Guild Wars 2

I’m worried about them fixing hobo-sacks in HoT, if they do I won’t be able to look in here and see the same thread that’s been here for almost 2 years now and calms me about things never changing :P

Black Box.9312:

guardian.6489:

Hey it’s not completely useless you can use it as a back-up reflect when your on the reflect team in triple trouble!…….

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But ya that’s about it. It really lacks any practical applications compared to the focus and even the torch now.

Guardian shield does not reflect.

Block projectiles… that’s what I meant.. I just say reflect out of habit.

Taygus.4571:

no…groups of 5 can be trouble enough.
I hope what they add is more maps/bosses like on silverwastes.

Well rest easy, all new HoT maps will be like the sliverwastes.

The question is if we want to add raids on top of that.

kimeekat.2548:

DigitalKirin.9714:

guardian.6489:

Hey guys I have this crazy idea. What if there was some sort of…. box that the fractal weapons dropped in, where you got to pick which weapon you actually wanted. Just thinking out loud here. :P

But this box you speak of might be put in a very high level of Fractal… Say… 51+.

Oh and just in case people think that might be too easy to achieve, they might reset people’s fractal levels to Really make them earn it.

Never forget.

Iol you two <3 I am a little embarrassed for Anet at all the people responding with excitement to the first “idea”. There are already weapon boxes in-game, guys, that’s guardian’s joke. The codes are there and everything. They are just, as Kirin pointed out, drops at a fractal level we can’t even play at. It’s like slamming your head into a wall with that logic, I swear.

I don’t want fractal weapons on the TP. I want to work for them either by a token system or if it’s gonna be pure RNG, take out individual weapons altogether and just drop the effing box.

Draknar.5748:

At the very least, perhaps when you finish the fractal frequenter achievement (500 fractals I wanna say?) you get to choose a skin.

This would also be nice! See, these are all great examples of keeping items elite and yet attainable.

It’s always painful when Anet already has the solution to a problem but it just hasn’t implemented it for stupid reasons. . In the meantime the perfect solution to this problem just sort of sits there in the code not being implemented.

Hey it’s not completely useless you can use it as a back-up reflect when your on the reflect team in triple trouble!…….

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But ya that’s about it. It really lacks any practical applications compared to the focus and even the torch now.

Aye.8392:

Marcus Greythorne.6843:

it’s probably like Guild Missions, some are more challenging, some not so much. All of them become a challenge when you try to beat your friend’s highscores.

Having to do jumping puzzles in a certain time certainly sounds challenging enough to me. When I think of an adventure at skipping stones, I’m gonna have a hard time.

“Mesmer portal to the end of the Skipping Stones adventure, tips appreciated!”

Debuff: “No portal 4 U”: During your adventure you aren’t allowed to use portals created by allied players…. cheater…

Edit: Ninja’d again!

Hey guys I have this crazy idea. What if there was some sort of…. box that the fractal weapons dropped in, where you got to pick which weapon you actually wanted. Just thinking out loud here. :P

You should probably base some adventures on the random silly things players do for fun on their own like:

1. No Armor race: I remember running through southsun in a naked relay race with some guildmates, it was quite hilarious and awesome.

2. Hide and seek: Might become stupid when Dulfy inevitably puts up a guide with all the hidden locations but a fun hide and seek game might be a good fit for a silly adventure.

3. 1v1 Duels with NPCs. Just a simple boss fight only the adventurer can participate in. Given how popular soloing existing world/dungeon/etc bosses is already, I imagine this would be a hit. Don’t be afraid to make a couple of these hard.

That’s all I can think of but honestly if players are already doing it for fun anyways, it’ll be a good fit for adventures. O ya and do that hand gliding race idea, that sounds like fun.

When Anet reveals the Guardian specialization page… it’ll slowly load to only reveal the following words:

“Guardian is in a good place right now”

:P

Thaia.5146:

guardian.6489:

Then your class will remain the same as launch and you’ll understand what it’s like to be a Guardian :P

Oh so you want to discuss that topic with someone who mains an Ele?

Yes I do!

Feature pack stuffs

Anet: Alright Eles look at all these awesome new traits, you get one that makes you immune to crits and one that blinds everyone that you burn and we revamped all these skills so the underused ones are awesome now

Eles:

Anet: O Well Guardian is in a good place so here’s a bunch of traits that enhance burning that you’ll never use.

Guardian:

Not to mention you can use almost all your weapons in PvE while I can never seem to find a build where I put down my greatsword!

Thaia.5146:

dsslive.8473:

Thaia.5146:

BrunoBRS.5178:

all things point towards specializations being an alternative to the base class, not an upgrade. you can still remain an elementalist, or you can specialize into whatever comes for eles, earn some new tricks, and lose some old ones.

I don’t mind “loosing some tricks” but I do mind which one I’ll loose. That’s why I’m a little worried when I hear that initially we will be given only one specialisation.

ye but if you dont like the loosing the ones you lose, you just switch back to an elementalist, since you can swap out of combat when you choose too

Okay I agree but where is my horizontal progression then?

Then your class will remain the same as launch and you’ll understand what it’s like to be a Guardian :P

Fashion Mage.3712:

guardian.6489:

Anet stated that they didn’t want Guardians to be too powerful with a ranged weapon because of their defensive abilities.

Do you have the source for that?

Gah, this was an old interview that I can’t seem find from before the release but I swear I read it somewhere.

I’m thinking zealot

-Defensive Virtues are exchanged with offensive ones.

-Longbow with “judgemental” themed skills with conditions. Could maybe inflict torment because they fear the Zealot’s conviction or something.

-Traitlines bring new awesome offensive skills but some of the most fun defensive traits are locked to keep Guardian from being overpowered.

I think Swapping virtues alone would be a big change, Guardians have low health to compensate for how good their defensive abilities from virtues and traits, taking these away would allow Anet to go nuts and makes Guardian have much more damage.

Hattoni.8597:

I’d agree with a need for condition options. But don’t you think that ranged weapons don’t fit guardian? I mean, was there any ‘guardian’ with ranged weapons in a history (or movie, book)? No offense, I’m just curious if there was any. DW: sword, shield, axe, hammer, mace; 2H: sword, hammer, staff, spear – all of these weapons are close-medium range and all of those fits guardian. I don’t mean that guardian shouldn’t have range options, but CC+gap closers fits better than bow. Let me know what you think. I don’t want to offend anyone, these are only my thoughts.

Keep in mind the whole point of this specialization is to open up a new playstyle which the Guardian can’t access to normally (maybe citing balance issues) by locking some stuff away in exchange for new stuff.

Anet stated that they didn’t want Guardians to be too powerful with a ranged weapon because of their defensive abilities. Take away their defensive abilities and replace them with offensives abilites and suddenly you can hand us a good offensive ranged weapon.

I’m also going to say Longbow ranger. It along with the Sword is the current meta for ranger but just a pew-pew longbow ranger with maybe a Greatsword for backup would be best for you. All you have to know is avoid using the skill 4 knockback unless you actually need to knock something back.

Greatsword has an auto-attack that evades and it’s abilities are easy enough to use.

If you don’t want to reroll, Condi-nerco if probably your best bet otherwise but I don’t know much about it.

I’m also going to advise against Guardian Staff. Most of the other builds are fairly powerful and a few even the speedrunners use variations of but people will not like it when your run a Guardian Staff outside of loot stick farming mobs in the open world.

I personally think Galie is probably the best community manager I’ve seen.

I seriously can’t think of anyone off the topic of my head that comes close to being as active and skilled as she is.

tagari.3915:

Forgive me, i didn’t mean to say a pure specific role,that’s what i get when i wanted to express myself in English while thinking on my native language.. :p
From what i get by reading around is that Guardian is a “safer” choice for supporting a group whereas the Engi has a higher learning curve,but could be more rewarding.
Did i get this right?

Pretty much correct.

Guardians are pretty much accepted everywhere but they’re a common profession.

Engineers are uncommon but rewarding when you learn them.

The Raid CDI was only a short while ago so I could see them wanting to nail down some details before sharing anything with us.

Professor Yakkington

He’d be unstoppable

Smitty.9432:

maybe open world bosses?

That’s what I meant by megabosses, that’s the name they use for Tequatl or Triple Trouble Wurm. (Karka queen doesn’t count)

I think it’s a nice compromise. You can still play with non-guildies but the gamemode is mostly the same as GvG with some updates and there’s a Guild leaderboard.

I heard this phrase thrown around a lot during the livestream however there was absolutely no info on what it meant.

What does that mean?

Dungeons?
Raids?
A new Megaboss?
Something like the tower of nightmares?

All the above?

I have a feeling Galie is going to swoop in and tell me there will be more info later but that seemed to be the only blank slot in the press.

It’s definitely one of the more interesting world bosses.

What I found interesting is that it has the mechanics of a megaboss but the failure tolerance is so high most PuGs can figure out their mistakes in time to beat the boss. So in a sense it’s kind of training megaboss you can use to prepare the community for tougher content.

Personally I’m still holding out the next megaboss but hopefully this is a stepping stone so a difficultly spike to Teq or TT level difficultly isn’t as steep.

In general when I see the triple trouble armor, I rarely think “man that guy must be an at triple trouble” instead I think “Wow that guy is much luckier then me when fighting triple trouble”. I honestly think a token system is still superior, especially if it used a similar reward scheme to what I proposed in the Raid CDI:

Single Decap: 1 Token
Double Decap: 3 Token
Triple Decap: 5 Token
Full Kill: 10 Tokens.
Vendor is only unlocked when you get a full kill

That way a couple groups desperate to kill him still have some motivation to finally get the full kill.

I think the reward system is the only thing I don’t like about Triple Trouble and Teq. Well that and Megaserver hopping.

Does anyone actually think the rewards are any good? I’ve been complaining about these for a while.

Galie I imagine you’ll want at least one megaboss representative, right?

Excellent I hope we can resume the Raid CDI and later move onto the GvG CDI.

Is the new CDI forum and rules part of these changes?

hybrid.5027:

phoenix.3465:

Simplest solution would be to increase enemies armor and decrease enemies health.

No one wants conditions to be viable more than me, but if the “solution” is a brute force idiotic nerf to direct damage builds I will pass on it.

Ya but higher enemy toughness and lower enemy vitality could “buff” condi damage without affecting power builds if the numbers were calculated correctly so that the additional toughness only makes up for the vitality lost (i.e. a power build is doing 40 DPS to a 800 Hp enemy as opposed to 50 DPS to a 1000 HP enemy while a condi build does 45 DPS in both cases or something).

While I’ll agree your other solutions are better thought out, keep in mind any implementation of them would also cross into PvP and WvW and Anet would be worried about buffing conditions in that environment (from what I gather conditions are in a good place there though people still complain about PU Mesmers).

Adjusting monster toughness and vitality would isolate this balance change to PvE and having high monster toughness is something Anet is already experimenting with (see husks).

I do want to see some of these other thing on this list though…. how do the potions not affect condi-damage anyways.

dlonie.6547:

Awesome! It’d be cool to revisit the Raiding CDI in the more controlled environment, since it got shut down prematurely.

Just my 2c.

It was annoying to have good discussions hijacked by people boiling down complex topic into the stupid debates you see on this forum all the time.

Clearly this is an important issue Anet needs to address immediately!

One of these days someone needs to make a massive thread of old complaints Anet has never got around to fixing.

Season 2 is mostly better then most of season 1. I think your forgetting some of the crappy filler updates before good bits of content like the collecting meta-achievements stuffs before the tower of nightmares openned up or fixing signs. However I will state that the season 1 finale has yet to be topped (Marionette, EoTM, Triple Trouble Wurm, Prime Hologram fight). Sliverwastes are a step in the right direction but I feel they need to turn up the difficultly to make the zones super fun.

Rewards are just better too. Nomad’s is a bit of a joke stat set but Sinister trinkets as a reward for hard achievement completion is better then another dumb backpiece.

But if we get rid of DR entirely, what will I blame for my bad RNG?!?

I’d wait till the full zone is out before criticizing it mostly because as others have said, I wouldn’t be too surprised if they’re “training” us this patch and harder content will be added as the meta moves along.

All the core wurm communities view it as an exploit and don’t use it mostly because it invalidates the condi role however Anet hasn’t said anything on whether it’s an exploit and if they’re fixing it.

Symph.8407:

Blaeys.3102:

The content of the raid is dependent on the context of the raid – in other words, a scalable raid would be developed differently than a set size raid. The same is true, to a lesser degree with multiple sized raids. That factor would need to be considered at the start of the process – not the end (which is why the mechanics conversation has veered in so many different and, often, conflicting, directions).
..
How raids are formed and how exclusive/inclusive they are is probably one of (if not the) most important elements that people care about. Content can (and should) vary greatly within the model they decide to go with, but the processes and accessibility model they choose to build raids upon will be the first decision they have to make (and is something we want to collaborate on).

I still don’t really see scalable as a working solution, I think (with my extremely limited knowledge) that it would simply be too difficult to balance.

But, what I meant was: you have voiced your concern for accessibility with fixed size raids (or just one size), and I’m sure the devs have read that concern.
To me, that’s all there is to do on that matter. I have no expertise in game development, I don’t know if you have, but I’m sure the devs have a much better idea of what will work and what will not, when it comes to this part of the raid discussion. That’s why I think it’s much more important to talk about the design of the raids, and bring up interesting/cool/etc. ideas, than it is to talk about the size, which we (I assume) haven’t got the expertise to properly comment on anyways.

I agree that raid content should vary as much as possible between different raids, but I also think that the most important thing about a raid is the encounter(s). I think it’s so much more important that the devs focus on making the encounters really amazing, and then they can tune each raid to 8, 10, 15 (not more) players individually for all I care. I (and my guild) will manage to get everyone in, even if it means taking turns. The quality of the encounters will always have the highest importance.

Since we’re digging this topic up again.

One of my arguments for scaling was that you don’t have to look at flexible Raid sizes as a “How do we make every party size the same difficulty?” and can look at it as “How do you ensure the Raid is never easy at any scaling level but doable at most levels?” which basically means you have a set difficulty and size in mind but you still add some scaling mechanics to make other sizes “possible” even if it’s not “optimized”.

Just going to add this real quick before Chris swoops in to lock this thread.
Raids would be an excellent time to introduce the following alongside them:

1. Adding an upgrade to allow stat switching to ascended gear. If people are encouraged to try out different stat sets such as condi-damage, it would be a good idea to add an upgrade that allows players to change their ascended gear to that stat set.

2. New Ascended acquisition methods. Currently the only way to get ascended armor and weapons is through RNG or crafting, it would be nice if there were alternative methods, Raiding could be one but I’m sure players wouldn’t mind being able to get them through fractals or something.

3. New Stat sets. Sinister is already probably filling a possible new stat set niche that Raids could create but one or two new stat sets catering to niche roles (like boon duration gear) would be nice

4. Legendary Armor. We discussed this heavily in the thread but Raids could be one piece in a massive puzzle to create legendary armor.

The lack of Waypoints is a design choice for the gameplay they were going for. They essentially wanted death and more specifically wipes at the forts to be meaningful instead of death rushing from the nearest waypoint to be the norm like pretty much every other event in the open world.

This makes you more dependent on other players in the region to stay alive and encourages you to stay together in each of the forts and Res anyone you see down in case you also go down.

You can argue with me that this isn’t gameplay you perfer but I will counter that in order to create the good gameplay people are praising now, they had to sacrifice the convience of nearby waypoint.

Most of the game spoils you with easy WP access, this is a level 80 zone, it make sense for them to add harsher elements to create more interesting gameplay.

Gaile Gray.6029:

Is it even possible, given the changes that came about in the world?

Most old living world content was discussed as excellent Candidates for being coverted into Raids in the Raid CDI.

ZudetGambeous.9573:

The problem with enemies with boons is that only 2 classes have access to boon strips and the stripping CD is always significantly longer than the boon uptime, making them pretty useless in PvE.

PvE boons/boon stripping need an overhaul imo. More classes need boon strips, and enemies in PvE need to have long duration long cd boons instead of short duration short CD boons.

Just to correct you, 5 classes have access to boon removal: http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Boon

Nerco, Mesmer, Thief, Engineer and Guardian(Searing Flames). It’s just we never use boon removal.

Alright Top 3 Priorities, I think difficulty and skill being top priority are basically no brainers so I won’t touch on them.

1. Soft Raid Roles.

I think we had a very good an enlightening discussion in this CDI and what existing roles in Guild wars 2 could be expanded on. The reflect and condition damage roles in triple trouble are a perfect example of what I want to see. However in addition to these I think interrupts, Crowd control, boon striping and stealth should be added to the toolbox when designing raids (though for the later 2 an environmental item substitute may be required). Most class compositions should be able to complete a Raid but that doesn’t mean we can’t dust off the lesser used utility skills on our bars.

2. Different Reward Tiers/Difficultly

I think Anet will be fighting a losing war if they try to decide a difficulty level that’s perfect for everyone. Add some sort of reward tier system that makes the Raid harder if you want slighter better rewards or have a wide array of Raids that are different levels of difficulty. One man’s farm is another man’s Everest.

3. Scaling.

Alright here’s my controversial pick. We’ve said everything that can be said on this subject in this thread but here’s my final defense of scaling!

I know everyone’s top priority is difficultly but I think we could pull of scaling to a degree without sacrificing difficulty. Keep in mind this isn’t the open world, you can add players to a Raid and have it be objectively harder instead of easier and it would still be fair to the players. Think of more platforms opening up in the Marionette as you add more people, objectively it would be harder the more people you have because your adding more and more failure points but it’s still fair because you choose to open the Raid up to more people as the Raid leader.

Thank you for the opportunity to have this CDI discussion and thanks to everyone that I bounced idea with, I feel confident that Raids will be an excellent addition to Guild wars 2 if this is added. Well as long as you don’t copy-paste the reward system from Triple Trouble to Raids…. nobody likes that reward system…..

Reward Tiers

Proposal Overview
Different reward tiers with different requirements per Raid. Each tier is increasingly hard to complete.

Goal of Proposal
To create multiple difficultly levels without changing a raid

Proposal Functionality
Basically each Raid would have a base reward, which is rewarded regardless of how well you do however each Raid would also have “bonus” loot based how well you do. These would be separated into 4 tiers, Bronze, Siliver, Gold and Platinum. These requirements for how well you do could vary Raid to Raid, it could be how quickly you complete the Raid, how well you complete bonus objectives or how soundly you beat the various Bosses. As an example here’s what they could be for various Raids:

Battle of LA/ Battle on the Breachmaker:
Mechanism: Time based
Bronze: Whatever time
Silver: If you wipe 1 or 2 times you still may get this tier if your quick
Gold: Your not likely to get this tier if you wipe even once
Platinum: No wipes, you must have an optimized group and go through the entire Raid almost perfectly, melting bosses and going from step to step as fast as you can.

The Marionette:
Mechanism: The Aetherblade Cannon chrage
Bronze: You didn’t fail
Silver: 50% or less of a charge
Gold: No Marionette chain break attempts failed or equilvient amount of champs got through
Platinum: No champs got through, no chain attempts failed. 0% Charge

Tower of Nightmares:
Mechanism: There are people trapped in the tower you need to rescue, they die after a period of time.
Bronze: We had to save people?
Silver: 25% saved
Gold: 75% saved
Platinum: Nobody left behind.

As you can see Platinum requirements would be tuned to be absolutely insane, something so that “world’s first” would be something worth bragging about. This could have an additional one-time reward tied to it which could include an achievement with a title and good reward like an ascended item or something similar in value (something you could add to your ascended armor to add a new selectable stat would be nice). This would mean each base Raid would be completable but there would be something insane to go for the most hardcore amongst us.

Associated Risks
-Rage if a certain base reward tier isn’t met
-A time based requirement could strengthen the berserker meta more
-Harder class requirements for Platinum rewards
-Veterans could be less accepting of newbies for fear of losing out a reward tier.

I’m basing this on the fact that in TTS I’ve noticed over time there are the glory hunters who joined us for the Triple Trouble first kill but played less once we achieved the first kill, the farmers who just want their loot, and the explorers who just want to experience everything the game has to offer. I noticed in the beginning the glory hunters joined us for the glory of getting the first kill then over time they got their kill and moved on then the farmers who wanted the Wurm’s unique loot settled in once our strategies settled down and they’re still with us almost every day. The explorers come and go every once and a while and join in for a couple kills then move on.

Platinum is for the glory hunters, that’s why the main reward is one-time, once you get the epic achievement, to them repeatable rewards are kinda meh. Bronze through Gold is more for the farmers, multiple tiers will keep them entertained and keep the Raid tense even after the 100 times. The reason I didn’t want too many more repeatable rewards at Platinum is so there’s less conflict between explorers who won’t be knowledgable about the fight and Farmers who just want the best reward.

Keep in mind all 3 of these types of players (and any I missed) will all be in the same Raid together, their needs affect each other.

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Morning,

Ok I have been up all night reading the posts and thinking about this CDI.

To be frank this is not a good CDI, specifically because whilst some folks are trying to be collaborative and have valuable discussion others are just bullying with their different agendas.

I have always said that if a CDI loses its value on both sides that it will be stopped.

So I am at some what of a loss. I can’t tell anymore if it is of value to this group. Whilst it certainly has been valuable for us it has been extremely time consuming to get to the good stuff.

So I will leave it up to you folks. If you feel you can work more collaboratively then by all means let me know that you want to carry on.

If you feel that it is a lost cause then I will ask for everyone’s top three priorities for raiding and call it a day.

I want to say thank you very much to all those who tried to follow the rules of the CDI and who had a healthy discussion. I also wanted to say a big thank you to TTS and DnT. We appreciate your feedback.

Chris

In that case Chris, I’m going to make one last preposal based on rewards and the different player types I’ve noticed over the months of being a TTS leader.

Well the reason I like current defiance is that you can use your CC to get around the Boss’s CC immunity however I don’t like the fact it’s ridicilously hard to coordinate who’s taking off the last defiance stack and who’s getting off the best CC move after deviance is broken without 2 people accidently firing at one defiance stack at the same time and resetting deviance again.

Making breaking Defiance creating a CC window means you don’t have to coordinate that precisely but you still can’t spam CC mindlessly or else the Boss will get a fresh stack of Defiance when you really need to CC him.

On gear diversity. I think most of the beserker focused meta comes from the fact that gear choice being narrow has more to do with the fact that all the beserker stats are the most “active”. Vitality and Toughness have a set amount of effectiveness when it comes to defense and that defense becomes less and less required as you learn to dodge stuff in encounters , while power, precision and ferocity all increase in effectiveness the more skilled you get and the better you can land your skills.

Personally I think trying to figure out a way to “force” the use of defensive gear is counter-intuitive and look at other active stat sets that aren’t the beserker stat combo and learn how to make them more effective.

2 Stat sets I see as underused are Boon Duration and Condition Duration. Boon Duration has a number of group DPS uses (Might, Fury) and active defense uses (protection, aegis, Vigor, Swiftness, Stablity) so adding it into a stat set might force more interesting decisions like (do I sacrifice ferocity so we can keep might and stablity up X% longer), similiar idea with Condition Duration.

Bubi.5237:

Crystal Reid.2481:

All I can say on this is we have been talking about it internally and trying to come up with different solutions that make CC valuable without allowing players to “stun lock” creatures (which would be a very real problem if we did not have Defiance). I can’t say any more on that at this time, so here’s a better question for you:

If we removed Defiance, how would you propose a replacement that makes CC (interrupts, stuns, fears etc) valuable without creating a situation that allows players to CC a creature to death.

I think the “easiest” solution would be to get immunity to CC for the next X seconds after you got CC’d (would be nice for players too, but meh.. ), so you can’t chain CC but can rupt the important ones.
Actually as the boss get immunity to CC for a few seconds, if someone timed the CC wrong, the boss’ important skill cannot be rupted, which makes it a bit harder maybe but imo still better than the defiance we have now.

I was thinking of flipping the script. Make it so the boss is Vulenerable to CC for X seconds after Defiance is broken then deviance returns as normal. If you break Defiance early, it could really screw up a group trying to interupt a key skill or push the boss into a certain area.

Blaeys.3102:

hybrid.5027:

You realize that you can change gear and traits and skills at any point out of combat? Each boss, each difficult trash pull etc will have its own meta. If you need condition damage for a particular encounter, the warriors or engineers will throw on their Rabid gear with giver’s weapons and retrait, and then go back to whatever is good for other encounters.

The meta will be determined boss by boss and encounter by encounter. That’s how it should be, by the way.

Very well said.

This is why I think this thread needs to take the toolbox approach several of us advocated several pages back (https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/CDI-Guilds-Raiding/page/25#post4535356).

Let’s put our energy into identifying the tools a raid should be expected to bring (interrupts), those they are likely to have (boon stripping), and those that are very niche (mesmer portal) – and then look at them as a laundry list of soft “roles” players can fill while in raids. That will provide a solid base on which initial raid design can be built.

Well we could establish a hard limit for what we would tolerate as a “hard” requirement, as in where do you draw the line for how much a certain profession has access to a tool? I think we’ve talked a lot about reflects and condition damage and most other tools absolutely everyone has access to (condi-removal, interupts, crowd control, etc.). Let’s focus on 2 edge cases, Boon Striping and Stealth.

Here’s the wiki page for everything that can remove boons: http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Boon. Now as I listed earlier, Mesmers, Nercomancers, Engineers, thieves and Guardians (we got one trait that actually works well) all have access to boon removal. It should be noted that all professions technically can access boon removal with the Superior Sigil of Nullification which removes a boon on crit.

So with that in mind, could you develop an encounter which requires boon removal? Like a Boss is applying Stability to himself and you need to remove it and push him into a certain spot with Crowd control skills?

I think it’s fine since I doubt you’ll be in a situation where out of 15 people, nobody is a Mesmer, Nerco, Engineer, thief or Guardian or has a Sigil of Superior Nullification. You’d have to be a 15 man group of pure Warrior, Elementalist and rangers.

Stealth is a lot less widespread wiki page: http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Stealth. Effectivelty only Thieves, Engineers and mesmer have access to it (rangers have it but it’s short and doesn’t last very long) and mesmer stealth only lasts 6 seconds at the most.

So with that in mind would a section where you have to quickly stealth by an enemy be unfair in it’s class spread? Now in theory you could get around this dilemna by offering a “smoke bomb” item nearby which creates a smoke field you can blast for stealth. But what are your guy’s opinions?

Dalanor.5387:

guardian.6489:

hybrid.5027:

The problem is Necromancer isn’t even good at condition damage in pve compared to warrior or engineer. They need a significant buff in that department on the pve side at least.

Aren’t they the meta Condi-bomb in WvW?

It’s completely different to nuke down a player with 10-20k hp than to deal effective DPS on a boss with a few million hp.

True but I thought that killed Condi-damage in PvE in general not just for Nercomancers. Unless I missed something. the only time you use Condi-damage in PvE is at triple trouble and in that case Nercomancers are probably one of the best professions for the role.

hybrid.5027:

The problem is Necromancer isn’t even good at condition damage in pve compared to warrior or engineer. They need a significant buff in that department on the pve side at least.

Aren’t they the meta Condi-bomb in WvW?

Blaeys.3102:

Group Roles/Mechanics

xxxxx Melee Damage
xxxxx Range Damage
xxxxx Condition Damage
xxxxx Crowd Control
xxxxx Interrupts
xxxxx Runners

xxxx Group Condition Removal/Support Heals
xxxx Core Boon Sharing (might, regeneration, vigor, etc)
xxxx Damage Reducing Conditions (blind, weakness, Moa morph)
xxxx Reflects and Projectile Protection
xxxx Combo Fields and Blast Finishers

xxx Boon Stripping
xxx Group Stability
xxx Stealth/Invisibility

xx Group Quickness
xx Group Aegis
xx Group Stun Breaks
xx Instant Resurrection (from downed state)

x Mesmer Portal

Two Questions
The point of this is to set the stage for a few questions -

• How much effort should groups be expected to put into raid composition (which professions/builds they bring), as dictated by fight design?

• Where do we draw the line regarding mandatory roles? Given the above, can developers design a fight where reflects are mandatory? What about mesmer portals or stealth? Should anything outside of the core (4 and 5 "x"s) ever be mandatory in an encounter?

My Opinion
I wanted to separate this out so people could provide their own opinions regarding the questions above (and add in other roles and mechanics in a similar fashion, if they wish) – without having to pay attention to my biases.

In my opinion, the primary advantage of raids compared to other content comes from greater access to niche roles. Raids differ from other content primarily because of that access to diversity. Larger groups mean you can assume most roles will/can be filled by someone in the group.

With that said, this is the developers’ opportunity to design fights that do require pretty much every role any player can fill. With players able to switch traits on the fly, there are very few capabilities that most groups with more than 8 players will not have (as seen above).

To expand on this even further here’s the classes that are strongest and can perform each of those roles.

I’ll ignore most of the 5 star ones since that’s pretty much everyone (might edit this post later).

Condition damage
Nercomancer Engineer Mesmer Thief Ranger Warrior Elementalist

Interupts
Thieves have a spammable one, most professions have a number of interupts on one weapon set.

Group Condition Removal
Guardian Warrior Nercomancer Engineer Ranger Thief

Core Boon Sharing
Elementalist Guardian All other professions

Damage Reducing Conditions (blind, weakness, Moa morph)
Thief Nercomancer Engineer All other professions

Reflects and Projectile Protection
Guardian Elementalist Mesmer Engineer Thief Ranger

Combo Fields and Blast Finishers
Pretty much everyone to various degrees

Boon Stripping
Mesmer Nercomancer Thief Engineer Guardian,

Group Stability (honestly I think this is a 2 star, Guardian has a monopoly pratically)
Guardian Mesmer Engineer

Stealth/Invisibility
Thief Engineer Mesmer Ranger*(has only individual stealth)

Group Quickness
Mesmer Guardian

Group Aegis
Guardian Mesmer?

Group Stun Breaks
Guardian…. and there’s like one trait that does it, O ya and one mesmer skill.

Instant Resurrection (from downed state)(should be moved a tier look)
Warrior Ranger Elementalist Nercomancer Guardian Engineer

Mesmer Portal
…… Take a guess

One thing we can learn from this is some roles we rarely use like Boon striping are actually avaiable on most of the professions while a couple others we take for granted are very narrow (group stability is essentially Guardian only).

I’m also noticing a lot of the roles Nerco is king of, tend to be underplayed in most PvE areas of the game.

About Open World vs Instanced Content.
While leading Raids with TTS, I’ve found over time that open world is more trouble than it’s worth most of the time. Probably it was at its best when we guested over to a low-pop server for Teq and a couple locals would come out and thanked us for setting up a run. Post-megaserver update that doesn’t happen anymore and mostly we just keep bumping into other groups trying to organize, PuGs trying to organize, and random players trying to figure out where’s the best map to go on while we’re looking for a semi-clean map to taxi all of our members to. And that’s not even going into how everyone on a Triple Trouble map needs to know what’s going on and listening to the commander calls.

So really the way to go even for a 150 man raid like Triple Trouble is instanced with a strong way to pull in Random players through the LFG tool so everyone can participate regardless of whatever Raid size we pick or if it scales or not or whatever.