way raids are designed, they have the easiest possible difficulty that still allows you to fail if you do something wrong. If you were to make them even easier (like central tyria), the only thing left is to make them impossible to lose to, not require any attention or effort and completely fool-proof.

What’s happened to gaming? Is this how population wants games to be designed now? Award you for nothing? Reach the end before you even begin?

That’s entirely up to you to judge. For some people it might be worth it, for others it might not. If you’re swimming in asc weap boxes, then you can easily make a lot of sets for all your characters. If you’re struggling for money, then you might just stick to your main weapon set.

If you’re asking whether it’s a DPS increase, then I’d say probably yeah. I mean it has the same impact (heh) on other classes as it has on ele.

Getting sick of posts like this. Never in the history of gaming I’ve seen anyone being so entitled or lazy. You want the rewards? Play the frikkin game!! If you don’t have the time or skill to play an action-based MMO, go ahead and play angry birds. This game is already so easy and casual I cannot believe anyone can have trouble playing. People can solo content designed for 5 player parties and duo content designed for 10 player squads. Back in my days of gaming people had to adapt to the game and learn to play better, not act entitled and demand that the devs adapt the game to them.

Edit: I’d like to also add that being able to experience the story is a reward in itself, NOT something you’re entitled to by purchasing the game. In order to experience the whole story, you should have to play through the whole game. If you’re unable (or even unwilling) to, then you don’t get to experience the story. Period.

Char swapping to reach optimal party comp is not a thing exclusive to raids, good players have been practicing that in dungeons/FotM for years. It’s just these gamemodes are overwhelmed with terrible/lazy people now that majority of decent players have moved over to raids and you don’t see that anymore.
If you get a reliable static group and clearly define who’s bringing what, you’ll very rarely have to swap chars. Herald is good for everything and necro is good almost everywhere (depending on the rest of the group). Otherwise, when you pug, you will have to wait for a group looking for whatever you feel like bringing.

Hello everyone,
with a lot of people lately being especially vocal and negative about raids, I thought I would take some time to express my absolute satisfaction with this gamemode. Anet, please don’t pay attention to people complaining, it comes from silly entitlement of some individuals who expect to be able to easily access everything (including content that wasn’t even designed for them).
Raids are a major success, I love everything about them. I think you’ve set the bar perfectly, the tuning is just right and there’s no need to change things up. Most encounters are a real challenge when you face them for the first time and remain very entertaining and fun even after many repeats.
Raids are what’s keeping me playing during this content drought. You’ve shown again you’re capable of designing beautiful, challenging, fun and repeatable content. Raid combat, map design, the lore, everything is just so amazing. Even more so if you consider that raid team is actually very small.
For a long time as a veteran player I felt left out. Majority of the game is designed to be very casual, easy and relaxing. That’s a good thing, but sometimes you just want a bit more engaging content, which takes some preparation and commitment. We finally got that. Please don’t ever step back, don’t let anyone make you think raids were a bad choice. They are perfect just the way the are.
Keep up the good work.

hornswroggle.8023:

Fractals are the games main source of ascended equipment, the highest quality of gear currently available (aside from Legendary but that’s a totally different Story)

I don’t wanna get off topic here, but I’d be very careful making statements like that. As for me, even though I did almost every T4 daily since april, I got 1 (ONE!) ascended box from FotM, while getting 3 boxes from WvW reward tracks – and I only play WvW very casually. Now imagine all the people who don’t do fractals daily but rather dedicate themselves to PvP and WvW. Just because you personally have never tried anything else, doesn’t mean every single GW2 player does FotM dailies exclusively and doesn’t PvP/WvW.

@OP: One thing I’d recommend, is making it absolutely clear for your party how much experience you have. Even when there are no requirements written explicitly on LFG (something like P1/P2), it doesn’t mean people don’t expect a certain level of experience. As for me, I expect people to be familiar with the dungeon path and have proper gear unless stated otherwise, since this is a 3 year old game with guides to stuff everywhere around. That doesn’t mean I’m not willing to give someone carry from time to time, it just means I assume I won’t have to until that person comes out and actually says he is a first-timer. Also I hope I don’t have to mention how wrong it is to join “exp”/“meta” groups when you’re actually not experienced/meta, I kick that kind of people without hesitation.

eldrin.6471:

Yes im convinced there are a tinny fraction of players playing this game that are more than happy that anet has developed content solely for them in the last 8 months and balanced the number of legendary grindsights needed for legendary armour around keeping the bulk of players far away from the chosen fews rewards and maybe making a few $$$$$ in the process.

You seem to be a bit confused, let me clear a few things up for ya.
1) The team making raids is actually very small. The fact that we’ve gotten more raid content than anything else doesn’t mean Anet doesn’t care about casual events. It means the particular devs making raids are awesome, they work fast and are passionate about their work. You can hardly expect anyone to be nearly as passionate about making content where you zerg around and spam 1 to win.

2) I would hardy consider raids “elite” content. They are accesible by everyone, fairly easy (every encounter leaves a huge room for error), you can get geared up for it very quickly and there’s a lot of guides and experienced players out there. Just because some people refuse to adapt and sit on their PTV flamethrower camping engis/fullsignet bearbow rangers doesn’t make it hard. I’ve encountered literally hundreds of players refusing to change their build and playing something utterly useless that has no chance to be successful in raids. Is that Anet’s fault? Metabattle is out there accessible by everyone, you don’t even have to understand the build, just copypaste it.

3) For over 3 years I’ve seen Anet making casual content and nerfing it to the ground because people who play 1 hour a week come to forums and QQ how hard it is. This is the first time they’ve made something for serious players and suddenly the game is super unfriendly, hardcore, toxic and elite? You have a plethora of content that doesn’t require any skill or preparation, why do you fight so hard to take away the tiny 1% of the game that was designed for someone else? Is it so unacceptable for you to let anyone else have fun?

4) You’re not entitled to raid-exclusive rewards if you refuse to raid. Do you see me ranting on other forums that I don’t get PvP rewards if I don’t PvP? No. In order to obtain rewards, you have to play the game. Legendary armor gives no stat benefit over ascended, it is just shiny pack of pixels that says “I’ve raided for some time”, nothing more. If you give it out to every single player, it says nothing.
This is a game, noone is forcing you to play it. Noone is forcing you to play any particular gamemode either. But if you deliberately choose to ignore a gamemore altogether, you can’t possibly expect to be given appropriate rewards just because you paid for the game. That’s not how it works.

Azoqu.8917:

I am just really hoping that in the second achievement for the precursor armor that there is a set that requires personal skill that no one can help you with so that anyone in the armor you know is a good player.

Exactly, I hope so. However based on what Anet did so far, the chances are very low. Either there’s gonna be a stupid bug that allows you to join someone who does it for you (like SAB trib mode) or there’s gonna be a bug that allows you to cheeze it without any kind of difficulty (like Liadri lifesteal). Or they’re not gonna bother with a solo challenge at all (which is most likely), since this is the easiest and the most casual game that ever existed and they do what most people want from them -> zerg and spam AA to win.

@eldrin:
Buying runs is an unintended oversight and noone cares about it. The legendary armor was designed around people who play the game the intended way and actually do raids, rather than just paying someone else to carry them through. Of course you’re perfectly welcome to do so if you wish, but you have no right to complain about the expense since you’re abusing an oversight and not playing the game the way it was meant. Also you should prepare for the fact that you may have to pay a lot more, since it’s very likely that future steps of legendary armor crafting will require tasks that are way above your skill level. I don’t mean to belittle you or your skill, but the fact is legendary armor (at least this set) was not designed for people like you. Casual players are not meant to be able to obtain it and if you choose to go for it anyway, it will be very costly.

Harddrive.2738:

4 month time gate is very long, there is no reasonable justification why the average player shouldn’t be able to complete it in the minimum amount of time or moderately close to it.

Average player……. legendary armor…… gg mate, nice one.
Seriously WTF is everyone acting so entitled lately and thinks every player should have access to everything? If you cannot put in the required effort or don’t have enough skill, you don’t get the armor. It’s as simple as that.
If every scrub and their grandma have access to it, we may as well rename it to average armor, because there’s nothing legendary about something that average player can acquire.
I am already sick of people running around with legendaries and not even knowing how to play. Tying legendary armor to raids was the best idea, only thing I’m missing is a personal skill check (because you can buy runs from other people or simply get carried).

Dinosaurs.8674:

Best advice I can give you based on this info is to run a 4-4-2 comp with groups:

Group 1: Druid, Ele, Ele/Necro, Warrior
Group 2: Druid, Ele, Ele/Necro, Warrior
Group 3: Chrono, Rev

+1 to this, we tried this exact comp last week and it worked very well.

Given that every dungeon/FotM run takes a few minutes at most AND usually takes advantage of double portal via mimic, I can hardly see this item “replacing” mesmers in any way. Not to mention mesmers have alacrtiy – which still is AFAIK entirely exclusive to them, ability to maintain perma quickness for 6-7 people and perma (or almost perma) block/evade for itself. That class still has perfectly enough unique flavor, possibly even too much.

Also, since the suggested QoL change would hardly do any gamebreaking or give any sort of advantage (portals are mostly used to help out newbies unable to get to a place), this would only promote friendly play and I think is very reasonable thing to ask for. +1000 to OP, agreed on every point. Not to mention that very high price needs to be justified somehow.

Have you ever played any other game? Nobody gave you promise to spoon feed you every little piece of info you might need, in most games people have to figure stuff out on their own. Developers did just fine (maybe even too much if you ask me), it is YOU who has failed.

We already have 25-50 man raids, they’re called world bosses.
What it looks like: 99% of the people come to the event, don’t bother to dodge, don’t bother to CC, have no idea what to do, don’t do damage, wear full PTV/cleric gear, don’t waypoint after dying (which they do frequently despite being extremely tanky), don’t read chat, don’t split up where the mechanic encourages it, just zerg along with the commander and hope those 5 people, who actually prepared, will carry them through.

If anything, we need 1 man instanced content, where you’re not relying on other people/carrying newbies who don’t even say thanks. Pretty much everyone can confirm that rather than raids themselves, finding 9 competent players is much more challenging. I can’t imagine having to do that with 24 people (or worse yet – being automatically grouped up with them just like in open world).

When Anet announced “the ultimate challenging group content”, I felt like I was the only disappointed person in the world. Yes, I kinda enjoy raids, but if there’s something I would enjoy way more, it’s ultimate challegning solo content. There’s already plenty of group content, they could – for once – add some solo challenges.

I have no problem with the tonic being extremely rare. In fact, that’s probably the main reason why I want it so bad, otherwise I wouldn’t care.
But I think it’s stupid that some random number generator decides who gets it and who doesn’t. It should be awarded based on one’s performance in fractals and the amount of successful runs. They should create challenges (mainly solo) and set a super high amount of runs you have to do, but then you’d be guaranteed to get one. If the difficulty is set properly, the same percentage of players would be able to get it, so it would maintain its value, but it would be awarded to players who deserved it rather than just being lucky…

Just a flesh wound.3589:

Does anyone know if the way to void jump to the top of the Priory mountain was patched out? There was a really long glide across the map if you got up there.

You can still get under the map, but you have to be at a very specific spot when you relog, otherwise you’ll end up only close to the top and slide down. I tried it like twice but didn’t get it right, you have to be very precise with your positioning. But yeah, it’s possible.

Vinceman.4572:

Not rly. Have a closer look at the groups. Most often ppl still playing the real old zerker stuff – here in EU. There are also enough groups with Reapers in it but it’s fun to see players still not adapting. It’s fine for me and it shows – like I already wrote – that ppl have no problems with retal on bosses – not even in pugs. So I think the whole discussion is a lil bit exaggerated.

That’s not what I was talking about. Yeah, I play zerk on most of my classes as well. This is because I dungeon mostly and it’s not worthwhile for me to make an extra set of armor/weapons/trinkets on all of my classes. Zerk might not be as efficient as condi in really high levels, but it’s not bad either. What I was saying, is that people happily welcome condi classes if they happen upon them. And zerkers play alongside condi in high levels.
Also infusing all your equipment up to 150 can be a bit difficult, especially for newer players, which is why I don’t exclude anyone from FotM runs. Zerk, condi, reapers, guardians, everything is fine as long as the person plays decently and is willing to change his build if he’s asked to. And yeah, you’re right, this discussion is probably a bit exaggerated. I think most people feel like I do and won’t exclude guardians from FotM unless they’re really really bad and stubborn about their build/playstyle.

someguy.4298:

I did it again and someone disconnected. Is there something about this mission that causes disconnects? I feel I should just look for someone to buy the run.

My info might not be entirely up-to-date, but cutscenes, especially HoT ones, used to cause a lot of disconnects. So basically all story missions are a dangerous thing.
I feel your pain, having someone DC at migraine can… well… cause a pretty big migraine. Back when we were doing it, I DCed myself and had to do it some other time. The other 4 were able to finish it however, so it’s definitely possible. It would be nice though if Anet allowed people to log back into story instances (especially if the connection messes up at Anet’s end and not yours), I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t break anything.

Vinceman.4572:

I see dozens of guards/dh in the lfg and the groups are all asking “meta zerk”, " exp zerker" and more and almost no “condi”. Seems to me that only a few players have issues with guardians and/or higher fractal scalings.

Most people use “zerk” as a general term for any fully offensive stat set that’s meta. Condi gear for condi classes, zerk or assassin for power classes. For really low levels and dungeons, condi is kinda usless, but in high levels condi classes are gonna be accepted just as happily by “zerk only” groups as any zerk player.

Azoqu.8917:

I, personally, would be all up for allowing people who don’t raid to get Legendary armor/other raid rewards assuming there was a step that was shared between the two that was a test of personal skill. The reason for this is that the rewards would be a mark of “this player is this good” and not just a gold grind fest like everything else in the game. The only way to accomplish this is to have the players do a task in a solo instance, eg. soloing Lupi with no one else in your group. Truthfully I really hope that Legendary armor has this requirement in a future collection for it to stop all the fat cats who have bought raid runs from ruining the prestige that a legendary should have.

Absolutely agreed. Too bad this won’t happen, for two reasons:
1) It would require Anet to actually do something. They would need to produce content that allows this + fix bugs like lupi oneshot. I haven’t seen them fix a major gamebreaking bug related to dungeons in the last 2 years.
2) Based on how people tend to speak in general discussion + judging the game’s audience as a whole, nobody would want that. People keep whining and crying how hard the game is (despite it being extremely easy and casual) which eventually leads the devs to dumbing down the content. Also, the reward structure is based on communism and is specifically designed to punish elite players and skilled play. Even if you perform extremely poorly and contribute next to nothing, you’ll get full rewards just like the good people, who essentially carried the whole group through.

Here’s my prediction:
For a while, legendary armor will be raid exclusive because Anet will be lazy to create more content. They’ll just stick with that they’ve prepared already. After a few months of bad people QQing on forums and reddit, they will decide to dumb in down and make it so trivial that everybody and their momma will be able to acquire legendary armor with literally zero effort.

Do you know why there’s elitism and exclusion in this game? Because of the poor reward structure that doesn’t measure contribution or reward skilled play. If I got some extra rewards that would compensate for the insane time loss, I’d be more than willing to take things slowly and carry a newbie through a dungeon or a raid. But the game, as it is now, will give me nothing, even if I do 90% of the work myself. Why would I care then? Especially since in most cases these people won’t even listen to you/cooperate in any way. I’ve been doing this for some time, but after a while you start to feel so extremely punished by the game for trying to help that you just stop doing it. Zero reward for carrying someone through, so why in the world would I wanna do that?

Artemis Thuras.8795:

Vagrant.7206:

I’ve seen retaliation wipe a skilled team in less than five seconds,

Just gonna point out, this is an oxymoron.

So you basically said DnT has no skill. GG mate, WP.