Guild Wars 2

23 insights:
1 mini red guardian
2 mini gorseval
1 gorseval ascended shield
1 ghostly infusion (precision – 800g!!!!)
1 sabetha backpack
1 multifarious defenders leggings (medium)
several strength runes
several sigils of force
several 10g+ exotics

much of my raid group has very similar lists

There is absolutely no requirement to have ascended armor to complete the raid. It’s impossible to tune fights around a 2% difference in stats (it’s literally +36 stats – you get the same amount by using the best food as opposed to cheaper options). Weapons and trinkets provide a MUCH larger dps increase and while groups have beaten the raid in fully exotic everything, these upgrades are much more “required” for the average group.

Unfortunately, there is a somewhat loose correlation between having ascended armor and being a better player, so pug groups are going to “require” you to meet this standard. (More time played → having ascended gear → being a better player???) Clearly this correlation is a lose one. I, for example, did not have ascended armor when I started raiding and instead completed my set with drops and magnetite shards over many weeks while raiding with my group. I would consider myself a better-than-average player (though not top tier), clearing the entire raid by the second week and having it on farm quickly after that. We were killing the bosses comfortably while I still had my exotic armor on and since switching to ascended armor I have literally not felt a difference in my dps. I’m sure it exists, but it is barely noticeable.

And then there are terrible players who have just put enough hours in that they had the gold to create their set, but still have no idea how to play their class. The unfortunate reality is that any control pugs can get they will (and honestly should) take. These bosses are fairly difficult to pug so people do all they can to ensure success.

Though if anyone tells you that ascended armor is required to beat these bosses, they are flat out wrong and there’s proof of that….

(Stow weapons is something you can keybind. You push your bind right before you jump off, this cancels all your aftercasts and you shouldn’t have any glider problems especially with the new fix.)

Ideally you farm enough encryptions to buy 30 deeply discounted keys per day and use all of the keys you received from your dailies to open all of your encryptions. That will maximize your profit. That is also dreadfully boring, so I’d go for option 2. Use your daily keys to open all of the encryptions you farmed from dailies and by only deeply discounted keys to open the rest. If for some reason you have more encryptions than you can open with deeply discounted keys, save them and open them over the next few days by buying deeply discounted keys only. That’s how you will maximize your profits.

Takina.1739:

softblackcarbon.1537:

Why is this so hard to understand? If collectively, players report openings in bulk of 1000 chests, their average is likely to be fairly accurate. You’re not going to be able to collect this data on your own (in any reasonable amount of time anyway). We have already collected this data. It’s about 10-12%. Why is that hard to accept?

Its hard to understand because it hasnt yet be replicated.

IF everyone has the exact same chance of dropping an ascended chest at the end of a given fractal daily, then any collection of data collect by a group should be easy to duplicate by any other group that tries it because, as you say there is no other variable.

However, if another group cant duplicate the results then you have to look at the possible reasons why: faulty data collection, different times data was collected (different builds that altered loot tables), and the population used in each collection.

I have not been able to get anything close to 12% for the entire population of my sample group. I do have 1 guys who is currently sitting around 20% (3 chests in the last three weeks) but in the same time frame only 2 other chest dropped to 2 different people, which only comes out to a 6.667%. Yes, its early and +/-1 drop has the power to swing the % a lot but so far my numbers support what most people have seem to have suspected for weeks now and that is drop rates for ascended chests are greatly reduced compared to pre-HoT

I think the two people above me responded pretty well to this. Your sample size is too small. That’s why you haven’t been able to replicate the numbers. People aren’t suspecting that the drop rates have been lowered because we’ve looked at the data (with a large enough sample size to trust it) and the rate has come out to between 10-12%. There’s no argument here. We’re simply calculating the probability of one event occurring. This is exactly the same as flipping a weighted coin. If you flip it 10, 50, 100, 200 times, you shouldn’t feel confident that your calculations of the weightings are accurate. Flip it 1000, 2000, 10000 times and then come running back if your weights are way different than the currently calculated values.

This is a piece of code that’s executed. It’s the same code for every player who double clicks a chest. The code does not change depending on your build, your class, the time it took to complete the fractal, etc. There are no conflating variables.

Guys. We need data from about 1000 chest openings before we can say anything conclusively. We don’t really need to “design” studies here. The data is written in code. There are no external variables. (We also need people to report all of their openings, hopefully in bulk, rather than just when they remember as “remembering” to report getting a box may be easier than reporting not getting one – or something along those lines.)

Why is this so hard to understand? If collectively, players report openings in bulk of 1000 chests, their average is likely to be fairly accurate. You’re not going to be able to collect this data on your own (in any reasonable amount of time anyway). We have already collected this data. It’s about 10-12%. Why is that hard to accept?

Just so ya’ll know, the experience you’re earning isn’t going nowhere. It’s being banked and can be used for completion of future mastery lines when they are introduced. Players who had maxed all of their HoT masteries before the addition of the raid had their Forsaken Thicket mastery instantly maxed after their first VG kill and were able to train those right away given they had the mastery points.

While I agree, it would be nice to be gaining spirit shards, at least it isn’t completely going to nothing.

I actually love having a reaper in my party when I do fractals. While their group support isn’t great, my other friends play chrono, herald, and ps war so we already have all of the support we need, and as mentioned above, reapers have incredible sustain and pretty good dps. I will say, due to the toughness scaling, you’re probably better off playing a condition reaper at the higher levels as condition damage ignores DPS – you’ll probably even start to out dps power classes, especially if you can pull off an effective jagged horror build (works pretty well on say, Mossman) – but honestly there’s nothing wrong with playing power reaper if you don’t want to switch over unless you’re going for speed clearing or something. Necro got a lot of flack before HoT, but now it’s not a bad class at all.

I agree, I couldn’t care less about a fractals leaderboard. To clarify though, the devs mentioned a while back that Ad Infinitim was originally tied to the fractals leaderboard but they decided that they didn’t want that to be the case and so redesigned the recipe to remove that requirement. There is speculation about that being the cause for such a long delay in releasing. Let’s just keep our fingers crossed for a close release date….

You can download 3rd party ones currently. It’s probably an unreasonable request to ask Anet to implement on themselves, however probably not unreasonable to request API support for more accurate 3rd party DPS meter addons.

Rob.6934:

Swagger.1459:

I guarantee concurrent participation rates are extremely low for raids.

I guarantee the devs will not come here and say raids are a huge success.

I would love to get participation stats, but that won’t happen…

So much this.
Everytime I see people complaining about raid being delayed or not being fun enough or new content not being made available soon, all I can think of is:

“Do these guys have any idea of how many people actually enjoy doing raids in the community?”

As time goes I have this feeling that Raids are seen as the “end-game” content but with no point in doing them.

A lot of people see them as too difficult to waste their time in, just wiping and wiping.
Let’s be honest: as today, either you have a raiding guild or a guild with some good, dedicated PvErs, or you have to find random people. Someday they’ll be good, someday great, someday bad.
And since 50% of these random people are those that “Omg, we wiped, bb” we’re at a point where if you really want to get that reward (yet to be fully disclosed) you’ll have to go through several wipes and different groups.

Is this bad? I don’t know, I’ve yet to kill Sabetha and only managed to kill Gorseval yesterday for the 1st time. I really enjoy the raids, because even if I get killed, at least I’m doing something challenging.

But how many people outside of the “top-tier” guilds/groups would agree with me?

Pretty sure from all the dev comments and such we have seen that this was a pretty expected response from the community (to try it a few times and then give up). I’m also pretty sure that people are easily underestimating the number of the community who kill each boss every week now. As per the post today, raid content is still very much being developed and hyped and I doubt the developers would be making it if it was as much of a failure as people are making it out to be. The people who are loving it probably just run in different circles than you do. It’s easy to overlook that point. The devs made a great thing and they should be (and probably are) proud.

harold.3526:

for 6 pieces this number can easily be over 500

It has been confirmed that the cost/resources of making one set of legendary armor will be about the same as making one legendary weapon. You will forge the whole set at once, rather than one piece at a time. What this means for insights, I don’t know but 500 seems a little high. XD

Also, I am too disappointed that it seems like it’ll be a while until the next raid wing. My group has had the current one on farm for a while now and we’re itching for more! I will point out though, that they said “by March” and not “at the end of March”, so there’s always hope for a sooner release date. Right? RIGHT?!?!?!

Dinosaurs.8674:

1.) I guess it depends on how you split up your team during the split phase, we usually send one person to 3 of the spirits and then zerg them down one by one. If one of the people who is alone has an orb covering their spirit, we just have them walk in and CC the spirit anyway. Then once the orbs are clear they just pick up the orange orbs. Most of the time it’s probably fine if they wait, but if theyre the last person the zerg comes to or something there could be problems if they wait too long. DPS during the split phase doesn’t matter unless your damage is so poor that you are hitting the enrage timer so taking the dps hit is pretty unimportant.

I certainly would not advise the entire zerg (5-7 players) walking into the orbs.

2.) From the perspective of players who aren’t practiced at clearing orbs, two players are necessary. If they are having trouble with orbs already I don’t want them to think they should be cutting back on orb clearers, lol. And again, dps during split doesn’t really matter so there is little incentive to not have two players clearing orbs to get them down as fast as possible.

Ok, that’s fair. We zerg the same way you do. So if one of my three holders has orbs around them, we usually have them wait and just chill/cripple/do what they can from range while I run over and clear their orbs. And sometimes they can just clear on their own (like engis) while still holding the spirit. I guess my point is that if you can get away with not getting debuffed that’s always better than taking the debuff. But you definitely shouldn’t wipe to avoid getting debuffed.

During split phase, yes I think it’s totally fine to assign two people to orb clearing. But I would try to avoid it for other phases. Like I said, if people can help out without taking much or any of a dps hit (hello scorched earth), definite do it as it will only make life easier. But I wouldn’t assign anyone else to orb clearing exclusively. If you’re having trouble with just 1-1.5 people clearing orbs in non-split phases, there may be other issues you need to address. I’d always aim for the optimal and then deal with the sub-optimal if it’s necessary.

Takina.1739:

Part of the problem is people believing the above linked data-set about a 12% drop rate for ascended chests is accurate without seeing any methodology or manner of data collection.

Let me explain some of the reasons I find it questionable, just based on seeing it.

1) it was a self reporting system. self reporting systems are historically bad because they always skew towards the favorable. Example why, post that you are taking a survey of people to figure out the drop rates of ascended chest. While you will get reports of people that dont get any, most people that dont get them, wont report anything as they will have “nothing to report”, were as people that did get a chest are more likely to report because they do have “something to report”. So the data is already skewed.

2) We dont have a control group data set of the same people from before the HoT expansion to compare it to. For example, as I had stated in an earlier post, before the HoT expansion I would do a L50 fractals 5-6 times a week with members of my guild. There was a group of 3 that did it every night and other 2 slots would be from a pool of 6-7 other guildies. With this group of people, I had been running fractals 5-6 times a week for well over a year. Most night we would get 1-2 chests between us, sometimes 3. Over the course of a week I would say 7-9 chests dropping was normal. Were they evenly spread out across the all of us? no. There were certainly people that seemed to have better luck than others. But I in general have horrid drops throughout the entire rest of the game would still average an ascended chest a week. Now, I think we are 5 months into HoT, I have gotten 2 chests. 1 guildmate that has gotten 3 in just the past month of so, 1 other guildmate that just recently got his 2nd. 2 of our regular group have gotten 1 and the rest havent gotten any. These are people that I can say I have seen our drop rates before HoT and I can say I have seen them since HoT. Why? Because they I was there when the fractals were completed. Is it a large sample size of people? No, but it is a sample size of people where I can compare both a Before and After HoT.

3) Any good study, survey, poll, is worthless if its results are not repeatable. We dont have the needed info to even try to repeat the results of the previously posted results.

As for the entire game wide RNG, that crap is BS, and I dont care what ANET says. It has become a running joke with how many precursors 2 of my guildmates get in a given month (and worth noting, 1 of them has an MF of less than 150). Where as most people I know have never gotten 1 as a drop, including myself in the 3+ years Ive been playing.

But people (aside from just myself and guildmates) have knowledge of what their before HoT drop rate was in fractals and know what there post HoT drop rate is like. And a lot of us can see a noticeable decrease in loot. And the increased gold rate doesn’t come anywhere near balancing out the cost of crafting ascended armor or weapons…

Ok, let me correct some of the points you just made so we can all have an accurate picture of what statistics tells us when it comes to fractals loot.

1. This is a mostly valid point. Self-reported surveys are inherently flawed, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the actual drop rate of ascended boxes is lower than what is reported by those spreadsheet. However, I don’t think the data is nearly as biased as you are making it out to be. A lot of the data comes from people who saved up all of their 51+ chests for a month or two before the fractals fix patch and reported their findings in bulk, and intended to report their data regardless of their drops. While it’s definitely possible that there were some cases of people getting one drop and reporting only one box, I don’t feel that bad about making the assumption that the data is fairly representative of a non-biased model. There comes a point where the sample size is large enough that if people are reporting most of their chests, we’ll have a fairly accurate picture. I highly doubt we’re seeing a reported drop rate of about 10% if the reality is about a 0.1% drop rate. Remember that people love to complain (report data?) about not getting drops too.

2. There is absolutely no reason why we would need data from before HoT in order to get an accurate picture of the current drop rates. In fact, conflating current data with data from before the change can only harm our accuracy in finding the current rate. We can obviously compare data from before HoT and from after HoT to see how the drop rate has changed, but there’s no reason we need to know the pre-HoT drop rate to determine the current one. You also in this point bring up a lot of anecdotal evidence (which really has no baring on claims we can make about the current rates). The fact of the matter is, even with a group the size you report and data from several months, your sample size isn’t big enough to provide an accurate drop rate. Your memory can also suffer from bias (and definitely does…). Should you feel like the drop rate was higher from before HoT, you are much more likely to remember instances of drops, should you feel like it’s lower, you’re much more likely to forget these. Any argument of statistics that concludes with “this is true because I saw it happen” is inherently flawed and in no way empirical. If you want the true drop rate, we need to look at data from thousands of chest openings which frankly, one group of friends/guild is not going to be able to provide on their own.

3. The concept of “repeating” this study doesn’t really make any sense. This wasn’t a study. It’s the reporting of data which is generated by a piece of code. There certainly is an empirically correct number that we are trying to find by estimating it with a sub-sample of chest openings (ArenaNet knows these numbers but does not provide them to the players). When you double click a chest, there are zero other variables that may be conflating the data, as opposed to in a scientific study in which something like temperature, light, etc (whatever it is….) could effect the results. Repeat-ability ensures that we are testing the correct variable under the same set of conditions. When it comes to code, this is ensured automatically (baring any bugs or changes to the code, of course – though if we’re assuming these exist, we might as well just give up trying to find the answer).

Finally as to your last, unnumbered points, what you’re experiencing is the high variance which comes with low drop rates. There are stories about people putting 20 rares in the MF and getting 3 precursors, and stories about people putting 1.5k rares in the MF and getting 0. This is expected. No one person can “have knowledge of what their before HoT drop rate was in fractals and know what there post HoT drop rate is like”. Their sample size is simply just too small.

What TaxZero said. In GW2, immob is considered a soft cc so I basically wanted to make the differentiation for condi war, which needs to be in melee range to apply immob. Lots of the other classes can hold the spirits from range and have immobs from range as well.

I want to just disagree with two points Dinosaurs made, but overall I think their comment is also quite helpful. Hopefully between mine and theirs, your eles will feel better about their job.

1. I don’t like telling your spirit holders (during split phase) to run into orbs to hold the spirits. If your orb clear is good, this shouldn’t be a problem in the first place, but if it is, have them call out where they need orb clearing, and have your tempests start working on that ASAP. Most of the classes that hold can at least apply soft ccs (in this case meaning anything but immob) from range and should avoid getting the orb debuff if possible. Obviously if it’s a choice between wiping and getting the orb debuff, get the debuff but if you’re finding that’s the case a lot, I’d predict that there was some other problem you’re probably just not seeing.

2. It’s pretty unnecessary to have a second person clearing orbs during the second split phase. I am the only one clearing orbs in my group and I can always clear every single orb during that phase by myself and leave us a completely clear arena for the next updraft phase. Obviously people can help out if it’s not a loss for them (sometimes my revs like to run over and kill orbs right when they spawn because you can auto them far enough away to not get debuffed) but it’s not strictly necessary to assign an extra person to do this at all.

I’ll be raiding tonight so message me in-game if your group needs any help!

Spoj, I completely disagree. Arena mechanics add uniqueness and variability to encounters. I’m not arguing that fights should only be like VG or Sab, but that we should have a healthy mix. Sab is my favorite fight because there’s so much going on at once and so much you have to be thinking about and prepared for, it’s constantly exciting and really feels like an “epic” fight against all of the bandits!

Belenwyn, I would argue that the two points you brought up actually already exist in the current raids. In the gors fight, if your group’s dps is too low, you will not phase him before he performs the second world eater attack, wiping your entire group. This happens about 1:30 into the fight. Plus, the timers are honestly mostly irrelevant currently. Groups can 5-man VG within the enrage timer and groups can 6-man gors within the enrage timer. Most likely, if your group is hitting the enrage timer it is due to improper mechanics execution or poor rotation execution. Having non-optimal builds doesn’t make the raid impossible but there is certainly a correlation between players using optimal builds and also executing rotations and mechanics well. The rewards are already basically on a timed system as well. If you beat the boss within the timer or shortly after it ends, you get to loot an extra chest. If you don’t, you get some magnetite shards which will give you the same rewards, just more slowly. There is no reason why everybody should be able to beat the bosses. That was always the intention with the design and is certainly working as intended.

Swagger, I agree that I believe raid participation stats probably started slightly high and have since dropped tremendously. However, I think that was predictable and intended by the developers. Raids are not supposed to be “the end game” of GW2 which offers you so many end game options besides the raids. And I bet you the devs and the players who have been clearing the raids every week now would come here and say the raids were a great success. Best content GW2 has ever made IMO.

BloodyNine.7504:

20+ daily. No ascended drops. Fun times!

Every one I have opened have contained the exact same thing. Stabilizing Matrix, that junk item worth a gold and a tome. That is all. Every. Single. One!

That’s because those are the items contained in 21+ (or whatever the number is) chests…. There is a small small small chance to get ascended drops from the 21+ boxes but it is rare. (Rings are more common but largely not valuable.) Your best bet for ascended armor or weapon boxes is in the 51+ chest which has a little over a 10% chance to contain an armor box (according to current data). The drop rates is lower (between 3-4% I think?) for weapon boxes. I really wouldn’t expect much from the lower level chests…

1. Like someone said above, the adds will agro on minions/spirits/pets, so make sure if this is a problem for you that your rangers are calling their pets/destroying their spirits and any classes with minions are either switching to different utilities, or not summoning them at that point.

2. I main tempest and am usually the only tempest in my party for Gorseval (thus the only one clearing orbs). I can tell you how I do it and hope that that helps? Feel free to get in touch with me if you have any additional questions either in-game or on here (though obviously I’m in-game way more than I’m on here).

The first thing I would check is just to make sure your eles are running completely optimal builds as this makes orb clearing wayyyyy easier (full berserker gear, with either some assassins stats or food/whatever they need to get up to 100% crit, fire/air/tempest lines with the correct traits, etc.) At the start of phase 3, when orbs are first spawning, I stay stacked with the group and continue to dps gorseval normally, except I drop every lava font on an orb, and never on a boss. I continue to meteor shower, overload: fire, and auto attack the boss. If I stay stacked and maintain 25 might and grace of the land buffs, the lava fonts I drop on the orbs during this phase will kill the orbs without any additional autos (this is why having a fully optimal build is so important, so you don’t have to waste time autoing the orbs). Also make sure if you have any burnzerkers, the are positioning their scorched earths so that they hit any nearby orbs as this can help out a ton. It’s also important at this point to make sure that your tempests are in the group with your chrono as the alactrity is incredibly helpful in keeping the orbs under control. After my group has pulled gors to the wall, I drop lava fonts on any orbs in range, but if there are none I just dps gors as normal. After the updraft, I usually glide all the way back to the middle of the arena while my group stays by the wall (as the usually do before cc phase) and focus only on orb clearing before cc phase and gors teleports back to the middle. At that point, I go back to my lava font on orbs, everything else on gors rotation while making sure to focus on places where the spirits will spawn in the split phase so my group can hold them effectively. During the split phase, I focus almost exclusively on orbs, while sometimes using meteor shower or overload on the spirits if I happen to be nearby, but keeping fonts on the orbs. During this point too, because the group is not stacked, the orbs usually require one or two autos in addition to a lava font to kill. So I make sure I put a few autos on each orb while I wait for lava font to come off cd. It’s also important here to try to be near the zerg in case you get low so you can be healed, as going down can cause havoc for orb control. At the end of this phase, I generally find that I have cleared every orb except for the one or two that have just spanwed and so after this phase, I ignore the north side of the map (as my group takes the two north updrafts first) and only use lava fonts on orbs that will be in our way for taking the next updraft, but focus most of my dps on the boss. The orbs will be a little out of control by the very end of the fight, but if you just focus on keeping the south side of the map clear (assuming you take the north updrafts first), there should be enough room for your group to dps while getting the kill.

The only last thing I can say, is make sure the rest of you group is bringing as much dps as they can. The more dps the rest of the group is able to bring, the less pressure the tempests will feel to focus dps on the boss, thus providing them more time to focus on orbs. If you’re running with two tempests, I’d recommend having one on orb control and one on dps who occasionally drops fonts on orbs to help out but you can easily keep the orbs under control with just one tempest.

deSade.9437:

spoj.9672:

I have a problem with all this support for making fights as mechanical as possible. VG and Sabetha both have a lot of mechanics to deal with. And as a result it feels less like you are fighting the boss and more like you are fighting the mechanics/arena. I dont find that fun.

On the other hand Gorseval is much more about the boss itself. Its a lot more fun. But as a result its easier once you get the dps check and basic mechanics sorted. The thing is that style can be really good if its expanded on.

PREACH. IT.

I think the intention for the Sabetha fight is that you are fighting the arena. Sure, you’re fighting Sabetha, but you’re fighting all of the bandits in the camp, and they’re all working together to kill you by firing cannons at you, and destroying the platform under your feet, making you fall to your death while they clearly have the ability to survive (Sabetha can shadowstep away). This actually leads to what feels like a more engaging fight to me because I feel like I need to make sure my friends aren’t killed by bandits while also trying to focus on taking down their leader. That kind of effort is exciting!

Wicked Rin.1972:

softblackcarbon.1537:

Your sample size is 19. You quite literally cannot make any sort of claim about drop rates with a sample size that small. Once you have opened hundreds or thousands of 51+ chests, then you can report your data on drop rates.

Since the release of the drop changes, one of my friends has gotten 1-2 armor boxes a week. I have never had an armor or weapon box drop in any sort of content in the game (not just fractals) and I’ve been playing for over 3 years. Such is the reality of variance and RNG. The more I open/play, the closer to the average my numbers will get. I’m not worried, and you shouldn’t be either. :P

These are drops I’ve gotten since ascended armor boxes have first started. After months of fractals, these are what I’ve gotten from opening those boxes. The new upgraded fractal drop patch since then doesn’t change the rate of shoulders I’ve gotten from before or after.

Months of fractals still only equates to fewer than 100 51+ boxes opened. To get an accurate estimate of the drop rates, you would need to open somewhere in the thousands of boxes to have a large enough sample size. I’m not saying you’re necessarily wrong about the shoulder drop rate being high, but before I were to believe that, I would need to see samples from thousands of openings, which one player is, so far, not able to supply. That’s just the reality of statistics. (I actually think that data is out there right now, so it may be interesting for you to take a look if you actually think the shoulder box drop rate is higher than the others.)

Your sample size is 19. You quite literally cannot make any sort of claim about drop rates with a sample size that small. Once you have opened hundreds or thousands of 51+ chests, then you can report your data on drop rates.

Since the release of the drop changes, one of my friends has gotten 1-2 armor boxes a week. I have never had an armor or weapon box drop in any sort of content in the game (not just fractals) and I’ve been playing for over 3 years. Such is the reality of variance and RNG. The more I open/play, the closer to the average my numbers will get. I’m not worried, and you shouldn’t be either. :P

Several other people have said this, but you’re just experiencing high variance due to an extremely small sample size. For example:

I’ve been playing GW2 for 3 years and I, quite literally, have never had an ascended chest (weapon or armor box) drop for me from any content – not just fractals. One of my friends who I run daily fractals with everyday has opened at least one if not more armor box from his 51+ chest per week. It’s just bad RNG on my part, and that’s unfortunately just how things work.

In terms of gold though, it is 100% intended that you will have to buy extra keys as those are not an RNG drop and you will 100% make a profit after just a few days of opening all of your encryptions. Like people said, I make about 10g a day running fractals which is about the average. (If you’re running all of your fractal dailies, you should also be getting over 20 encryptions a day, not just 10-11…)

Quick explanation (again… there are 10000000 posts on this) of why the timers are necessary to creating a challenge. I’ll explain with an example:

I mainly play tempest. Sometimes, my raid group asks me to run green circles on VG which I do with the standard zerker staff build. I have 11.6k health because my gear has no vitality or toughness on it. During phase 5, if our tank doesn’t move the boss soon enough, our CCs are too slow, our seeker control is bad, etc. green circles will spawn in lit-up zones or it will be impossible to stand in them without going down. If green circles spawn in lit-up zones, I am likely to go down. The pressure is incredibly high.

Let’s say I ran the same fight with soldier’s gear. Suddenly I have 17k health (or whatever the actual number is, I don’t run PTV gear XD) and extra toughness. Seekers don’t hurt nearly as much. I can survive 3-4 more ticks of the lit-up sections. Our ccs can be slow. Our tank can be sloppy because she doesn’t have to worry about me going down. Our seeker control can be almost non-existent. Suddenly, the fight is much easier. Sure it might take longer, but doing 5 more green circles while not having to care is still much easier than having to survive 5 fewer while attempting to maintain DPS.

The bottom line is that extra health and less damage makes content easier, no matter what the mechanics are. Raid timers are not a new method of counteracting this and forcing dps classes to use dps gear. If you want to run soldiers gear on your tank (tanky gear for a tank? :P), I’m sure you could get away with that (even if maybe not the most optimal build). Raid timers are good. You should be failing repeatedly while learning. The expectation of being able to casually clear the raid within a few days is naive and unfounded. No raid in any game has ever been designed for that level of difficulty.

Also, for the people saying that it is impossible to carry people through this content, I ensure you that’s not true. There are currently videos of people 5-manning VG (in fact, its not super rare to see groups selling VG kills to up to 5 people at a time – why you’d actually buy that, I’m not sure, but it happens) and 6-manning Gor (video on reddit came out today) without hitting the enrage timer on either boss. I haven’t actually done any research on whether people have less-than-10-manned Sab, but I can say from experience that my group has essentially 9-manned her (someone went down early in phase 1 or on kiernan and we continued and got the kill anyway). I’m sure better groups could complete her with fewer players. My group has gotten kills on these bosses after a few attempts with players who have literally never tried the fights before. It is certainly possible to carry less skilled players if you yourself can compensate for their lack of skill.

IMO, raids are in a great spot right now and could maybe benefit from slight balance changes (maybe tune down burnzerkers a bit? :P). I can’t wait for the next wing, more bosses, and more answers to the questions Anet has set up in Spirit Vale!

I actually think that originally one or both of these gifts was tied to the leaderboards, however Anet decided that they no longer wanted that to be the case. It seems as if this re-design is the reason the gifts aren’t in the game yet. While it doesn’t seem like a kittenumption that leaderboards and the legendary backpiece will be introduced at the same time, it is likely that they will not be tied together.

Pretty sure the current known upper limit of salvaging regular rings (not infused) is 50 matrices.

The advice in the above groups is all good. My only addition is that my group doesn’t usually ask eles to run circles for 2 reasons:

1. They almost always run the d/f fresh air build for VG which requires you to be close to the boss to do any damage at all.

2. They have incredibly small health pools which means they have a very hard time dealing with the seekers on the circles. They down often which can cause party wipes for your group. There are definitely easier classes to run circles on.

(Plus, they lack the cc that other classes can bring as they generally want to just camp fire if they’re playing staff.)

I think the point is that the HoT maps add so much complexity and explorability to the standard MMO map we’re used to. The maps in central tyria are frankly dull. Once you’ve map completed a zone once and seen all the pretty things that exist there, there really is very little reason to ever return (besides for farming the higher level maps).

Frankly, HoT has taken MMO map design to a place where it has never been before. VB especially brings an entirely new feel to MMO maps. Never before have I ever played a game where even running around on the ground, I see things taking place on cliffs above me which I need to figure out how to access, or on levels below me where I can glide down and participate in the event going on there. And then you get to glide around far far above the map through a system of updrafts and crashed pact ships, and far far below the map, finding little nooks and crannies with hidden hero points and strongboxes. I honestly still feel like I’m finding new little areas/ways to get around VB.

HoT maps actually made me think a little bit and do some true exploring which is truly refreshing in an MMO. In core Tyria, I just angled my character at the next poi/vista/wp/etc. and turned on auto run. Occasionally I ran around a tiny hill. HoT takes that concept to a whole new level.

In my opinion, obviously.

TheFrighteningFrenchFry.3275:

Pandabro.8743:

softblackcarbon.1537:

Can you beat it with 2-3 condi reapers instead of engis? Of course. Should a brand new group that’s trying to make getting a kill as easy as possible for themselves bring 3 condi engis? I think so. That’s all I’m saying.

People need to realize that rotation complexity factors into actual damage. Few people can actually pull off a engineer’s rotation properly and add in boss mechanics and that percentage dips even lower.

this

The entire point is that dps is so irrelevant on VG that new groups should be bringing the classes that make the mechanics the easiest to succeed at. I think it was Nike who said something along the lines of “you should take away the weapons of your circle team so all they do is focus on circles” (which is obviously not to be taken literally, but to make a point). There is zero question in my mind that engi just deals with seekers and circles better than reaper. While it may be true that engis and reapers both have an easy time keeping seekers off the circles, reapers lack the knockbacks that engis bring (and fear is not nearly as useful as the seekers move so slowly) and the same burst healing with water fields/blasts. (I understand that they can heal.)

There’s also no doubt in my mind that a skilled engi will out-damage a skilled reaper on VG currently even while running circles. That’s just reality of the current class balances. Again, that’s not to say that reaper damage is too low or that you shouldn’t bring them to this fight.

tl;dr: Dps on VG is largely irrelevant (DnT is getting sub 4-min kills). New groups who are (and should be) focusing on mechanics should bring engis if they want the easiest time possible because of utility, not dps. You can be successful in this fight with basically any composition.

Thaddeus.4891:

Omg the mayhem Junkpile is doing these days on the forum lol.

IMO the difference in dps between engineer and necro is not calculable when on circle duty. It really depend on luck and skill. For exemple. I don’t think I miss much blowtorch anymore and maybe miss between 2/3 and 1/2 of my bombs because I always run to the boss after a circle. It also depend on the placement of seekers. If you have to push or immobilize more seekers then you dps will suffer.

Personnally, I prefer my engineer because of the 2 pushback and 2 immo for the seekers and the additional group healing the turret bring. But both are solid choice that work well. The engineer will bring more quality of life for the seekers and healing, while the necro will be more focused on the boss while doing circle.

I’m curious. Does 2 Viper Reaper can take care of the Red Guardian by themselves like 2 engineer can? This doesn’t change a thing because 3 or 2 condi on Red Guardian doesn’t really change the total speed of the 2nd and 4th phase. I’m just curious.

This. I don’t think reapers are at all bad for VG. I’m simply saying that I think higher QOL for your circle group is much more important than the slightly higher ranged dps your reapers can provide. It’s true that reapers bring some cc, but they lack the knockbacks and burst healing that the engis can provide. The easier of a time your circle group has on the fight, the easier the fight is in general as the other roles really aren’t that hard and DPS shouldn’t be at all an issue. Can you beat it with 2-3 condi reapers instead of engis? Of course. Should a brand new group that’s trying to make getting a kill as easy as possible for themselves bring 3 condi engis? I think so. That’s all I’m saying.

MadRabbit: I’m not going to quote and respond to parts of your post individually, but I do have a general response.

After reading your post, it’s clear that we’re no longer arguing about whether raids are exclusive or not. We’ve established that all content in the game is somewhat exclusive and now we’re arguing about whether raids are “too exclusive”. I honestly don’t really care that much about the semantics, so while I was arguing before that raids were “not exclusive”, I will switch my stance to “raids are not ‘too exclusive’”. If we are eventually to accept my point, I will say that I would rather word it the way I originally did, as the word exclusive apparently has an extremely negative connotation I don’t want associated with raids because I think they’re awesome, but that’s another point entirely. :P

I guess my argument breaks down into this:
1. Yes, there are different tiers of players. This is true for any game.
2. GW2 has catered to the lower tiers for 3 years.
3. GW2 has continued to cater to the lower tiers through the release of HoT.
4. The lower tier of players have become used to the content of this game being incredibly easy and doable (regardless of efficiency) with any profession and build.
5. The higher tier of players worked to optimize this content as it was what they found fun, but had very little recognition of their progress by the game (they essentially just gathered rewards more quickly).
6. Anet added in one piece of content because they wanted to add something nice for the highest tier of players, while leaving the vast majority of the rest of the game incredibly accessible to the larger player-base.
7. The top tier of players is incredibly happy because this is the content they have been waiting for, and finally have something exciting to do in the game.
8. The lower tiers of players try it, realize it requires them to play and think like the top tier players (which everyone is capable of…), and immediately (like, day of release) call for Anet to change the content because they feel excluded by it.

Do I think that raids “exclude” a larger part of the player-base than the rest of the game? Yes. But do I really think that they exclude people from vital game content? No. Anet specifically designed the raids to make sure that players didn’t feel like they were missing a large part of the game by not playing them, because they knew a lot of players would not want to adapt to the challenge. They didn’t gate any story, masteries (other than the raid-specific ones), or armor-tier behind them intentionally to make sure players feel like they weren’t missing out if they chose not to complete them. And that’s really just it. The barrier to entry on these raids is so much lower than it is in other raiding MMOs (like, pugs were downing VG and Gor during the first week). Raids in other games are exclusive because they require a ton of time investment before you can even start learning the boss fights.

Basically what I’m trying to say, and I think a lot of other hardcore players are agreeing, is that essentially we’ve felt the way people are feeling now about raids, about the entire game up until this point. I know a ton of people who who took long breaks from the game (I stopped playing for about 8 months before HoT because I simply just ran out of challenging things to do after farming for my bioluminescent gear), and came back for the promise of new content and new challenging content. So when we finally get to pour our time into literally three bosses and people immediately start calling for nerfs and changes because they feel excluded from the content even though we’re creating welcoming and friendly communities around the raids, that gets really frustrating really quickly. (Honestly, I’ve never really had any friends in-game in GW2, and now I’m playing with the same 10 people every night and having the most fun I’ve ever had in this game before. My raid group has lead guild raids for each of our guilds – we have members from about 3 guilds in the group – so they could experience the content with more advanced player who were willing to lend them a hand. The fact that people are saying raids are exclusive is baffling to me when all I’ve seen them do is bring people together for laughs and good times.

I think I morphed into a bit of an emotional argument at the end there, which obviously isn’t as logically compelling, and I know people are obviously having different experiences with raids than I’ve had. But the tl;dr is this: Raids are a tiny tiny tiny portion of the game. They provide a much needed challenge for the top tier of players, without shutting other players out of a large amount of content. While players may feel like they are being excluded, the reality is that the barrier of entry is incredibly low. While there are basic requirements for success (play a more meta build for your class), they are easily attainable for all players should they want to find success in raids. Raids are not “too exclusive” and provide a type of content this game has been lacking for three years.

Ugh, I’m not super happy with this post but I’m posting it anyway. I just feel like my arguments are hard to put into words right now. Maybe I helped show people the other side of the argument though? Idk…

MadRabbit.3179:

All right, so I must be missing something, because by this very sentence, you have demonstrated it is exclusive. Since ascended gear is not “really” required, this states that is required by some, which it is. And I am sure we can look up objective numbers that show a certain percentage of the population do not have ascended armor and thus, on that criteria alone, are being excluded.

Your statement is subjective. You are stating an opinion that you think the acquisition of ascended armor is so easy that anyone can do it, thus making it inclusive. I can also state the opinion that becoming the President of the United States or attending Harvard is so easy anyone can do it, but yet objective evidence shows a very small percentage of the population have done either, making them both very exclusive.

Even if we both agree that the process of acquiring ascended armor is so trivial that anyone can do it, it still comes with a time requirement. Time to make it or time to raise the gold to buy it. This time requirement is objectively higher than exotic and a number of adults, regardless of our opinion that they can if they really wanted to, cannot meet that time requirement. This makes raiding content more exclusive than historical content that has never once brought up this issue of requiring ascended gear.

Let me rephrase his point. Ascended armor is not required. This has been confirmed. People are always going to find some way to exclude people from content. For example, “p2 zerker only ping gear on inv” in dungeons. That doesn’t make dungeons exclusive, it just means that some people are excluding others. You find that anywhere. My raid group has downed the bosses several times by taking pugs and never once have we required someone be in exotics or ping their gear. Since we’re bringing up WoW so much, the LFR system literally requires you to meet a certain gear level before you’re even allowed to hit the “queue for raid” button. Thank god we don’t have that in GW2… right?

MadRabbit.3179:

Personally, I never once said it would work that. I understand that it does work like that and that’s why I have made the statement that raiding has a degree of exclusion. Despite, one again, your opinion that this particular task is so trivial it can be done by 100% of the population, there is a time requirement in leveling an alt. Anyone who cannot meet this requirement will be excluded if the main they did level is not viable for the raid, once again, creating a degree of exclusion.

… (as in “continued”, not I’m responding to this point with “…”)

MadRabbit.3179:

Yes, anyone as long as they have met the asended gear requirement or only selected people who did not have that requirement and are playing a class can contribute, can gather a raid together and attempt it. You are correct in saying this 100% inclusive to, let’s say, 70% of the population.

Frankly, you could argue that there’s 0 time requirement in leveling an alt in that you just get tomes of knowledge handed to you everywhere. But seeing at that’s a kind of dumb argument… these bosses are being downed by people of every class. Of course some classes are going to be harder to find groups with. You’re again making the “I should be able to walk into a raid with whatever class/build I want and find success” except this time you’re just adding “to feel included” at the end. In the end, you’re just excluding yourself from the content if you’re refusing to be flexible and play with the meta. It’s the same argument as to why you can’t just walk into a league of legends game and say “Oh I only play Zed and I build him AP. I don’t know how to play any other champion or build because I leveled my account only playing AP Zed against bots and I don’t want to get any other champions because that’s work. Why can’t I have a positive win rate?” The fact of the matter is that it doesn’t matter what profession you leveled. As long as you build them properly and play them well, you can find success in the raid ==> inclusion. (We find class exclusion when, for example, thieves literally can’t zone into the spirit vale. You can make it easier on yourself to find a group by not playing thief, but you can also not adapt, and play your thief, and be successful.)

MadRabbit.3179:

Practice requires time. We have this statement in engineering that given enough time, you can solve any problem or build anything, which is true for anything. With enough time, anyone can beat the raid.
But, as we have already established, time is finite resource not available equally to all players, thus making completion of the raid, once again, exclusive to a percentage of the population.

You may find this acceptable and how it is meant to be. I do not. I think the integrity of the current difficulty level should be preserved via lower diffulty levels with lesser rewards so the percentage of the population who paid for the game and yet cannot make the time commitment the current difficulty level requires can experience the content.

Leveling to 80 takes time. With enough time anyone can level to 80. But, as we have already established, time is finite resource not available equally to all players, thus making leveling to 80, once again, exclusive to a percentage of the population.

That’s obviously an extreme example, but you get my point. Everything in games is a time commitment. You can honestly find success in the raids by just throwing together a group of friends for 30-60 minutes a week and doing some VG attempts. You might find that success after a month or two, but you will find it. In fact, in theory, this raid wing can be completed in < 30 minutes in total. I would understand the time argument if the raid required you to commit 2-3 hours consecutively in order to complete the content. Obviously that helps, but is in no means required. (What about DS, which requires active participation for an extended period of time. Isn’t that more exclusive?)

MadRabbit.3179:

Unless you lack the time to invest into that progress, then you are excluded on that criteria. Or your raid party has formed the subjective opinion that you lack the skill or talent to contribute and have removed you, excluding you on that criteria as well. Both of these have nothing to do with a “lack of willingness” or, to be blunt, laziness. In fact, attributing anyone who cannot complete the raid to laziness is a cognitive bias called fundamental attribution error.

If that’s your raid party’s attitude, you need to find a new one. Mine has never kicked anyone for “lack of skill”. If you show willingness and improvement, we’ll keep you for as long as you like. Like I said earlier, players will always find ways to exclude other players from content. That doesn’t necessarily make that content exclusive.

MadRabbit.3179:

I welcome your opinion, but it is just that: an opinion. These is no objective criteria that associates a certain degree of difficulty with the label of “raid”. WoW has a casual level of difficulty that I am sure both of us would agree is very easy, but it is referred to as a “raid”.

Perhaps we can agree that the point of raids in GW2 was to add challenging content. However, since what is or is not a challenge is subjective, multiple difficulty levels can be added while still meeting that goal. It just allows players to choose what they find “challenging” while still being within the time investment they are able to give.

Raids were added as a way to provide a challenge to the top tier of players. Anet stated that their game lacked “challenging group content” and they fixed that. While what is considered a challenge is obviously a subjective point, yes, within the context of these statements, Anet is referring to the rest of the game as “not a challenge” and raids as a “challenge”. You can choose what you find “challenging” while still being within the time investment you are able to give. You just might not choose raids. Just as I choose what I find challenging within my time investment. I don’t choose story-mode dungeons, or map exploration. Yet, there’s not a “hard-mode” of those things for me. If you don’t like the way a piece of content functions, yet there’s no hard barrier to entry, the solution isn’t to call for a nerf. It’s to just not play it…. I don’t want Anet spending time on easy-mode raids. I want them spending time on more challenging raids.

Condi engi is considered the better class for VG because it is much better at running green circles than the other condi builds. Engis provide several knockbacks and ccs that reapers are missing, as well as water fields and blast finishers for aoe healing, both of which reapers lack reliably. Their condis still tick while they are running circles (though they do lose dps when they leave the boss, that is true), but the loss of dps is largely irrelevant in actually killing the boss as the timer is so lax. You’re much better off bringing the survivability and ease of circle running, than slightly more consistent dps with reapers from range and the number one thing that causes wipes is people missing/going down in green circles, rather than lack of dps. Lack of dps usually stems from other issues and not from losing out on dps when people run circles. Prioritizing the circle team’s survivability over slightly higher dps will almost always lead to more success in the fight.

tl;dr – engis are better because of the utility they provide, rather than their dps. They’re not the only class that can be successful though.

I agree that there is definitely a range of comps that can be very successful at this boss. I’m simply trying to recommend a comp new guilds can strive for that will lead to the fastest success at killing the boss. Clearly generalizations will never be 100% correct and the ideal will always depend on your specific group. We find the ideal comp just by taking the strongest class of each role and making a group from them. It’s very possible that DnT’s comp is higher DPS (and it probably is) than the "ideal’ comp that I listed, however it requires much more precise play (holding the boss as still as possible for as long as possible) in order to be as effective as they made it. Maybe ideal is the wrong word – fine. But I think the comp I listed is a great starting point for people trying to figure out what classes to gear up and bring into the VG fight (and to show it’s not the only option, I listed my group’s comp as well).

Agreed. Sticky this. Fantastic post. Well written, funny, and informative. Props.

You can always run zealot’s gear with 1-2 toughness trinkets. Again though, I really think you’re going to have an easier time with some other tank, and using your druid to run circles. Druid on circles is easier on both your circle team and your druid while providing essentially equal (or even possibly greater dps) than having a druid tank.

The ideal comp looks something like this (though a large range of comps can and have been successful):
3 Condi engi
3 Herald
2 PS war
1 Chrono tank
1 Duid healer

My group runs every week:
3 condi engi (or 2 if someone’s not available)
1 Ps war
2 Herald
1 d/f tempest (experimenting with staff now)
1 Chrono
1 Druid
1 Reaper tank

We’ve been consistently downing the boss after 1-2 attempts with about 1:30-2:00 left on the timer (The dps of the comp is fairly low, but it’s what we have and obviously works XD)

Frankly, you can just run zerker druid, get increased dps, and provide more than enough healing to be successful. While having zealot’s gear is nice, I’m actually starting to see druids prefer to run zerker over zealot’s regardless of cost.

While your ideas in this post are interesting, I’m not sure I really agree that your proposed strat is actually better than the current one the major of groups are running.

Voluptus.3509:

Say your green circle group gets into trouble. You pop Avatar form and keep them alive by “carpet bombing” heals and blowing CD’s. Now you come out of Avatar and you have no energy at all. You need to refuel.
There are only two ways you can do that. One is to do damage. Have you ever tried to do DPS in Zealot’s gear? Okay, so that ain’t happening.

Astral force generation doesn’t depend on your dps, but rather how many hits you do. You gain .75% of your astral force bar per attack you do, regardless of how much damage that attack does. A druid in clerics gear will generate just as much astral force by attack as a druid in zerker gear (I’m not recommending clerics). In fact, a lot of druids are now running zerker gear because it’s cheaper than zelots, and the healing power really isn’t require for them to do their job effectively.

Voluptus.3509:

“But the green circle needs those heals.”
The circle can get plenty of heals via the big three bomber heals a druid has in Avatar form because those three “Death from Above” heals all have range 1200. They can always hit the green circle from melee, without fail.

The green circle team does need those heals. This fight is honestly all about keeping that team alive and not worrying so much about the rest of the group. While engis certainly do have a lot of resources to pump out a lot of heals quickly, having the druid in that role will be incredibly helpful to a lot of groups who are having a lot of circle problems. The druid has a lot of heals at range 1200. They can always hit the melee from the green circle, without fail. (Plus they have the flexibility of using their short-range heals and long range heals on the circle group if they are in the green circle.)

Voluptus.3509:

“But putting a druid in melee is a loss of DPS that the tank was providing.”
Yes but you’re better off. Here’s why:
First, the obvious. You get all those buffs back. That in itself is worth a lot more than the DPS of any tank.
Second: You can bring in a ninth DPS.

Your group should already have that 9th dps. If your tank for any of these bosses is not just running a zerker build with one-two toughness trinkets, you’re already playing non-optimally and losing dps. (Obviously, you can still down VG with a much tankier tank, but you might run into problems with Gor.) If your solution is to make the druid a tank, you get one dps player that can now gain ~ 200 power/ferocity (or whatever stat they’re replacing for the toughness). Then your druid puts on toughness trinkets and loses ~ 200 power/precision in order to tank. It’s essentially a net dps equality to make this switch.

Another issue with switching the druid to melee, is that the optimal dps classes for this fight all dps in melee range. When you put a ranged class like druid in a ranged role, they can continue to dps while running circles. You would need to add a ranged dps to the circle group in order to not lose out on dps on the boss, and what class is that going to be? Instead, if you bring a separate “tank”, you can use a melee class like chrono, and allow the druid to continue to dps from range.

Frankly, I don’t think you can’t beat this boss with a druid healer/tank, but I don’t think it’s nearly as optimal as you’re making it out to be. A good druid will be able to maintain up time on their damage buffs on the melee group while running circles and keeping your condi team alive. The DPS timer is so lax on VG that the little dps you potentially might sort of squeeze out from putting your druid in melee is largely irrelevant, and groups will most likely have an easier time with the boss by making life easier for the circle team. Groups are quite literally killing VG with ~4min left on the timer (and most of them aren’t running a druid tank). If your group is actually having trouble reaching phase 1 before the 6min mark, it’s more than likely that there are other major underlying issues you should be trying to address before looking at moving your druid to the tanking role. (That to me sounds like people are playing non-optimal builds, using poor rotations, or consistently failing mechanics i.e getting teleported too much or going down too often.)

Ironically, I’ve mostly been playing dps tempest for this fight (ironic because it’s definitely a non-optimal build for VG XD) and am part of the melee team (I usually run d/f for VG) and I rarely go down. It’s so easy for the melee team to simply just not take a lot of damage, that putting the druid in melee range is rather unnecessary. With a melee group that is positioning well, the druid can largely ignore them for a majority of the fight and just throw random heals at them when possible to maintain scholar rune buffs.

Again, I don’t think your suggested strategy simply won’t work, but I do think that there are much better strats for newer/less-skilled groups to use to find success more easily (namely: prioritize your circle team, prioritize your circle team, prioritize the green circles).

Full disclosure: I don’t play either class. I have played with both however.

Condi engi has higher dps than condi reaper. Both classes are still fully viable, and condi reaper brings epidemic which condi engi does not. Epidemic does an amazing job at clearing adds which can make the fight easier on your group. It is not necessary to clear the adds with epidemic though so that’s honestly up to your group. Engi can bring slick shoes for Gorseval which is amazing for breaking his bar. It’s not necesary to break his bar with slick shoes though so that’s honestly up to your group. (See what I did there XD)

It all comes down to personal/group preference really. (Condi engi is definitely better for VG though the fight is so easy, it pretty much doesn’t matter.) If you’re pugging, I think it’d be easier to find a group with condi engi.

DresdenAllblack.1249:

I agree, current raid fine as is difficulty & mechanic wise. Lore though, man all they did was throw bosses in a row. REskinned bosses at that.
So next raid wing I wouldn’t mind if they just gave a little effort in the story department, or am I the only one that doesn’t want to see a pink Tequatl?

1. The bosses are quite pretty and unique. The fights are mechanically interesting, and the whole instance is gorgeous.

2. Did you just miss all of the lore in the instance? They’ve set up quite the mystery that I’m sure will get revealed over the next two wings. WoodenPotatoes did a great video detailing the lore of the instance. Check it out if you want: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CkJ9LiR2Hh0

UnbentMars.9126:

To be fair, the mechanics present in PvP and WvW are vastly different than the ones present in raids. Players behave in manners very different from the way PvE creatures do.

And ample opportunity differs between people. I happen to be in favor of low barriers to entry and right now the barrier of success is fairly steep so I’d love to see some more opportunities for players to increase their skills in progressively more challenging content.

Also I want more dungeons and Fractals, and they are good ways to add such content

It’s definitely true that you need to play differently in PvP and WvW than you do in PvE, but the mechanics aren’t all that different. You need to predict abilities and dodge them (definitely harder against players), you need to place your skills well to predict movement. You need to use your skills at the correct time (and you need to know how and when to use all of your abilities). Players are just frankly harder to fight than bosses because bosses are so predictable. I’m not saying that you should play PvP for a month and then expect to waltz into raids and beat all three bosses immediately because your mechanics are good. I’m just saying, if you’re having problems with like, basic keybinding and skill using, PvP will train you to do that better quite quickly as good mechanics are a large factor in success. Spamming 1 against the Shatterer won’t.

The barrier to entry right now in raids is like, have exotic gear (obviously it’s better to have ascended trinkets – easy to get – and weapons – slightly harder to get, but armor is unnecessary). I’d consider that a pretty low barrier to entry as I’ve been using the same exotic gear for the past three years (I’ve upgraded to ascended since then, but again, it’s so unnecessary). The only other barrier is how much practice you’re willing to put in. Like I said, these bosses aren’t at all difficult once you learn that particular fight (that’s true for really any raid boss). You just need to put the time in to master the specific mechanics for each boss and you’ll never have a problem again. The problem isn’t that there’s not enough room in the game to practice mechanics. The problem is that people aren’t willing to put a lot of time into practicing a specific boss. Once that happens, there’s no longer a problem.

For example, my group downed VG this week after two attempts (our first attempt was the first pull of the week and we were all just not warmed up XD) with one or two people who had never downed VG before and had only had an hour or two of experience with the fight. However, because so many of us had put in the work several weeks ago to master the fight, we executed (essentially) flawlessly and didn’t have any trouble “carrying” the people who hadn’t done it before. (Granted those people were also playing quite well. When you’re in a group that is executing well, it’s much easier to quickly reach the same level as the other players in the group as you really only need to focus on your own game and can trust that no one else is going to be making mistakes.)

Having one chrono is a fairly high priority for most groups, but almost no one wants to take more than one. They provide a lot of great group buffs, but their personal damage is not as high as other classes. And clearly bosses have been downed without chronos in the party, so they’re certainly not required. XD

Most people are finding that the 32-bit client is functioning right now. My entire raid group just switched over to it so we could get a few more pulls in before we called it for the night. Looks like an issue on your end for that one. (64-bit is downloading between 0-4kb/sec right now though.)

HoT is fantastic. Just as mattkoko said above, people almost always voice negative opinions much more often and loudly than positive ones. If you just spend three minutes on this forum, you may get the impression that HoT is a disaster, but spend three minutes in game and you’ll see large player populations who are having a great time.

All the talk of “group or lose” in HoT baffles me. I constantly run around the world solo doing events and exploring maps (on a full zerker ele no less – 11.6k health ftw) and don’t seem to have any problems. Usually you bump into other players during event chains, but even if you don’t, essentially all of them are soloable. It’s the big meta-events that require large map participation, but they only run once every hour or two and tend to be quite fun! You are more than capable of playing the HoT content without actively looking for a group.

The map design is literally the best I have ever seen in an MMO. I actually want to get back out into the maps, rather than standing around in a major city as players in other MMOs tend to do. They’re dynamic, complex (yes, they have a slight learning curve, but after that it’s not a problem – plus the learning curve is half the fun!), rewarding, full of activity, and have beautiful artwork. Mobs actually have some depth to them now as opposed to just spamming auto-attacks on you – suddenly the combat system is able to shine.

The elite specs add a whole new dimension to each profession and are, for the most part, incredibly well designed. I’ve been playing ele for 3 years now and Tempest feels like what I’ve been missing this whole time.

There is a whole host of new achievements and collections you can work on while you play, adding tons more replayability to the new maps and content and the new rewards systems allow you to experience the content how you want to, and still reap at least something for your efforts.

The mastery system adds new long-term goals for players already at level cap, with only one or two actually being super necessary for getting around (you’ll have them within the first 2-3 hours of play, especially if you start right away on the story). Again, more replayability for the new maps, and things to work on beyond just your first day of play.

Not to mention, the raids are absolutely fantastic. I also used to raid in WoW and I’m having just as much fun (if not more – GW2’s combat system is actually amazing) as I did playing WoW back in its glory days. (Plus, not having a gear treadmill is so nice…. Don’t let anyone tell you you need ascended armor for raids – you don’t. This is confirmed.)

It’s hard to parse through a lot of the negativity on the forums, but there are a ton of players who are really enjoying the game right now and who all would definitely tell you it’s totally worth it. You can always come back to the core game for a bit and see what you think of that before deciding to buy HoT, but keep in mind, you’ll be missing out on quite a bit without the xpack.

Hope that helped!

NovaanVerdiano.6174:

Gors doesn’t require ascended either. lol

Confirmed.

Honestly, I think just the fact that groups are able to kill these bosses proves that there is currently ample room to master your profession in the game currently. The learning curve in the raids is more about learning specific boss fights, rather than learning how to play your class. Once you’ve mastered the fight, it becomes trivial, but the next fight still starts out quite difficult, even though you already have your profession mastered.

(PvP and WvW are already really good places to practice mechanics!)

I’m not sure I really agree with what you’re saying. Ascended armor is currently not at all required to defeat the current three bosses, nor do I think that it is at all possible to tune an encounter around the ~2% stat increase ascended armor provides. Good execution of mechanics/dodges/rotations will always be way more important than having around 50 extra points in stats total across all your gear. Ascended weapons and trinkets are both extremely helpful – if not necessary – in killing these bosses (especially the later two) as they provide much larger stat increases than ascended armor (to a degree where fights can actually be effectively tuned around them). The current system for acquiring ascended weapons and trinkets is not at all tied to the raids – though by wiping on VG for a few weeks, you can very cheaply acquire ascended weapons (and armor pieces should you want them).

Anet released raids to satisfy a not insignificant portion of the community who has been calling for more challenging content for three years now. The content they released to satisfy this demand (raids, obviously :P) is currently doing an excellent job and the players who had been calling for more of a challenge are extremely happy with the current implementation and difficulties. What you see on these forums is not at all reflective of the opinions of this group of people as most of them tend to avoid it here due to the high levels of negativity (which I’m not saying your post is at all). Satisfied players tend to be silent players.

For Anet to put development time into easier raids would be unfair to the players who are waiting for more hard content. GW2 is filled with easy content. The entire point of raids is to provide a challenge to the top tier of players. That means, and this is something that Anet understands, that the lower tiers of players are probably going to have a very hard time with raids and not find them as fun. Anet identified a subset of the player-base who was completely lacking content they enjoyed, decided they wanted their game to satisfy those people too, and designed content that they could enjoy. If people want easier content, the solution is not to implement easier raids, it’s to implement other types of content that players find easier (dungeons, fractals, meta-events, personal story, achievements/collections, etc.) It’s the job of the raid team to design hard content to release in a timely manner to keep the top tier of players happy. It is not also their job to design medium-difficulty content for everyone else. That’s the job of other teams. I would be very upset/disappointed if the next wing of Spirit Vale was much easier than the current and I had to wait several months beyond that wing for the third wing that would challenge me again.

It’s also highly dependent on the type of mob you’re hitting. For example, Staff tempest has incredibly high dps against Gorseval because his hitbox is so big that most of your meteors from meteor shower will hit and he doesn’t move out of your fields a lot. It’s lower on Vale Guardian because he moves more and has a smaller hitbox. Some classes bring high single-target dps while others are much better in aoe situations. Etc. etc. etc….

Samhayn.2385:

But the truth is timer aren’t need you have plenty of ways to make the fight ramp up to a wipe with out having a hard timer.

The timers aren’t hard enrages…. They just increase boss damage (200% for VG and Gor – can’t remember if Sabetha is more). The fight doesn’t end when you reach the timer (though it most likely will end shortly as this means your group’s dps wasn’t very good). Groups shouldn’t be wiping to timers. If they’re wiping to timers, it’s more than likely a mechanics problem causing a loss in dps, or people bringing too defensive builds, which essentially the timers are there to make sure you don’t do. You’ll wipe on Gorseval before the timer is up if your dps is too low, and the platform will most likely break on Sabetha before the timer is up if you’re executing mechanics poorly. Honestly, your suggestions for VG actually make the fight harder at enrage than the current enrage system does. 200% damage on attacks isn’t a huge deal if you can just consistently dodge them.

Honestly, challenging raid mechanics usually involve some sort of precise timing in order to execute them well. These raids were definitely not designed to be played on high ping. Which means there’s not really a good solution to your problem. It is beyond unlikely we’ll see any changes to the raid at least for the next few months, and especially not to compensate for people playing on high ping. I guess start praying for an Oceanic server?