In a Raid situation, maybe, and only if you’re Chrono taking. Otherwise, again, you’re costing someone else points to overcome your Commander gear’s toughness.
As far as boon duration goes, it’s a balance. And honestly, Mesmer/Chrono is about thinking outside the box with all the tools we have. We can CS to multicast skills as well as effectively shortening Cooldowns on skills that have CD’s that last longer than CS (TW, notably in this case). On top of that, we have Signet of Inspiration that can act as a Boon duration hack. Grab the trait that casts Signet of Inspiration on a Phantasm cast, and you’ll be able to cover a lot more players more frequently.
Now, if you’re claiming that the “new meta” extends outside of Raids I would have to disagree. Most encounters (if not all) in PvE outside of Raids end with plenty of quickness/alacrity to spare. In which case why would we need an extra 13.8% boon duration that doesn’t get used when I can get back that small bit of DPS for ourselves and our Illusions?
As far as raw stats are concerned: Berserker’s and Assassin’s trade between 1st and 2nd place depending on what buffs are in play. More importantly, Mesmers are often placed on Reflect duty is another selling point as the Reflect damage formula only uses the player’s own Precision and Ferocity; the Power variable actually comes from your target that cast the attack.
So, if both gear sets are almost identical it’s better to take the set that gives you an advantage in a role that we frequently take on. If you’re looking to do fractals the metabattle build works very well as the fights are short enough towhere you don’t have to worry about buff/boon duration as much since the encounters are so short.
If you plan to branch out to Raids, you may want to consider switching your food, buffs, and such depending on your role. Keep in mind though that you don’t want to pull away too much from your raw stats as your Phantasms strength relies on what stats your feeding them.
Here’s a reddit post where a couple of Raid builds are discussed as well as their uses.
For catch-all, Assassin/Berserker works great since you can change around everything else to accommodate your needs.
Edit: Another thing to note is that your Mesmers are a lot more dynamic in their setups than other classes. Sandy’s guide does a great job of describing “ideal” situations of when to use what as far as traitlines and weapons.
Continuum Shift is also used to break the rules a lot being able to do crazy things like using a utility skill 4 times in a row with no cooldown or drop a portal and double blink to cover vertical ground yet have 0 cooldowns at the end. Mesmers are all about cheating, really.
(edited by savacli.8172)
The direct answer: it varies on what you’re crafting. Some collection items have a much steeper price tag to them then others. So if you’re looking to make a decision based on costs you may want to look at something like https://gw2efficiency.com/ and see what you have vs what you need to get. Time wise, the full set of collections can be done in a weekend if you plan it out (boss timers, map events, etc). If you try to tackle one thing at a time you may find you lost out on collection items you could have multi-tasked on.
Revenant, Mesmer, and Rangers all excel with Mainhand sword (Mesmer can duel wield them as well).
Guard Sword is rather meh after the June Specialization Patch (at least in PvE).
Warrior Sword is used in a Condition build but otherwise doesn’t get much play time. Warrior can also duel wield swords.
I have very few hours on Thief, but I don’t remember using sword a whole lot other than cleaving situations which I believe Staff overshadows that now (except for pistol whipping??).
Similar to Condi duration, Boon duration caps at +100% as well.
In a typical Dungeon or Fractal situation the typical Assassin/Berserker Phantasm build works just fine and pushes out enough Quickness and alacrity to last well beyond the encounter.
If you’re doing Raids (or anything that goes beyond the 5-man team) you’ll need to break out the spreadsheet and see where you can budget to get in extra sources of Quickness. A lot of factors go into play such as team comp and Sub-squading. Also, Signet of Inspiration Shenanigans goes pretty far in reducing the need for boon duration .
Unless you’re Tanking, Commanders should be avoiding as Toughness will interfere with the dedicated Tank causing that player to tack on toughness that surpasses yours (commander armor alone is puts you at ~1200 toughness). DPS is still needed stats are better invested in squeezing out that extra tiny bit of DPS instead of investing it into buffering yourself so Assassin/Berserker is still the way to go if you’re not tanking.
I’m okay with this. The original block duration was great when I needed it, but it’s more often than not that I’m just wanting to get the iAvenger out rather than needing the block.
Note: I mostly play PvE
I’ve come across folks who have had their rings replaced, though a few of them took a couple support tickets since the issue was not well known at the time.
I don’t anticipate that they’ll be willing to replace those “Select Stat” rings as their Attuned form may not be even coded into the game. Support may just opt to replace your “Select Stat” rings with a properly coded ring of your choice so that you can Mystic Forge it.
Does anyone know if/when light armor is going to be allowed to use Commander’s Intricate Gossamer Insignias? I unwittingly made 6 insignias for my mesmer without realizing you’re not allowed to craft exotic light armor with it… I don’t see why tailoring would be an allowable profession for the recipe if you’re not allowed to craft light armor with it. :-(
The “HoT” recipes for the pattern of needing both the recipes for the insignia/inscription as well as a recipe for the individual item.
In other words you’ll also need to buy/learn the following recipe’s as you can’t just acquire them through the Discovery panel:
- Commander’s Exalted Masque
- Commander’s Exalted Mantle
- Commander’s Exalted Coat
- Commander’s Exalted Gloves
- Commander’s Exalted Pants
- Commander’s Exalted Boots
Not sure if I’m just lucky, but with items like those I’ve had much better results when stacking MF vs times where I just walk in with my base MF percentile.
There was only ever one item I ran into that took me over an hour, but that’s about it. All the rest of my exotic drops like that were acquired in about 5-10 minutes (depending on availability of mobs).
As far as resource node gathering, I would try banners/boosters that give you a gathering bonus (just guessing, no personal experience with this).
For the most part you want to be aiming for Power > Precision > Ferocity as you level. At higher levels that switches around to Precision > Power > Ferocity.
Armor needs to be Berserker. Though, the DPS gain from all 6 pieces of your armor being ascended over exotic is barely 2%. If you got a set, great. If not, you’re not missing out.
Sword and Axe is definitely a must as the vast majority of your damage contribution comes from this weapon set. Keep in mind the way damage is calculated averages the weapons in both of your hands as a single weapon so you want to make sure you’re upgrading both weapons even though you’ll mostly be using Sword skills.
Runes: Scholars if you can maintain the 90% threshold for a good portion of the fight. Otherwise, Strength would be the next best set as as well as aiding your might stacking. Force and Air sigils if you’re trying to squeeze out as much damage as possible.
The vials, globs, and shards? I didn’t see that as a hurdle at all. Granted, I’ve been consistently running fractals and have a fair amount of stock. But, there’s also mystic forge recipes to break down higher grade mist material to its lesser counter parts. E.G. 1 shard can make 3 Globs of mist.
Team Comp, Team Comp, Team Comp
I cannot stress that enough when it comes to putting together a build for an toon going into a raid. A build like what Xyonon posted would be a good baseline in a vacuum setting where I’m only concerned about my Mesmer regardless of my team comp.
However, Xyonon’s build wouldn’t work for me in my regular Raid group. Namely, I would be well over 100% in critical strike chance if I changed nothing. In which case I might opt for something like Air Sigil. Pricing is also something that may be a make-break deal for some players.
There’s a reddit post that goes over a few build options with small descriptions of each and their uses.
Yeah and raids arent meant to be pugged. If you cant form a guild group then form a group of friends instead. This still comes under the social category. If you cant sort out a proper group for group content that requires coordination and teamwork then you probably shouldnt be bothering to raid in the first place.
And if you still insist on raiding with pugs then you should have no expectations of success in such a group. Just enjoy what you can instead of complaining. Because really the complaints arent really about the content they are about peoples inability to make friends and get a group together. Or their own or others inability to be flexible (common occurence in pugs).
tl;dr
Dont pug. Or dont expect success in a pug.
This I can agree with. The content is fine the issue being the effort of the average player not meeting the expectations required to progress in the content (be it laziness or schedule conflicts).
A proper LFG tool won’t suddenly turn a noob into a raid conquering hero, but it would help many players get their foot in the door and at least experience the content. From there, the player decides if they want to take the content more seriously or continue casually experiencing the content through PUG’s. Though the understanding is very clear that walking into raids with a group like that should be primarily for the experience as clearing/progressing through the content with such a group has low success rates; raids are new after all.
Later on, I’m sure strategy/techniques we use now will be more and more refined where the execution of them doesn’t require nearly as much skill as they do now. At which point, I would say that raids have become closer to being casual friendly.
P.S. How the kitten do you get to 1k8 toughness while being a “healer”?
“Bruh, do you even tank?”
Seriously though, part of the problem is that even in the healing role you are still responsible for your portion of contributing to DPS. So with that high of toughness you’re stealing from other stats that help contribute to damage.The other part of the problem is that now the team’s tank has to surpass that 1.8k toughness to fulfil the role. So, now there’s two players on the team that nerfed themselves.
See I’m higly skeptical of that. Ya of course if they gonna make a complete overhaul of the LFG or if they have difficulty making Squad work with the LFG, that I could understand.
But just adding some section in the LFG? Adding a section Raid or a section Maguuma for the 4 new maps?? Is that so much complicated to do? They did it with fractal, changed the name of the section. So why raid and the new 4 maps are SO MUCH more difficult? Hell they could even use current section and just rename them. Half of the LFG is unused. Nobody post in the WvW section and PvP isn’t far from it. People just don’t use that tool for that type of content.
IMO, they want to overhaul the LFG at some point in the future and until then, they don,t want to touch it. Even if just a really really small amount of resources just to adapt a tiny tiny bit the LFG would do wonder for the players. Changing a tag or two on the LFG ain’t hard.
Tah Dah. That alone would suffice for now. Right now you pull up LFG and there are posts upon posts about Raids intermingled with SW and Magus Falls events. A simple Raid tab would do wonders, bonus points if we can get sub-tabs for each of the individual bosses. The flashy stuff (if that’s the project goal) can come later if need be.
As far as the whole just “add good players as your friends and whisper them” suggestion: we’ve (the general we) have been doing that since the launch of the game, and while some have better luck than other the whole friending thing doesn’t work everytime since they might be busy doing something else or even raiding with their side friends (GASP!). Go with your Guildies? Well, I guess that depends on your guild, where you fall in their ranks, and whether or not there’s a spot for you. Find an auxiliary Guild to raid? I hope req requirements don’t clash.
How did all that effort from players work out? Some player took the initiative to make a website dedicated to party finding and instantly grouping was much easier since we could find other players who were wanting to tackle the same content.
Call it lazy or not but on nights where I have just a few minutes to play I more easily and more quickly find a group on LFG to get in my fractal dailies than trying to play buddy roulette through Whisper or Guild chat.
And then there’s also the case of Vacuum situations vs Classes in particular team comps. More Etc.
So yeah, there’s not really a convenient cheat sheet of “Who’s better than who”. Some classes are a bit more flexible and versatile so they may see more play time than others, but there’s not a End All Be All King or loser.
Verdant Brink is probably the worst as there’s alot of RNG that goes into getting the currency. I too am going for the 9 Spec weapons and ended up with a very large stack of Airship parts, but now it’s a matter of finger crossing hoping I get a good drop or loot from the cargos.
AB and TD can be more time consuming, but at least I’ve developed somewhat of a rhythm so I can go from one maps meta to another and still walk away with a generous amount of currency.
DS is easy but very boring and time consuming. There’s also the big gotcha of practically “all or nothing” when it comes to hunting for Noxious Pods for Ore depending on whether the meta is successful or not. Otherwise you got only a handful of freebee pods to spawn regardless of the meta’s completion or not.
Casual friendly…?!?
I know, everybody has slightly different ideas of what “casual” means.
But spending 30mins to 1hour just to find a grp and organize this grp, isn´t that much casual friendly for me.
Oh, and someone has left the grp…just wait another 15-30mins to fill up the party again.
Not that casual friendly i think.
This pretty much goes back to the fact that there’s no LFR or enchanced LFG tool to help facilitate this. So yeah, I hope our casual players already have a way to get a group beforehand (guild or regular dungeon/fractal buddies). Otherwise, they are losing time trying to pug raids when they’re probably already on a time crunch.
Eh, if anything someone will do the jobs themselves and put together a website or something like gw2lfg (gw2lfr?) ages before the anet team addresses the issue themselves.
I agree with 99% of what you are saying Dusk. But not on that. You said it yourself. Someone can play ranked, unranked or even hotjoin depending on what they choose. But they all can experience conquest PvP on their level. Nobody is telling them go in EoTM for easy mode PvP.
Same should be true for raids. Nobody should tell them go in dungeon or fractal if you want easy mode because they are not the same type of content. Like Ranked, Unranked and Hot join, there should be different level of difficulty for raids too. Just like there is several difficulty level in fractal.
It was my opinion back when we didn’t even know what was this challenging group content. You can’t make a content that will have the right difficulty for everybody. So the ideal solution is to make different level of difficulty.
And I disagree that would diminish the value of the effort we make. Lets just give you an exemple. Back when fractal was lauch, people were putting video of them doing level 80 and it was impressive and those people had pride of doing it. The fact that some people were doing fractal 10 didn’t devalued that.
Same with league. When I’m gonna see someone in diamond or legendary division I’m gonna be impress and their achivement won’t be devaluated because I also can play in PvP League, just 2 or 3 division under them.
If I’m able to kill the raid in normal mode, I’m gonna be proud of myself. This won’t be devaluated by someone killing the raid in easy mode.
I suck at PvP…like terribly horrible at PvP. So, with that in mind I stay away from anything other than Hot Join or friendly pre-organized matches. I’ll never get that fancy Roman numeral by my name, BUT I can still experience the same content as the League-ers do.
It’s very humbling to have some of my friends and guild mates play with me on “easy” mode, and I get to return the favor by cheering them on as they compete for much higher stakes and rewards. The same could be reciprocated in PvE. In that case it would be me helping a lesser skilled guildie while I take on the tougher challenges for better rewards; we’d still be playing the same content. It’d almost be an insult to tell that guildie to go play Fractals since they such at raids.
[sarcasm] It’s okay though since Fractals are kinda like Raids! [/sarcasm]
I am that guy that believes that everything is in this game should be designed for everyone.
The moment you decided to find time to practice is when you went beyond the call on an average player. To me, I see the casual player as someone who came across GW2 and picked up the game because it was a cheap buy and found it interesting. Though the moment a Steam sale goes live I expect that same player to chase after the next shiny object. Should he come back to GW2 I don’t think he’d have much luck finding a group because he probably doesn’t have the right gear let alone the experience necessary to bypass that check.
So we should make sure the game is for the most casual players all the time? What about the guy that play 20min per year. Did you think about him? How hardcore elitist the game is if that guy can’t experience all the content?
I’m exagerrating, but you get my point. It’s not like they changed everything in the game into raid and there is nothing in the game except raid. Jesus 2 months ago the game was fine, they added 1 raids and suddenly that,s all there is. I can’t play raid, so this game isn’t for casual anymore. That’s why we can’t have nice things because each time there is people screaming that not everybody can play it. From the casual mom with 2 kids and 2 hours on sathurday to the hardcore gamer that love GW2 and play 30-40 hours per weeks. Why can’t they both have content that they love? Or it need to be always about the casual 100% of the time?
Err, not quite. I’d like to see Raids move in a direction similar to fractals (the good ol’ version) to where casual players aren’t necessarily excluded, but they should appropriately get wrecked if they walked into a Raid difficulty equating to Fractals 50 (pre-HoT).
My gripe is that there’s a clear division now, and it’s disheartening when I can’t even bring in one of my guildies who love the game but do not have the time to come practice with us. They eventually give up their spot in the group because they think after several hours of trying they were holding us down (admittedly, they were making regular mistakes) or felt discouraged that they weren’t making any progress. This is even more insult to injury after we complete the raid 1-2 attempts after that person was replaced.
Some of you would see that and think, “That’s just motivation for that guild member to get better.” when in reality I’ve seen fewer and fewer people return because they don’t think they’re good enough. That’s the part I don’t like about Raids. In any other content I can help someone through the content, and have them walk away making them feel accomplished and empowered. But what the kitten do I do with people who I see time and time again giving up on themselves while they see others succeed. I expect that from other games but not GW2.
Edit: The reason I plea for a Easy mode or tier’d Raids is because it will serve as a crutch. Again, pointing back to fractals even though there was an “easy” mode the general player base opted for the higher levels because of the increased availability of rewards (ascended boxes notably). Now, I’m not gonna throw someone straight to the sharks if they want a chance at a box, but it’s a whole lot easier to crutch them into the hardcore content if I had an easy mode rather than have said person eaten alive.
P.S. I realize that Easy mode or whatever will never happen; I’m just voicing my 2 copper that Raids are not casual friendly.
(edited by savacli.8172)
OP is absolutely correct. Having spent hours on 2/3 bosses they are not that mind bogglingly hard that casual players cannot complete them.
BUT there is a perception that Ascended, or at least 2/3 ascended is required. It’s not a completely unjustified perception either as the 2nd boss is a pretty hard DPS check and having certain Ascended gear will really really help you. Sure it can probably be done with everyone in full exotics but the level of play needed to do that is pretty high and not many can execute on that level so people putting groups together are safer in making the requirement that Ascended gear is required.
The problem with this is that Ascended costs SO kitten MUCH. It’s a huge barrier to entry for new players. It takes months for a new player to get to the level they need to be to even start raids.
This is the biggest problem with raids right now. Difficulty is fine, but so many are being locked out of content simply because of the huge gold sink Ascended is right now.
This spreadsheet breaks down Ascended vs Exotic for those curious about the exact advantage with Power builds.
In other words walking in with Ascended trinkets is about 4% damage increase.
Bringing in an Ascended weapon is another 6% ish.
Armor and all infusions slotted is about another 2% each in damage increase.
So those who have the time and resources for Ascended gear can easily walk in with a boosted 10% in damage over the exotic player. That’s not to say it’s impossible for an exotic team to clear the Raid bosses, but that’s an additional 10% in damage that the exotic team would have to come up with when compared to a similarly skilled team that is in ascended gear.
So a casual player not only needs to get through the initial learning curve, but they may also have a harder time clearing the boss depending on the team’s overall gear quality.
Great and insightful post OP, much needed in these dire times! As Ive said before, remember dungeons, people were frustrated because they were hard at the time, many meant that paths couldnt be solo in PuGs and a year later it was easy. Raids just came out, people need to look at them as a longterm progression, it’s basically the same mechanics but upped in every way.. we’ve had our fill with dungeons and should be prepared.
The key difference being with dungeons (and fractals) there was a generous margin for error, and the fault of one person didn’t necessarily contribute a wipe for the team.
In Raids, something as simple as missing a green spot levels the entire squad. Miss a second one in a row, and I’d be surprised to see even half the team still on their feet. Your boon stripper died? Good luck on the Boss Split. Tank got teleported? Hope he didn’t get ported to a dead/kill zone. And that’s just on the first fight alone.
There is margin for error, but it’s very minimal On top of that, some squads are pushing fights straight to the enrage timer so that a solid 8 minutes of not making detrimental mistakes.
I’m a little curious as to what you were salvaging, the exact items I mean. I have a decent stack of these inscriptions lying around even with casual salvaging from loot I get from events/fractals.
There’s no way to learn the recipe for the inscription itself, but you do have to learn the recipe to craft the individual items be it through discovery or buying the recipe from a vendor.
Auric Basin and Tangled Depths give a huge chunk of currency through map bonus. So, try to get Gold in as many events as possible to get your Participation % up. There is a bit of timing you can work on so you know when the best time is to drop in. In other words you want to be in the map when events are going and building up the map tiers, or you want to be there when the map is shifting its meta and is resetting the map tier.
You can also do Hero Points and Adventures once a day per account for up to 10 Aurillium each.
Other than that the other source of your big chunks is up to RNGesus when it comes to the Hunting drops.
(edited by savacli.8172)
Interestingly, I am the “traveling business professional” you pointed out there. I spend less than 30 minutes of time on the forums in a day, and play for fewer than 2 hours a day if I play at all. The difference is, ultimately, in attitude and willingness to learn.
You are also passionate about the game as much as I am which is why we’re both business professionals (me working upwards of 60+ hours a week) but are deciding to make time to keep current with the game’s newly introduced challenges. However, I would argue folks like you and I are the exception and not an accurate portrayal of the average business profession for that example. On any typical MMO, I would expect that level of effort to keep current else risk falling behind while others advance. With GW2, I’ve experienced difference.
When I have to travel overseas for work I am situated in remote locations where the most advanced piece of technology is a black and white TV. So, I was very thrilled when I came back home after a few months and could pick up the game and feel like I didn’t fall behind. I understand that the rest of the game still operates to this theme, but Raids are one thing that you simply can’t just walk back into. In other words, I expect to put in a tremendous amount of effort should I have to take a hiatus again. For the dedicated player it’s a joy. For the casual it’d be a chore, and odds are they walked away to do something else that’s within their time/skill constraints
I want to point out that in my guild’s case, we have invested 1-2 hours a day on assorted different days of a number of weeks to get to where we are. We’re not scheduling 4 hour sessions, we’re just playing for an hour and change when people are most available. It’s been pretty easy, and we have people with children, full time jobs, the works. The difference is that we all want to participate in this content together, so we’re motivated to find some time. If a person isn’t motivated or doesn’t care that much, well they won’t find much success in raids or a lot of things in games.
The moment you decided to find time to practice is when you went beyond the call on an average player. To me, I see the casual player as someone who came across GW2 and picked up the game because it was a cheap buy and found it interesting. Though the moment a Steam sale goes live I expect that same player to chase after the next shiny object. Should he come back to GW2 I don’t think he’d have much luck finding a group because he probably doesn’t have the right gear let alone the experience necessary to bypass that check.
Ultimately, I think the topic you and I are disagreeing on is the definition of what a casual player is versus someone who doesn’t play the game to the extent that an elitist does. It’s not black and white (elitist and casual player, respectively), and there’s a lot of grey area in between. Where I see you and I falling into is that grey area where we have IRL responsibilities but still make time to attend the game regularly. The elitists being those who eat, live, and breathe GW2. The casuals being those who are the “shiny-chasers” or cannot commit to regular game participation for whatever reason.
With that definition in mind, I cannot agree that Raids are casual friendly. For committed/dedicated players, yes, I’d agree with you there; Raids are definitely and reasonably within their bounds. The elitist….well, they’re off eating a heaping bowl of GW2-O’s
I´d have no problem with raids if it wasn´t for the massive ascended gear grind that new players are facing and having to play a specific class/build.
Ascended gear is by far the worst thing to ever happen to GW2.
Why keeping on saying this when plenty of people have posted vids where they actually beat the first raid in full exo or the ones in ascended finish it with 2 min left on timer (2 min out of 8 left = 25% of “over-dps” and asc is less than 25 % dps increase !)?
The thing is you beat the first boss and get a chance at finding ascended stuff… so the more you beat the raid the more ascended stuff you have.That´s nice, but what I´m saying is even if you are the most skilled GW2 player in the world you won´t even be able to access the raid if you don´t have ascended gear and play the right class/build.
I dare you to find skilled PUG raid group that accepts a thief with no ascended gear. First thing people ask you when you join is to ping your gear. If you don´t have ascended gear you get kicked.
^ Unfortunately this.
The first boss isn’t too bad a DPS check as it’s more of having to learn new team concepts that’s the biggest shock. In other words, you have to do more than just just stand an Auto-attack.
Ultimately, if you crunch the numbers you’re looking at most at about a 12.5% DPS gain on a Power build wearing full decked out ascended set vs full exotic (spreadsheet with the exact number distribution). Realistically, players are getting just over 10% damage increase with full ascended if infusions are ignored.
Again, for the first boss full exotics is more than enough as the DPS check isn’t too hard. On the following fights though the DPS is much tighter so for those wearing better gear they have a slight advantage. Those wearing lesser grade armor have to practice more to squeeze out that extra DPS they’re lacking from not having the gear.
However, PUG’s will be PUG’s regardless what the math looks like. The sad truth is that groups look at the gear much quicker than they look at the player. I’m not saying that the correct thing to do, but it’s what we have going on right now.
For a lot of us we have currency (laurels, commendation, materials, etc) on hand to adapt fairly painlessly. But for those who don’t have the luxury of time due to IRL conflicts they’re already a disadvantage since they don’t have that backstock and may not have the time to research how to most efficiently come up with that stock to ascend to the next level. This is a game advertised as casual so I don’t have the expectation that player spend as much time doing research as other games that demand more time dedication.
As Xillllix.3485 put it, why invest 2 hours on something that is likely to fail? I would decide the same if I only had limited windows of play time.
@Risng Dusk
You’re right; Raids take time, effort, and dedication to clear them. For the more hardcore player like myself the difficulty and skill expectations for the fights was very well received and enjoyed.
There’s still a couple of issues though:
First off, our in-game LFG tool doesn’t work that great when it comes to filling up 10 man teams. What we have now is a person or two breaking off from the squad to post an LFG and having people join on the parent squad. Though after a few trial and errors said person is locked out of LFG from too may posts so someone else has to fill the recruiting role.
Secondly, and most importantly, there is more than one type of a casual player. That’s great to hear that you refer to yourself as a casual, but here I see you are more than involved in the forums so at the very least you have somewhat of a good idea of what the “norm” is regarding strategy, builds, and whatnots relating to how to lead a successful raid regardless of your in-game play time.
What about the casual player who doesn’t have the same luxury of being able to be online as much be it playing the game or just being able to read up on it: a student who’s slaving away at dozens of school hours a week, the travelling business professional, or the parent who just recently had a child?
Normally, I wouldn’t bring up such silly examples, but hasn’t one of this game’s biggest selling point continuously been that it caters to casual players? I’m not saying that Raids have to be scrapped entirely, but Raids don’t really work well with folks that have scheduling conflicts. I understand that Raids can eventually be completed by everyone with practice, but that can take hours upon hours. As exaggerated as this sounds, not everyone is going to be able to put in the time commitment to overcome to skill challenge.
Why not design something like Challenge Modes/Motes where the initial difficulty is somewhere close to Fractals, but the rewards accrue at a drastically slower rate if not limiting reward availability compared to what “Hard Mode” offers. That way there’s less pressure to devote so much time (for the folks who honestly can’t afford it) while still offering an incentive and fair compensation to those that put in the time and effort to improve their skill and gameplay.
Ultimately, if Raids was implemented with the casual folks (by my definition) in mind being cut off I would say the line is very well noticed.
(edited by savacli.8172)
Healers, tanks and other crucial players in raids are frequently blamed for fails and wipes, often with good cause, but that is seldom balanced by recognition and praise. When the raid succeeds, everyone takes credit, but when it fails, it often seems one or two people are going to feel bad about it. You`ll know which roles are this important in that the raid won’t start until they are filled.
Your guild can measure its strength not by how many people took part in the meat grinder that is a “learn the boss” session, but by how many of those people are prepared to come back again the next day after having failed so many times. It is about endurance and the way to boost that in a guild is by showing some consideration and understanding of what failure or lack of praise can do to a player.
So much this.
I’ve come from other games where I was hesitant to play the Healer/Tank roles because there was a lot hinging on my performance, and player were much quicker to blame than to praise. One thing is criticizing bad tactics, but it was more often that I saw that players in these roles where been griped at for making an honest mistake. Unfortunately though, those guys has little to no margin for error in most high-skill events.
Even if your team did nothing but fail after fail, there’s just something heart-warming about seeing that same group up and ready to go the next day to tackle the challenge once more.
First off, my opinion of the introduction of the raids.
I love it. The difficulty is right where I want it to be as in the content was not impossible, but even myself and the more seasoned/experienced players in the guild I’m in were not able to complete the bosses for a few days. VG is a cake walk now, but it wasn’t at first.
The way we did it in my guild was we had a core group up players to sign up as the “A-team” that would be primarily responsible for grinding out the strats and ultimately figuring out what works. From there we would communicate our results to the rest of the guild and hold “Open Raid” days where anyone could join so long as they met reasonable requirements (knowledge of their class, correct gear, good build, etc).
Now, my opinion as to how the Raid content fits with the rest of the game:
I don’t like it very much. First off, our in-game LFG tool was not built with this content in mind. Most importantly, though, the game has for the past 3 years been catering to the casual player, and I think that should continue. The game is supposed to be something where a person can pick up the game in their spare time, and still reap decent rewards. With Raids, that’s not necessarily the case.
What I would like to see is something like a tier system where easier tiers could be completed by the more casual players, but they wouldn’t necessarily get the same rewards and/or receive rewards at a dramatically reduced rate. That was casual players still feel like they can complete the content, but there’s an incentive to improve their gameplay.
The frustrating part (and the part that most contributes to the “toxicity”) is when the more casual players are playing copypasta when it comes to builds and team composition and refuse to adapt otherwise. Now, I realize that’s nothing new to this game, but I would say we’re getting better about being less picky when it comes to other aspects/content of the game (especially in Fractals).
I fully agree though, that Raids have introduced a sort of divide in the player base more so than there already was.
Edit: My definition of a casual player being both someone who doesn’t care to better his skill and a casual player also being someone who simply does not have time (due to IRL conflicts) to invest as much time to practice.
(edited by savacli.8172)
Note: I main Mesmer in Fractals is where most of my perspective comes from.
If I had to pick just one weapon to Ascend it would be Shield. The block duration is great as well as the Alacrity provided from the Phantasm (decent damage too). Tides of Time can be used for additional quickness but also for multiple interrupts.
Beyond that, I would recommend Focus as Mesmers/Chrono’s are regularly on Reflect Duty, and the Phantasm from this weapon cleaves which is very helpful since we’re regularly running into blobs of mobs. Grouping things together with currently is great for taking care of mobs that are scattered.
Lastly, Off-Hand Sword provides amazing amounts of damage especially when traited. Though, we’re often needing to run other utility that prevents slotting OH Sword comfortably is why I would leave this item to acquire for last.
From a Open World PoV:
Shield’s Blocks helps tremendously, especially in HoT maps where things can sneak up on you and 1-shot you. OH Sword is needed in Events where DPS is critical to success. Pistol can be used when Phantasms need to stay a distance away, and GS is useful for fights that are devastating in Melee. Sadly, not a whole lot of uses for Focus.
The rest of the weapons don’t see much airtime. Torch has uses in min-max situations but isn’t worth ascending. Staff is great in Conditions builds and tagging. Scepter also is good for condition builds or for Open World where you want an additional block.
Fried Golden Dumplings have been around since last Winter so I wouldn’t say they were raid specific food. Allspice cake is definitely new and was introduced with HoT.
Regardless, I agree that food that share similar effects need to be normalized when it comes to ICD be it a common cooldown or no cooldown at all. Currently, you have to double check foods such as these to confirm the frequency of their effects.
“Behold! Dragon and Hero together!” is my favorite.
For the most part you don’t pick a Mesmer for its damage. The exception to that rule would be encounters that are bombarding you with reflects.
Otherwise, Mesmers excel as being the Jack of All trades in the utility role: stealth, reflects, Alacrity**, Portals**, Quickness, Interrupts, Boon stripping, Condi clear, Healing, distortion/evasion, etc.
Your damage is split between personal damage and Illusions. So, if you in a situation where you can’t use your Illusions you’re losing practically half your damage.
Unfortunately, that’s the sad reality if you’re trying to LFG/PUG raids. The community is doing what it’s always done and trying to take the easy route. By that I mean there’s already a loose idea for an ideal composition against the Guardian that non-organized groups are trying to put together: Thief didn’t make the cut.
In that case you have three options:
-Continue pugging and hope that there’s a group that’s not abiding by that loose composition.
-Continue pugging and roll a character that’s being asked for
-Discontinue pugging and find an organized group that’s willing to work with your class.
I will admit that any class can be viable against the boss fight, and I’d much rather have a player that’s proficient is a “sub-optimal” class vs trying to force said player into an “ideal” class that he has no idea how to play.
The difficulty is at just the right level. Casual pugs who google the latest and greatest builds expecting to faceroll everything don’t stand a chance. Though, players who have the aptitude to learn and adapt excel in a fight like this. Even if we get to the point where the community has developed the ideal composition and strategy there’s still the execution check.
Fights like Teq and Wurm were difficult at first because we were used to having to fulfil certain tasks while engaged in combat. Suddenly roles had to be taken and certain coordination was needed to make sure that certain tasks were being met at certain times. We were used to walking up to a boss, let’s say Lupi, and execute very consistent strategies: DPS hard, dodge the grub, dodge the kick, nuke with reflects. Bosses would hide behind invulnerability windows were the map could burn hard and then take a break while fulfilling the events.
Vale Guard takes that concept one step further by requiring the team to fulfil tasks while maintaining damage throughout the whole fight. You also lose the safety of the zerg blob to where we are used to throwing bodies to overcome the difficulty. Now, we have to compensate quantity with quality: 10 solid folks. The unfortunate part about the Vale fight is that one wrong move could potentially wipe the team. Two wrong moves in a row, and it’ll be very difficult to recover. I much prefer this form of “on your toes” mentality vs what we have with Teq, “Oh, I died. Let me waypoint and run back.”
If you come across a slot that’s labeled Offensive, Defensive, or Utility infusion you can only slot in Infusions that match one of those three labels or are labelled as Versatile. These infusions are found in all three types of Asecnded gears: armor, weapons, trinkets. In these types of infusions the highest AR available is a “+7 Versatile Infusion”
On upgraded Rings and Backpieces they come with Agony Infusions slots that can take the +x infusions (the green ones). Theoretically, there’s no limit as to how much AR you can get from these infusions slots are they can be crafted to whatever number so long as you have the material for it. Do not however the pricing for these infusions scale exponentially. So lower AR values cost only a handful of silver while AR values in the double digits can cost you hundreds and thousands of gold.
The dps checks are so tightly tuned that groups in full ascended are barely making the timer. Ascended armor can be the difference between a kill with a few seconds left and wiping to enrage at 0.
You want every statistical advantage you can get on top of your personal skill.
For the the time being. We do not know if these groups are playing optimally yet.
Precisely. Gear right now is being used as a crutch more or less until we (the community) can put together something that’s as close to as possible consistent technique for the boss.
Lol the stat boost is barely around 6%. People keep saying 12% have no idea.
Anyway with time Im sure people will be able to beat them on full exotics.
The stat boost isn’t 12%, correct, but the overall damage increase is around 12% at most when factoring in raw stats and the additional Weapon Strength.
The gear is only as good as the player. So through ascended gear on a player who knows his class and has a build to complement the team, and you’ll take advantage of the extra stats you get. However, give the same gear to a noob who knows nothing about his class and is uncoordinated, and he’ll wipe. Though, at least he’ll look fabulous doing so in his flashy gear.
If you’re at the point where you’re building your set you may want to take a peek at this spreadsheet to see where you’ll get the best mileage. Weapon alone seems to offer the best payoff, trinkets offering the next big chunk, and Armor providing the lowest increase over its exotic counterpart.
Edit: The reason Weapon offers the most damage increase is due to both the raw stat increase as well as the boost in Weapon Strength. Though it’s easiest to get the trinkets so you should be able to collect those pretty quickly with Relics, Laurels, and commendations depending on how much of those you got stocked up. No harm in “trial-ing” the exotic versions first c:
(edited by savacli.8172)
In my guild we actually used the Guard as the boss tank, and our best attempt was final phase about 20% ish health left with around 2 minutes left on the clock.
Shield was used for the same knockback pressure relief though that was low priority as we had other team members who would call out their cc’s. Mace was paired with shield to help with healing as well.
I will say our Tank Guard was still gear rather offensively with only Toughness being a priority for aggro-ing purposes.
Retal has always proc’d for individual strikes from multi-striking attacks such as Meteors. Retal scales with Power (or Condi if you’re a Guard) so if you throw down a nuke in the middle of a zerg stacked with Retal you’ll end up wrecking yourself in the process.
The only thing I can think of that cause a noticeable change in retal damage (at least at the WvW level) is more builds incorporating Power specifically Condition/Hybrid builds. In other words there’s been more Power in gear as the game has advanced. So something like a Carrion/Sinister player picking up Viper gear would cause retaliation damage to go up.
You need to buy the Viper’s recipe for the Torch itself.
(edited by savacli.8172)
To an extent you’ll still need to have a lot of offense packed into your team because of the timers (assuming nothing changed from the beta encounters). So, yeah, kudos to tanks and healers, but not going down won’t be a reason to celebrate if you can’t beat the boss in time.
I actually enjoy the instability for the very reason of having to think outside the box. Though what sucks about the instability is that it’s for 10 levels. It’d be better if we have the older instability system where we just had to put up with it for one level and have a new challenge on the next.
The instability I’m reffering to lasts for 20 levels actually.
…burn it to the ground.
Nope. At that point it’s just another Ascended Amulet so you get the usual salvage bits that the rest of the amulets do: Dark energy, +1 agony, crystal, etc.
If you’re asking for optimal you’re gonna want to aim for berserker in all slots. Though if you’re new to the game you may want to start off with more defensive gear and slowly work your way up.
In PvE, it’s more about learning the encounter and avoiding the hits that drop you down so gear is somewhat a crutch to get you by as surviving relies more on your passive/active defenses: knowing when to pop a blind/Aegis to avoid the killshot vs knowing when to frontload on boons/utility skills to mitigate several attacks.
Carrying multiple gearsets is already a good idea for PvE nowadays, but the upcoming raids may further emphasize that concept.
Ultimately, it’s a matter of would you rather be thrown in the sharks and learn to swim (you’ll learn really fast but might lose a limb or two), or would you rather have training wheels and learn at a slower pace?
Feel free to PM me on the forums or in-game if you have any Guardian specific questions. The class is really fun to play but also very useful one as well.
I actually enjoy the instability for the very reason of having to think outside the box. Though what sucks about the instability is that it’s for 10 levels. It’d be better if we have the older instability system where we just had to put up with it for one level and have a new challenge on the next.
The molten boss thing is just stupidly annoying because of the whole yoinking of the team if even one person hops off the ledge. I’d be completely fine if players who abused this where banned since players are going out of their way to avoid an otherwise required event.
As far as safespotting being banned, I dunno. In the case of Mossman safe-spotting folks are just hopping up a ledge to avoid attacks which is completely allowed in the game mechanics, but I’m sure that’s not how the encounter was made to play out. So, I feel something like this would just fall under “not intended”.
/2copper