Guild Wars 2

ZudetGambeous.9573:

Additionally make sure you go in with the correct expectations. Raids are this game’s form of challenging group content. Dungeons are extreme casual content. You will not clear the first boss on the first attempt like you can in dungeons. You should expect 3-10 hours of learning the mechanics before downing each boss depending on the groups skill level. That is 3-10 hours for each individual person. If you lose a member and pick up a brand new person with 0 experience then your group is unlikely to succeed until that new person has 3 hours of experience.

Yes this is important. I had almost the same group of 10 people and it took us about 10 hours before our first VG kill. It take a lot of practice for some people. Now he’s is so easy, but take a lot of practice at first.

It really depend on your, but for mai trin 100 I would take some condi cleanse just in case.

People really have problems understanding the principle of RNG. This is becoming ridiculous.

No you can’t pull mai train. The goal is to cc her when she’s already in the lightning field so she’s stun and stay there.

In theory the build you link is one of the best. That said if you gonna pug mai trin level 100 you may have some problem with sticking in melee for all fight. Make sure you bring either a Longbow or a Scepter. Personnally, I prefer scepter in that fight for the focus. The Focus 5 is perfect to rez down people without dying yourself.

As far as tactics goes. Your first priority is to stay alive and to rez people that down before they die. After that you want to make sure you rip those stack asap. She does her lighting field every 2 or 3 shot so count them and when Horrik is ready to shoot the lighting all stack on mai trin so horrik shoot on her, then cc her so she stay. If you are doing it right you should remove all stack in 2 or 3 shoots. Finally, after she’s out of stack CC her as much as you can when the breakbar is up. That’s stun her so your team receive less damage and have an easier time melee her. And it increase the damage of your team a bit. I also like to time my Shield of Courage right when you get out of stun when all the team is in melee so we can melee her a bit more time without any damage.

In the last phase concentrate on the alts and then finish her.

- Silverwaste : Been a long time but you want to do chest farm (don’t know if it work as well now), breach and VW. There is also the labyrinth and the champion after VW which can give good money. Running around doing event is only when you need bandit crest for like chest key or stuff like that.

- Dungeon : Low level dungeon even after HoT could give you 10 gold/hour+ with all the low material. Now I think their price dropped, but Anet boosted the gold reward so it’s still good money. Especially now since it’s easy to explode them with a decent team. Aetherpath give you 100% chance of a weapon which can sell between 3 and 30 gold, but the price will continue to drop so it will eventually sell like any exotic.

- Fractal 40. You can farm the fractal 40. It’s probably one of the best legit source of gold in the game outside of the TP. You just do it over and over again. I suggest you to bring as much karma buff as possible there. You can latter transform the karma into gold.

- Gathering Iron and Platinum are easy to get, several of the rich vein are permanent. The wood also can sell for a lot right now because of the legendary fractal back item.

Zalani.9827:

I also still remember how said kind of people treated Rangers at the start of Gw2 with dungeons/groups

I understand that some people can be jerk, but it wouldn’t happen if Anet didn’t do a bad job at balancing their profession. Ranger and Necro used to be a joke in PvE and now they are both part of most raid party.

Firestorm is one of the skill of your Fiery GS, while Glyph of Storm is a utility. I didn’t listed it twice, they are different skill which do similar thing.

You can pick up different skill if you want. I’m not an expert on condi tempest tbh, but from the works of Wooden Potatoes and Particular the skills that I talked about are the best if you want the highest dps you can on a condi tempest. Of course maybe there is other ways to play condi tempest which have less dps in static fight, but could have better dps against moving target. Something that would need to be tested.

And yes VG is the only raid boss that require condi. Not the only boss where condi build can do a good job.

Btw you linked a weird guardian build there. I don’t know what it have to do with condi tempest.

Well all profession are good in PvE. It depend if they fit you. They are ranked in term of dps capability of their highest dps build. At least as far as I know, thing change over time as new information and test become more public. Keep in mind that I’ll talk about the meta builds of each profession. Alternate ways of playing each profession exist that are not meta, but can still be good.

- Elementalist : Biggest dps, squishy.

- Thief : Second highest dps, squishy, but have more dodge and movement skill. Good utilities in dungeon and fractal (most Stealth), but not really for raids.

- Engineer : High condi dps, Jack-of-all-trades, master of nones. Highly adaptable. Hard to master.

- Herald : Average dps, decent buffer. His buffing capability become great with a Chronomancer in a Raid party.

- Guardian : Average dps, defensive support.

- Reaper : Average/low dps, but a lot of situational tricks can be use to have high dps.

- Warrior, Mesmer and Druid : All have low dps, but high buffing capability. And the druid can heal as well.

Pick whatever you like the most really. Ideally, pick a profession that fit your need in their meta or near meta build. They will perform better than if you try to fit a profession in a role they are not really good at. That said, some non meta build can do a great job. Especially in open world, dungeon and low level fractal, where it’s not that important.

Ven Zehn.6573:

With ele, most of your condi comes from burns, and most burn abilities are on target, so moving targets matters less.
Moving targets affect power eles more I think (Lava Font and MS).

So, is condi war kind of pointless then at this point? Trying to decide if I keep my war’s condi set, or move stuff to my ele.

You are wrong. Flamewall, Glyph of Storms, Burning Speed, Fiery Eruption and Firestorm are all static attack. I’m not saying that Staff ele isn’t affected a lot by moving target, but condi tempest are affected even more because. Several of those attack have long cooldown are in line and not in circle.

As for condi Warrior. There is really no reason right now to use it. It have about the same dps as a PS Warrior, while bringing less buff. That said, it still have correct dps so it can still do the job in Fractal and Dungeon if you already have. But I wouldn’t gear one right now. They overnerfed it a bit, it should get a 20-30% buff to his dps to get around the same dps of a guardian. It shouldn’t be higher because a condi warrior still bring some buffs, but it shouldn’t be lower because it doesn’t bring as much buffs as the other profession like Druids, Mesmer and PS Warrior.

reikken.4961:

yo, just a heads up
I did a dps test with a much-less-than-optimally-geared condi ele and got 32k dps
so ele is still top dps even if you go condi with it.

edit: This was against the large size golem, though. All ele builds benefit from increased hitbox size.

Also condi elementalist is probably one of the build the most affected by moving target since a lot of the attacks are static like your fields. Would be interesting to test the same build with a moving golem.

ButterPeanut.9746:

Did you see the math at the end? It ends up around 31k.

I went in as a solo player and did two tests:
1. No venoms
2. Using venoms

Then I subtracted the difference between the two. This should account for the damage from 1 instance of the venoms. (RNG aside with crits and such)

Then I multiplied that difference by 5 in order to account for the venoms being shared to 5 people. That ended up being around 15k DPS just the venoms. Then I added the “venomshare” damage to the baseline with no venoms. This ended up around 31k which is right where engi is.

Obviously this is a vacuum test where you have every buff, but so were the tests for condi engi. Reaper is probably the only class where the DPS could be much better than in this arena because you can’t keep your minions up as long (at least solo) and you can’t epidemic bounce.

Ya saw it after. Around 31k sound about right. That would put the Condi Thief right between the Tempest D/W and the Condi Engineer in the dps ranking. Would be nice to have a video of test with Normal Buff like qt.

Ok butter tell me if I have something wrong. You tested with full buff and you got at max about 20.9k dps right? It would have been higher with 4 other players using your venomshare, something that would be interesting to test.

But if you compare that to other profession with full buff you get

Reaper : 23.5k
Engie : 31k

For the reaper the number could be higher with a druid to keep horror alive, longer fight for more horrors, epidemic bounce, etc. While the engineer could be lower with someone not as good with the rotation.

That said, it seem that condi Thief have lower dps than I was hoping. But maybe I didn’t saw something. I hope because if I didn’t condi thief seem be equal in dps to a Druid Condi Healer.

TheRandomGuy.7246:

How many people are actually flat out against easy mode or difficulty settings in general? Looks like you are confusing people who are against your “ohoni mode” and people who are against “easy mode”.

So much. He just stall the conversion on the ridiculous point that an easy mode should give the exact same reward. This doesn’t help to push the conversation forward at all, which is a shame.

Engineer have the highest dps in Viper, but it’s really hard to reach that dps because of the ’’complexe’’ rotation. It also have a lot of quality of life which make fight easier, but don’t really bring utility vital for raid. We used to have slick shoes, but that’s over. That’s why, even if it’s a good choice, it’s not really that popular.

Reaper is the most popular condi in raid currently. When you test it, it will have a recently low dps compare to other profession, but there is a lot of little tricks that the reaper can do to boost his dps. For exemple, a healer can keep his jagged horror alive longer, the longer the fight the more horrors he can spawn, reaper is godly against adds, if you have 2 reapers you can bounce epidemic, you can take condi from your team and give them to the boss, etc. All of those trick are hard to test out, but boost the dps of the reaper significantly against some boss like Gorseval, Sabetha, Trio Bandits and Slothazor.

You also have Druids. The condition version of Druid is probably the best build for druids in raid, but it’s mostly for good groups or when you have 2 Druids in your group. Most pugs or less skilled group will prefer you to camp Staff or have some healing power, which is better in power version. Mostly because a Druid doesn’t have much dps anyway, so why not focus on healing and make the job of the rest of your team easier.

You also have other options, but they are not that popular. Elementalist have decent dps compare to other condi, but why use condi on Elementalist when the power version is the best dps of the game. The condi ele is also higly dependent on static attack so moving target drop his dps significantly. I heard of condi thief, but I don’t have solid numbers on it so I’m not sure.

If you want a steady place in pug, definitively Reaper. That’s a good choice and it’s popular, meaning people will want you.

Sean Hughes.2487:

Thaddeus.4891:

Still, I think they could have implemented better system that allow us to choose and to not push people to only do swamp.

It was actually intentional that you would not be able to choose the daily Fractals. We want to reward players for playing all of the different Fractals, not just for playing a couple of them over and over again.

Oh that’s for sure. The worst possible outcome is when the best option for the players is to do the same couple of fractal over and over again.

But that doesn’t exclude allowing ppl to choose what they want to do either. I mean dungeon did it greatly.

Pre-hot most dungeon had a similar reward vs challenge vs time ratio. Out of the 25 dungeon path, only a couple of them were not popular. We could choose which one we wanted to do and we didn’t have only 1 or 2 dungeon that everybody runned. About 10 of these path were view as more profitable, but they weren’t so much more shorter or more rewarding that we only did these one. It wasn’t uncommon for groups to do 15 or 20 out of the 25 some days.

And with the last patch a portion of the reward from dungeon come from the achievement that push people to play at least 8 different dungeon path.

That the kind of stuff that would be ideal for fractal. Incentive doing different fractal, but still leaving us the choice of which one we want to do.

30min for a speed run.

60min with no wipe.

90min with your average good group with a couple of wipe.

But all of that need a good group. You could still end up in a group playing 2 hours and not killing any boss.

I don’t think this new system is really great either. I mean it’s 200% time better than the system we used to have. We random fractal is better than 3 swamp. After all, when fractal started it was swamp, random, random and it was good.

Still, I think they could have implemented better system that allow us to choose and to not push people to only do swamp.

PyrateSilly.4710:

Expansion – get the stuff that comes with it
no expansion – no extra stuff

How is this hard to understand when all games that have expansions do this? What would be the purpose of having an expansion in an MMO if you did not have this?

You would be right, but Anet did some jerk move with HoT. And to follow your deal, Anet removed some of the core game and put it behind HoT, How is this hard to understand?

- The vast majority of the guild stuff that was available pre-hot isn’t anymore. Banners, Buff, guild bank, etc. All of that could be unlocked and use pre-hot and you can’t access it now if you don’t have HoT.

- We used to have good ascended drop in fractal 50, 40 and 30. Now you need to reach higher level of fractal to get the good reward. Now even counting that the pre-hot level 50 is more similar to level 80-90 post-hot in term of difficulty. Without HoT you can only reach level 76 unless you pay a lot of gold to get some +12 or higher. With mean that you get less reward and can access less challenging content now that you could pre-hot.

- Elite spec are straight up boost for most if not all profession, especially in PvP. Pre-hot you could find a way to play one of the best build. Post-HoT you systematically can’t if you don’t have HoT. There is a difference between adding elite spec as different playstyle for all profession, with some of them being better than normal, some being equal and some being less good than core profession, but there is a problem when all of them are just simply better in all modes.

Not having access to new content when you don’t buy an expansion is normal. Losing content and having limited access to the old content because you didn’t buy an expansion is not normal.

No you just play with Agony Resistance all the time. They are useless, but don’t hurt you either.

You could replace the AR infusion with +5 stats infusion, but that would only give you like 70 more stats points, which is not really high. Most people don’t bother and keep their AR infusion all the time.

khani.4786:

Yes, because you get 100% uptime of all of those boons and class buffs in raids.

The goal to have a standardized setup so we can single out variable and compare orange to orange. It’s a comparison tools, which have it’s used even if it can’t do everything.

The goal here is not to see what is your actual dps in fight, but to compare your efficiency in your rotation and to compare the dps of different build. If you can’t fix the amount of buff so that they don’t vary then you can’t isolate the 2 variables I talked about (build and rotation). You wouldn’t know if you had a better dps because you are better at your rotation or because you were lucky and had better buff that time.

That said, it would be nice to give realistic buff, for exemple give a like 50% updtime to alacrity. But I think it would be just too difficult to set up and it would give more variable, making it hard again to compare build and rotation.

Well the time vs reward ratio is highly dependant on your team. In speed run, some team can complete a wing in about 30min, but a normal good team can complete it in between 60 and 90min. Just take a look at the magnetite shards. If you can complete a wing in 1 hour, it mean you can get 100 shards in 2 hours, so you will need 20 hours to get 1000 shards that you can use to buy and sell a Ghostly Infusion for about 400 gold of profit. Meaning that just with shards, you get a reward of 20 gold per hours with a good team. Which is more than most content and it doesn’t even count the reward gold reward or the loots. You probably can reach about 30 gold per hours. The problem is that you don’t get much reward each time you play it. Most reward are either RNG (loots) or after a lot of kills (buying with shards). So raid can feel not really rewarding.

Also, it can become really unrewarding when you start to pug or have a bad team. Not uncommon to have a team spending 3 hours and only killing 2 of the 3 bosses, which can make drastic cut into your time vs reward ratio.

That said, there isn’t much change to the reward since launch of raids. They added the possibility to sell back double of reward like Minis for shards and the first wing give less reward in gold and xp now, but they announced that before raid were even introduced so it’s not news.

Jesus people, can’t we wait at least a couple of days so we actually know the droprate before we start to complain about it?? You didn’t searched much if you didn’t found the 2-3 post about it already.

In the AMA that you can see on dulfy Anet say this : ‘’Ascended drops were actually increased significantly in the 26-50 range, and while they’re slightly lower in the 51-75 range, the addition of the 76-100 tier means the overall chance of getting Ascended from your dailies is a lot better!’’

Now we gonna have to wait a couple of days or weeks before we start to see a picture, then we gonna have 2 thousands post complain about RNG and people responding that RNG is RNG. Then people will complain that they did 10 daily and no ascended. Then a bunch of people will tell them that they did 10 daily and got 200 ascended drops. Then we gonna link to KINGS spreasheet with actual numbers. Then we people will tell that these don’t have high enough sample size to be representative, but somehow anecdotal evidence of people complaining on the forum have a bigger weight. Then we gonna end up saying that if we want a good sample size we gonna need to wait like 6 months and by that time, fractal drop would have probably change again so this all trip gonna start again.

Yippi.

Ya the Cliffside fractal is a lot better. I did Cliffside 82 and I find it a bit too easy. I mean, we downed a couple of time as we tried to learn his attack (it was our first fractal in a long time). It was a lot more fun, but his new attack where telegraphed a bit too much if you ask me. But like I said, overall a lot better than it used to be.

So far, the bossed don’t seem to be too long to kill. Keep in mind that most people only have 1 character with 150 AR so pug and even most guild run don’t have a great composition. We ran with 2 Warrior, 1 Guardian, 1 Thief and 1 Herald. With a Warrior, Chrono, Druid, 2 Ele party it would have been a lot faster.

Probably been nerfed since you get a lot more chest. They at least divided the odds by 3 just to keep it at the same level than before the patch. Maybe they divided by less to improve the odds, or maybe they divided it by a bit more since we got 12 chest if you do the tier 4. I guess that KINGS will start to put data on their spreadsheet, we’ll have a better idea in a couple of weeks. I didn’t got any ascended last daily, but my friends got some.

It’s just too soon to judge.

When you turn on your commander tag you automatically form a standard 50 man Squad. To enter the Test area you need to swap it to a 10 man Raid squad. You can swap it by pressing the small arrow next to the commander tag icon on the top left of your screen. See right next to it’s 1/50 and it should be 1/10.

It’s the exact same thing with raid.

Vukorep.3081:

i never understood the need of a dps meter in this game. And the only places i ever kept hearing about it is on youtube. It all started when 1 youtuber (who is missing for months now) made a 3 parts very long videos about how the min/max dps burst zerker meta is wrong and fake, and later on another youtube started using those 3rd party dps meters on raids and fractals and what not.

honestly is it really that important? If you want to deal lots of dmg learn your encounter and rotation. Add power/precision stats and stack might/quickness with party. Who cares if youre missing 2 might stacks or have 5% less stats cause youre missing a ascended boot and glove…

oh and lets not forget about how people arent bothered with a dps meter when it comes to encountering a herd of moa while exploring the world, comparing dps as you lvl up or underwater dps or any other 90% of the content that isnt raids, dungeons and a few fractal bosses..

It’s not because you don’t find it interesting that other people won’t find it interesting. Here a lit of reason why I wanted such a thing.

1) Calculating DPS is hard. It used to be with math, now we have some half decent 3rd party meter, but they screenshot so error might occur. This mean that information about the dps capacity of certain build are hard to find since not much people are testing or post those information. This end up with pretty much zero information about the strenght of build other than the meta, so we rarely know if what is the 2nd best build and if it’s 2% less dps or 30% less dps than the meta. Sometime the meta changed and nobody test it for several month, this happened with Hammer Guardian when raid appeared. Plenty of cool build are not properly tested like Condi Thief.

With this kind of testing space, more people will have an easy time testing the max dps of their build, making it easier to inform the community about the actual strength of different build, which will push for more diversity.

2) It will take into account your individual skill. The max dps of a build isn’t necessarily the dps that individual will have. The rotation and buff will differ from group to group and so is the ranking of different build. If we are able to test thing for ourself it will be easier to figure out on which build you perform the best, even if it’s not the meta.

3) It’s a self improvement tool. It will allow you to see what is your output depending on different rotation allowing you to improve yourself if you want.

4) Eye opener for a lot of people. No need to try to improve yourself if you think you are doing a good job. For a lot of people it will be a shock to see how little dps they are doing even with a meta build because they don’t play properly to max their dps. And for some people that will push them to improve themselves. A motivation they didn’t had when they didn’t know what was their dps.

You may not find those attractive, but a lot of people do.

Dinosaurs.8674:

Even taking your numbers, if you add all those up that’s an ascended armor set every 18 days on average. And that’s not even counting random drops from raids, open world, and champ bags, and it ignores the fact that if you use your shards and gold efficiently you can get a much better return than what you’re assuming. I said that the devaluing of ascended armor was a smaller issue and I meant it, but this is supposed to be the endgame armor, and you can’t really think that an armor set every 18 days is unfair.

No I don’t think it’s unfair and it was never my point either. My only point is that it’s stupid that completing the 3 wings once will give us 150, but that the cap is 100, meaning that 1 wing of the 3 (the last one you will do) will always give you zero shards. That’s all. They could fix that by putting the cap to 150 or they could limit the drop from boss to around 10 shards, and buff the daily reward to compensate, I don’t really mind. I just don’t to keep the current system, because the raid reward just down grade more and more over time. With the wing 1 gold reward in half and wing 2 that will follow in some months, with most raider having full ascended on most of their character, having already most minis and now one of the wing will give you no shard?

I’m relatively ok with the initial reward of the first wing, but as time by, we get less and less reward.

Dinosaurs.8674:

There are other smaller issues such as devaluing ascended items, or making them so easy to get that very pew people would ever craft them. But the biggest problem with using the shard cap to incentivize multiple clears is that once people hit the new cap they just go back to the same point they were at before – capped out on shards and having no incentive to raid. What would be better is a system that continues to give a decent reward no matter how many times you have cleared. This is actually what we have right now – all clears after the first give the same number of bags of gear and utility backpacks every time. You can question whether this is an adequate reward, but the way it was implemented isn’t bad at all.

And let’s be fair here, if you say the reward for a boss clear should be 1-2 gold then we’re already there, because bags of gear are worth about 20s each (or at least they were last time we checked with a mass opening), and utility backpacks are probably something like 5-10s on average, even discounting the fact that they can (rarely) give ascended boxes. If you clear sabetha and the trash before her you will get what? 7 bags of gear and 3 utility backpacks? which is worth about 1.5g per run. That isn’t horrible, considering an experienced group could easily clear sabetha + trash in under 10 minutes. I mean it isn’t something people are going to farm, but it isn’t god awful

I disagree with your first point. The best groups are able to complete a wing in about 60min, but most normal groups will do it between 1.5 and 2 hours.

To get a full armor

- Raid : 26-52 hours, 13 weeks (Drops can drop these numbers, highly dependent on your group)
- Crafting : 27.5-55 hours, 36 days
- Fractal : average of 27 hours, 8 weeks (RNG can make that vary)

Raid is not a particularly a good way to make ascended armor. Whatever the cap you will put, it will still take the same amount of work to get it, it will just reduce the time gate. Only really good group will be able to get an armor in 26 hours and most of them doesn’t really look for an ascended armor anyway. Most group will still need 52+ hours to get an armor. My point is that you have a lot of room to increase the cap before it can possibly have the effect you talk about.

Your second point have the same problem. When the 3rd wing will hit, just doing once each wing will give you 150 shards in theory (probably around 170 with the guild buff). So until the cap is higher than 150-170, then the problem of incentive grinding won’t exist. It’s just if we go higher than 150-170 that this start to be a thing (when the 3rd wing hit I mean).

For the bags thing, I didn’t really saw it. I mean, I know that I got some bags, but I never really looked at them. We would need to see how much bags you get by doing the complete wing to see how much gold per hour you can make.

DGraves.3720:

Content Gate. You don’t do Raids? No Legendary Armor.

You don’t do SAB? No Super weapons skin.

You don’t do Fractal?. No Ad Infinitum, or fractal weapons.

You don’t do PvP?. No glorious armor, no Ascension.

You don’t do dungeon, WvW or Open World? No Legendary weapons.

You don’t do HoT maps? No new Legendary weapons.

What are the difference between all of this? If there isn’t then should to do something about everything that is exclusive to one content? Is two content enough? Or is it different because it’s raid? And if so, why?

Absurdo.8309:

If you looked at my solution, I buffed the weekly boss reward to balance the less of shard. Increasing the shard cap won’t fix the issue either since just doing the 3 wings once will reach the cap anyway. You would need to increase the cap to like 200 or more to incentive to run repeat run, which start to be a little too much according to some people.

I would be happy either way. Personnally, I prefer the shard reward, which allow you to buy what you want, than the RNG chance of dropping sometime nice or nothing.

Saudi.5320:

Well, we did only run this about an hour and it was pug group. We had some bad rng with blue circles, with some spawning on green circles. Usually, we had a hard time with the green circles in third phase and them spawning across from where everyone was. Gorseval is much easier imo. Did with that with another group and had like half our buff times left. Only wiped a couple times because people fell off.

It’s not RNG. He spawn like 4 blue circle during the first 2 phase and 6 during the last phase. He spawn them on the alive player that are the closest to him. If the melee group stay in position, the only time this might be an issue would be when the green circle spawn on the boss or during the later phase when people are down or dead.

The green circle team should concentrate on the green circle and position themselves to be able to reach any green circle.

Doubt that a Tempest in maurauder will do more dps than a Guardian, a Thief or another Tempest in zerker gear.

practice, practice, practice. It took about 10 hours for my group to kill the VG the first time. Forget about the dps and focus on the mechanics. You need to know all of them completely. When we bring new people, I often tell them that they can remove their weapons completely just to show them that the important part is the mechanics. No need to do a bit more dps, if your green circle team doesn’t do it’s job or the tank is to slow and the entire team wipe. You’ll see, VG is actually super easy once everybody learned the mechanics and keep concentrate. The hard part is to find a team that is at the same level as you. It can be frustrating to wipe because 1 or 2 people are less experienced than everybody else.

Something between

Condition Damage : 1326
Precision : 789
Expertise : 405
Power : 132

And

Condition Damage : 1326
Expertise : 750
Precision : 444
Power : 132

Depending on which profession and setup. The idea would be to reach 100% condition duration with maximum condition damage, minimum power as possible and the remaining as precision.

TPMN.1483:

I have a solution :
Award less shards
On any boss:
Max for Phase 1: 1 shard
Max for phase 2: 2 shards
Max for phase 3: 3 shards…

Boss Kill: 10 shards.

Simple, very easy to understand – cant be too hard to implement either.
I think we get too many shards atm.

That’s my solution too, but they should introduce it with the 3rd wing, and implement some buff to the weekly boss kill reward. Because right now, the overall reward isn’t that great. The initial reward for raid were good, but over time it decreased. XP is useless for most people now and with half the reward in the first wing, the reward isn’t good enough anymore. They should keep the gold reward equal for all wing and not reduce it when a new wing appear. There is already enough incentive to do the new wing without that tbh. It’s new content that people are happy to try and learn after all.

ZudetGambeous.9573:

With the ability to sell mini and salvage ascended gear, and with the increase from 3 boss chests to 6 boss chests, the shard cap was effectively raised from 100 to 150. It is very rare to kill all 6 bosses and not get a single mini or ascended drop. Once we have 9 bosses the effective cap will raise even further to roughly 175 shards a week on average.

This seems reasonable to me. If they raise the cap too high then people will be able to get all the skins they want in just a few months, leaving raiding content dead for newer players. The intent was to keep raids relevant for years, meaning they must enforce a low cap in order to keep people coming back.

No i don’t think you get the point. The point isn’t that we don’t get enough shard per week. The point is that with the guild buff you receive about 50 shard per wing without selling anything. So when the 3rd wing will arrive, just by doing the 3 wing normally, you will get about 150 shards, but you will only receive 100 of those. The first 2 wings you will do will give you more reward than the 3rd one you will do each week. It’s just a weird and bad system. You shouldn’t hit the cap by doing each boss only once per week.

It’s like if you wouldn’t receive any fractal relic on the 3rd fractal of your daily.

Rising Dusk.2408:

NovaanVerdiano.6174:

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

Bingo.

But it won’t fix the problem that I was talking about. Even if they boost the reward from the boss kill, you will still get shard for only 2 or the 3 wings. The last wing you will do each week will still be the least rewarding. But like I said there could be numerous solution.

- They could increase the cap to 150 with the 3rd wing. No grind involve since you get about 50 shard per wing if you do it only once.

- They could boost the reward from boss and drop the amount of shard, either by removing the guild buff that boost your amount of shard, or just straight nerfing the amount of shard to about 10 per boss so you get around 90-100 shard per week while doing all 3 wings.

But just buffing the reward from boss just fix the amount of reward you get, it doesn’t fix the fact that you will receive part of your reward (the shard part) only for 2 or the 3 wings in the current system.

Scipion.7548:

Ok maybe this it wasnt the best example, but those classes have just 2 roles, compared to 4 if a clear holy quatuor power/condi/tank/healer was established.

How many roles an engie can perform in raid today ? a necro ? a guardian ? a rev ? a warrior ? a thief ?

There are different roles in a raid group and for each of these roles are different possible classes/builds to fill them.

You said this because you want “trinity”. But trinity (or quatuor if we add condi) isnt exactly that ?

You are right that the the game need more build. We should be able to bring a Mesmer without being the chronomancer, we should be able to bring a power engineer, etc.

That said, the community itself limit itself. The community usually view build as either meta or garbage. A bunch of great build just get kicked out of raid even if they are more than potent enough for the fight.

You also have the problem of no personnal dps meter. I hear rumour about 24K condi thief build, but it’ hard to find out test about it, so is it true or false? Do we really don’t bring condi Thief just because we don’t have enough information about it or is it really bad dps? We did the same thing with guardian, seeing it as a average dps for the first few month of the raid before some guild started to test thing out and post video about it. But it’s a challenging task to do those test since we have zero way of showing the dps except with long math or 3rd party dps meter that isn’t always accurate and a lot of people fear to use.

That said, a diversity of build problem isn’t the same as the limitation impose by a rigid trinity. In a trinity game, you need to have tank, healer and dps. In GW2 you don’t have that limitation. You can bring 1 zealot druid as a healer, or 2 zerker Druid or 2 Viper Druid. You can have bosses likes sabetha or slothazor or matthias that doesn’t have a tank at all. The difference is also that raid is an content for organized group. It’s ok that you NEED to have a tank and a healer for certain boss because it’s an organized group, it’s new content and it’s 10 man.

I don’t want to need a tank and a healer in 5 man fractal. Right now I can do a fractal with any of my friend, with any composition, and I don’t have problem finding pugs because anyone can join. I don’t want to leave my guardian being, and craft put infusion into my druid because we need a healer in fractal and imagine the mess if we suddenly need healer and tank in a open world content?

Rising Dusk.2408:

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

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

I just don’t get you man. Shards is way more rewarding than the chance of loot at each boss. Like I said. Shards give you between 10 and 17gold per hour of reward, which is by far the biggest portion of your reward from raid, unless you are really lucky in your drops. And even if shard were just a small reward, the thing is you said it yourself. The current reward for raid is meh, but you are ok with 1 or the 3rd wing having less reward because of the cap. I just can’t understand your point of no giving a kitten about losing a big part of your reward for 1 of the 3rd wing.

MADPIEMAN.8023:

Ele seems to be most meta atm( but would be most time investment), I find druid fun and viper engi but I am not sure how guardian is for raids (how good is the hammer dps build?).

Ele, Druid and Guardian are you best bet. Engie is good, but not ideal. Guardian is excellent at Sabetha and Slothazor in particular, but it’s a great profession for all fights.

Rising Dusk.2408:

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

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

I mean, they don’t need to increase the cap, they can change the system a lot of ways. For exemple, they could decrease the amount of shards so that you receive like 10 shards per boss so you don’t hit the cap when you did all 3 wings, but buff the weekly reward from each boss. Or really any other solutions. But I just find it weird that you could complete all of their wing only once and still don’t get the normal reward.

Rising Dusk.2408:

Thaddeus.4891:

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

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

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

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

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

I was specifically talking about what you said ‘’People grind the raid multiple times just to hit the shard cap’’. Which is not really true. You can do just the first wing twice and hit the cap. You can do the 2 first wing once and hit the cap. Is that grinding the raid multiple times? No, so that specific sentence was a lie. Probably not because of bad intention, but probably by lack of experience in raid I suppose.

I can see your point about what anet want to do, but I disagree.

1) The shards are not the rewards, the once-per-week chests are. Maybe it was their intention, but it’s not what we see in the game. About half of the reward we get in the raid are the Shards. Just look at the ghosly infusion. It took about 2-3 hours to hit the weekly cap of 100 shards and in 10 weeks or between 20 and 30 hours to get enough shards to buy an infusion that you can sold for a profit of about 350 gold minimum. That’s between 11 and 17 gold per hours of raid just for the Shard alone, which is far more than all the remaining reward, especially for the first wing that give less reward now. Maybe they planned on shard behind a side reward, but in reality it’s probably the biggest reward.

2) Higher cap will push toward more grind. You are right, but like anything it’s about balance. A cap of 1 shard per week is obviously ridiculous and is a bad decision. No cap at all, would push people toward grinding raid, which is not really a great idea either. So the best stop is between those extremes. Like I said before, the cap right now don’t really have any problems since we only have 2 wings. A good team will reach the cap without really losing any shards just by completing the first 2 wings. The problems will appear when the 3rd wing will appear because now you will only get shards as a reward for 2 of those 3 wings. A lot of people will choose to play 2 of those 3 wings and forget about one of them because the reward isn’t great at all, especially for the first 2 wings which at that point will give less gold reward than the 3rd. On wing, the one that most people will consider a bit more complicated or longer to clear will have lot less traffic than the other 2. Why arbitrarily put a limit on the reward for 1 or the 3 wings? I don’t want super high cap so we grind the same raid 3-4 times per week, but I would still appreciation to have the full reward the first time per week I do each of the wings.

Again, this is not a problem for now, but it will be when the 3rd wing arrive.

Sird.4536:

@Thaddeus

The thing is that you don’t need anything special from any class, I guess that was what I was trying to get at. There was a 10 man guardian VG kill so it comes down to 10 people just knowing what they are doing. Every class brings something of course but as I always say skill > class. It’s a shame pugs see guardians as ‘bringing nothing special’.

Just to be sure and I’m sure I said it several times, but when I say bring nothing special, I mean that Guardian doesn’t bring something that the fight specifically need in which the guardian is the one of the best option. My group usually have a Guardian in most boss when we raid, but we won’t make sure we bring guardian in all boss. If we end up with a Guardian at gorseval I won’t care, but if we don’t have enough tempest at gorseval, I’ll probably ask a guardian to swap. But it will be the other way around for slothazor for exemple.

Astralporing.1957:

Yes. Precisely. That crowd turned out to be much smaller than Anet expected, which was a huge part in HoT general failure.

That’s exactly why they are now trying to make HoT zones more easily accessible, and why they are pushing their development powers towards LS (which is mainly content for casuals, not hardcores).

What crowd? Like all of my friends, I’m hardcore when it come to the challenge, but not when it come to the accessibility. Challenge is nice, it’s entertaining. Difficulty in accessibility is not. The crowd that like the raid and are hardcore also want HoT maps to be more casual and accessible. Keep in mind, most of us play the game way before raid were introduced. We like the casual nature of the game, we just wanted a tiny bit of challenge in our game and we got it.

Sird.4536:

@Thaddeus I cannot agree with that half of what you said.

Doesn’t bring anything to VG, your f3 block can negate the blue circles during phase one not just for yourself but anyone standing in it. You can cc the seekers so others don’t have to which saves cc for when there is a seeker near a green circle or the cc bar.

Gorseval moves to much? His AI was fixed so he doesn’t move outside of when you take him to the wall and when he teleports to the middle to start cc phase. The adds during the split move sure but as I said test of faith will rip the adds to pieces.

Bandit camp there isn’t much to do for most classes. The only requirement I see is having 3 necros and then let the environmental effects kill the bosses.

Unless you have a really good Mesmer that never dies or never forgets a reflect you will need a guardian for a back up reflect. The cc we bring is also valuable, the amount of times I have had to use my signet or f1 pull for that last bit of cc is to much for me to count. Protection will also save people from he haduken attack and aegis blocks time bomb.

VG : Can you go read my post again pls. I said, that guardian doesn’t bring something -special to the fight. I didn’t say that he bring nothing. It’s a good choice, but there is no particular reason to bring a guardian to this fight over another profession. What you said is true, but it’s not the only profession that can make them and it’s not the best option either. I can just press ’’S’’ on my keyboard and get out of the blue circle, a engineer can do a better job against seeker, etc.

Gorseval : Again can you please read my post again. I specifically talked about the agro fix, saying that the problem is not as important now, but he still move between the wall and the center. Which is true. The fact is that Gorseval move more than sabetha. The Guardian is the 3rd best dps against sabetha, it’s not as good dps wise against Gorseval.

Bandit Camp : Jesus man, again. Where did I said, it’s a bad option. I said what where the strength of the profession was and that’s it. The fact that not a lot of profession have particular strength for this boss doesn’t change the fact that the guardian doesn’t have any particular strength for this boss.

Do you understand the difference between a profession that is able to do a task and a profession that excel in that task? For exemple, at slothazor the guardian reflect is better than the Feedback of the Mesmer. By saying that fact does this mean that I’m saying that Mesmer Feedback is bad and should be used? No.

By saying that Mesmer Feedback is a better reflect than the Guardian wall at Matthias doesn’t mean that a Guardian reflect is useless neither.

If the discussion is about what profession can do, the answer is simple. Pretty much every profession can do almost anything in a fight and you can complete all boss with almost any composition of any profession. But don’t you think this discussion is a bit pointless? Yes you can bring a Guardian in any fight and it will be able to do part of the job.

I was only saying what are the strength of the Guardian, where is excel, where it,s the best. Where you want specifically a Guardian over another profession. I wasn’t talking where a Guardian can do something in a fight where pretty much any profession can do the same.

Matti.2719:

Is healing needed in high level fractals? Or are rangers needed for dps in both fractals and raids or is the ele a lot better in that departmant. If so then i think it would be better go pick ele or chrono and let the druid be. I don’t like getting multiple armor sets (one for healing, the other one for damage) and rather just stick to one set ot stats for both type of instances.

No healing is need need for high level Fractal. It can help for sure. A run with a healer is easier, but might be longer.

The strength of the Druid is that he can do the job of a Healer and Buffer without sacrificing much DPS. The condition Druid is not the best dps, but it still buff the party with Grace of the Land, Spirit and Spotter, while doing decent dps in Viper/Sinister Gear. It’s not a lot of healing, but still a lot more than most other profession can do. In that situation your main focus are dps and buffing, while you can still heal with astral form when needed.

Elementalist will be better than druid in term of dps, but less good as a buffer. In term of Healing/Support the Auramancer will have less healing, but give 40% Protection. Druid is usually view as superior (mostly because of the buffing capability).

If you prefer having one gear set for both raid and fractal, you would be better with Elementalist or Chrono. You can have 1 build for druid for both raid and fractal, like a Viper or Beserker Druid, but a lot of pug in raid prefer a Druid with healing gear.

Rednik.3809:

Honestly, this is kinda same argument as “everybody can have 5k$ monthly paycheck, you just have to work harder”. Raiding is pretty different from any other activity in game, and requirements are different too.

What is the problem with working harder = better rewards?? And keep in mind that i agree that there shouldn’t be exclusive type of reward in raid like Legendary Armor or Trinket with special stats.

Absurdo.8309:

So just to sum up the position of the non raiders in this thread:

1. I don’t like raids
2. But I want the reward
3. So make easy mode raids, or give the raid rewards to an easier tier of content

I don’t want to straw man, but that’s what I’m seeing from this thread.

But you kind of strawman it a bit. Or at least you take the position of the extreme and paint every non raider with it. I’m myself are a raider with a decent raid team, but that doesn’t stop me from understanding the other side (at least as good as I can).

1) Yes some player don’t like raid, but most of them don’t cry about that.
1a) They like raid, don’t like the organization. Let’s be honest here. The LFG is a mess, it’s hard to find a raiding guild that fit you, there is few place to find ascended gear (1 fractal daily, PvP and crafting, outside of that forget about it) and it’s harder to get them than pre-HoT, 10man content is harder to organized than 5 man content in pugs and in guild, there is only 1 or 2 builds that people wants in raid for each profession, not much diversity (even if it’s better than it used to be).
1b) They like raid, but not the difficulty. It’s a debatable position. I mean, most if not all game have different level of difficulty that you can choose because not everybody have the same level of skill. For exemple, I would like harder raid but I know that I would have to kick more than half of my current raid team if that ever happen because they won’t be able to keep up.

2) The only reward they seem to want is Legendary Armor which is more than a skin, it’s a legendary type item. A type of item which was never ever put behind a hard content before in the game. Personally, I would like that ALL legendary armor be behind a hard content but up until now GW2 wasn’t this kind of game. There is also the point of trinket with special stats only available in raid, which is bad if you ask me. I don’t think we would view much discussion on the subject if that was only about exclusive skin/minis, since those exist everywhere in the game. People usually don’t want raid to have exclusive TYPE of reward, but don’t mind that raid have higher quantity of reward.

3) You represented that point pretty well. What you misrepresented a bit (because not everybody ask the same thing for the same reason) is the reason why they ask that.

dubstax.9102:

From my point of view…

• Unless you are doing a friend or guild run all ascended will be required most of the time by LFGs
• I can’t just go in with my class, my build, and do the best I can working with the team
• Adding to what was stated above, I need to be heavily invested into multi stat sets and perhaps even characters to fit the need of what is usually required by LFG teams
• There is little to no room for making mistakes (honest mistakes) with LFG groups and simply trying your best and listening to direction is not an option

My point being that unless you can afford (or have) multiple ascended sets, near expert experience with multiple classes, and are able to quickly learn and adapt within the LFG group in most cases you will not enjoy your raiding experience. As a casual player I don’t have the time, the riches, or the experience to bother with raids. I spend most of my time in World vs. World because that is what I love and raids really require an awful lot of PvE dedication to make yourself competitive.

It depend. For exemple, Druids, Chronomancer, PS Warrior, Herald and Tempest and need in all raid bosses with only 1 build good for all fight. You will always have a place in a raid as part of the best setup and will never have to change anything. One character, 1 gear, 1 setup. Might have to change trait or skill from time to time, but shouldn’t be a problem.

Reaper and Dragonhunter also have one setup/build that work for all boss. You might have to swap between GS and Hammer build, but that’s only 1 piece of equipment. They are popular in most boss and work great for all boss. Some pug composition might not want one of those from time to time at specific boss maybe because they lack something specific, but that should be rare if they know what they are talking about.

Thief and Engineer also can use one setup/build for all bosses and are great for all boss. You might have an harder time finding a place in some group because the thief bring nothing but DPS and the Engineer bring a bit of everything, but don’t excel in anything. They are popular in certain fight, but not all of them.

I agree with your point 1, which is ok if you ask me. But your point 2 and 3 only apply to certain specific situation, which Anet should work to fix. Most profession can do all bosses with 1 setup and most profession are popular. Of course we can’t control stupid pugs that will kick a profession because they have bad informations that will always exist.

As for point 4 I can’t really argue with that. I never got kicked from a pug group, but I consider myself a good player with experience so. But that’s a point against human nature, not the game. Did they asked for experienced? Are they jerk that didn’t ask for experienced but expected it? Did they explained something to you that you didn’t heard or understood and did that very mistake they explained because of that? Did they had a bad experience with a pug recently and kinda of kicked you from frustration?

Astralporing.1957:

Which is why it was suggested many times that current raids should get increase in non-exclusive drops. Which happen to have much greater influence on longterm sustainability of content than exclusives anyway.

I agree with that. You can’t have exclusive reward as the main reward of a content because as more and more people gain those exclusive reward, they because non rewarding. You can only have a skin once. But I see 3 exclusives type of reward in raid.

There is cosmetics only like the ascended weapons skins and minis

There is the trinkets with special stats

and There is the Legendary armor which is more than just a skin.

Because if you are against the last 2 categories, but ok with the first, then we have the same opinion. And as for everything else, yes you can always find some extreme on any argument. It’s the internet after all.