Guild Wars 2

Do weekly trio and escort. That’s 2 LI per week. It takes 75 weeks at that rate. If you have been doing weekly escort+trio since it came out, you would almost be done.

As for the collections, you have to kill every boss once, except vg which needs to die twice, and gorse which needs to die 5 times. If you can’t find the time to do that, grind out gold, and buy the kills from a guild. Compared to the price of materials to make legendary armor, buying all the kills wouldn’t even double the price of the armor, which is a fair price for getting the end rewards from content you don’t play.

1 of each profession, 10 spot is for selling. Perfect balance. Ofc this would also require all 9 professions to be desirable.

Sublimatio.6981:

i’m still waiting for toiler paper to be usable in raids…

I would use it every wipe

CptAurellian.9537:

And I thought the biggest problem in raids was PEOPLE WRITING IN CAPS. Guess I was wrong.

Yes you were.

People are allowed to use their sab boombox, but I’m not allowed to use my, ‘How to dance, volume 1’. So I’m stuck there doing the char dance, while all the other races get cool flashy dances :c

power builds already meta at several bosses, and fully competitive at others. If you want to play the dps role in a serious way you should have good builds for each boss. I.E. you should have a condi class and a power class.

VG: power builds are good bc vg’s toughness is very low. Condi viable too though.

Sloth: power builds are good bc sloth clenses conditions every break bar. condi viable too.

KC: power builds win easy. Condi can probably work, but they are extremely disadvantaged.

Xera: power builds common, many people still play fresh air staff there.

edit: also obviously power is better/competitive at trio and escort too.

OP’s overall post has a lot of truth. But you have to remember that your build goes hand in hand with your tactic.

Bringing 4 low dps classes to kc is going to make it more difficult to phase.

Doing the stand still method on xera with low dps classes won’t work.

etc.

lol you think pugs don’t know they are lying when the join an lfg that says exp and literally don’t know mechanics? Pugs that can’t throw sabetha bombs, don’t know how to drop volatile poisons, and constantly get ported at vg?

Get real. Plenty of these pugs know they are not fulfilling the requirements in the lfg, they are just hoping they wont get caught.

The green circles not showing at Cairn is a serious bug and I can’t believe it has been allowed to exist this long.

Same is true for Samarog restarting.

Specifically for dredge platforms, get these 3 items:
https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Harpy_Feathers_
https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Order_of_Whispers_Spy_Kit
https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Ash_Legion_Spy_Kit

I recommend attuning to water so that water overload is available when you reach the platform.

Start with harpy feathers (3s stealth), then use whispers spy kit as it expires (3s of stealth long cd), then ash legion spy kit(10s of invisibility, which goes away if you move, unlike stealth), then do another harpy feathers (3s stealth).

You can easily chain 19s of peacefully standing on the platform. Hopefully you have a thief who will stealth the person channeling the lever, that way you don’t have to enter combat. If that option is not available, do your part drawing the dredge agro, but enter stealth if the pressure gets too high.

I see, well that is unfortunate. I guess I would still consider power ele the go-to dps class for xera then.

While I have a few of your attentions, do any of you happen to know whether flesh wurm can be used to block xera’s orb? Similar to how you can block old tom’s bullet hell.

Hey guys, just curious if anyone has tested out the new epi at xera. Since the range has been increased to 900, I am curious if it is possible to epi xera and clear shards?

Obviously the fact that shards would be chosen randomly is a problem. But I know I won’t even be able to convince my static to try it if I don’t know the answer to this first.

No there are no recent tests for cele gear on rev.

Make your own training groups. Nothing makes you learn more than leading. Additionally, it isn’t uncommon for experienced players to join.

Once you feel confident, make your own regular groups.

The skill is blockable. One target can stand in front of the other 4 targets, and absorb all 5 projectiles, but only get the conditions of one projectile.

It is completely ridiculous that you can body block epi projectiles for no additional penalty.

Epi should punish for grouping. Its clearly made for that.

Everything I say is about pve only, in particular raids.

They should have skill split. Power ps was already bad in pve. Power ps already struggled to compete with condi ps, and could only really do so at vg, sloth, and kc. IMO most groups were better taking condi ps for vg and sloth as well.

This isn’t just a damage nerf. This is nerfing the fun. Now, the entire rotation feels so awful. Headbutt feels awful too. Honestly, half the frustration comes from the fact that quickness doesn’t affect your major skills. So you go from a lightning fast 100b to a sluggish arc divider.

It wouldn’t be so bad if quickness affected headbutt and arc divider. It doesn’t seem to work on either skill.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

Dungeons still work

Not a completely accurate statement, there are several dungeons that literally do not work. There is a bug with the cutscene at the end of aetherblade after the final boss that pauses the dungeon until everyone manually force quits the game (before receiving rewards). A bug where first boss in arah p2 literally just won’t go into combat.

There are actual game breaking bugs in dungeons. I ran these dungeons for the first time in about a year this week, and I encountered them both on my first run. I don’t think (obviously bigger sample size would be better) they are rare.

I loved dungeons. The main reason I stopped doing them was because I finished the dungeoneer achievement (I had a LOT of fun on the way), and I felt it was time to move on to other content. I would love to see a few more dungeons, with equivalent long-term collections connected to them. Of course they also need to have good rewards.

Raids and fractals are great, but dungeons had large maps that fractals don’t. Dungeons utilized areas of the game like portals,stealth,movement skills,etc that raids and fractals rarely utilize. I liked skipping trash mobs, it was something besides combat. There was more variety to the skill set.

arah, to me just about all of it was really good. I loved the lore. I loved the scenery and large expansiveness of the dungeon. And I always loved lupi.

Out of all dungeon fights I think lupi is a common favorite for a few reasons. One of the reasons is that he has attacks you actually want/need to dodge/block/reflect. Too many bosses die before they are even dangerous. Another being that his model is large enough that you can actually see telegraphs among the usual visual clutter. Compare this to other bosses in dungeons, and I think Lupi really is an outlier.

Heck compare this even to modern day fractals. The other day I got one shotted during molten duo. I had no idea why, checked my combat log. There was a rabbit hidden in the flame aoes (red name on top of redish aoe, opps). I never felt cheated at lupi, if I died, I knew what mistake I made.

edit: Not fully true, his aoe circles use to be (maybe still are?) completely useless in determining where the danger is. But by know I know to just assume I need to block the whole thing.

There is tiered difficulty. Not all bosses are equally difficult, and not all roles in the group are equally difficult. I recommend you start by playing the condi ps role. In order from easiest to harder I would then rank the bosses as (for the condi ps role specifically):

1.) escort
2.)trio
3.)mursaat overseer
4.)gorseval
5.)keep construct (don’t play condi ps here, play power ps)
6.)Samarog
7.)Vale Guardian
8.)Cairyn
9.)Slothasar
10.)Deimos
11.)Xera
12.)Sabetha
13.)Matthias

Bosses 1 and 2 are basically just testing if you can work as a team.

Bosses 3,4,5, have very little in terms of mechanics. They are basically just a test of whether or not you can do a proper rotation (using skills in correct order to maximize dps), and control cc properly.

Boss 6 and above begin to throw in personal responsibility mechanics. Such as make sure you stand in the right spot, or make sure you perform a specific action. All the way until boss 13 which has a lot of personal responsibility mechanics (although not very much of a dps check).

So what? You have the choice, you can earn gold however you want and buy kills, or you can raid. What is wrong with that choice?

Sirbeaumerdier.3740:

How is it not true? I get mats from PvP, Fractals and WvW by playing normally. I’m not even talking about buying anything at all.

If you really feel that all game modes are balanced and that you truly have choice, then just grind out the gold to buy 150 LI worth of raid kills. I’m sure a raid guild would give you a deal if you tell them you want to buy a full clear every week for 12 weeks.

You can totally avoid raids. In fact this is traditional and this type of open market has roots all the way back to gw1.

Sirbeaumerdier.3740:

You can get the material from any part of the game. It doesn’t ask you to play content you do not care much for. LI on the other hand…

Yeah except that’s not really true. Yes you can get gold and buy materials via any part of the game. But we can’t just ignore how much faster the gold per hour is from certain parts. Its not really the case that you have freedom in how to earn this.

I always find it strange that the only complaint about legendary armor is always the LI requirements. No one ever seems to mention the huge amount of materials necessary.

Anyone willing to do escort,trio,and mursaat overseer each week, can have legendary armor in less than a year. Even when pugging, that seems like a lot less effort to me than grinding out all the material costs.

It just seems like people focus on one aspect of the journey, and that aspect isn’t even the real time sink.

Sirbeaumerdier.3740:

If you were able to pug and form your own groups so often I can tell you right of the bat you had a lot of time for that game mode. A kitten load of it. Maybe it didn’t looked like much to you because you enjoyed it, but you have to understand that it isn’t an option all can reasonably go for.

But the most important factor of them all is you enjoy that content. It is no sacrifice for you to go for the legendary armor. Any comparison using arguments regarding choices and will to play between someone who enjoy the content and someone who would greatly prefer something else is rendered pretty dubious when the denominators are so drastically different.

My options are:

Renounce the armor (despite all I’ve invested).
suck-it-up and push forward.
Pay for a raid group ready to go at a moment I’m available.

You, OTOH, have all those too except you can replace ‘suck-it-up’ with ‘continue to do what you enjoy’.

Yeah, we all have choices, but the options are not the same at all.

My options are the exact same as yours, I simply chose to act on them. All you’ve invested? I’ll ask again, how many LI do you have? Do you need me to teach you escort, trio, and mursaat overseer? If you are NA I am happy to teach you those.

edit: I’m happy to explain them if you are not NA, but I won’t be able to teach you in game.

Sirbeaumerdier.3740:

It is hard for you to grasp because raid is what you enjoy and are probably in a position that you have, or had, at least one fixed group schedule long enough to learn and get reliable progress and success. It also make pugging a lot easier as a consequence since you have the experience of all fights and the LI to go along. You make zero sacrifice when you raid. It is what you like to do.

Amassing T6 mats can be done anywhere in the game and doesn’t require any preparation before you can even try to hope getting results. All laurels I get are transformed in T6 and all the bags I collect I keep for a legendary. When I near the end of a gift I can accelerate the process by buying what remains. Also, when I say 10, it is since day 1 of Gw2. Not in one year.

Your assumptions are incorrect. I didn’t even join a guild until I was over 50 LI (with kills and experience on all bosses prior). And the first guild I did join was more of a training group (which I eventually ended up leading a fair amount of the time). I started raiding after wing 3 came out. I literally solo pugged about 75 of my LI (half way there). I pugged to learn every boss. I made my own lfg’s, I created my own training groups.

In short I took the initiative to learn how to raid because I wanted to do that.

Also, I didn’t force myself to grind out content I didn’t enjoy. I DO like raiding, but you don’t. Personally, I think there should be other means of getting legendary armor (equal in difficulty and time gating). I think Anet spent way too much work on these skins to make them exclusive to raiders. If you make or comment on a threat like that, pm me on the forums and link me to it, I will totally support it. But as for 150 LI as a req for raiding, it feels fine to me.

Sirbeaumerdier.3740:

There are things you are not privy to, like my work taking me out of home for several weeks in a year for instance and where I do not have access a computer that I can play GW2 on, or an Internet connection some times. And when I come back from long periods of absence, raids aren’t the first thing I want to think of even if I always look out for groups each day I play. Just in case something would fit my time.

I know this is not other players problem, and I’m not asking for players solutions here, but if it wasn’t locked behind such a time consuming content it wouldn’t be that bad at all. Over the years, I could casually make 10 legendary weapons and both legendary back packs without any problem. Granted, I had periods where I had more time before raid existed, but that is no longer the case.

The fact that 12 gifts of fortune is no big deal for you, but a weekly escort is too difficult is hard for me to understand. Have you at least tried to do weekly escort? If the only thing you have ever tried to do is pug wing 1 bosses, then you will have a very inaccurate view of what I am describing.

Sirbeaumerdier how many LI are you at? If you did escort every week since release you would be around 40 LI now. Add trio to that and your at 80 LI without even killing a real boss.

Additionally I would consider mursaat overseer to be in about that same range of difficulty. This means even casual raiders can kill 3 bosses / week which would net over 150 LI a year going forward.

Some of them are also crafting materials.

Fire blossoms are used in the magnanimous utilities (crafted by artificers, weapon smiths, and huntsmen).

Winter berries are used in several food recipes such as Winterberry Sorbet.

1.) It depends, the ‘meta’ means different things to different people. For example many groups have magi druids for healing, although some more experienced groups bring offensively geared druids who provide some healing. Others bring a combination. Some non-meta choices are actually better at providing players a safety net. For example, bringing a necro with blood magic (and hence transfusion) can be a very helpful off-meta choice for certain fights. There are other choices, such as a healer ele instead of a druid, or a hammer guardian or rev as a dps slot for protection up keep. However, there are also off-meta choices that can really hurt your group. A ps warrior who brings the defense traitline instead of berserker is not a good off-meta choice. A ps warrior who swaps shattering blow for wild blow because the group doesn’t have enough cc is a good choice. Above all, use your personal judgement, recognize what caused your group to wipe on the most recent attempt, and try to make precise changes that address that issue.

2.) This goes hand in hand with running meta builds. In general I recommend you have the approximate structure of: 2 warrior, 2 druid, 2 chrono, 4 dps slots. Druids can be replaced with healer ele/rev for more healing, but at the cost of a lot of group dps buffs, but you CAN live without those if need be. Dps can be just about any class. Literally, the issue in gw2 for beginners is rarely which class is better, but rather which class can you play better? I recommend testing your rotations out and comparing to qt (http://qtfy.eu/).

3.) You can, if your good. Chances are decent that your first kill will involve several players getting killed throughout the fight, and maybe even a warrior using vengeance at the last moment to finish the boss. I don’t recommend low manning as a beginner.

My personal experience was that the best way to get this is to be a dps. Stack extremely tightly, like right inside the hit box of the boss. Just stare at your feet, don’t get ported. Power thief or engi just auto attacking is a great way to go for this. Your goal is to make sure you don’t get agony, so that you don’t get downed during green circles.

Nothing you can do about the bug though

Slippy I’m not saying wait forever, but realistically, balance changes happen every 3 months. Wait 1 week here for things to settle, then make a good class (probably still ele or condi ranger), and raid with that. By the time the next balance patch comes around, OP will have enough magnetite shards to get the next set of armor they need.

zealex.9410:

Im sorry that t4 is a cake walk :/ but the cm for 100 was too good to do once in a year and no it doesnt defeats the point of tiered system since ppl majorly do the tiers and the cm is fr those few that will go a step further.

I’m not saying people don’t use the tiers. But it just seems odd to have 5 levels of difficulty, but 4 of them fit into the tier system, and one outlier has this other system called challenge motes. Its just another example of anet being consistently inconsistent, but hey, at least we don’t have to grind out 200 AR so that’s nice.

don’t make any decision until after this week’s update.

It seems unlikely to me, but hey you never know. As for CM, is it the new norm that we expect every new fractal to have a cm? Sorta defeats the point of having a tiered system. If that’s the case, they might as well just introduce tier 5 with a different daily system.

I think if you distribute buffs so that every class is a buffer, instead of having 4 flexible dps slots, we will have 0 flexible spots and a completely static meta comp. Which doesn’t sound better to me.

Of course, OP is asking for balance. Experience in this game indicates that will never happen. However, making it so all buffs go to 10 players in raids only, is a much easier way to ensure that meta comps bring more of the other classes.

Astralporing.1957:

This has been true since first raids appeared in first MMO games, and GW2 is no exception. And the reason Raiders want it to stay that way is because most of them do not really want for the majority of players to be able to do them.

I just want to point out that Astral doesn’t speak for all raiders. I don’t support tiers of difficulty because lower tiers will have magnetite shards as rewards, which will then force anet to make them useless, the exact same way fractal relics are worthless now. However a story mode with literally none of the raid specific rewards I support.

Astralporing.1957:

Also, the best ways of learning it are also different – some woud do fine when thrown into the deep water (the model now), others would rather take it slow, step by step (or they might drown).

Right, so start with escort, move to trio, them mursaat overseer, and gradually work up to Maathias and the wing 4 challenge motes etc.

Hybrid reaper doesn’t exist currently. There is just a condi reaper that uses a greatsword to apply more conditions to a target in its rotation. Hybrid reaper could probably happen if the correct gear combos were ever released, but currently reaper is forced to waste a lot of its stats on precision.

Jski.6180:

Well why not some skills do have unblockable for a reason just pure raw dmg should not win you boss fights.

I don’t consider this statement to be accurate. First off many groups bring 2 magi druids, they are hardly focusing on pure raw damage. Many chronos wear minstrels and use suboptimal runes to share protection. That’s about 40% of the raid group giving up its own personal damage to deal with mechanics. Then you have further sacrifices like your ps taking wild blow, bringing safety net dps classes like hammer guard and blood necro.

I think its fair to say, there is a good mix between some players maxing damage, some maxing heals, and some maxing survivability. Of course, if you choose to only use the speediest of speed clear strats from qt, your going to max damage pretty much exclusively. But qt is willing to wipe for hours practicing and getting perfect kills. Most groups don’t want to do that.

Blaeys.3102:

But raid training runs, while a noble concept, do not address many of the key concerns – and become a pretty rare occurrence when things start to get stale for the harder core raiders leading them.

Anyone who wants to raid can create their own training runs, that’s how many of us did it, including myself.

Blaeys.3102:

Even worse, they are often used by players to get higher skilled players to carry them through the content rather than teach them how to do it. That doesn’t really help the raid scene and probably feels tedious and unfun for everyone involved.

Again, training raids do not have to be led by vets. Additionally, this exact problem happens all the time in fractals. My friend (and experienced chrono) has literally out dpsed eles who have no idea what they are doing in t4 fractals. These players didn’t learn anything from t1-t3.

Blaeys.3102:

I also think it’s worth bringing up since it was in a blog post today – the idea of raids consuming only a small amount of ANet’s time and resources pretty much went out the window with the Legendary Armor blog post today. The writer specifically talks about the huge amount of work – even rewriting core system – that went into developing it. That pretty much negates any argument that this is a niche corner of content that doesn’t affect developmental resources for the rest of the game.

Well, this blog post was about legendary armor not raids. They happen to be intertwined right now. But personally I think legendary armor required too much effort to leave as raid exclusive rewards. I think other content needs its own route to that reward (not an easier route however, just a different one). I think eventually wvw will gain a means to this armor.

Rednik are you implying that multi mode system isn’t flawed?

Dadnir.5038:

Well, it’s not like it would be hard to create an easy mode. They just remove the enrage timer and the boss punishing mechanism when he is just about to die. Job done, everybody and it’s grandma should be able to pass through the raid while still keeping the feeling of achivement after a long stressfull fight.

They did this for Cairn the first boss of wing 4 effectively. Considering I have never seen a thread praising that, it didn’t seem to make a difference.

Blaeys.3102:

thrag.9740:

I support story mode with no rewards. I don’t think you should get any mag shards for heavily nerfed raids. I think unlocking mastery track via easy mode is fine, its basically the same as escort.

But I guess I just don’t see the difference between what OP is suggesting, and what we have. We already have some raids which are insanely easy like escort,trio, and MO. Anyone wanting to get into raids can start with those pretty easily.

And I agree 1000% that story or lesser difficulty raids should come with a significantly lesser reward, possibly even excluding magnetite shards (or, at the very least, locking the more interesting items on the magnetite vendor until players have beaten bosses on the harder modes as they have to now).

To the other point, what we have now is limited to specific encounters and does not offer the experience of the raid, which is the true need.

So yes, reduced or almost no reward is definitely warranted in this case – providing the experience for a greater number of players is the goal.

Do you really mean the experience of the raid is the need? Or do you mean the story? Because the experience of the raid is the fight. Creating easy mode, would allow people to experience a fundamentally difference experience. A Matthias without difficulty isn’t the same experience. You can experience the same dialogue, but easy mode raids can never be the same experience, because the difficulty is the experience. Raids are tied with difficulty, which forces deeper teamwork than any other content in the game. You can’t just remove that and pretend its the same content.

I support story mode with no rewards. I don’t think you should get any mag shards for heavily nerfed raids. I think unlocking mastery track via easy mode is fine, its basically the same as escort.

But I guess I just don’t see the difference between what OP is suggesting, and what we have. We already have some raids which are insanely easy like escort,trio, and MO. Anyone wanting to get into raids can start with those pretty easily.

I don’t disagree that you can learn more from the harder bosses. But that knowledge is a waste for the easier bosses. So why not start with the easy bosses and gradually work your way up in difficulty? You will also get more LI early on, which is helpful for joining groups.

I don’t think racial skills are a bad idea, they just have to be done the right way. In fact, they could be nice because anet can use them to guarantee that every profession has access to certain bare minimums.

For example, my idea with battle roar would guarantee that every profession has at least some minimal access to might and fury support. Access to bear form would guarantee that every profession has at least some movement abilities. Every profession would have at least some access to immobilize through the avatar of melandru.

In fact if every race had equal access to all the racial skills, you could actually let the skills not be terrible. We would have more possible variety, and we might see some really interesting tactics develop.

Something else I consider problematic is racial skills. I enjoy that racial skills exist, but the fact that every condi class should roll sylvari is dumb.

I think it would be good to be able to complete a quest that explores each of the different races and allows you to ‘attune’ with whichever race you want. What I mean by attune is, it would allow you to use human skills as a norn, or whatever combo you want. But you only have access to one race’s skills at a time. So for example, you can’t bring battle roar (char utility), and take root (sylvari elite) on the same character.

Also why can’t rev use racial skills? Its just one more strike against condi rev.

There are a few routes going forward for you OP.

First, you can learn about a particular boss as much as you can from guides. And then make your own raid lfg, and try to lead a group.

You can keep your eyes on the raid lfg and look for training groups.

You can search for a guild to join, who is willing to train you.

Also OP, be aware, the first boss of the first wing isn’t necissarily the easiest boss. In fact for a new raider, I think wing 4 is a very good place to start. Cairn, mursaat overseer, and samarog are all pretty easy. Vale Guardian imo is a bad boss to start on, because 4 players are responsible for what is essentially a group wipe mechanic.

Good luck!

Sartharina.3542:

What’s the point of blinds when every enemy of significance has a defiance bar?

I see people get downed by monks in urban battle ground all the time. In fractals I think trash mobs hit harder than bosses a fair amount of the time.