Please, make the raids with an additional mode (solo)

I, like many others, dislike playing the raids because of several reasons. Things like "you don't have the right build - you can't play", "you don't have experience - you can't play", "you fail too much - you can't play" or the constant flaming (in most cases) makes these encounters unplayable for someone who wants to relax in the game.ANET, why don't you cut all the drops/loot etc. and make an additional mode of the raids for solo gameplay so that everyone can experience the story and the feeling of the areas? This way the raiders will continue to enjoy their raids and still get the drops while the players that are here for the story and fell in love with GW because of it, will be able to experience these chapters too.

because that'd defeat the point of raids

The point of raids is 99% loot. I support a solo mode just to see the story and maps.

Probably a response tohttps://en-forum.guildwars2.com/discussion/73942/please-make-raids-5-man

I think you might be serverely overestimating how much story/lore raids have. 90% of it comes from books and pages on the floor of the instance which can be read in any completed instance. Same for the feeling of the instances.

For alot of the other 10% , it happens right at the start of the boss fight. So you can go in, listen to the opening dialogue and then die. Same for any epic atmosphere that happens in boss fights, its all at the start of the fight when the boss is revealed.The only bosses which have lore within the fight are quadim and dhuum. I guess a tiny bit in deimos maybe. The rest is just audio queues for mechanics in the fights themselves.

I really dont think its worth the time for anet to rework all these encounters when you can just enter a completed instance and see almost everything it has to offer in terms of story anyway.

I have to agree with another commenter. Making a solo mode would defeat the purpose of Raids. I understand you point, I don't raid much because I don't have the correct builds or gear or whatnot, but you also need to understand that having those things are kinda essential. Raids are tough, especially when learning. That's the point though, Anet wanted it to be tough, challenging endgame content. Get out there, make some new friends, you are playing an MMO for Dwayna's sake. Plus you can always read the story on the wiki or look up youtube videos of it.

I'd like a solo or at least small-group version of Raids, or if not that, an Easy, Normal, and Hard Mode. I don't really care about Raid Rewards that much. I'd just like to someday fight Dhuum in the Underworld and see the inside of the Mystic Forge and all these other cool things Anet have created but I can't be a part of because of inexperience and player-driven exclusivity.

There's barely any story in raids OP, you are not missing much. And seems Anet learnt their lesson from dungeons and made the story content there irrelevant to the main narrative.

The decision to include them in the game was always baffling to me ,considering GW2's main demographic, but since they are here, there is no reason to water them down. Most raiders don't play them for story but even if a few do, it's still a "selling point". No reason to take away incentives from playing one of the least active modes in the game already.

I'm against solo raids, because it's just another step in a wrong direction, to a "solo-mmorpg" Frankenstein. But I would like to see a "training" or "easy" mode for all existing raids, doable by a PUG party of 5 ppl, with much worse rewards than a current raid content and without any achievements and unique stuff "real" raids have, ofc. Yes, sort of dungeons on steroids. That would surely drag more attention to raids, and some of players who got into raids this way with time could get interested in "real" raids as well.

I don't buy all those arguments of "this is dumbing down raids and it will kill them duh!" Nobody advocates for changing the current raids, so those who want challenge still will have it. It can't harm current raid community, unless you assume all those challenge-seekers will immediately switch to running those on "easy" mode, ofc ;)

@"MoriMoriMori.5349" said:

I don't buy all those arguments of "this is dumbing down raids and it will kill them duh!" Nobody advocates for changing the current raids, so those who want challenge still will have it. It can't harm current raid community, unless you assume all those challenge-seekers will immediately switch to running those on "easy" mode, ofc ?

I agree, the people that want the challenge and rewards will stick with the current mode as it is. A story mode or solo mode or easy mode, whatever it would be would probably bring in people, who had no intentions of raiding before. Might get all players excited about a raid release, which I can definitely get behind. Anet does seem to have some plans to add an open world component to this too.

It would kinda be nice if Raids got their own trailers like living world to hype them up more.

An alternative solution: Get the right build. Become more experienced. Fail less. You can play.

Anet can't even release raids in a reasonable amount of time, and you expect them to make an entirely new mode for it? Good luck, never happening. I wouldn't be surprised if this coming raid will be the last one we ever get.

I am satisfied with raids getting the attention they are getting now. This content caters to a subset of players of unknown size, and uses relatively little in the way of developer resources. If ANet were to attempt to cater to people who want smaller group/solo/easier versions of raids, doing so would come at the expense of other content. This would make GW2 a more raid-centric game than it currently is. This would not be good for me, and for any other players who don't care one whit about raids.

Would the game be better if all content came in versions that would appeal to almost every player demographic? While it might seem this would be the case, it really isn't. As long as development resources have to stretch to cover the existing development priorities, trying to please everyone with every piece of content is a recipe for disappointing almost everyone.

@Okami Amaterasu.9237 said:I'd like a solo or at least small-group version of Raids, or if not that, an Easy, Normal, and Hard Mode. I don't really care about Raid Rewards that much. I'd just like to someday fight Dhuum in the Underworld and see the inside of the Mystic Forge and all these other cool things Anet have created but I can't be a part of because of inexperience and player-driven exclusivity.

Agree with this so much. I would want to do raids for the exploration, story, and team play aspect, not for rare loot or battles that require perfect meta builds. I would add a difficulty mode option and then base the raid drops/rewards based on that mode, so that hardcore raiders can still be exclusive for the good loot, while casual players can also experience the content without feeling left out or that they're not good enough like they do currently.

Youtube is there in the meantime.

D:

As a person who has done a few raids, but don't plan to do anymore (I don't find them interesting, and as a person who played GW2 because it was a casual MMO, raids are anything but casual), I still don't think the effort to change the content makes any sense. If you care about the story, go to the wiki or youtube. Even making them easier would start having people say 'we can 3 man this one' or so on, which is not the intent.Dungeons have a lot more story - if they were going to ever make the effort to make previous multiplayer content soloable, it should be dungeons. And that probably isn't so hard - except for a few dungeons which have mechanics needing multiple players, in many cases, they could just decrease the number of monsters or the health of them.

you can solo life by living in the forest and eating berries

About Casual:

@"Solvar.7953" said:(I don't find them interesting, and as a person who played GW2 because it was a casual MMO, raids are anything but casual)

This part always makes me wonder. After all GW2 was never made or designed to be a casual MMO game, it was always a MMO game made to have a lot of different options available for a lot of different types of players. For example the entire combat system, and thus PvP (and to some extent WvW) thus automatically appeals to the more "hardcore" players, Dungeons especially with exploration paths did the same. At launch even maps like Orr would fall more into that group, than casual.

But for some reason, because this game doesn't increase levels and gear/ilvl per expansion people call it casual? Which was clearly made the way it was, as ANet themselves said, to encourage this game to be easy for people to get back to, from playing other main MMO's and thus use gw2 as a 2nd main mmo. Not to become casual, if anything the entire combat system should have dissuaded anyone from thinking this game to be casual.

Granted, they have since nerfed and dumbed down entire open world tyria until it certainly feels so weak that you don't even have a proper chance to learn your actual combat mechanics until you get to Orr (which nowadays feels about as difficult as Queensdale did at launch...).

So the only way I can see GW2 really described as casual, is by some hardcore wow elite veterans saying "Game doesn't have gear/level grind? How casual!". Then again the way people fling the word "casual" around on this forums, I don't think people really understand what it means any-longer.

About Raids:

Anyways, to get somewhat back on topic. I think it is completely natural and expected that GW2 being a game focused around giving a little bit of something to everyone, has raids, and keeps them as they are, the end game for those interested in doing hardcore content. To make a solo version of that would cheapen/lessen the experience for those that are currently interested in raids, just as much as making Story missions and open world tyria into hardcore content difficulty would piss off all the players that enjoyed that type of content.

Humans are naturally inclined toward the feeling of success, and different people will find what kind of success they feel themselves best able to get, and latch onto that. It's just how human nature works, no matter how much most tries to deny it. And thus humans enjoys feeling exclusive because it is another feeling of success, which brings us to rewards, humans actually react positively to exclusive rewards and will search out rewards that others can't get, because it makes them feel successful. This is pretty much the whole glue that makes games like WOW work and be as popular as it is. Which also means that if everyone could get anything they wanted from anything in gw2, well less people would actually end up playing, because most would lack a goal (get something).

So even though I've tried exactly 1 raid, with a bunch of random murderhobo's... I mean guildies, and died a bunch of times, laughed, and went away and never tried it again. I think it is completely ok for raids to be how they are. They serve a purpose, and that is to keep the hardcore content fans interested in at least coming back for a few weeks every time a new one launches. Technically I wouldn't mind an "easy/training mode" with absolutely no rewards at all (no loot, achievements, gold, any kind of tokens/currency etc), but at the same time that would have to be something ANet worked into future raids, not retroactively, because that would likely just be more work than it is worth to them when it already works as intended.

@"bOTEB.1573" said:I, like many others, dislike playing the raids because of several reasons. Things like "you don't have the right build - you can't play", "you don't have experience - you can't play", "you fail too much - you can't play" or the constant flaming (in most cases) makes these encounters unplayable for someone who wants to relax in the game.ANET, why don't you cut all the drops/loot etc. and make an additional mode of the raids for solo gameplay so that everyone can experience the story and the feeling of the areas? This way the raiders will continue to enjoy their raids and still get the drops while the players that are here for the story and fell in love with GW because of it, will be able to experience these chapters too.

Watch a youtube videos of someone playing raids if you don't want to play it with players. True soloing. A better idea will be to create infantile raids where bosses cannot be failed and you can be insta ressed when you die and this way players like you can stop frustrating about raids and learn more about them and what they are all about. Also infantile mode raids will be the perfect thing for training squads. Just cut all the rewards... after all it's just a training.

If they created a solo mode, it will be abandoned fairly quickly. How many players play the episode stories more than once? How long before players then start asking for rewards for the solo mode?

@Poormany.4507 said:

Agree with this so much. I would want to do raids for the exploration, story, and team play aspect, not for rare loot or battles that require perfect meta builds.

Is this not already possible with LFG?

@Ayrilana.1396 said:If they created a solo mode, it will be abandoned fairly quickly. How many players play the episode stories more than once? How long before players then start asking for rewards for the solo mode?

thats why it would still need decent loot to make any sense.

while i would love challanging solo content with decent rewards, i wouldnt want them to rework the raids for it.

@MUDse.7623 said:

@Ayrilana.1396 said:If they created a solo mode, it will be abandoned fairly quickly. How many players play the episode stories more than once? How long before players then start asking for rewards for the solo mode?

At the very most, no more loot than one would get from doing a normal event in the open world.

You want to change a group designed content mechanic because you don't like being in groups? I would suggest taking some of the criticism to heart and refine your build, join a raid training guild (there are several) and practice. If you aren't serious about raiding then maybe raiding isn't for you. This is why I don't raid...I just don't care that much.

Just because you can't meet a standard doesn't mean that the world has to change to your standards. I'm not a raider, and even I can see that there would be little point to them spending any development time on this.

Raids are group content.

@Ayrilana.1396 said:

@MUDse.7623 said:

@Ayrilana.1396 said:If they created a solo mode, it will be abandoned fairly quickly. How many players play the episode stories more than once? How long before players then start asking for rewards for the solo mode?

then better not waste resources on it, nobody will do anything challanging for a couple karma and a few xp more than once.