Raiders in Training (NA) - new Discord community now open to the public!

UPDATE 11/25

Hello everyone, we now have plenty of awesome Trainers and I think they are now all settled in comfy to start training.

Here is the link to Raiders In Training's Discord community!

We ask that you please follow the rules listed in this welcome page to set your name to your GW2 account and to please link your API key (steps on how to do this are listed) to the GW2 bot found in the GW2 Bot text channel!

The detailed instructions on how to create an API key can be found in the pinned message in the GW2 Bot text channel, which can be easily found on the top right portion of the window as a "tac pin" icon.

All you need to do after that is just do a $bosses in the Gw2 Bot channel to show your account is linked, and then we will add the Recruit tag for you, which unlocks all of the other channels. Thank you all for being so patient, and for our US players, I hope you've had an awesome holiday weekend so far!

I look forward to raiding with all of you, and I plan to run several training runs for the rest of the evening and on Sunday!

Raiders In Training (NA)

Swifty here, previous founder of Guild Wars 2 Raid Training (GW2RT).

I’m here today to announce Raiders In Training (RIT), a new NA based guild-less Discord community that is exclusively focused on training new raiders to prepare them to be able to clear individual raid wings in a reasonable time.

At this time, similar with the original launch of GW2RT back in September, we are really in need of additional Trainers before we fully open RIT up to the general public, which we want to do as soon as our Trainers are ready.

TL:DR If you are interested in becoming one of our Trainers, please PM myself or reply below and we can show you around the server! Read below if you want to learn more about what makes us unique and how our server functions.

What Makes Us Different? Accessibility and Realistic Performance Expectations

There are multiple raid training Discords that serve large communities that provide awesome services for players who desire META focused clear runs. However, they are restrictive in who they train and have strict vetting processes (kill counts, KP, or LI requirements), and often require specific META on their runs. Additionally, some training servers may limit a newer player’s access to training on specific, difficult bosses until they meet these restrictions. While the above is great for speed clear training, it is not ideal for players looking to learn bosses at their own speed.

RIT designed our system to provide a space for players to train on any boss they desire. We want our members to have achievable, realistic raiding goals to work towards. We want members to feel comfortable using builds and professions they prefer, while still being effective enough to reliably complete the content. To aid with this goal, we have a recommended difficulty scale and written guides that breakdown the individual mechanics and special roles needed for each fight.

Additionally, while we don't require META Builds to be run, but we do explain their strengths and benefits to help members create effective builds. We want to help our members improve their performance with their builds to at least a level that achieves the minimum viability required to reliably complete the content, rather than focus on top end builds that attempt to speed clear content that assume ideal conditions that are rarely met. To this end, we eventually plan to create a list of highly accessible, decent performing builds that are mechanically easy to perform.

Finally, the last aspect that sets us apart is we heavily focus on using GW2 Raidar to set realistic expectations for what we encourage our members to strive for with their builds, more so than focusing on golem benchmarks. We strongly encourage our Trainers to familiarize themselves with using ARC DPS, generating logs, and uploading them to Raidar to do a "post raid" review to help people self-evaluate how well their builds are working. If your build just isn't cutting the mustard, lets work on improving it together!

The Four Types of Squad Runs: Initial, Training, Wing Trials, and Wing Clears

Initial Run

• Prerequisite: None! But please try to optimize your builds, work with Trainers and other members for help!
• Intention: For players who are brand new to the boss encounter. All mechanics explained, guide provided with videos.
• Expected Duration: 2 hours maximum
• Initiated and Lead by: Trainers only

Training Run

• Prerequisite: Joining requires Initial Run completion for this encounter.
• Intention: Practice and improve on mechanics on individual bosses, get weekly kill, and prepare for Wing Trials.
• Expected Duration: 1 to 2 hours
• Initiated and Lead by: Trainers or anyone who has completed the Initial Run for the boss.

Wing Trial

• Prerequisite: Joining requires Initial Run completion for all encounters in the Wing, preferably some Training Runs as well.
• Intention: A challenge run to attempt to beat all encounters within a single Wing within a set time limit.
• Expected Duration: 2 hours hard time limit to pass the Trial.
• Initiated and Lead by: Trainers only so they can document results and pass out the Trial Completions tags!

Wing Clear

• Prerequisite: Joining requires Trial Completion tag for this specific Wing.
• Intention: Reliably beat all encounters within a single Wing with with as few failed pulls as possible.
• Expected Duration: 1 hour or less. We focus on "successful" pulls more than "fast kills" to lower overall time.
• Initiated and Lead by: Any member with the Trial Completion tags!

The Rank System: Progression with Options and Forward Scalability

Lastly, our server uses numerical Ranks as a visual indicator for each member’s total number of Wing Trial Completions they have earned. As Wing Trials can be completed in any order, they are not a direct indicator of skill, but rather a symbol of accomplishment for our members.

There are no inherent benefits to being Max Rank beyond feeling accomplished and informing others that you “can Clear any Wing” if they want to bring you along!

Another benefit of the Rank system is that it will upscale as new Wings are released, such as the new Wing coming next Tuesday. (So excited!) This means that Max Rank is a moving target, something even the most seasoned veterans will be striving towards as new content is released, as everyone has to start learning the new content from scratch.

Remember: on launch day, we’re all noobs together!

Conclusion: Raiding Should be Fun and Welcoming to All!

At the end of the day, Guild Wars 2 is an entertainment activity that should bring more joy to your life than stress. All of our rules are based around respecting your fellow players, your Squad leader and Trainers, and yourself.

This is a volunteer project that we take pride in, and our community has proven countless times how awesome, unique, and weirdly nice we are on the whole. As soon as we have enough Trainers, we intend to launch RIT and tweak our systems as needed based on everyone’s feedback.

If you would like to learn more about becoming one of our volunteer trainers, even just for specific bosses or Wings, please reply below or send a PM!

Thank you all for reading this far, and I look forward to Raiding with you all!

Swifty (Swiftwynd.1685)

Id like to participate, but my schedule is limited.I usually only reliably have one day each week.

@Murdock.6547 said:Id like to participate, but my schedule is limited.I usually only reliably have one day each week.

Awesome, that is more than fine. The minimal amount of training we'd really like from our trainers is "at least two bosses total per week."

Even if they are two bosses within the same run, that's more than enough for us to consider people an active trainer. We totally understand people are super busy this time of year :)

I look forward to see you around and raiding with yea!