Guild Wars 2

I really don’t think any sensible game developer would seriously make anything based on… Eurovision out of all things.

Considering the contest doesn’t even take itself seriously and is very hard to link to any game…at all really.

Jerus.4350:

Xae Isareth.1364:

The problem is that people don#t want their skill levels raised.

What Anet is saying is that (despite how simple the mechanics are), we want everyone to be in a raid mindset. It doesn’t work. Not everyone wants to raid, and we don’t have a choice but to be thrown in the same bloody pot.

If a dev is reading, please just stop trying to make these events, it’s just frustrating. If you want raids, either instance them or give us districts so we can play with like-minded people.

I completely disagree, in fact my reaction to these events was simply “sweet, this is what GW2 was missing”. A nice quick event that is always available that really promotes active individual play as well as a team strategy to complete the event.

I find it a lot of fun.

I just wish those of us that cared to do it right could team up easier without having a ton of people who simply don’t care ruining it. I’m glad bronze gives crud for rewards, because then maybe those people will get out of there after they get the achievements.

Give me a vendor that sells tokens to start our own instances of it such that we could pull people in we wanted and that’s it.

There’s nothing wrong with not liking this kind of content, but don’t ruin it for everyone else, please.

What you’re saying is basically an instanced raid, which is what I want as well, but apparently Anet doesn’t want that because it will ‘split the community’. I’ve never seen a community more split than we are now, with so much hate towards those who simply don’t want to raid.

The problem is that people don#t want their skill levels raised.

What Anet is saying is that (despite how simple the mechanics are), we want everyone to be in a raid mindset. It doesn’t work. Not everyone wants to raid, and we don’t have a choice but to be thrown in the same bloody pot.

If a dev is reading, please just stop trying to make these events, it’s just frustrating. If you want raids, either instance them or give us districts so we can play with like-minded people.

RottenRagamuffin.3159:

Aza.2105:

I’ve gotten gold over a dozen times. The loot is good. Also you can trade tokens for equipment boxes for even more loot.

Are you a member of a large guild?

You don’t even need to be a member of a large guild. If you join halfway, you just look around and ask how many people are at each boss. 0-10? Join it. 10> go to another boss.

If its a fresh event, just gather yourself into 6 groups.

I gave up, not because the event mechanics is bad or anything, but because after spending 30mins explaining why you don’t zerg them and how to get gold multiple times, all that happens is people just zerg up and ignore you.

The once I succeeded convincing a small group to split up, we took one of the bosses down quicker than the blob next to us, and I’m all like ‘see?’, yet no one followed suit.

I don’t even know how is this actually possible. If I grab a bunch of 5 year old kids and tell them to split into 6 groups on the playground, they can probably do it. Apparently we can’t.

Scrambles.2604:

Xae Isareth.1364:

I think what came out of these threads is that some players like DPS meters, some don’t. Anet going either way is going to annoy players.

But the question then becomes, “How will the players that don’t like it be effected?”

I think it is very realistic to implement and not effect players that don’t care about their DPS.

Even if they won’t be affected it’ll be perceived as moving the game in a certain direction which they don’t want. There isn’t any particular logical reason why, it’s just a matter of perception.

It’s like if Anet introduces raids, or why people complain about the WP system. You don’t have to raid, and you don’t have to WP, but they still don’t want it there.

On the topic though, lets pose a theoretical question. You’re doing perfect rotations, you’re looking forwards to seeing your sweet DPS record on a fight, then a party member gets downed next to you. What do you do?

I think what came out of these threads is that some players like DPS meters, some don’t. Anet going either way is going to annoy players.

So, just like the title says, come up with new ideas for traits.

Warrior:

Adrenal Inspiration (Arms Grandmaster)
When using adrenaline, nearby allies gain 1 10 second stack of Inspiration for each bar of adrenaline spent.

Inspiration (max 3 stacks)
Increases damage by 2%, stacks in intensity.

Hand of the Master (Discipline Master)
Improves Burst skills:

GS: Increases damage dealt by the skill and gives 3 stacks of 20 second might to nearby allies.
Axe: Now cleaves.
Mace: Inflicts 10 seconds of 8 stacks of Vulnerability on the target.
Sword: Extends the base duration of inflicted Bleed and Immobility
LB: Enemies standing in AoE are inflicted with Weakness/pulsing Vulnerability (font know which would suit more)
Hammer: Targets have their Endurance drained by x.
Rifle: Shortens cast time.

Who cares about UW weapons

Mesmer:

Mental Ambush
Deal x% (x tbd) extra damage for each stack of Confusion on your target.

(lol) Actually Works Now
Phase retreat doesn’t dig your own grave anymore, the illusion summoned by Illusionary Leap now knows the world isn’t flat and Illuionary Warden now stops daydreaming.

Harper.4173:

Because Axe F1 is the highest DPS. Any other F1 is a waste of my adrenaline.

This thinking i’ve illustrated above is what would make the new meta.

Also speaking of mechanics : mesmer’s mechanic is to shatter their illusions but you don’t see a lot of them doing that in PVE do you? I also don’t see a lot of thieves stealing in PVE either.

Mechanics work in certain game modes ( WvW, PVP) and are less usable in others ( PVE).

Regarding the nerf – it’s pretty clear that changing the trait is in a sense nerfing it for PVE. I doubt anyone except a few players ( yourself included) want this. We’ve taken enough nerfs as it is.

If you run a pure GS build or if you there’s not enough warriors/eles around and you want Warbanner because dead people = DPS loss, then GS F1 would be useful if it wasn’t a 15% DPS loss.

LB is an alternative fire field to guardian/ele flames if again, it wasn’t a huge DPS loss.

and so on.

Why does change automatically equate to nerf? There’s a lot of ways in which you can change the way a mechanic works without undermining how strong it is.

Farming is ok. I like farming too.

What is not OK is if pressing 111111 nets you more gold than other activities with a higher skill-requirement. And thats what the Pavillion last year was, that’s what the champ trains are, that’s what the game teaches you. That makes no sense, because it’s like the local street cleaner earning more money than a doctor.

However, we do need more activities with a high skill requirement which has high payouts.

Flipping on the TP does not introduce more gold to the economy, the gold you make came from another’s wallet, it’s a zero sum game.

Actually, it takes gold out of the economy because of the trade tax. Flipping actually helps to stabilise the economy because it doesn’t cause prove fluctuations as the flipper is just playing the buy/sell margin, acts as a gold sink, and keeps buy/sell margins relatively in check.

The whole idea was that a minority kill her. In fact, she’s not even hard enough. She was made by Anet as a response to players wanting hardcore content, so obviously she’s supposed to be hardcore.

But we got builds like the guaranteed warrior kill build which can down her in greens, meaning that we really need something even harder.

^ the TP mongul is in every game really, and it’s not actually that bad here. I’ve been trading in games where there’s huge trading guild alliances who regularly decide on items they want to manipulate. When that happens, you get prices on uncommon everyday items crashing or rising by ridiculous proportions almost overnight, and then it shows up red on every trader’s charts, making the entire market follow.

That’s what you call scary.

Anet’s buy gold from us messages is really getting on my nerves though.

Harper.4173:

Xae Isareth.1364:

Liewec.2896:

Harper.4173:

I disagree – using your adrenaline is viable in the proper context. An Axe build will have this sort of F1 usage in its rotation.

this^

i use both berserkers power and heightened focus in my axe/axe zerker build and i used F1 frequently since my adrenaline refills so fast (instantly with whirling axe)

This is the problem. You got a fun build, but its massively unoptimized.

If BP is changed ( nerfed ) builds won’t be more “fun”. They’ll simply force you to run axe on your 2nd weapon slot so you can F1 at regular intervals.
I don’t see how adding 1 button press to your dps rotation takes the game from " omg so bland and boring " to " wow so super hardcore awesome diversity and interaction".

First of all, that one button happens to be our class mechanic.

Second of all, I never said nerf BP.

Third of all, why would axe be the only F1 you do? For example, GS F1 as poor as it is, is better than your GS auto and would have its occasional uses (e.g. carry warbanner for pugs, not enough fury uptime) if it didn’t mean a 15% DPS loss for using it.

Like I was saying before. One step at a time. One change won’t suddenly solve everything wrong with PvE. There’s no magic solution. You change things one at a time.

The only problem I got against warriors is that as a purely PvE player, I am forced to not use my class skills on most builds.

hannah mee.7925:

Azrael.4960:

you couldn’t just go with a vanilla or cookie cutter build in your party and expect to beat them consistently.

Wait wat?

Don’t forget your cookie cutter.

What’s the moral of these builds though? Oh, “CC” (GW1 called it shutdown) and heals were the backbone of the metagame, not a sideline spectator.

Nick.6972:

Azrael.4960:

Anet’s design to have fixed weapon skills was to get around the problem they had in GW1. There were over a thousand skills, many duplicated because of the expansions, and only 2% of them would get regular use.

Perhaps what is needed is alternative modes on the same weapon. For instance, an offensive mode where most of the skills are attack based or defensive mode where the auto attack is still offensive but the rest are more like parries, blocks or deflects.

Also, more weapons would be welcome!

Remember PvX Builds? For each profession?
2%? Wrong.

Eh…2% or 10%…it was a stupidly low number There were 300+ elite skills alone and maybe on average only 30 were ever really used in the metagame.

Well, PvE-wise, this game isn’t doing much better.

Look at warrior for example, our entire class mechanic is just borked in PvE.

Also, if I wanted to go play a perfectly balanced game, I’d go play chess.

Lilith Ajit.6173:

Xae Isareth.1364:

Lilith Ajit.6173:

I’m loving what I’m seeing!

Just a reminder that 3 screens/characters/dungeons are absolutely mandatory for entrance into judging. Certain exceptions (like the Coe photoshop) ARE acceptable but there will be points off in my judging for it not having 3 dungeons. But there absolutely must be 3 fashionable characters of the different weights

Just curious though, do you need to have characters in all 3 armor weights? Or cna you just enter with 1 character?

Also, does FotM hub count as a dungeon?

Yes and yes.

Is that a yes to you can enter with only 1 character or a yes to you have to have all 3 weights?

I don’t have a medium-armor character you see

EDIT: Oh dang.

Lilith Ajit.6173:

I’m loving what I’m seeing!

Just a reminder that 3 screens/characters/dungeons are absolutely mandatory for entrance into judging. Certain exceptions (like the Coe photoshop) ARE acceptable but there will be points off in my judging for it not having 3 dungeons. But there absolutely must be 3 fashionable characters of the different weights

Just curious though, do you need to have characters in all 3 armor weights? Or cna you just enter with 1 character?

Also, does FotM hub count as a dungeon?

OOOOPS, posted in the wrong thread lol.

Here’s my vampire themed Mesmer and my fiend-themed (?) Guardian.

Vol.7601:

What did you guys exactly expect for your shards? Precursor? Free exotics? A bag of 10 T6 mats?

A reasonable number of them for T6s or Exotics wouldn’t be a bad thing now would it?

Rauderi.8706:

Sherpder.1834:

I’m just really tired of swinging the same 5 skills. Everything about this game is great and amazing, but the limitation on weapons skills and types makes the combat not much better than WoW’s

There’s.. other weapons? And skills? And traits?

One of the “problems” is that the business end of a weapon is usually the #1 skill for damage. A few weapon skills do better damage, but have cooldowns. More likely, most of the skills have some control or support component.

And compared to WoW, the skills in GW2 tend to be more dense in utility. WoW has skill rotations, but that’s just an illusion of depth, forcing players to tote a wealth of only-occasionally useful side skills while they bang out their 2-to-4 damage button combos. That rotation has been more-or-less replaced with autoattack.

And that’s fine. There’s only but so much a person can do at once, anyway.

Well, often the problem is that in PvE traits is mostly a spreadsheet game. You got a few traits like Guardian AH which might change gameplay up a bit, but its mostly a statistical exercise, so it’s really rather unexciting.

JustTrogdor.7892:

We play how Anet want’s us to. PvP and WvW getting left behind, nerf PvE dailies and try to funnel PvE players there. Not spending enough time in certain zones, nerf other zones to force you there. Anet seems to spend a lot of time trying to direct players into certain areas. Instead of improving the areas they want to funnel us into they nerf the heck out of everything else to try to force us there.

Hold on a sec.

See the ktrain in EotM?
See the ‘farm map only red cap, gather at B and suicide’ maps?

That’s what happens when you try and buff WvW or sPvP.

I don’t even see why it took this long to get the vendor out.

I always thought that it took this long because it was an intricate process of balancing the rewards. Blade Shards were common, so obviously no precurors etc, but at the same time, they were only common as an event item and now drops pretty infrequently, so the rewards had to be something worthwhile. A difficult balance and a very unique situation.

Then all they came up with was a bag which gave you a green? What the heck are they thinking? It’s like Anet is actively trying to drive the game into the ground.

Lankybrit.4598:

What you want is better loot
What you get is nerfed loot

Sorry, that’s just the way it is.

And Archage smarchage. Wildstar is where it’s at, in 9 days!!

I honestly don’t see how that’s better loot. From what I heard, their legendaries/artifact weapons is created from a rare raid drop which gives you a quest to complete, which sounds pretty much just like a precursor drop.

Liewec.2896:

Harper.4173:

I disagree – using your adrenaline is viable in the proper context. An Axe build will have this sort of F1 usage in its rotation.

this^

i use both berserkers power and heightened focus in my axe/axe zerker build and i used F1 frequently since my adrenaline refills so fast (instantly with whirling axe)

This is the problem. You got a fun build, but its massively unoptimized.

My Vampire-themed mesmer and errmmm, fire-man-thing Guardian?

The add at some events drop no loot because they once did, and people just abused the heck out of them. Invasions used to never complete because people all beloved up and scaled the mobs to champion status to farm boxes, Jormag never got dove because of the same reason, people verbally abused players destroying the cauldrons at that Orr event (I just did it anyways and /laugh), annnd so on.

I get why the QP mobs drop no loot. Can you imagine trying organise a gold attempt whilst there’s a Zerg if 50 people running rampant across zones? I like the idea of rewarding people for organisation and good gameplay but open Workd rauds just don’t work, and even if you get gold, the rewards just aren’t remotely worth it.

As much as I would live to perform heart surgery with a greatsword, I don’t think the Tyrian Medical Association would dub it acceptable.

Jokes aside, yes, we would love that but that would take a lot of resources to pull off.

I do like my ele as well. Just not staff, it just seems everything apart from fire and water on there is useless, which kind of ruins the point of being an elementalist.

I do have a fascination with greatswords though (don’t judge :V)., and eles can’t fill that fascination.

The warrior does have a sense of raw power that no other class has. Low CDs, high mobility, high damage, and fast attacks all add to this.

You know. I had this entire 4 paragraph analysis typed out just now, but boom, forum error and it’s gone. sigh

@khani I really don’t want dungeon armor dropping in dungeons instead of being buyable for tokens. What that means is that on average, you’ll probably have to run the dungeon the same number of times as you would now, but you just have no idea when you’re going to get drop. Not fun.

Which one would you prefer and why?

Personally, I prefer another feature patch, because the first one simply scratched the surface of the problem, at least in PvE. There’s so many things still broken in PvE on a core level, things like how most combo fields and finishers having next to zero use, that another feature patch would be like playing a whole new game.

@Harper the main aspects of PvE actually consists of many smaller segments. This a part of making PvE more engaging, and I’m sure making an entire mechanic having some sort of relevance in PvE again is very much in line with that agenda.

You can make engaging fights like stuff in the Queen’s Gauntlet to fix the problem, but it’s far too late for that. If this was alpha and everything was still up for tweaking, yeah, that’s a fine solution. But the game is live, and pretty much most of PvE is set in stone.

It’ll take years and years to make enough permenant and ‘mainstream’ (ie, stuff people do on a daily basis) content to solve the problem through your way, or to basically redesign, rebalance and basically remake most of existing PvE. The latter is not going happen.

So the most realistic and efficient way to solve the problem is then to just change this one single trait.

Hello quit thread #223468 written in the same way about the same stuff as every MMO ever.

I’m making Frostfang, can I have your stuff or precursors? Game’s dying afterall, so it ain’t worth much.

Fenrina.2954:

Xae Isareth.1364:

The heal turret on Boom-boom even specifically tells you that it heals Boom-boom, and its not even a normal-sized heal turret, its huge. And what do people do? 11111111111 on Boom-boom and wonder why she’s not dying.

For this one specifically, the turret spawns away from Boom-boom. Often the turret spawns offscreen for me so the size is irrelevant. After that, the only indication that the turret is around is a status icon and the purple tether. Both of those indicators are easy to overlook unless one is intentionally looking for them. In the case of the tether, I generally find the turret by simple camera movement than following it.

I’m quite sure it also shows up on the minimap.

And even if it doesn’t, the wall of people shouting kill the turret should make what needs to happen pretty obvious.

It’s not even focused group coordination. Its like the most basic, borderline raid environment you can possibly have without it turning into press 1 to win.

You just split up. That’s it. That’s basically how you win this. I really don’t quite understand how the heck do people screw this up. I’m actually baffled by this update.

With Teq/Wurm, there’s some mechanics that actually needed organisation and are somewhat difficult to pull off. The bosses in this update have mechanics that are so simple and clear that they may as well be written on the screen in neon letters.

The heal turret on Boom-boom even specifically tells you that it heals Boom-boom, and its not even a normal-sized heal turret, its huge. And what do people do? 11111111111 on Boom-boom and wonder why she’s not dying.

It’s like the devs basically went ‘right, ok, Teq, Wurm, Marionette, way too hard. Let’s make a open world raid that’s so simple, people who never played games before can understand what’s going on’, and we still screwed it up. It’s a miracle that convinces me and proves to me that open world raids are just not a thing.

It’s because its frustrating.

Look at the queen’s pavilion for example. You try to get random people to follow instructions, organise and learn the boss mechanics, because the content demands it. They unsurprisingly don’t listen.

So you struggle on zerging a super-scaled boss for a hour straight because the randoms are screwing everything up and you can’t do digidy squat about, only to get 3 greens as a reward.

It’s not ‘awful’ or anything, but it just seems there’s a massive lack of planning out.

And it’s both ways. I can see people’s hearts and souls going towards designing the boss mechanics. They’re probably thinking, ‘man, this looks cool, can’t wait til the players see this’, then of course the players tell them they should all be fired. I’d imagine its a downward spiral.

DancingMad.8504:

What “my way”?

Well, you can play “your way”, but don’t expect rewards out of it.

This game discourages you from playing the way you want to play, due to it’s reward system, which point’s you to the direction Anet wants.

What makes a truly good game is to have all the different aspects of it equally rewarding, so the player can play what he truly enjoys. Guess what, gw2 is far, far from it.

And no, im not saying make it easy. Make it equally rewarding.

The problem is that’s impossible. There’s too many different variables at work and so many ways to exploit everything.

Tried to make exploring rewarding —→ people ran champ trains.
Tried to make WvW rewarding in EotM --—→ EotM is now a farm train where everyone is in agreements with each other to not fight and zerg in a rotating circle.

Zylonite.5913:

This is why free to play or buy to play MMOs are all the same (Except The Secret World). At the end of the day the focus of the game will be the cash shop and GW2 has proven to be no exception.

Personally I can’t even bother to login to at least get the daily. Kind of disappointing that this game is going downhill so fast and I bet the living story season 2 will be another big disappointment. If the devs haven’t leaned anything by now then they are not going to change the new gem store content model of the game.

But on the good side, I just pre-ordered a new MMO coming out soon with a one year subscription up front. Hopefully that will help to erase my disappointment in this game. The latest patch is nothing more than a shameful display of the game which is hard to recognize compare to when it was released….

You do realise that TSW’s item store is basically the same thing as the gem store, but you can also actually get actual stuff like BiS signets, epic augments and etc from a lockbox right?

How is any of this related to the gemstore anyways? Are tokens on sale in the gem store? Is the content locked behind the gem store?

That’s like saying all raid mechanics are bad design because players can fail them.

Devildoc.6721:

I was at first excited to get the chance to get the gas mask that I missed out on the first time it was out.. but since this meta is so heavily tied to boss rush to the point of being unable to complete unless you do boss rush at least once.. this is a disaster, it’s not like you can get yourself on maps where it’s actually being done either, every time I go into the pavillion it’s a freaking ghost town. Nobody wants to do this crappy event.

This is just garbage. What were the developers thinking?

Trying to make open world raids a thing again. That’s what.

Jahroots.6791:

The lack of useful loot is the primary reason I just did the meta achievement ankitten ow done with it.

Beyond that, I just don’t think this kind of content works with 100+ groups. The lag generated by so many characters on screen, and all of the particle effects of their attacks is just way too much to handle. I suspect a lot of the ‘AFKers’ at zerg events are really just doing the best they can at <10 fps.

This event could have been spectacular as a 30 or 40 man instanced raid, though.

This is the thing you see. There’s nothing wrong with instanced raids. They keep saying that it promotes elitism and divides the playerbase, but look at this. I’ve never seen more frustration and verbal abuse in a MMO than when Teq/Wurm/etc fails, ever.

Azhure.1857:

Ionut.2307:

Azhure.1857:

Ionut.2307:

Now let’s wait for that white knight posting that we shouldn’t play for reward.

One should always play for some kind of reward. Just maybe that reward doesn’t always need to be $$$. Mmkay?

Absolutely agree with you.
But for this particular encounter, which is it?
Is it an engrossing story?
Is it amazing combat?

Besides “insert AP checklist here”, what reward this encounter does provide?

To be perfectly honest, I can not speak for any of the events in the 5/20 Update… yet. I logged online in the evening to my guild saying it wasn’t fun and wasn’t worth it. Take that coupled with the fact that I don’t enjoy being told by ArenaNet what to do and when – I’ve felt no need to jump into it yet.

I’m also not an AP farmer by any means. I’ve got around 7k points from just enjoying the game, though compared to many of the people on my friends list I think I sometimes get laughed at for how low it is.

As for my earlier post – I responded as I did because in the large scheme of things players should play for reward. Just that so many people are using the argument that the reward is either $$$ LOOT $$$ or Bust. I disagree.

To be honest, I purely attribute the not fun to poor execution, not the fights themselves.

They seemed to have balanced the bosses around everyone being optimised, with zerker sets, and being somewhat organised. That just won’t happen.

Kaiyanwan.8521:

You must be kidding…

After they introduced the grindiest grinds ever in a western AAA MMO (noone likes to grind they said), vertical progression (even casuals should have BiS they said), most of the events are watered down to press 1, 1 and 1 again (boring they said), you still think they would give a kitten about what they said in the past?

That is a lot of faith you got there.

Hi, how’s ESO going?
(sorry, I couldn’t help it :<)

First of all, you can never eliminate grind in a MMO, ever. The very fact that devs can’t make content faster than players play them just enforces this.

The difference here is that the grind is optional, you aren’t gated from any content apart from very high FotMs (I won’t go into this argument again) by not grinding.

Watered down to 1,1,1,1? Mentality like that is why I don’t ever bother with Wurm or Teq, and why I gave up on Queen’s Pavillion after 5mins.

I used GS for the first phase, LB for the second.

Harper.4173:

I disagree - using your adrenaline is viable in the proper context. An Axe build will have this sort of F1 usage in its rotation.

Using your longbow F1 to set down a fire field that you and your party can blast to 25 stacks of might is more viable than just sitting on a flat 15% adrenaline.

The trait as it is now gives you options - you can not use the F1 and have 15% damage or use it and have a good burst or more importantly buff your party’s dps output.

Using Eviserate constantly within your rotation is a DPS loss.

Eles and Guardians both have fire fields that aren’t DPS losses to use, you’ll probably have at least one of them. This is however, one of those rare circumstances where you might find it useful, ie, if you don’t have any other class that can fire field better than you, and even in that case, you might actually be better off using Phalanx Strength to perma might your party anyways.

Burst skills can be useful in PvE, but it’s way too late to make that happen. In QG, Burst skills were very useful, because

1. Some fights went down to the wire when you put gambits on, so CCs etc made or broke your attempt.
2. There a few rights where it does make your choose. e.g. I killed Lladri with a cleansing ire build because she was spamming weakness and cripple way too fast for normal skills to cleanse it, and that’s not a fight you want to be crippled on.

So if mechanics are complex enough, it can replicate that decision process that’s common in PvP. However, almost all existing PvE content aren’t complex enough to make that happen, and it’s a lot easier to just change the way the skill works for PvE than rehaul everything in PvE to make it work as it is now.

A couple of silvers per player. I don’t think I’m getting out my credit card for that.

There’s many things wrong with the event, but P2W certainly isn’t one of them.

Nor is zerging. Where us the zergfest in Bazaar? Sanctum Sprint? The Dolyak race? The whole reason why we’re do frustrated at the QP is BECAUSE people are zerging. If they split themselves up and actually have any buttons in their keyboard other than 1, we might actually see what hold rewards are.

^ I think we’re definitely in agreement then.

There’s a reason why open world raids aren’t a thing anymore. Blizzard wasn’t able to make it work, Trion didn’t make it work, Anet isn’t any different. It’s an impossible task, they just don’t work.

They only worked in the past because back then, it wasn’t about killing the boss, it was about who got the loot. Since this game ain’t about that, it’s not going to work. You just can’t expect Joe Bloggs who never played a MMO, who just plays game’s fit fun and uses skills that look cool to suddenly start optimising builds and follow commander’s orders.

The hardcore raiders get annoyed that there’s people who aren’t raiders trying to raid and screwing everything up for them, the non-raiders feel like idiots and get shouted at.

Put those bosses into dungeons, or even better, follow the same philosophy and change them even more to be raid worthy and put them in raids.

Hyung.6140:

Xae Isareth.1364:

To be honest, those bosses have some of them most well designed telegraphs in this game to date and some very very interesting mechanics. Look at Wiggins and Pyro, look at them! That’s clear and fair telegraphed mechanics which promote active movement.

I’d LOVE to look at them, but they were buried under 50+ people hitting them with spell effects.

You can say that “well, you shouldn’t be zerging” and you’re right, we shouldn’t. I was trying NOT to. I tried getting multiple commanders, tried convincing pugs to split, tried forming parties and slipping away so the 5 of us could attack one boss. But each shard I loaded into the vast majority just zerged.

I think everyone defending this content is imagining how it should ideally be played and saying ‘well, if it were played like that it would be good content’. Maybe, but in practice it isn’t played like that… and even if I WANTED to play it like that, which I do, I CANNOT do it of my own free choice. I somehow need to find a shard of 70-ish players who think like I do.

So in practice it is not fun.

Worse, not only is it not fun, it’s not rewarding. Even gold tier rewards are terrible. I’d love to see a graph of player participation numbers in the Pavilion over the few weeks of this patch, I suspect it will bottom out rapidly and stay there, as there’s absolutely no reason to do it, and it’s frustratingly designed.

Imagine the same bosses instanced, with say ten of your friends and a more forgiving timer. Can you make it around the Pavilion and kill them all in time? It’d be fun, interesting, challenging. Instead we have all the entertainment of shouting “USE THE BIRDSEED” while watching zergs die to retal, and “please split up, I’m begging you”.

Ah well. At least Labyrinthine Cliffs is fun <3

What I’m defending isn’t open world raids. I hate them. I don’t ever do Teq or Wurm because it’s a lesson in frustration. If you want people to do something in a certain way and to be organised, you need the tools to exclude people who don’t want to be organised. Otherwise you just get frustration.

I was openly telling people who don’t listen to orders, who aren’t in Zerker, who runs whatever build they want to get out of the pavillion last night, and I feel justified, because simply that’s what Anet was asking people to do.

What I am defending is the mechanics themselves. I like them. I love them in fact. Clear telegraphs, fair mechanics thst cabt be just brute forced, engaging gameplay requiring active movement, stuff this game desperately lacks.

What I’m afraid of is Anet does a DE v2.0 and go ‘clearly people hate fights like that’, back to zerg zerg stack stack press 111111, or even worse, unclear and frustrating mechanics consisting purely of 1HKOs that’s basically equivalent to playing Russian roulette.