How I see the raids of GW2

Hello everyone,

First of all, I want to tell you I am a big fan of this game. I played it for 5 years, I spent cash for gems and I bought all the expansions. I am an everyday player and I try to be involved in every content of this game.

Before GW2, was WoW. Best lore, best leveling experience and probably one of the best experiences in raids, even if I always hated the length of the raids and the amount of time needed. How did WoW succeded on making raids challenging and user friendly at the same time? Well, easly.They completed some milestones on other issues. First, they made every class useful. Second, they created a nice matchmaking tool that will help you find player faster. The problem with the raids of GW2 is not the encounter itself. Some bosses are harder, other are easier, but they are ok. The raid itself is ok, but still a big part of the community hate it. This means the problem is somewhere else, not with the content itself.

And yes....here we are, finally, talking about the real problems of GW2 raids. First of all, the devs do not look for the entire community. It was enough for some players to make some static teams or pro guilds and to raid all day and all night until they had no more fun. Then they asked for more challenging content. The devs delivered them CM and additional rewards for it, everything ok. But then there was another category of raiders, the ones who were raiding with LFG (I am included here) because they were working and they couldn't follow strict schedules. What devs did for them? A separated category in LFG....this is all. The hard raiders started to grow and to become better, they developed new builds, new tactics just to make things faster and then they pushed all this brainless elitism into LFG. That's why LFG is now full of people asking for "pictures about dps on golem" or "500 LI+" even if they did not meet their own requirements. What is Anet doing? Closing it's eyes and spamming us with "it is supposed to be challenging". Yes, it is supposed to be challenging, but not bad organised. The people who hate raids do not complain about bosses or encounter, they complain about bad elitism and the lack of puggs on LFG. And still they use the excuse with "it is supposed to be challenging".

What WoW did to prevent these things? Easly.....WoW used something called gearscore back in ICC. They just needed to check your gear and this was all. No spamming of LI or legendary armor or guild decoration, no bad chat floodings. What WoW did to help LFG? Raid Finder. Raid Finder opened the gate for newcomers and after they trained and become better, they were ready to join guilds.

All newcomers from LFG end up being kicked so many times that they just give up or join serious groups and leave after 2-3 tries. Even the training guilds are failing to train people anymore. So, my dears, I would ask you, how would you fix these problems? I would personaly introduce a Raid log interface (visible to other players too) where you would see how many LI that person collected, all time, and what bosses did he kill and for the ones he did not kill yet, the best score.

@Daniel.5428 said:"pictures about dps on golem" and the lack of puggs on LFG.

Do you Raid on NA by any chance?

What WoW did to prevent these things? Easly.....WoW used something called gearscore back in ICC. They just needed to check your gear and this was all.

Good luck trying to argue that on the official Forums. I can already see the replies.I would love a gearcheck tho.

@RaidsAreEasyAF.8652 said:Do you Raid on NA by any chance?

no, EU.

I´ve never ever seen someone ask for a DPS Golem picture in LFG. Also there are plenty of pug LFG´s.

This is the same discussion that was had a week or so ago. At least yours is more geared towards a request than a demand.

Good for you...

Gearcheck won't work, because the ILVL does not work here as in WoW.

Also, unlike wow, here Equipment means nothing because there are XX kind of stats, which can be mixed, with different runes, sigils, etc.

One player could craft Ascended equipment without playing the game, simply staying afk in LA ( Gems > Golds > Materials to lvl crafting skill + Halloween Bags for ascended mats ).LI would instead mean that the players managed to do some boss fights.

It won't simply work on GW2.Furthermore the raids are not a hard task.

Let's focus on the current situation and its own problems

• Players who want to play with their own spec/equip, without consumables maybe.
• Players who get frustrated after some wipe, and put blame on the others.
• Players who don't try to make a own group, but instead plan to join existent maybe elite groups and complain if they don't have the requirements.
• Players who don't know bosses, mechanics, and eventually the class they are playing ( no guides, youtube videos, wikis... ).

The pool is 10 person, and you are 1 of em, so you should just find 9 more.Not that hard, but you have to make some effort... yeah... you won't be carried by elites... unfortunately, you will have to play the game and learn from it.And after some wipes, you will achieve time after time more victories... and probably start to make a simil elite group, rejecting those who didn't manage to do the proper escalation.

It's not selfish, it's normal.

The System is indeed raw, but it works.People are only not used to play hard content, and tend to disband after a single wipe.

We don't need to feed those kind of pepole.Never.

As others have noted, gearscore simply wouldn't work in this game because of the how gear works.

I know some people do not want to accept it, but the reason WoW is seen as the posterchild for how to make raiding work in an MMO is because the developers there adapted the game mode throughout the years and ended up with something that fits with the rest of the game. By including multiple difficulty tiers (including and LFG and flex raid tier), they were able to do things that a game like GW2 cannot, most notably incorporating strong story and lore focused content into raids. Since they do not have to worry about the accessibility factor, raids could become a deeply integrated part of the WoW experience.

And it worked (despite the complaints from elitists claiming lower tiers somehow "ruined" raids). That game offers some of the (if not the) best raiding experiences in the industry - and has done so for almost a decade now.

Unfortunately (I believe), Anet wants raids to be something different in this game. In a game that has always been about accessibility and community (where they even bragged about being the "friendliest" MMO), they have injected semi-exclusionary content. They cannot tie that content strongly to the rest of the story and, by their own admission, want it to be almost exclusively for a small percentage of players.

Given that, they have made the conscious decision to limit the size of the raid development team to the point where new raids will probably come 2-3 times a year, at the fastest.

So, what we end up with is content that feels disconnected from the rest of the game, that is only enjoyed by a small percentage of players, that people "master" within a few weeks (month at the longest), and that comes out at a snail's pace (unfortunately, rightfully so, given the size of the team and target audience).

That is not a sustainable model for success. If you doubt that, think about what raids would look like if the rest of the game weren't here. No one - not even hardcore raiders - would think that was enough - or interesting enough - to warrant their attention. They are relegated to ancillary content at best. And, when that ancillary content cannot have strong story ties to the rest of the game and is partially walled off due to the math of raiding (refuse to call them actually difficult), it will eventually begin to feel more and more out of place.

Despite the reluctance from the developers and worries from hardercore raiders, the mode needs difficulty tiers. It needs them to justify stronger story ties to the GW2 narrative and to justify more development resources from Anet. Until that happens, we are stuck with how raids are now, a model that I believe is unsustainable longterm.

@Shirlias.8104 said:And after some wipes, you will achieve time after time more victories... and probably start to make a simil elite group, rejecting those who didn't manage to do the proper escalation.

Ok, but couldn't that happen automatically?

An automated LFG feature in which players state their profession and intended role, and the system assigns a group for them. With the caveat that those who have killed a boss are only assigned to groups made of people who have killed that same boss. An experienced player would not be automatically grouped with players who lacked experience, although people would be free to manually make their own groups (if, for example, someone wants to help their friends, and so on).

Of course there are ways to bypass that (buying runs, for example), but it would prevent new players from finding themselves in groups in which everyone has ran through the content a dozen times and expect everyone to know their roles.

There was elitism before in the LFG with dungeons and fractals. Elitism didn’t just appear with raids.

Players have all the right to impose whatever restrictions they want on their own groups. No other player can tell them otherwise. If there are players that do not like those requirements then they can create their own group.

Most of the people I see complaining don’t want to put in the effort to create their own groups and would prefer Anet to change the game to cater them.

@Ayrilana.1396 said:There was elitism before in the LFG with dungeons and fractals. Elitism didn’t just appear with raids.

Players have all the right to impose whatever restrictions they want on their own groups. No other player can tell them otherwise. If there are players that do not like those requirements then they can create their own group.

Most of the people I see complaining don’t want to put in the effort to create their own groups and would prefer Anet to change the game to cater them.

Yeah but it's a MMO, not a dating site where you find 9 players and spend time with those ignoring everyone else from the rest of 1 milion. It should work for LFG too. Raiding with random people do not work in this game, or works very hard.

@Erasculio.2914 said:

@Shirlias.8104 said:And after some wipes, you will achieve time after time more victories... and probably start to make a simil elite group, rejecting those who didn't manage to do the proper escalation.

It won't change a thing.Elites will use LFG, and those who will be put together by AUTOMATED LFG will suffer because of the fact they suck.

Let's make it simple.Elites do only want Elites. Which means they do it through guild rooster or checking only Elites with determined stats.

Ok, now what about the others?

You will be stuck in a group of non elites, which includes

• Noobs
• Those who get carried but have equip.
• Those who don't have a meta build/class/equip and want to play the content with the spec they want.

The party will be formed by these players, and the result will also be the same.

@Shirlias.8104 said:

@Erasculio.2914 said:

@Shirlias.8104 said:And after some wipes, you will achieve time after time more victories... and probably start to make a simil elite group, rejecting those who didn't manage to do the proper escalation.

• Noobs
• Those who get carried but have equip.
• Those who don't have a meta build/class/equip and want to play the content with the spec they want.

this

@Shirlias.8104 said:

@Erasculio.2914 said:

@Shirlias.8104 said:And after some wipes, you will achieve time after time more victories... and probably start to make a simil elite group, rejecting those who didn't manage to do the proper escalation.

• Noobs
• Those who get carried but have equip.
• Those who don't have a meta build/class/equip and want to play the content with the spec they want.

This happens only because classes are too different. There is always one class that rules and one that suck. In WoW, when you needed a tank you could have pick from at least 3 classes. Here all you can hope for is a chrono.

Because this is not wow.The project started with the proposal that all classes could have done more or less the same ( and no tanks nor healers ).

This was a total mess as you can see, but still the system is not wow like ( for god sake ).

Chronomancer is the best tank ( which means no tanking skills but just more armor and more sustain/survavility )? I do agreeYou can't manage to do a raid without a Chrono as tank? I doubt. Meta tiers end the fights with 2/3 minutles left, so a different group could do the same.

@Daniel.5428 said:Hello everyone,

First of all, I want to tell you I am a big fan of this game. I played it for 5 years, I spent cash for gems and I bought all the expansions. I am an everyday player and I try to be involved in every content of this game.

Before GW2, was WoW. Best lore, best leveling experience and probably one of the best experiences in raids, even if I always hated the length of the raids and the amount of time needed. How did WoW succeded on making raids challenging and user friendly at the same time? Well, easly.They completed some milestones on other issues. First, they made every class useful. Second, they created a nice matchmaking tool that will help you find player faster. The problem with the raids of GW2 is not the encounter itself. Some bosses are harder, other are easier, but they are ok. The raid itself is ok, but still a big part of the community hate it. This means the problem is somewhere else, not with the content itself.

And yes....here we are, finally, talking about the real problems of GW2 raids. First of all, the devs do not look for the entire community. It was enough for some players to make some static teams or pro guilds and to raid all day and all night until they had no more fun. Then they asked for more challenging content. The devs delivered them CM and additional rewards for it, everything ok. But then there was another category of raiders, the ones who were raiding with LFG (I am included here) because they were working and they couldn't follow strict schedules. What devs did for them? A separated category in LFG....this is all. The hard raiders started to grow and to become better, they developed new builds, new tactics just to make things faster and then they pushed all this brainless elitism into LFG. That's why LFG is now full of people asking for "pictures about dps on golem" or "500 LI+" even if they did not meet their own requirements. What is Anet doing? Closing it's eyes and spamming us with "it is supposed to be challenging". Yes, it is supposed to be challenging, but not bad organised. The people who hate raids do not complain about bosses or encounter, they complain about bad elitism and the lack of puggs on LFG. And still they use the excuse with "it is supposed to be challenging".

What WoW did to prevent these things? Easly.....WoW used something called gearscore back in ICC. They just needed to check your gear and this was all. No spamming of LI or legendary armor or guild decoration, no bad chat floodings. What WoW did to help LFG? Raid Finder. Raid Finder opened the gate for newcomers and after they trained and become better, they were ready to join guilds.

All newcomers from LFG end up being kicked so many times that they just give up or join serious groups and leave after 2-3 tries. Even the training guilds are failing to train people anymore. So, my dears, I would ask you, how would you fix these problems? I would personaly introduce a Raid log interface (visible to other players too) where you would see how many LI that person collected, all time, and what bosses did he kill and for the ones he did not kill yet, the best score.

Second post about raid elitism i seen this week xD and since i think is a real problem i'm gonna comment again.

I think this point bring the real issue quick and on point " First, they made every class useful" but doesn't develop on that anymore, i have to insist that the problem with raid elitism is not player behavior, gear, experience or random team LFG. Is balance and supply/demand as simple (or not) as that, i go a little deep into this in another post about elitism on raids but the short version is we have a low player base that can actually fill the most important spots (tank, healers) a huge amount of player that can dps not because it's the easy job but it the only role that actually allows for different professions, gears and builds so the tank and the healer have to maximize and get the best of the best of the dps in order to succeed in a raid.

In conclusion you can introduce any system you want but at the end of the day the tank and the healer would pick the better DPS and the not so good dps dosen't have any real option here, there is no other tank or healer that could use him or benefit from his particular set of skill, there is also not enough influx of new tanks and healers that would want to take new dps player to run the raids because honestly building a meta tank or healer is a pain and not only that you have to take into account that some players simply doesn't like to play the profession or the gear, so basically raids right now are elitism because two of the 3 main roles are bottleneck.

Solution? yeah sure make more viable end game tanks and healers and no, not viable is i have a full team build around the class...... chrono tank viable equal or better and you will see a huge influx of new player to raid.

@Daniel.5428 said:

@Ayrilana.1396 said:There was elitism before in the LFG with dungeons and fractals. Elitism didn’t just appear with raids.

Players have all the right to impose whatever restrictions they want on their own groups. No other player can tell them otherwise. If there are players that do not like those requirements then they can create their own group.

Most of the people I see complaining don’t want to put in the effort to create their own groups and would prefer Anet to change the game to cater them.

It does work as people do it every week.

For starter. WoW does not have multi guilds feature, one toon per guild. How does multi guilds features affect the communities and general behavior of players? Right now, the declining amount of people in LFG is largely due to multi guilds. It is no brainer that players will use guilds as a raid organisations, it has been proven in many other MMOs. Now, when players are given much more freedoms to access up to 5 guilds which can be 5 raid guilds of potential of 2500 people. Now, these people will not use LFG but that is not the biggest problem here. We now have ourselves raid veterans only guilds, plenty of them. Since great majority veterans only stick to themselves, how are you expecting training raid guild to be any effective if everyone starts to be selfish? And conveniently forgot that most of them were helped by helpful pioneers. Since so little people are teaching the newbies, how are we gonna sustain raid in long run? Raid in this game is just yet another declining game mode.

Next thing is the gear score thingy. Does gear even means anything? Well, if you have legendary armor, yea, it means something but other than that, nothing at all. Gears are a poor representation of how experienced a person be, so is LI.

Lastly, anet does not have a concrete design direction for raid and its classes. Anet initially have pve people trial for them, it is up to these pve people to think of the possible ways. Anet only did tuning base on their results.

Hard to pin point what would work better.I mean, in Final Fantasy 14 you have Item Levels that require a minimum to enter their raids and they're easy enough to attain by doing dungeons and either getting drops or acquiring the currency to buy the parts. And Raids are also added infrequently enough for you to acquire the gear necessary to be able to enter first thing when servers go live for the new raid.GW2 of course doesn't cater to the holy trinity so with how many builds there are and the Poor to Good ratio so out of whack, it's easy to get into a raid and, due to your build, get smashed repeatedly.

A PUG-like system with a Soft-mode that gears you up for the next mode may do better. Same mechanics but more forgiving maybe? No one-shots but keep all the telegraphs and what not just to get people familiar with the chaos. But attack damage from mobs as well as health pools not so inflated? I admit, that'd require quite the overhaul but maybe looking forward it would pay itself off.

Personally I hate the crafting in this game and I don't like gold farming so gearing up for ascended seems like a dream I'll never fulfill unless I get lucky with RNG and happen to get a Legendary pre-req or something that I can turn around and sell for a butt-ton. I admit, this is a personal problem - I loved the intuitive crafting for ESO where it's simple to get the hang of and what not. Crafting in GW2 just never appealed to me. So I feel that the system itself helps compound the overall problem. Market inflation doesn't make matters any better, either.

/ramblerant

I have a small guild, and i have some friends in another small guild, we get together weekly, and try to get some raids going, but usually, because people work and all, we usually supplment with LFG.If you want to try it with us (we're all mostly newbs) just PM me ingame.We always do escort weekly without fail - cause that's just easy, and then we do attempts at other encounters as we have time/will/people online to get something going (at least half a raid).

@Daniel.5428 said:

@Ayrilana.1396 said:There was elitism before in the LFG with dungeons and fractals. Elitism didn’t just appear with raids.

Players have all the right to impose whatever restrictions they want on their own groups. No other player can tell them otherwise. If there are players that do not like those requirements then they can create their own group.

Most of the people I see complaining don’t want to put in the effort to create their own groups and would prefer Anet to change the game to cater them.

I'll take what is a Guild for $1000 Alex!

....It's like the social tools already exist and people refuse to use them because "It's an MMO" everyone else should cater to Me.

You know there's a site that generates a LI chat link for you? I used that to get into groups with ridiculous li requirements and it turned out i did boss mechanics a lot better than a lot of those supposedly 250+ ppl. Besides that join the chat communication ppl are using, it's a lot harder kicking ppl when you show yourself to be more than pixels on a screen. Know the boss mechanics as well, even if you don't understand completely first time you will usually get a hang of it in 2 tries and I assure you that some "elitist" might screw it up anyway so you probably wont get the blame

Better solution, and probably one they might be headed in based on the AMA, is the make the mechanics of the encounters REQUIRE all classes to succeed, that would mean that everyone would be needed, not just those that fit the current roles. Does it sound difficult to do, yes, but then again that's what any developer should be striving for, make something difficult that can please ALMOST everyone(because you will NEVER please everyone).

P.S. - for the person that said raids would be released only 2 - 3 a year that was also covered with the statement they want to release more raids on a faster schedule.

Being able to link achievements would be cool.

Idk if my opinion would say make raids better but able for everyone to play. When you buy a game you want to be able to play all content. But when you have gw2 and you want to raid, the average player won’t be able to. As much as we would want everyone to raid. We can’t because how much grind there is to do before you can raid.

If making people want to raid more, I think you would have to kinda make it like fractals. Make easier raids for everyone to develope to be doing the regular raids and harder. I know it’s a challenge but I think that arenanet should develope easier ones. Then the easier ones give the right loot for going into higher raids.

I could be wrong. But knowing I’m those people who can’t find people who would let me do raids because no one will train. I think arenanet has to go to a different approach on it. The grind is real even when you have all crafting tiers to 500. I’m not saying tune down the crafting. But maybe make mini raids and give ascended crafting materials for the loot. To craft for the bigger raids. Then I think it would probably make it better. I could be wrong though.

@blambidy.3216 said:Idk if my opinion would say make raids better but able for everyone to play. When you buy a game you want to be able to play all content. But when you have gw2 and you want to raid, the average player won’t be able to. As much as we would want everyone to raid. We can’t because how much grind there is to do before you can raid.

If making people want to raid more, I think you would have to kinda make it like fractals. Make easier raids for everyone to develope to be doing the regular raids and harder. I know it’s a challenge but I think that arenanet should develope easier ones. Then the easier ones give the right loot for going into higher raids.

I could be wrong. But knowing I’m those people who can’t find people who would let me do raids because no one will train. I think arenanet has to go to a different approach on it. The grind is real even when you have all crafting tiers to 500. I’m not saying tune down the crafting. But maybe make mini raids and give ascended crafting materials for the loot. To craft for the bigger raids. Then I think it would probably make it better. I could be wrong though.

It always comes down to resources. WoW has a vast amount of resources and a playerbase that is receptive to the idea of raiding as a focal point for the PvE game. They can afford to develop far more raid content while incorporating the story into it and making it available to all players via a tiered difficulty system and easy process for forming groups. I just don't see this happening in GW2.