Guild Wars 2

Read the topics on the front page of this subforum. One of the titles will answer your question.

In a nutshell, the new Squad UI, which is used to assemble raiding parties, is broken. So although the raid content is fine, we can’t access it until it’s fixed. They were working on it until the wee hours this morning, and seem to be getting back to it now.

Hopefully it’ll be fixed soon, and/or they’ll let us take another crack at the raid once the UI bugs are ironed out.

I agree, a less linear layout would be nice. It’s sort of counter intuitive, but one of the easiest dungeons, AC story, has some of the most interesting speedruns because the party can split up and complete sections of the instance in parallel.

But even here, I can see a group splitting up to take all three guardians down at once. None of them are particularly difficult, and they can easily be pulled apart so that specialized subgroups can focus on them simultaneously. So that’s something, at least

White Hunter.3416:

I can’t agree. You still can’t list your squad into LFG and find people. Unitl they implement this, it will not be good/comfortable for use. Let us list 10 man squads in lfg, nothing more. Of cource you can create party inside the squad and find 4 people for it. But it not ok, isn’kitten

No, that’s not okay, you’re right. I hope this is just one of the limitations of the temporary squad UI implementation and that these features will be available for release.

Edit: There is a list of known issues with the squad UI here: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/dungeons/Welcome-to-GW2-Raiding-in-Beta-Weekend-3/first I didn’t see these issues on there when I skimmed it, but I’d really hope things like LFG support are planned as well.

Another great suggestion (IMO) from the other thread on this is to add some sort of gap closer to them. They’re way too easy to easy-mode kite, and adding closers would make soloing them much less trivial.

Out of curiosity, what is the green guardian mechanic that we’re supposed to be learning there? It seems it could be better messaged. I’d suggest moving him to be the first guardian encountered. He’s much easier than the other two, as all you have to do is avoid the Bullet Storm and AoEs while smacking him down.

+1 for adding gap closers. I can say with absolute certainty that if it wasn’t so easy to just walk away and kite while waiting on cooldowns if needed, my solo attempt would have failed miserably. Great suggestion.

I think fighting them separately is intended, honestly. They’re there to teach the mechanics of the final boss fight so that everything isn’t thrown at you at once, causing overload while you try to figure out all of the different mechanics. If they all just swarmed you at once, they wouldn’t communicate their messages as effectively.

Evapor.6849:

I wasn’t aware that opinions were locked behind a pre-purchase wall, ill just copy what I said since you apparently didn’t read it. Do I need to be ingame and witness the recoloured mobs or the immune, unavoidable damage to say firmly I don’t like this.

It’d help. But really, the main problem people have with your posts is that you’ve been making claims about content, when the facts clearly aren’t in yet. You saw 20% of the first boss fight, before balancing, and were rushing to condemn the CGC as not being developed with challenge in mind, and spouting paranoid conspiracies that they pulled the content because they were embarrassed that players were progressing in it.

Then you went on to claim that mobs that actually have very unique (albeit underpowered) mechanics were “literal recolors” of the same fight.

It doesn’t make you seem like a terribly levelheaded individual when you step back and look at your posts this weekend, and at the end of the day, we haven’t even seen the boss get killed yet. Could it be too easy? Sure. But do you think it might be prudent to wait until someone gets it down before you start making those sorts of accusations towards the raid team?

Evapor.6849:

In most limited betas they showcase their absolute best of the best

There are other factors at play here. They’ve mentioned that this boss was chosen because it doesn’t require any masteries and there are no story spoilers as part of the fight. Sure, I’d love to see their best, too, but we got the introductory boss to test instead. It doesn’t mean it’s meant to be the pinnacle of challenge in the raid, and again — we haven’t even seen all of his phases, so we don’t really even know what he can do.

I don’t think the vale guardian boss was interesting

That’s sort of the problem — you saw 20% of the fight. Assuming that he’s like most other multiphase bosses in this game that phase at 75%, you saw one phase and dismissed the entire encounter. Does that seem rational?

Would you dismiss Lupi as a wholly unchallenging boss because a party can easily range him through phase 1 with next to no effort? No, it’s a single phase, and it gets more interesting as the encounter progresses.

My constructive criticism is me saying i’m not a fan tick, unavoidable damage. I’m not a fan of forcing everyone to run a gimmick build by making the boss straight up immune, the boss models and animations aren’t very good in my opinion. I even suggested adding a build template system if they are going to force people to change traitlines and gear before each encounter, this is already something I do in the live game when I go from condi to power for example, it’s tedious and uninteresting. If this isn’t constructive I don’t know what is.

That is better. If it’d been expressed without the premature conclusions and paranoid outburst the first time around, you might not have made such a large splash.

Not a bad idea, Iris. It seems to be causing confusion as people are having trouble reading my OP.

I didn’t want to focus on green at first because I’d heard the others were similarly unchallenging. I couldn’t test them last night though — red needs conditions, which I wasn’t built for, and blue requires boon stripping, which I don’t have.

Now someone has confirmed that red is also easily soloable on an appropriate build, so maybe when we can get back in we can explore the others a bit more. I’ll leave the title as is for now, but kitten . People really need to read before they just react.

Jankz, please do go into details, that’s what will help the devs know what to look at. Feel free to hide the details in a spoiler tag if you’re worried about ruining anything for anyone I’m certainly interested in hearing more in-depth examinations of the mechanics and what people think about them.

Rising Dusk.2408:

While this is definitely an issue, one of the best ways the raid designers can combat it is by making the bosses larger so their tells are more obvious. I’ll include this feedback in my report.

+1

Excellent point. I honestly believe this is a large reason for why Lupi is as popular as he is. Sure, he’s got multiple phases and a healthy amount of pressure, too, but he’s one of the few bosses where every killshot has an unmistakable, unobscureable telegraph.

I’d sure love to see a solution (like a setting to lessen/disable them) that would also apply to all of the old content too, though!

My point is definitely not that “no mobs should be soloable”. I even explicitly said in my last post (which you quoted…) that I’m fine with them being soloable, but it should pose some challenge. I think that’s far more reasonable than the impression you took from my words.

So if I’m understanding your view correctly, our difference in opinion boils down to: since only one of the three Guardians was soloable, it’s ok because there are two others?

Ok, that’s certainly not unreasonable. It doesn’t change my position, but I understand that view.

My view is that the three guardians should be treated as separate encounters, and that they should pose a rather significant challenge to a solo player. This is for a few reasons:

1) They are staggered so that they are easy to pull and fight individually. If they were meant to be fought together, they’d spawn closer together and have linked aggro. This is my rationale for evaluating each individually rather than taking them as a whole.

2) They are legendary status. Aside from the HP pool, there’s nothing about the green guardian that gives this impression.

3) They are tutorial monsters. We should be learning mechanics from them and having to pay attention to a challenging fight. However, the green guardian doesn’t seem to be fulfilling that role, even solo.

Perhaps the green guardian is supposed to introduce us to the mechanic of fighting while avoiding the Bullet Storm attacks? If so, I’d suggest making him the first encounter, as these are present throughout the others and players will have already figured that out by the time they get to him.

I’m not trying to convince you, by the way. I’m merely sharing my impressions. You’re welcome to share yours and it’s ok to disagree. I only ask that if you reply, you read my arguments first and try to understand them. So far, your first reply was a knee-jerk reaction trying to shame me because you thought I was bragging, and your second reply expounds on a point (“I don’t want any mobs to be soloable”) that directly contradicts my post that it quoted. It’s getting difficult to treat this conversation seriously when everything I say gets so grossly misinterpreted / ignored.

Also, tired of waiting for that cookie. I think I have some samoas in the freezer. kitten yeah…samoas.

Zaroua.2714:

“they’re looking to open a dialogue with us and they certainly seem to be saying the right things when it comes to being accepting of feedback and constructive criticism”

Saying that content is dull and easy can be seen as constructive criticism. Go read up on what the term actually means.

Ok: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructive_criticism

Constructive criticism is the process of offering valid and well-reasoned opinions about the work of others, usually involving both positive and negative comments, in a friendly manner rather than an oppositional one.

Let’s see if this thread has lived up to that, shall we?

- Valid and well reasoned opinions? Well, opinions are subjective, so it’s hard to say. But I’d say that expecting unbalanced content in a beta test to be an accurate prediction of the final product’s exact form is not a very well reasoned exercise. Particularly when judging from only seeing a portion of the encounter, not in person, but on a twitch stream. Beta content is typically tuned to be easier so that the devs can get feedback on the entire fight. If no one could get the boss lower than say, 90%, over the course of the weekend, there wouldn’t be much to get feedback on, eh? That’s sort of the entire point of this weekend.

- Negative comments? Oh yeah. This thread’s got tons of them.

- Positive comments? Not so much.

-Friendly, non-oppositional tone? Well, let’s just say some of us are trying harder than others here.

That profile doesn’t sound like constructive criticism to me. It sounds like uninformed kittening.

shrugs

I have some screens of my combat log for the legendary mobs here: http://imgur.com/a/Y25LK

None of those show any incoming crits. Those hits are also mostly the ticking background damage procs, I believe, so I wouldn’t be surprised if those didn’t crit anyway.

Not much data, but it’s all I got until they open back up :-/

Laggo.8973:

It’s literally the first trash mob in the first wing of the first raid that you can’t even completely solo, just do part of the fight. You might have a point if you could make it to the boss solo, but you can’t even do that.

This is like saying the Thaumanova Reactor fractal laser puzzle is too easy because you can solo the first switch (ignoring the rest of the puzzle because clearly that’s not relevant)

Look at this seriously for half a second. I’m guessing none of you have ever raided before, because this honestly makes absolutely 0 sense to me.

How can you have difficulty curve and progression if you want the first trash mob of the first wing to require hours of study? It’s already a little more complex than a tank and spank, which is the overwhelming majority of initial trash in raid encounters for other games. That should be a good sign, not a bad one.

Who said anything about “hours of study”? I just don’t think a mediocre (at best) player should be able to solo it with complete ease on their first try. That’s a far cry from what you seem to think I’m saying.

I’ll try to clarify. I think the minimum difficulty for a minor encounter in a 10-man raid should be this:

- A skilled player being able to solo (with practice) is fine.
- It should not be easily soloable on an average player’s first attempt.
- A solo player should feel slightly challenged when fighting a boss with 1/10 of the resources of the intended encounter.

Again, this is for a minor raid encounter, the major bosses should not be soloable under any circumstances.

Is this something that we can agree on?

Also, what happened to that cookie? Don’t tell me the cookie is a lie :-(

Since a part of this BWE is to evaluate what’s good and bad about the components that go into these raid encounters, it seems relevant to resurrect this poor, dead, heavily beaten horse:

Particle effects. Guardian flames, engi grenade blasts, the new alacrity flame…all very cool, aesthetically awesome things. But when it become difficult or even impossible to see the boss animations through them, the experience turns from challenging to frustrating very quickly.

This has been a frequent, longstanding complaint in this game, and with the push for more challenging PvE encounters through raids, the need for a solution is only going to intensify.

I hope that the devs have something in mind to address this as more challenging raid encounters are introduced. Something as simple as an opacity slider would do wonders for improving the combat experience.

Not sure what to say then. You are, of course, free to be rude and offer hostile, unconstructive criticism of fresh, unbalanced content that you have neither played nor even seen the entirety of, while the people who made it sitting right here asking “How can we make this better?”. If that’s who you want to be, cool. Have fun.

The rest of us will still just be shaking our heads though.

Wasabi Kitty.8247:

dlonie.6547:

I didn’t expect it to be epic, but I didn’t expect to be soloing a tutorial boss intended for 10 people on my first try without feeling any pressure at all, either. I’m really not even all that good at this game :-P

But it’s not a boss. Not sure why people can’t understand that.

I think one of the bits of feedback ArenaNet should take from these threads is that we do expect these tutorial fights to be boss-level difficulty. They don’t need to be on the level of the final boss of the 10-man encounter, but they certainly should not be soloable on the first try. Especially not by me, heh.

Iris Ng.9845:

Well, if it’s easy, doesn’t it feel… wrong to spend 30 minutes on one trash?

Well, I spent 30 minutes on it because I couldn’t bring anyone in due to squad UI issues, and being too excited about being in the instance that I wanted to fight something

If it took me 30 minutes solo, rusty, and with PvT armor, it’s probably in an alright place time-wise for a full group. The main issue was the dullness of the fight. Aside from the blue projectiles (which weren’t even from the green guardian), there wasn’t much interesting going on.

deSade.9437:

What’s up with all the snappy, confrontational, flaming unknowns that are flooding the poor trashcan subforum? Every thread is basically filled to the brim with randoms not reading, kittentalking the OP and noobcalling left and right. This is so weird.

ikr? Annoying.

The mechanics were obscure and obscure(d) by the crazy particle effects cluttering everything, I didn’t see what was going on half the time, I had no idea where my teammates were most of the time and the animation tells were just lame.

Heh, yeah. Something really needs to be done about that if we’re expected to be reacting to tells during a challenging encounter. This is honestly one of my favorite reasons to solo play — the bosses are so much easier to see that you can actually learn them.

hint hint I’d love to hear the devs’ thoughts on the subject :-) Do they struggle with particle effects obscuring boss tells, too? Is there some workaround that they know of to lessen this? Does it seem important enough to do something about? I think most players would say it is.

Wasabi Kitty.8247:

It’s not supposed to be a challenge. It’s only there to teach you about the mechanics you will need to know for the boss fight.

I don’t get people on this forum. Were you expecting trash mobs to be epic fights or something?

I didn’t expect it to be epic, but I didn’t expect to be soloing a tutorial boss intended for 10 people on my first try without feeling any pressure at all, either. I’m really not even all that good at this game :-P

Awesome feedback, I have a similar thread, but could only really speak to the green guardian: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/dungeons/Raids-RGB-Guardian-Difficulty

Just tagging that here, since it’s on the same topic and this thread is better

I’m also very confused what the green guardian was supposed to teach. You mentioned a displacement, do you mean the blue AoE? I thought maybe it teleported me once, but honestly it was easy to avoid so I only stayed in it once due to a lag spike (which also made it hard to tell if the attack ported me, or if I was just rubberbanding).

I loved the constant blue projectiles (bullet storm). It made it important to keep moving and kept things interesting.

It sounds like figuring out the red mechanic is gonna be the trick to beating this encounter in time.

Quickfoot Katana.8642:

dlonie.6547:

Right now we’ve got more devs on here then ever before, and they’re actually talking, listening, and keeping us updated. This is unprecedented. Since we’ve actually got their attention at the moment, maybe it’d be a good to give constructive feedback and approach this with the goal of working with them to improve the content, rather than just kittening and trying to beat them down.

Remember when Regina came asking for us to develop a thread per dungeon of changes and bugs?

I remember the time that I wasted there because a dev came by and baited us. Do you remember?

There’s no excuse for being mean to them, and people who are doing that are stupid. But I just can’t feel motivated to help after being ignored on the other attempts. I hope this time is the charm, though.

God, I get this. I understand so, so well. It’s hard to believe that anything will change for this game’s PvE after what we’ve seen in the past.

But I’ll share why I have hope this time (which I’ll admit, may be foolish…).

We have the entire raid team engaged here, and they’ve given us content to test ahead of release. They are genuinely interested in seeing the work they’ve done for the last year or so be worthwhile and meet our expectations.

Regina came by and said “Look, we’re not going to be working on dungeons, but if you guys want to put together a list of bugs, we might find time to fix them.” (Regrettably, they didn’t.)

But in this case the team is saying “We’re making new PvE content, and want to make it as good as possible — let us know what you think”. They’re keeping us in the loop as things break/get fixed, and they’ve even said they want to put new instances out regularly — they even shared that they’d like to put out 6 wings/year ideally. That is fantastic news, I honestly couldn’t ask for more.

I guess my point is that if they’re putting in the effort and seem to be making a genuine attempt to produce better content than before, we should at least be constructive with our feedback. After all, the alternative is to run them off, make them regret opening up here, and lose their motivation to put out tons of satisfying PvE content. Nobody wins in that scenario.

Again, I may be foolish, but this looks different. They’re talking to us now because they’ve rebuilt what looks to be a permanent raid team — last time they did this it was because they tore the dungeon team apart.

Just my perspectives

kitten is that

is that a ranger pet

pls tell me that’s a ranger pet

White Hunter.3416:

Raids squads is hard to use, finding ppl via LFG is not fast and time waste. Raids just need a normal 10-man partyes and special tab in LFG panel. No squads, no commanders, nothing. Just party.

It looks like the raid squad system is (thankfully!) their implementation of an actual party leader system. We’ve been wanting this for years, because it cuts down on opportunities to grief tremendously over the current “majority kick” system.

The party system won’t work well for raids — they’re limited to 5 people, the UI doesn’t scale well to large groups, there’s no leader or party control, no ready checks, etc.

So why not just expand the party system to include those things? Well, that’s exactly what they’re doing, they just killed two birds with one stone and revamped the WvW squad system at the same time since there’s a lot of overlap between the needs of both.

The current UI is clunky, buggy, and hard to use, for sure. They’ve mentioned a few times that the UI team is still working on the final version and that what we’re seeing during the beta is just a temporary “barebones” implementation.

Colored Guardians look like a dummy to hide real appearance.

Can you expand on this? It’s not clear what you’re trying to say. You don’t like their aesthetics?

Speaking of mechanics, I should add that green really did seem to be lacking something there.

I assume blue is there to show us that boon stripping matters, and red is maybe something to do with adds (and from what I’ve heard, conditions?). Maybe someone else who has fought those can chime in about what they got out of the encounters.

But green? I spent 30 minutes of quality time with the bloke and don’t really have any idea what he’s supposed to be teaching us. From what I recall of his mechanics:

- Magic Aura seems to be the ticking damage. It’s not unblockable though, see http://i.imgur.com/m2fMnFL.jpg It’s a negligible amount of damage.
- Bullet Strom seems to be the attack that procs when the blue projectiles hit you. The damage is moderate, and gets attributed to the Vale Guardian.
- He would stop and do an little animation every so often, but I had trouble telling what was going on (disclaimer: I’m terrible at reading boss tells). I think it was an melee autoattack sort of thing? All I know is that it was easy to facetank while bursting. Maybe this was the Magic Aura that I was blocking/evading?
- He casts a blue AoE underneath you every so often that does damage when it explodes after a second or two. I think this was the “Concentrated Magic Spike”? Super easy to avoid. It seemed to teleport me around a bit if I stayed in it when it detonated, but I was having a bit of lag during the fight and maybe I was just rubberbanding….

That’s it for the mechanics I noticed. I didn’t really feel much like he was trying to teach me much, other than common sense “avoid AoEs and projectiles”.

Tuthan.3250:

You only do one (easiest out of 3 since you only need to dodge the red circles) trash mob in this raid and you think they all are easy

Well, not really:

The guardians are pretty easy, at least green, anyway…I had more trouble with red and blue, hence why I skipped to green.

My feedback was meant to be specific to the green guardian.

I titled the thread to include all three, since there seem to be a lot of people talking about the trio and saying they should be harder. I thought this thread could be used to provide feedback on their difficulty and mechanics, but instead it mostly seems to be attracting folks who think I’m just arrogantly bragging about killing a trash mob :-/ I should have been clearer about that in the OP.

You should get a full raid and try to do the real boss in there, then you will see how things get real in each phase.

I’m looking forward to it :-)

I should probably just ignore this one, but I don’t think it’s a reading comprehension issue on my end.

Title: Raids don’t work without gear grind barrier.
Closing remark: I don’t want gear grind.

These seem contradictory.

Statement of problem: Without a gear grind, some players are capable of beating content on day one, and then they’ll start farming it.
Proposed solution: Design several versions of each encounter, and then rotate them every few months.

This doesn’t really address the problem. If players are beating an encounter on day one, what difference would it make if other versions of the encounter exist?

If you want to point out an issue and brainstorm ways to improve raids, that’s awesome! But there are some problems and inconsistencies with your proposal. I guess you could say that I’m just pointing out the trouble with it and trying evolve the idea

Brimstar.9036:

Grats Dlonie, there’s 4 encounters in the first wing, each wing will have mechanics teaching about the actual boss. The trash mobs weren’t the ones suppose to be challenging but teaching you mechanics : ) P.S. No one has been able to even get close to defeating even the first boss in the wing of 4 encounters.

Yep, I mentioned that these were teaching/trash mobs in my OP. But since I felt hardly any pressure solo against one of them when it’s a 10 man instance, I felt it was worth pointing out as feedback on the beta content.

Laggo.8973:

Congratulations, you solo’d one trash mob at the very beginning of the first wing of the first raid, skipping any of the mobs with mechanics.

Would you like a cookie? No offense, but what are we supposed to get out of this post? People already solo fractal 50 mossman.

O.o

I’m sorry, what did I say that came across as bragging?

I outright said that there was little challenge to it (which, by the way, was I wanted the devs to “get out of this post”). It needs a buff.

But yeah, if you have a cookie, I’ll take one.

I ended up getting into a raid instance during the last window that the squad UI was up, but I couldn’t get the rest of my party in before it was broken again. It didn’t kick me out when the UI was disabled, so I’ve just been exploring around solo.

Not much of a spoiler below, but just in case anyone is super fickle, I’ll tag it anyway

tl;dr Thumbs up on the narrative improvements and level design. Can’t wait to get a party in here to try out the encounter.

Balsa.3951:

sorry but it will be like that and that’s why Raids don’t come with the expansion day 1

GW2 has some dam pro player who find every weakness in a encounter. And since there is no Gear Barrier People can beat Raids day 1.

So you prefer a raiding system where the only reason you can’t beat an encounter is, not that it’s too challenging and your skills need to improve, but because you aren’t wearing the magical piece of gear that lets you beat it?

There for replay love demands good loot. But once a Raid is beaten the challenging group content is gone.

If the loot is great (best in game) I will redo it.

Would you do it for something like, say….legendary armor loot?

So what can anet do to avoid that there mega Raid become another Twilight Arbor after 1 Months? (and be honest most of us beat this dungeon, once and never came back)

Content eventually goes on farm status. This is how it always goes.

My idea would be a constant changing mode, Bosses changing every months in a rotation. That way anet has less work with building extra wings and the content keep longer fresh.
Maybe don’t even need new models just different attack rotations of the Bosses.

How would it be less work to create 3 versions of each encounter, rather than focusing on entirely new ones? And won’t we eventually learn the rotations and still just farm it afterwards?

(PS I don’t want gear grind)

I’m very confused. That’s the exact opposite of what your thread title and opening statements say.

Novamatrix.2569:

3 patches have been released over the past 8 hours. It doesnt matter how many updates/patches you put out, if they dont solve the problem. The game just breaks even more.

So….what’s your point? That they should stop trying? :-?

Meh, it’s a balance issue on what’s basically a trash mob during a beta. Let’s wait till we see how it ends up in the final form to worry too much :-)

And there’s no possible way that there are some balance issues the first time they release it for widespread playtesting? It’s impossible that they made it a little easier intentionally in the beta so that more people could get through it and be able to provide feedbacks on mechanics/feel/playstyle?

C’mon. Listen to yourself.

Also, calling the first three guardians mechanic-less and “literal recolored” copies of each other doesn’t make it look like you have a clue what you’re talking about. They each have different mechanics that are noticeable when you’re playing. They’re not complex mechanics on their own, but that’s how game design works: introduce elements on their own so players can learn how they work before trying to sort out several unique mechanics combined on a single boss.

Anyway, feel free to continue your armchair critique. It’s quite entertaining :-)

For starters, this is about the intro “trash” red, blue, and green guardians, not the actual boss.

The guardians are pretty easy, at least green, anyway. I just soloed green on my first try, and I’m rusty at playing a guard and it was pretty sloppy: http://imgur.com/a/Y25LK

That said…it took about 30 minutes, and it was pretty fun. Having to dance around the blue projectiles kept it interesting. However, even though I was solo, I never really felt like I was in any real danger. I had ample time to kite and heal when needed, and even with the continuous unblockable damage it really wasn’t very much pressure (I was in PVT armor + zerk weap/trinkets, so I was somewhat tankier than usual, but not to an extreme). The blue projectiles kept some pressure on to stay mobile and pay attention, though I have a feeling that this would be lessened by having more meatshields party members around.

I have mixed feeling about this. I like being able to solo things in the game, and these particular enemies are just for teaching mechanics and whatnot, so in a sense it seems fine. But on the other hand, I feel like it should have been a bit more challenging than a worry-free solo on my first try For the record, I had more trouble with red and blue, hence why I skipped to green.

Oh, and the fun part? Having to strip his break bar at the end. With only Blinding Blades, which is about 1/8 of the bar on a 24s cd xD

Worth a try if you find yourself solo in the instance.

Squad UI works now, I’m in the raid instance as I type this
Hope the login issues are resolved soon.

By the way, I get a lot of “the player you tried to invite is already in a party” errors, even when they’re not in a party. I’m using /invite and also typing their names into the party UI invite box. Any other ideas?

Restarted after the patch, still have the old UI when I create a squad. Should that update have fixed it?

Nifty, Wooden Potatoes was right

Thanks for the detailed post, and the upcoming bugfix!

I hope they stocked up on popcorn in Bellevue for tonight, this stuff is gold.

You played watched a twitch stream of a roughly balanced beta test of trash mobs and one boss. You saw a group get the boss to 80% before wiping, and are calling the entire raid effort garbage based on that.

I’m not saying not to be critical, nor am I trying to whiteknight, but let’s at least wait until we see the boss go through all of its phases and actually get defeated before we start kittenting on it.

Right now we’ve got more devs on here then ever before, and they’re actually talking, listening, and keeping us updated. This is unprecedented. Since we’ve actually got their attention at the moment, maybe it’d be a good to give constructive feedback and approach this with the goal of working with them to improve the content, rather than just kittening and trying to beat them down.

In the past, yes, we’ve been ignored and neglected. Right now we’re not — perhaps we could try to keep it that way? They’re putting in the effort to make raids work. So should we.

Cool, I’ll keep checking in then.

I know I wouldn’t want to spend my Friday night at work fixing bugs — thanks guys.

Thanks for the update Paul. I know you can’t pin down an exact ETA, but can you share a ballpark estimate? Just something rough…an hour? later tonight? tomorrow?

The raids are preeeeetty much the only reason I’m playing this beta, so I’m just trying to plan my weekend and whether I should just keep sitting here refreshing the forums, lol.

Boo. Well that explains why things stopped working at least!

Thanks for the heads up Hope it’s resolved quickly.

Making subgroups seems either broken or unintuitive at this stage. Any pointers?

There’s a lot of info on raid rewards here: http://dulfy.net/2015/09/26/gw2-twitchcon-designing-raids-in-heart-of-thorns/

Branden Gee.2150:

Vyce.2014:

I could be wrong, but it seems like someone at Anet decided to encourage the raid team to post in this thread. [snip]

It’s pretty simple, you all wanted to know who we are, and we’re big on peer pressure here so we’ll see who else we can force ask to respond as well.

heh heh heh heh heh….good.

<3

Looking forward to the more dynamic elements that are going into the raid story! Sounds like these should be a significant improvement on the first generation of instances.

Prolly gonna go soldiers the first time around. I’d like to live to see as much as possible :-P

Hmm, all this talk of crippling has me interested…sounds as if crippling a certain boss makes them more powerful.

Ah, got it! Did you guys give a boss a pre-nerf FGS? :P

Dibs on Jerus.

Hehe, thanks Iris. I honestly expected that thread to get infracted for “calling out ANet employees” or some such, but I’m amazed how quickly so many came to say hi. So hyped for this weekend now We’ll have to see how it all goes, but it sounds like the content production is in good hands. Wildstar-style encounters with GW2 combat systems? Hell yeah, that’s a dream come true.

Mind putting a little salt on my my oreo, though? It’s how I like ’em

Scootabuser.4915:

I’d like to be the first person to say WELCOME and I’m sorry. Hopefully most of you have jobs lined up, anet doesn’t have a good history with their pve content teams

And I think it’s safe to say that those decisions blew up in their faces…big time.

Here’s hoping they learned a lesson from that.

#InstancedPvEMatters

Thanks for kicking off the thread, Crystal and Jason! (Edit: and hi Cameron, too!)

FWIW, having you all post here actually has me way more hyped about the raids than the trailers and blog posts did :-)

DDCarvalho.2071:

You worked on Volcano Fractal?
Now I am confident about raids. This is one of the best encounters

I had the same thought Shaman is easily one of my favorite bosses.

Can’t wait to try the new stuff out! It sounds like Gorseval is the boss we saw in the trailer, surrounded by the blue (I think?) wall? Is that the encounter that we’ll be playing this weekend?

Streaming is a good point. There are going to be a lot of people who haven’t preordered (or are otherwise unable to play this weekend) that will want to watch streams to see what the raids are like. They shouldn’t be forbidden from seeing what’s up just because some people don’t want to resist the temptation to watch kill videos.

I think self-control is the way to go here.

Well, I believe she’s known as Crystal RAID on reddit, so I think so

(pssst…we could know for sure)

All I know about UW solo is from watching Miku spend over an hour clearing krait during his first FotM 50 solo.

From that, I think tedious is an understatement :P

God I hate krait.