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What happened in pug raiding? Skill level is really low (RANT THREAD)


polvere.2805

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What happened in pug ? I haven't pugged in a while since i have a static. This week due to irl things i was not able to join my static for the weekly clears so i decided to pug. Oh boy it was nightmarish. Some bosses are absolutely impossible for the average pug:

(I was playing as chrono in most of the encounters, either tank or off tank)

First of all, Deimos: i have been in various party of deimos this week, ages to full the whole group since it requires some particular roles. With one group i had to gg 3 TIMES in the first phase (yeah deimos was not even on the field) cause dps could not dodge his smash in the underground. YEAH 3 TIMESI cant count how many groups had people happily walked into blacks, even in ranged strat. In some groups where i swapped to bs i was doing more dps than most dps.Notice: in most of the encounters the group was 250li+.

Dhuum : have been in 3-4 party of 30kp+ , hard to get even to 50%, there is always the dude screwing up with greens (i usually take one green myself in order to at least have a sure one), or even worse, the dude screwing up with the bomb, killing the whole group by not noticing the afflicted. Oh i have seen a group where basically the whole squad decided after some time that walking in front of dhuum and facetanking his scythe was a good idea...(notice, they walked in front of him, dhuum was facing the right direction, tank was doing a good job)

Luckily i cleared Xera with static the only day i could play with them.The only clean run i had was the W1 run. I commanded it and required almost 30 min to full the group (i was asking for a 250li ping plus some more after them in rapid succesion, just to reduce the proabbility of a fake pinger)I will not go into details of the absoultely trash dps most pugs do (can't even reach 20 k personal dps which is not even that high), and the capability to NEVER stay in the right position.

DISCLAIMER NO PUGS WERE FLAMED (even though they probably deserved it)I tend to be a cheerful person, i NEVER flamed a single person. If the group is not ok by my standards i just write, "sorry this is going nowhere" and leave.

Just what is happening in pugs ? All the good players must be in statics obv.Now i understand why so many posts about "dps shaming" or "meta trash" or whatever complaint some people come up with for not wanting to invest 20 min of their life in gearing and learning a decent rotation and some mech on their main char.

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@"polvere.2805" said:What happened in pug ? I haven't pugged in a while since i have a static. This week due to irl things i was not able to join my static for the weekly clears so i decided to pug. Oh boy it was nightmarish. Some bosses are absolutely impossible for the average pug:

(I was playing as chrono in most of the encounters, either tank or off tank)

First of all, Deimos: i have been in various party of deimos this week, ages to full the whole group since it requires some particular roles. With one group i had to gg 3 TIMES in the first phase (yeah deimos was not even on the field) cause dps could not dodge his smash in the underground. YEAH 3 TIMESI cant count how many groups had people happily walked into blacks, even in ranged strat. In some groups where i swapped to bs i was doing more dps than most dps.Notice: in most of the encounters the group was 250li+.

Dhuum : have been in 3-4 party of 30kp+ , hard to get even to 50%, there is always the dude screwing up with greens (i usually take one green myself in order to at least have a sure one), or even worse, the dude screwing up with the bomb, killing the whole group by not noticing the afflicted. Oh i have seen a group where basically the whole squad decided after some time that walking in front of dhuum and facetanking his scythe was a good idea...(notice, they walked in front of him, dhuum was facing the right direction, tank was doing a good job)

Luckily i cleared Xera with static the only day i could play with them.The only clean run i had was the W1 run. I commanded it and required almost 30 min to full the group (i was asking for a 250li ping plus some more after them in rapid succesion, just to reduce the proabbility of a fake pinger)I will not go into details of the absoultely trash dps most pugs do (can't even reach 20 k personal dps which is not even that high), and the capability to NEVER stay in the right position.

DISCLAIMER NO PUGS WERE FLAMED (even though they probably deserved it)I tend to be a cheerful person, i NEVER flamed a single person. If the group is not ok by my standards i just write, "sorry this is going nowhere" and leave.

Just what is happening in pugs ? All the good players must be in statics obv.Now i understand why so many posts about "dps shaming" or "meta trash" or whatever complaint some people come up with for not wanting to invest 20 min of their life in gearing and learning a decent rotation and some mech on their main char.

Probably the outcome of raiders leaving the GW2 raid scene for something more reliable and timely.

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I told people this from the beginning but no one tends to listen until it’s too late! Raids (although I clear them myself weekly) are really bad for this particular game. For years and years Arenanet created a player-base of people who've learned that you can do and achieve everything there is in game, by just auto-attacking. There was only a small group of hardcore players crying their eyes out for “hardcore” content. Arenanet, wanting to be friends with everyone, came up with “raids”. And what we have now is the majority of the player-base leaving because the new prestige content is too hard for them, while the hardcore players are also leaving because (let’s face it) raids in this game are easy as ...

There is your problem. Don’t go out of your league to fix it, Arenanet listens to nobody.

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@"polvere.2805" said:Just what is happening in pugs ? All the good players must be in statics obv.Now i understand why so many posts about "dps shaming" or "meta trash" or whatever complaint some people come up with for not wanting to invest 20 min of their life in gearing and learning a decent rotation and some mech on their main char.

Ask for 600 LI or more (and even that is sometimes not enough). That way you can at least hope that people have experienced fights often enough to know what they are doing.

I made a similar observation last week, basically it's multiple factors:

  • people who have been casually raiding without killing any of the wing bosses have reached 300+ LI by now (and more). Since they were never required to learn the wing boss fights, that's where the groups disband or fail
  • people being unwilling to take on any extra task or work. This is also very visible in the constant lack of chronomancer since this role is often most burdened with mechanics
  • experienced raiders either quit or join a static or do their full clear runs in 60+ Dhuum KP groups

Also remember that you are essentially comparing PUG groups to your static. Even a mediocre static will outperform 90% of all PUG groups. Most evident on arc and the dps values people reach.

Sub 300 LI is the new 50 LI from the past. It's actually sometimes worse since people think they are bringing good performance because of the amount of LI they have thus not practicing or aiming to improve. 50 LI players actually might still work on rotations and try to learn mechanics.

@"FOX.3582" said:I told people this from the beginning but no one tends to listen until it’s too late! Raids (although I clear them myself weekly) are really bad for this particular game. For years and years Arenanet created a player-base of people who've learned that you can do and achieve everything there is in game, by just auto-attacking. There was only a small group of hardcore players crying their eyes out for “hardcore” content. Arenanet, wanting to be friends with everyone, came up with “raids”. And what we have now is the majority of the player-base leaving because the new prestige content is too hard for them, while the hardcore players are also leaving because (let’s face it) raids in this game are easy as ...

There is your problem. Don’t go out of your league to fix it, Arenanet listens to nobody.

Given the fraction of the player base who actually play raid content, this assumption is highly flawed. Here, this thread might be of interest to you:https://en-forum.guildwars2.com/discussion/61193/raiding-is-on-the-verge-of-destroying-huge-segments-of-the-gw2-community-if-it-hasnt-already/p1

A more realistic assumption is:

  • GROUP 1: a majority of the player base do not care about raids and/or are not exposed to them in any way (very casual players or simply uninterested in raids)
  • GROUP 2: a small group of players engages in raids and succeeds (hardcore, dedicated or simply well organized time wise)
  • GROUP 3: another tiny group of players wants to engage in raids but lacks either the time, skill or correct approach to actually succeed in raids

Group 3 is the group you are currently in. You want the raid rewards but are unwilling and/or un-able to produce the required performance and/or organization to succeed. You thus extrapolate your experience onto the entire player base. That said, neither group 2 or group 3 are of any big significance (if we leave aside that either group might be composed of wales who leave a lot of money with the game).

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Takes too long to get new wings out, having to wait 9 months for a new wing is not fun anymore and theres no much incentive to do raids.The legendary armor was a good reward to keep players hooked in raids for a long time, but now is only 1 legendary ring, is not that big deal and its taking too long to finish it.Over 1 year for 1 ring is too much, the ring should be finished with w6.

Legendary insights are useless to me now too, so no much reason to do w1-w4, only for the gold.

Raids need a bigger reward to keep players motivated to do weekly full clear, some big reward that uses Li and LD together.

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You answered it yourself, most seasoned raiders only do it with their statics and the other bunch of seasoned raiders are leaving or flat out don't make an effort anymore lest they end up stressed like you during their pugging. There is no new blood at all, everyone either gives up as soon as they realize they have to train for the content before doing the content, which doesn't matter if you think this is OK and natural, as I also do, but this is unique to GW2 even among other raiding games, and it is directly related to the lack of vertical progression to trivialize encounters. Or, they don't even try to start because they have a predisposition to not get involved in organized group content.

A high selling point of GW2 since release was the play how you want and when you want motto. It has always been a game friendly to players who play sporadically and leave for several months before returning again. Even fractals follow this with a reliable, tiered structure and sporadic updates that allow people to get back on it soon as they return to the game. sPvP and WvW are just as friendly to plug&play grouping even if you happen to be in an organized guild. Raids changed this logic and remain the only content to shake up this established feature of the game, while at the same time not "going all the way" and actually presenting the challenge that raiders have asked for. Said challenge would admittedly even further diminish the population anyway, so not worth it. In short, nothing happened to pug raiding, it was always bad but now you have become reasonably good amidst everyone else who hasn't, in a game that is not even about raiding, let alone pug raiding.

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I think the picture is just a random outcome like it has been in dungeons years ago (people joined zerker runs in cleric gear and no clue etc. etc.) and in fractals still to the recent day. Sometimes you have that bad week and sometimes you are very lucky. In addition negative things tend to stay in your memory while only the most important positive ones.I usually pug some raid bosses with my alt account and at first I'm going for the easier ones like W4 B1-3 & Escort. Most of these groups have a single stupid wipe but get the bosses down in the next attempt. Very easy LIs even if you join runs with less than 250 LI (have reached 200 with my alt last week).I admit that for example Cyninja made some good valid points but on the other hand we are talking about Dhuum, Xera, Deimos (although I found him not so hard and cannot understand people stepping into blacks during melee strat) as member of the harder bosses.Of course, if you have dedicated players playing their roles those bosses aren't a threat but a lot of players try out something new in pug runs and they don't care about failing & wiping because they already got their weekly kills. I have seen a couple of streamers randomly joining raid squads and not performing well. They had their kills and just didn't care about the team. That's one reason (maybe not the most substantial) why there are high LI & KP fails.

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@Vinceman.4572 said:I admit that for example Cyninja made some good valid points but on the other hand we are talking about Dhuum, Xera, Deimos (although I found him not so hard and cannot understand people stepping into blacks during melee strat) as member of the harder bosses.Of course, if you have dedicated players playing their roles those bosses aren't a threat but a lot of players try out something new in pug runs and they don't care about failing & wiping because they already got their weekly kills. I have seen a couple of streamers randomly joining raid squads and not performing well. They had their kills and just didn't care about the team. That's one reason (maybe not the most substantial) why there are high LI & KP fails.

True, that is also one of the more tricky aspects of wing bosses. Thanks for mentioning this since I had completely forgotten to put that in. Almost all of the wing bosses require additional organization and work from both the entire team as well as select individuals:

  • Sabetha - requires the group to properly throw greens (team) as well as cannon jumpers (individual)
  • Matthias - organized cc on sacrifice as well as dealing with both poisons (team) as well as reflects (individual)
  • Xera - proper phases to get back fast on platform with randomly chosen players (team) as well as Ambient Magic raid wipe (individual)
  • Deimos - dealing with saul and not stepping into green (team) as well as black kite, hand kite, special tanking (all individual)
  • Dhuum - proper positioning and final phase switches (team) as well as three greens (individual)

In general the wing boss fights will result in a faster wipe (or instant) if the players with individual roles mess up. Contrary to many not wing boss fights where such mistakes are not automatically a wipe. As such it is inherently easier to carry inexperienced players on fights up to the last boss and many players lack the ambition or opportunity (it's way more frustrating to practice as a PUG than as a static so this is not only PUG players fault) to practice the wing bosses. After all, most are only needed 1nce for the legendary armor and the remaining LI can just be farmed off of easier bosses.

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You have all said some interesting things. You gave me an idea on a future thread on the flaws of the raid design of GW, once i sort my thoughts on it i will probably open a thread that is not written on a whim like this one.

Back in the topic: What i don't get is why a random average pug joins a run or a boss that he can't do, moreover if he sees an high LI req. Is he hoping to get carried ? I don't think it's fun to wipe over and over on stupid things even if you want to get carried. Bosses like deimos xera and dhuum have overly tedious "pre fight" phases that makes wiping even worse.

Also as someone said in a post, gw2 raiding is NOT hard. Most mechanics are indeed easy, the "hard" part is only figuring them and understanding how to deal with them. The so feared dhuum greens are indeed quite easy but stressful as you have to costantly pay attention to timer and to the other greens. If the other members dont play correctly you are basically inviting the guys who decided to take on the "hard job" to leave thus making your wannabe carry run even worse as you will have to wait again for some more wannabe carry guys.

To me these kind of people just seem really stupid. You are ruining someone else run and also your run!! Total no sense

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@"polvere.2805" said:You have all said some interesting things. You gave me an idea on a future thread on the flaws of the raid design of GW, once i sort my thoughts on it i will probably open a thread that is not written on a whim like this one.

Back in the topic: What i don't get is why a random average pug joins a run or a boss that he can't do, moreover if he sees an high LI req. Is he hoping to get carried ? I don't think it's fun to wipe over and over on stupid things even if you want to get carried. Bosses like deimos xera and dhuum have overly tedious "pre fight" phases that makes wiping even worse.

Simple to answer, most will probably have 1 or 2 kills on the boss (which to them means they understand and can do the boss). Not realizing that they likely were heavy carried in other groups. People also want the kills, if it doesn't work out, no big loss for the inexperienced player. They are not used to clearing the boss regularly in the first place so its some time wasted at most with chance at a boss clear.

@"polvere.2805" said:Also as someone said in a post, gw2 raiding is NOT hard. Most mechanics are indeed easy, the "hard" part is only figuring them and understanding how to deal with them. The so feared dhuum greens are indeed quite easy but stressful as you have to costantly pay attention to timer and to the other greens. If the other members dont play correctly you are basically inviting the guys who decided to take on the "hard job" to leave thus making your wannabe carry run even worse as you will have to wait again for some more wannabe carry guys.

To me these kind of people just seem really stupid. You are ruining someone else run and also your run!! Total no sense

That's one of the possible results depending on who leaves first. In case the commander removes low performers and replaces them the group might succeed, this happens when the comm or core group of the run/raid want their full clear at all cost. In most cases the raid simply disbands. In some cases all experienced players leave (or a majority) and the remaining group devolves into an involuntary training run where the group wipes for a couple of tries before it disbands.

As far as difficulty, no raids are not difficult, but they are and require a very different approach and understanding to the game not present in any of the other pve segments (except maybe fractal CM modes). As such many people never get taught how to prepare for raids and this content. Unless you bring experience from another MMO, are willing to do a lot of research and practice or have people guiding and helping you, it is a very steep uphill battle. Again one of the reasons I always tell people to FIND A TRAINING GUILD.

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OP replied to his own question in his first paragraph.Just like you stoped pugging because you got a static group, the same happened to most other decent Raiders. Lets face it, a chunk of the PVE comunity are toxic casuals, that won't do crap about being unable to pull their own weight and then come to the forums whining they got kicked because they had less DPS than a dead cat.This environment isn't exactly conducive for people to want and help PUGs and new players, so they either form training guilds where they can have some control over the people that go into the raid, or they just play with static groups.

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@OPThere are a few reasons for that, but all can be summed up by the statement you yourself used: I haven't pugged in a while since i have a static.

Everyone that can and is more serious about raiding tries to get themselves a static. That of course means that the pug lists are made up of people that are just starting, aren't that new but couldn't find a static, and those that do have a static, but are playing around.

The first group is new (or relatively new, compared to rest), so obviously they do not know all the fights by heart yet, and that is all the more true for the last boss fights in a wing.

In the second group there are people that aren't good enough to get in a good static, those that aren't enough dedicated (or are simply incapable of required time commitments) to get into one, those that lost their static for many reasons...Some of them may, again, still be inexperienced on the last wing bosses - there are a lot of people that run only the easy ones, and try the harder ones very rarely (if ever).

A major point to notice here, for both first and second group is that it's way, way easier to learn boss fights if you have a static. It's much harder to do that while only pugging (especially if you're only starting your raiding). And since on many fights it's not that hard to carry one player, it's entirely possible to get a score of kills without fully understading what's going on.

Third group players may be more experienced, but they also aren't that serious about succeeding. They've probably already done full clear with their main group, and are there either only to kill time, or to test some new builds/strats. That doesn't mean they will be intentionally slacking, but they may not be as invested in the success of the fight as the other party members.

So, in short: most of the players you'd like to pug with don't pug at all - they are in statics.

@Cyninja.2954 said:

@"polvere.2805" said:You have all said some interesting things. You gave me an idea on a future thread on the flaws of the raid design of GW, once i sort my thoughts on it i will probably open a thread that is not written on a whim like this one.

Back in the topic: What i don't get is why a random average pug joins a run or a boss that he can't do, moreover if he sees an high LI req. Is he hoping to get carried ? I don't think it's fun to wipe over and over on stupid things even if you want to get carried. Bosses like deimos xera and dhuum have overly tedious "pre fight" phases that makes wiping even worse.

Simple to answer, most will probably have 1 or 2 kills on the boss (which to them means they understand and can do the boss). Not realizing that they likely were heavy carried in other groups. People also want the kills, if it doesn't work out, no big loss for the inexperienced player. They are not used to clearing the boss regularly in the first place so its some time wasted at most with chance at a boss clear.Also, for most of them, there's likely no other way (or at least no other way they know of) to learn those fights. If there are no low req LFGs present, they may feel the need to join the high ones, hoping that maybe this time they won't be kicked right away. Videos are good, but you can't really learn the fight without actually attempting it.

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The amount of new blood is low, proportion to the number of new blood to the game itself. This amount of low new blood accompanied with the community inability to tolerant new blood which lead to lower retain ratio make it even lower number of new blood. Naturally, low new blood doesn't means no new blood, they pug whenever possible and try to learn a bit of anything whenever possible. Some might tell them to go training raid but reality is training raid is never available at all times nor do they ever get enough people at all times.

This is why people form static team, this is to filter out new blood, taking in only decent players. Yes, this is elitism, is a reality. This yet again reduce the retain ratio.

This is just how the game is. It is a declining game mode. Surprised that anet even spend so much resources on this self destructing mode.

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@"SkyShroud.2865" said:The amount of new blood is low, proportion to the number of new blood to the game itself. This amount of low new blood accompanied with the community inability to tolerant new blood which lead to lower retain ratio make it even lower number of new blood. Naturally, low new blood doesn't means no new blood, they pug whenever possible and try to learn a bit of anything whenever possible. Some might tell them to go training raid but reality is training raid is never available at all times nor do they ever get enough people at all times.

This is why people form static team, this is to filter out new blood, taking in only decent players. Yes, this is elitism, is a reality. This yet again reduce the retain ratio.

This is just how the game is. It is a declining game mode. Surprised that anet even spend so much resources on this self destructing mode.

Err, about this i am not too sure. Inside my guild which is NOT a training guild we have a running static (mine) and every week we organise training runs for other guildies interested in raiding but too new to form their static or go in pug groups. If 1 out of 10 guilds does like us then a lot of new fresh blood will come in raid scene.

I honestly don't believe the argument of "raiding is dying", or at least if raiding is indeed dying i think it's more because anet releases raids REALLY slow. The time in between W5 and W6 was really long, even though i quite liked W6 and how encounters were designed.

in the end it's not even an LI problem, it's a problem of attitude that a lot of player have. They come in raids and expect to have success without effort nor time investment.

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@polvere.2805 said:Err, about this i am not too sure. Inside my guild which is NOT a training guild we have a running static (mine) and every week we organise training runs for other guildies interested in raiding but too new to form their static or go in pug groups. If 1 out of 10 guilds does like us then a lot of new fresh blood will come in raid scene.I have seen (and been in) several guilds that do exactly that. In all of them the new players were barely enough to keep the raid team afloat. You kept training new players, but by the time you had a few of them, the same number of veterans were gone from the game.Also, most of the new raid trainees do not stay for long. For every 10 people you have trained up to the competent level, maybe 1-2 will continue raiding.

Yes, there is some fresh blood coming to raid scene, but all it does is slowing the decay.

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^Knows how things works.

1 guild out of 10 guilds will never be enough to bring up the retain ratio to a sustainable level. Personally, I do respect that 1 guild more than that 9 other guilds but reality is, the strength of one single guild cannot change the outcome. Still, I do appreciate them for stepping outside the norm.

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I'll give you a small example of what's happening atm in pugs. I join a deimos group (250li) as tank. Commander asks for ranged strat while 90% of current dps builds are completely trash from range. I ask the commander to go melee strat but he insists. We start the fight and around 65% i pull deimos at the edge.Suddenly i notice a thief came all the way to the edge to melee the boss and instantly steps on black wiping the group.Commander flames me cause i asked for melee strat and the group wiped because of it. I'm literally speechless at that point and i realize the whole group has almost no other experience except pew pew and grind the kill,completely clueless of what melee means and probably never tried it even with "250 li", especially some people saying "melee on deimos sucks". I try to explain that melee strat isnt just about melee but keeping the boss near the center so boons are properly distibuted, u can aegis stomps for the group and bubble is one foot away, but commander just rages thinking its melee strat cause one person went melee at the edge, then proceeds to kick me and block me in chat. The gap between veterans and newbies is way too big atm, both in terms of dps and mechanics.

As the OP said, veterans have slowly but steadily left the pug scene leaving the casual raiders to fend for themselves to the point where going mid on VG or melee on Deimos is considered suicidal and should not be done at any cost. The fear of wiping is so much bigger than the drive to get better at the game, which has always been the way casuals engage raids, the problem is, what do u do when 90% of the pug groups follow that mentality?

I used to have a static but been away for a few months due to army obligations, came back to raiding only to realize the pug scene has indeed went from bad to worse, to the point were i'd rather not raid at all than pug. Feels like a whole new scene atm (in a bad way).

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IMO i don't think raid needs to be highly skilled to play. But a good team play matter more.. when a guy fail with a mechanic, how can a team continue until getting the group through? Instead of when a guy fail blame him straight away or point finger at druid or chrono or dps. Team work matters most. Human makes errors.. how can you pick up the pace when someone make an error?Eg 1 .. sab cannon guy die.. anyone can bu. just someone with good experience, no skill needed.. that person jump to platform get bounce to canon and destroy it and fly back.. what skill needed? Eg 2, dhuum green guy down.. anyone can go green right. No skill needed .. just someone who are confident enough to go Green then pick up 4 small orbs and one big orbs. Ofc you need to know how to pick orbs you don't just try to run like headless checken.. experience count.What I mean is, everyone in the group has the duty to make sure you are there to help other team mates that need to do certain mechanic. Everyone are equally responsible to get the boss down together. Stop the blaming mentality.. such a bad attitude towards raid.Also, I am quite tired of some new raiders just expect to be carried and don't put effort to learn at all. They just want to get their goal eg leg armour done etc and think you are their LI farming bot. If you are serious about raid.. want to learn.. jump into beginner group and wipe with them. That is how you learn.. by many wipes you get to learn how to be good team players.

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Also.. with pugs. Do not expect. Just play.Those you have a static.. lucky you. Some of players that has different arrangement for work and or those who can't raid at normal peak hours.. they don't have the luxury that you have. So don't come over here to rant about how sux the current pug is. You have a static that does FC w1to6 under 3 hours or 2.5 hrs? Thats good on you m8!Btw... I have been playing raid since start.. many raiders that start at the beginning has stopped playing this game. Although we constantly see new raiders rising slowly. Many use fake link too, and you know it as soon as you watch them play. I also found recent pug community is more forgiving on players who genuinely want to learn. Compared to before it is actually friendlier to before. Ofc you still occasionally gets nasty attitude here and there. You see worse in some armatuer guild that think they are above everyone and when they pug one or two ppl, they bully the pug.. I rather these people stay out of pug forever. There are many many nice people I have met in raids. They aren't just nice.. but they are experienced and good team players.
The benefit of playing with pug is, you get to meet these people and play with them.. they come from all over the world.

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@Talindra.4958 said:Btw... I have been playing raid since start.. many raiders that start at the beginning has stopped playing this game. Although we constantly see new raiders rising slowly. Many use fake link too, and you know it as soon as you watch them play. I also found recent pug community is more forgiving on players who genuinely want to learn. Compared to before it is actually friendlier to before. Ofc you still occasionally gets nasty attitude here and there. You see worse in some armatuer guild that think they are above everyone and when they pug one or two ppl, they bully the pug.. I rather these people stay out of pug forever. There are many many nice people I have met in raids. They aren't just nice.. but they are experienced and good team players.

Wanted to highlight this especially. It mirrors what I have mentioned in the past. One can tell quite fast how serious a person is about actually improving.

It's also a matter of where and when you join. If you join on a full run for experienced players and do not perform when everyone simply wants to clear the content asap, expect to be greeted with little tolerance for mistakes (depending on the skill level of the group). This counts twice if you faked yourself in.

Fun side fact, I had a 192 AP (yes, 192, I did not forget some zeros. Not even sure how he got to 80 and geared with this low AP :o ) join for W5 B1-3 yesterday (we needed a Dhuum ID for guild training tonight) as druid pusher on a twink account (obviously with no KP or LI). He had 1 try, and he nailed it. This wasn't training but the guild members I was running with had a lot less experience on wing 5 and the group as a whole with PUGs was solid enough to give it a shot.

If you on the other hand join a training run, many experienced raiders who signed up to help will hang in there the full 2-3 hours of tries giving pointers and helping out. At least in any and all training runs I am a part of (2 per week currently).

So if you are serious about raiding and enjoying the game, GO JOIN A GUILD!

EDIT: and if you absolutely can't find one, go over to reddit and look up Karma Initiative for EU.

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Quite an interesting discussion. I wouldn't say it is as easy as blaming the community or this supposed exclusion of anyone new. This might be the case if raids hadn't changed since 2015, if there had not been any new wings since then. It mostly comes down to exactly this raid design and even more so the general design of GW2, if you ask me.

We have certainly seen some power creep over the years but not through the usual means of new and far more powerful gear or further vertical progression. Not to mention that none of the old raid content has been devalued. You won't see any cap 110 players walk into Wing1 to oneshoot VG for laughs, just like they won't throw away ancient drops (2015) in this game. Quite on the contrary, VG (2015) remains to be just as important as Quadim (2018) or Dhuum (debatably the hardest) as far as acquiring the best-in-slot gear is concerned. So, why then would new players and most pugs focus on beating harder bosses (including Deimos) if Escort is just as rewarding as Dhuum? Hell, more rewarding if you consider success rates.Now also consider how raiding was introduced... wing by wing and over a long time. Those who have been there from the very start were clearing one single wing and the same three bosses over and over again each week. We dedicated 100% of our (limited) time in raids killing and mastering those bosses. Owning 50+ LI back then meant you had more than a dozen successful tries on every single boss avaible. Having spend 30 hours in raids meant you had spend 30 hours beating or at least practicing those bosses. Meaning that all of our experience was entirely concentrated on a few bosses. This remained to be the cases for quite a while. Two or three wings are easily manageable by most. Those who came in late mostly grouped with those who that concentrated experience to help them out.There are 20 bosses now, however. We all know that it would be laughable to assume the 250 LI on any given pug is going to be spread equally over those bosses. They will have concentrated their time on sure-kills while only trying the harder bosses once or twice. Don't really see why anyone would be surprised about the general level of pugging going down. People at this certain level of experience simply did not have the time to master every boss avaible yet unlike in 2015 or even 2016 when they would have done so by now.

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I'm one of thoses "low skill players" as I'm really new to raids.So I'll kinda explain why we do suck (or at least, why I do suck right now), feel free to dismiss my opinion or not, but remember that I took on my time to write this post so you do not go into a full circle of "raids are too easy, others players are too bad, they don't deserve...". Also remember it is HOW I perceive the game as a rather "new" player. So if I'm wrong, that also means that the game can do something bad at teaching me some stuff :

-> Game is not readable enough. This is the main point, and this is probably due to the number of differents mechanics at one time on the boss + players skills (which we can hardly see) + combos of skills. Sound does help (indicate big hits etc), the red area too (even if you have to know the timing beforehand as the dodge is short). For the rest, I have hard time to see if I'm targeted by something, if I'll explode, etc... Oh ok I have a red zone growing around me, then I'll go away from my mates. Oh wait, someone of my mate have to come on me. The sentence "Choose your allies wisely", yeah, thanks, it helps me a lot to understand what's going on.

-> Bosses have really strange mechanics. This is okay, refreshing and kinda fun, but the fact that you can't really do any boss without reading about all of his 10 patterns of attacks beforehand because they are not to be understood easily is weird. Maybe Anet could introduce thoses mechanics by not one shotting you when you fail at the beginning (and could increase in damage each time).

-> Extra skills given for a fight can't really be read during the actual fight. Extra points when you actually have to earn this specific extra skill during the fight by doing something like catching blue bullets while escaping red ones.

-> Stuff. It is hard for someone new, to come up with more than exotic pieces. It is probably fine when you're doing T4 fractal all the days, but I'm currently stuck into lower fractal tiers because I have only 2 rings and 1 necklace to put agony on. When I say "stuck", I probably have ways to unstuck myself, but thoses ways are kinda obscure at the moment without reading a full guide on how to do it. Then you'll tell me "Hey you can do thoses raids in full exo", yeah, but it's harder. And if the harder part is for the new players rather than the veterans. Yeah, I can guess why they're bored (or why they suck).

Now I know that the meta builds cost a lot more gold than I can currently handle, by far, so I won't join PUG as I do not have the prerequisite, making me unable to stuff myself as easily.-> Rotations. Mesmer, which is my main currently have a "26" rotation combo to learn as a chrono to be useful (on snowcrows at the moment). The fact that the game depends on learning thoses rotations before everything else as you'll really be useless without them doesn't really help. Could have more "easiers specs" on each class while still being relevant to boss fight would have helped.

So, I don't mind trying again and again a boss. Doing dailies to slowly, really slowly grind stuff to be ABLE to grind it faster. And I certainly don't expect to master a boss the first time I come against. It's just that I'd like an easier time to go in, rather than the current state. But this mostly list my current gripes with the game so far.

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