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[Raids] Why raids in GW2 stayed niched


Yasi.9065

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@Raizel.8175 said:

@thrag.9740 said:your way overthinking it. Its simple:

-gw2 is a casual game-raids are not casual

I'd argue about GW2 being a casual game. It truly isn't. What's casual are the skill-requirements for OW-content. But concerning time investment, GW2 is pretty hardcore. You could even argue that GW2 is grindier than some Asia-Grinders. The problem is rather the lack of difficulty progression and necessary learning curves in vital parts of the game, namely OW-content.

Its kind of funny. In my theory GW2 is very hard to learn and kind of hardcore game which is for some reason developed and targeted only for casuals :D

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@"Blood Red Arachnid.2493" said:The challenge comes from the environment and the enemies, not the interface and acquiring special knowledge. At launch, GW2 was like this, too. The highest damaging rotations were pretty simple and required only a few skills.

That's not completely true. The reason why simple rotation were mostly used was because in the era without dps meters it was much harder to do proper estimation of more complicated rotations. Additionally, the "meta" was extremely niche, and something you could have easily ignored in the whole PvE content, both OW and instanced. In fact, because you could not easily see your damage output, 99% of the population was completely unaware of how big the dps difference between average players and 100% efficient ones was, and noticing dps differences between two similar rotations was often beyond the capability of even most hardcore players.

Still, constant weapon switching for most classes, attunement dance for eles (and kit swapping madness for engis) were completely a thing then, if you wanted to be truly serious about efficiency.

Also, the "power creep" people keep bringing about is mostly a myth. While it did indeed happen both times after the expac hit, people keep forgetting that each of those cases were preceded by massive wave of nerfs. For example, i keep hearing about how PoF introduced power creep. This is indeed true - but at the same time it is also true that the highest dps builds are builds from the height of HoT era, and nothing in PoF times could even come close to some of those.

The barrier to entry for high level content in this game is nigh insurmountable for the new player. We at the top don't notice this, because we're so used to the climb that we fail to see exactly how high it is.Indeed. GW2 is the MMO with the biggest gap between efficiency of average and top skill i have ever seen. As such, things that are laughably easy for top 10% can be punishingly difficult for someone hovering around the 50% mark. That is one of the main problems of GW2. It's almost impossible to properly balance difficulty setting in such a game - not without introducing multiple difficulty tiers anyway.

@Xar.6279 said:Its kind of funny. In my theory GW2 is very hard to learn and kind of hardcore game which is for some reason developed and targeted only for casuals :DOh, it's very easy to learn - it is just extremely hard to master. And i consider it a very big design flaw. It might have worked in GW1, where the more casual players could still easily get by with hero system (and build templates) support, but in gw2 the consequences are far more reaching, and damaging.

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@"sigur.9453" said:to add another minor factor.while it was good for people outside the community to call it RAIDS (oh, , they have raids now, i will try it out) it was a mistake considering the current playerbase.for some reason: RAIDS = BAD!If they would have called it "Group Adventure", "Megadungeon", etc, ..... a lot more people would have at least checked it out and maybe stick to it instead of saying things like "raids do not belong in OUR game", "i quit X because of raids", " i only start playing because gw2 does not have raids" and not even giving it a try.there are still people here claiming that friends of them quit because raids were added. imagine beeing triggered like that.

generally i can mostly agree with op.especially the - "If you've never been part of a static raidgroup, you havent experienced the real mmorpg feeling." part.rest of the game (while beeing a very good game) always felt quite bland to me for an MMO regarding human interactions.

Yep. I wrote about it in another thread.Word "Raid" has its specific meaning in mmorpg genre.

Progression is most important part of raiding. While GW2 lacks of real progression. "Raids" here are based on farming same things over and over.So people which want to raid here are dissatisfied. Because they are misled.

Meantime more casual players (who are the majority of this game) don't like this word at all.

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0 - the meta.

This is GW2, game that thrives on "Play your way" and real build diversity, especially at lvl 80 with xpacs. And it's huge fun for me. Yet often in raids it's "bring a specific build on a specific role or gtfo", not to mention "dps gestapo" apps. I wonder how often i would get kicked outta T4 fracs if my blood magic reaper was shown to have sub-optimal dps, never mind saving the group from wipes serveral times due to strong sustain and mass ressing.

Until i can do raids playing how i really like instead of how I'm ordered to, that game mode can enjoy this message:

"Dear Raids...(picture of my backside)"

                                                      yours, Krytan Butcher.
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@"ZeftheWicked.3076" said:

0 - the meta.

This is GW2, game that thrives on "Play your way" and real build diversity, especially at lvl 80 with xpacs. And it's huge fun for me. Yet often in raids it's "bring a specific build on a specific role or gtfo", not to mention "dps gestapo" apps. I wonder how often i would get kicked outta T4 fracs if my blood magic reaper was shown to have sub-optimal dps, never mind saving the group from wipes serveral times due to strong sustain and mass ressing.

Until i can do raids playing how i really like instead of how I'm ordered to, that game mode can enjoy this message:

"Dear Raids...(picture of my backside)"

                                                      yours, Krytan Butcher.

I have amazing news for you!You already can play how you want!Make your own group and you are ready to go.Have fun.

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@sigur.9453 said:

@"ZeftheWicked.3076" said:

0 - the meta.

This is GW2, game that thrives on "Play your way" and real build diversity, especially at lvl 80 with xpacs. And it's huge fun for me. Yet often in raids it's "bring a specific build on a specific role or gtfo", not to mention "dps gestapo" apps. I wonder how often i would get kicked outta T4 fracs if my blood magic reaper was shown to have sub-optimal dps, never mind saving the group from wipes serveral times due to strong sustain and mass ressing.

Until i can do raids playing how i really like instead of how I'm ordered to, that game mode can enjoy this message:

"Dear Raids...(picture of my backside)"
                                                      yours, Krytan Butcher.

I have amazing news for you!You already can play how you want!Make your own group and you are ready to go.Have fun.

Oh, people are already playing the way they want, that's why they don't play raids.They aren't going to make their own groups for content that isn't designed with them in mind.

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I lost all interest in raids for two reasons:

I do not want to memorize a complex 20 step rotation

I do not want to memorize a whole bunch of stupid boss mechanics. Add to that that most of the time I can't even see the magic circles on the ground with all those effects and fat charr and bam: Charlie Foxtrott.

Both is not 'learning'. Both are just taking up valuabe brain storage I can use more productively elsewhere.

So I stay with the stuff I like. OW and WVW. Where my damage is actually good enough and (in case of wvw) there is actually some variance and challenge. Raids are not challening per se. They just demand that you prefill your muscle memory. My time is too valuable for that.

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@"Blood Red Arachnid.2493" said:The simple rotations get nerfed, quickness and alacrity became staple boons that ultimately require faster fingers to use, as well as more traits becoming less "passive" as time goes on.

All I see is the most complex rotations getting nerfed to the group with every balance patch, as if Arenanet doesn't like them. To be fair, the way the game is, not showing cooldowns of your off-bar skills for example, makes complex rotations much harder than they should be. But besides that they've been reducing even the most complex rotations to simple spam.

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@"VAHNeunzehnsechundsiebzig.3618" said:I lost all interest in raids for two reasons:

I do not want to memorize a complex 20 step rotation

I do not want to memorize a whole bunch of stupid boss mechanics. Add to that that most of the time I can't even see the magic circles on the ground with all those effects and fat charr and bam: Charlie Foxtrott.

Both is not 'learning'. Both are just taking up valuabe brain storage I can use more productively elsewhere.

So I stay with the stuff I like. OW and WVW. Where my damage is actually good enough and (in case of wvw) there is actually some variance and challenge. Raids are not challening per se. They just demand that you prefill your muscle memory. My time is too valuable for that.

People memorize random number or word chains. Its called memory exercise. Its good for you, trains your brain, keeps you sharp. So Im really surprised at this argument.

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@Yasi.9065 said:

@"VAHNeunzehnsechundsiebzig.3618" said:I lost all interest in raids for two reasons:

I do not want to memorize a complex 20 step rotation

I do not want to memorize a whole bunch of stupid boss mechanics. Add to that that most of the time I can't even see the magic circles on the ground with all those effects and fat charr and bam: Charlie Foxtrott.

Both is not 'learning'. Both are just taking up valuabe brain storage I can use more productively elsewhere.

So I stay with the stuff I like. OW and WVW. Where my damage is actually good enough and (in case of wvw) there is actually some variance and challenge. Raids are not challening per se. They just demand that you prefill your muscle memory. My time is too valuable for that.

People memorize random number or word chains. Its called memory exercise. Its good for you, trains your brain, keeps you sharp. So Im really surprised at this argument.

I excercise my brain everyday at work dealing with numbers, names and planning. I am fine. I do not want to do the same when I am home RELAXING.

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@"VAHNeunzehnsechundsiebzig.3618" said:I lost all interest in raids for two reasons:

I do not want to memorize a complex 20 step rotation

There is classes with very easy rotations, so no, this is not an argument.

@"VAHNeunzehnsechundsiebzig.3618" said:I do not want to memorize a whole bunch of stupid boss mechanics. Add to that that most of the time I can't even see the magic circles on the ground with all those effects and fat charr and bam: Charlie Foxtrott.

Both is not 'learning'. Both are just taking up valuabe brain storage I can use more productively elsewhere.

Merriam-Webster disagrees: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/learns

You personally might not consider the knowledge valuable which is acquired, but that is not the same as not learning.

If you do not want to practice boss mechanics, that is perfectly fine. Not all content is for everyone.

@"VAHNeunzehnsechundsiebzig.3618" said:So I stay with the stuff I like. OW and WVW. Where my damage is actually good enough and (in case of wvw) there is actually some variance and challenge. Raids are not challening per se. They just demand that you prefill your muscle memory. My time is too valuable for that.

There is different types of challenge. Raids are not challenging for people who have mastered them. To you they are obviously not completable, thus infinitely challenging.

If you think muscle memory or rotation or practice is not needed in WvW, you are not playing serious WvW. You are basically playing the open world pve variant of WvW, which is fine. But in both cases you are not tackling challenging content.

I'm quite sure some of the high performance GvG or Skrim guilds (or even WvW commanders) would take offence with your comment that your performance is equal to theirs without serious practice or dedication.

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People who claim that "oh my god 20 steps complex rotation" should first of all take a look at the rotation, huge part of them are literally weapon skills coming off cooldown, it's not that hard(cast dmg amplifiers, throw your burst, fill in the gap with filler skills until cooldowns are up), ele rota may be hard yeah but for the rest it usually takes around 1-2 hours of practicing on golem to do atleast 75-80% dps and believe me knowing your class dps rotation will not only benefit you folks in raids, it will benefit you even during a boss fight in story instance, silly things like queens gauntlet or everyone else at any meta in open world.

And no, the game is not hard to be good at, it is hard to be at the top level but that's hard in ANY game.

Oh, and to the one dude who's time is too valuable to prefill his muscle memory with some in game crap, can you enlighten us how come it's yet that low value that you are spending it on games instead of saving the world or smth?

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It seems GW2 is just in this very weird place where it's designed form the ground up to be a heavily skill based semi-hardcore game which then almost exclusively received extremely easy casual content which doesn't interact with those systems at all.

When you play PvP, WvW, Fractals and Raids, you can clearly see that the game was designed for that type of content and does indeed adhere to the play your own way philosophy even to this day.That doesn't mean you can make a bad build and play it badly and still clear the most difficult content without issue, nor should it. But GW2 being skill based and oozing that hardcore design with weapon swapping, evades, dodges, self heals and buffs as well as Trait and Stat choices etc., allows you to choose to bring a wide variety of viable compositions, even to not bring any healer or full support at all, and if you are skilled enough and want to put in that much effort you can beat the content, often faster than otherwise.

If you are good at this game and understand it's systems, the things you can do with it are quite fantastic.It's just that the opportunities to do great things in are very limited.

On the casual side though, it seems a majority of players would have been fine with something as simple as a 3 skill system for each profession, Attack, Support and Heal.Some attack chain, varying in speed and cadence per profession doing the same DPS at all times for everybody, some strong self- or slightly weaker group buff, and strong self- or slightly weaker group heal.Then maybe 3 "Trait" slots to slot in some passives out of an easily balanced selection of 10.No dodging, no crowd control (although maybe a 4th skill, Disable, wouldn't be too much).

That would work perfectly fine for GW2's Open World and Story Content and provide about the same gameplay, but that's just not what GW2 is or was designed for.But over the course of 7 years, GW2 received only about 6-8h of repeatable endgame content if played at a high level, consisting of 20 Fractals and 7 Raids so far.Most of it reward locked on a weekly basis with Raids, with the rest only worth playing on a daily rotation of a select few.

Meanwhile the content that doesn't interact with the game's systems very much or at all receives more content than that on a quarterly basis.

So who is the game actually for?It's like if chess was being played almost exclusively on a kindergarden playground. Sure it might be great fun moving the pieces around randomly and making it up as they go, nothing wrong with that at all, but if that's all there is one can't help but feel like it's a waste of the game and it's intricate well designed rules and mechanics.Clearly there is so much more you can do with it, but if Anet refuses to teach people how to play the game, to provide an incentive to become better and to provide an environment for people to practice and express that gained greater skill, then imo that's a shame.

TL;DR:I think at the end of the day we can endlessly argue what GW2 is or who it is for, because I'm pretty sure ArenaNet doesn't know themselves.The game clearly caters to and was designed for at least semi-hardcore players, but mostly provides content for casual play despite of that, without doing much to bridge the gap or incentivize a transition into the few pieces of more engaging content that are there.

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@SoulSin.5682 said:

1. No clear roles - no clear balancing

HeeeeeeeeeeeeeehNo.

Same reason I tell people that balance isn't killing PvP either.You need to play a game mode lot to notice Meta issues. To play a lot means that you have already started playing.

The gamemode is a niche not because people are playing and quitting, but because we have more people quitting than new players joining.Balance is not at fault.

2. No difficulty scaling

I find this half-right, half-wrong.

Half right that yes, Raids need an entry point that is not called fractals.Half Wrong because GW2 Raids are actually easier compared to other MMos. If you were to scale difficulty, it needs to actually be harder.

These can be solved in a myriad of ways, for starters, ANET could actually standardize the PvE instanced content in this game so bosses actually have clear tells and mechanics. Just so players can ACTUALLY train for raid mechanics outside of say... raiding.People would have an easier time understanding Greens if they actually see this mechanic, in a less lethal form, somewhere else.ANET need to do a full overhaul of dungeons, fractals, entrance raids, and hard ones so that there is an "actual learning flow". This way people notice things are getting progressively harder instead of the "abyss gap" between Open World content and Vale.

It isn't a wonder that people give up raiding right at the start.

3. Fully frontloaded weekly reward system

4. No longterm draw

Lack of proper rewards outside some exclusive skins and farming for legendary doesn't help either. That said, Raiders are not lacking on money.I guess that Raids need another progression system exclusive for them. Or anything that incentive to continue running then longterm

@Yasi.9065 said:So, theres several other problems, I know, but imo those 4 are whats kept raids from taking off.

Having to join a guild/discord
just
to start raiding is the worse of all."Oh look, you just need to change your whole build, your class choice, learn a role, learn a overcomplex rotation that changes ever patch notes, spent hours reading and watching guides, joining a practice guild, joining a discord, register, learn how to find a party, find said party, set a date, wipe for hours (the fun part, btw) to get the first raid victory, repeat all those steps 250Li times and then you are now a "Raider" that can actually join PUG parties.For what? Repeat this process another hundred times for a legendary armor?

^^ Now you understand why raiding is a niche?

Perfect explanation. I think the raids here are around end normal to mid heroic WoW difficulty. I compare it current WoW since i have some experience with it and it being the Best raid game (debatable since FFXIV does better these days) and in there is easier to get into raiding. Before they designed bosses with classes in mind and which can help out in some mechanic, now it somewhat reduced but it still has the case for some classes be better at some bosses. It is easier to get into raids even in the first day of the raid and people usually reach the boss before the last one with pugs.In guild wars 2 you have to min max or you will not get good dps, the % increases are way to vital and even doing the rotation correctly doesn't net you good dps you have get exact runes and the exact sigils, that are not that useful outside raids and fractals.The proper food and utility, which are just there to cap stuff.Stat selection is okish but is stuck in berserker or viper with some assassins and sinister(cap that stat but don't overcap blegh).Then you have to change into some min maxed build that you play only for the raid that relies on alacrity and quickness to work, those 2 boons are 10k+ increase in damage and they fuck with your timing since your class most probably doesn't have access to them) , so the best way to play outside the instance is not the same as inside.Many skills hit hard but are dps loss in raids but are good in open world, here you get the meme that people 1 1 1 they don't they are just not min maxed.The problem is that they did raids as any other mmo, they didn't put some twist like they do with mounts for example. They could have added raid specific special skills for tank, support and dps for each boss so you have something to work towards and not mess up the balance for sPVP and WvW. The mounts show that they know what the open world needs as special skills, the repeatable content needs something like it.

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@maddoctor.2738 said:

@"Blood Red Arachnid.2493" said:The simple rotations get nerfed, quickness and alacrity became staple boons that ultimately require faster fingers to use, as well as more traits becoming less "passive" as time goes on.

All I see is the most complex rotations getting nerfed to the group with every balance patch, as if Arenanet doesn't like them. To be fair, the way the game is, not showing cooldowns of your off-bar skills for example, makes complex rotations much harder than they should be. But besides that they've been reducing even the most complex rotations to simple spam.

Expand your scope a bit. I'm talking about through the years, not an individual balance patch. It was a stated goal of Anet to reduce passive traits awhile ago, and they've maintained it ever since. The most recent example comes from changes to the Scrapper, where the innate power boosts, damage boosts, and function gyro were all traded away for bonuses that don't work unless you have very specific, hard-to-maintain boons up and a manual gyro skill. Likewise, the Self-destructing build for Holosmiths, AKA the easy one to play, had its damage and functionality completely gutted in explicit favor of another trait. Of course, because the balance team didn't consider the PVE impact, they made engineer the worst class in the game, and had to introduce a panic balance patch that just raised up two traits in PVE only.

This type of architecture change isn't uncommon. I still remember when the highest DPS for mirage involved camping 3 clones and never shattering. I still remember when Deadeye's got malice passively, and just used Death's Judgement over and over again. I remember when Renegades just swapped toggles on each legend.

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@Yasi.9065 said:

@"VAHNeunzehnsechundsiebzig.3618" said:I lost all interest in raids for two reasons:

I do not want to memorize a complex 20 step rotation

I do not want to memorize a whole bunch of stupid boss mechanics. Add to that that most of the time I can't even see the magic circles on the ground with all those effects and fat charr and bam: Charlie Foxtrott.

Both is not 'learning'. Both are just taking up valuabe brain storage I can use more productively elsewhere.

So I stay with the stuff I like. OW and WVW. Where my damage is actually good enough and (in case of wvw) there is actually some variance and challenge. Raids are not challening per se. They just demand that you prefill your muscle memory. My time is too valuable for that.

People memorize random number or word chains. Its called memory exercise. Its good for you, trains your brain, keeps you sharp. So Im really surprised at this argument.

I'm not ... I believe this sentiment is held by a significant number of players in the game; the players that were attracted to the game for its original content approach. I don't appreciate the study and research that goes into learning how to do content, ESPECIALLY if the result of not doing it is a harsh rebuke by the game and the people you team with. I too do not feel the need to 'exercise' my brain in this way with this particular form of entertainment. In fact, I play these games as a way to remove my self from 'brain exercise', not subject myself to it. Hence ... casual.

At the beginning, GW2 felt like the perfect game for that. Even in dungeons, the threshold for knowing what to do was acceptable (and the penalty for not doing it palatable) ... somewhere, GW2 lost its way and tried to appeal to the fringe.

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@Asum.4960 said:Sometimes all the game needs is to provide a ramp for people to get up to and then to give them a little push.

This I can agree with ... NOTHING in this game prepares a player for endgame content. It's a big failure in that sense. It's worse the harder the endgame content gets.

Hence .... players' requests for an easy mode raid platform. Even players recognize this massive gap to get into raids. Honestly, I think if Anet felt raids needed to be a bigger thing in GW2 ... this would be THE way to do it.

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@"Astralporing.1957" said:That's not completely true. The reason why simple rotation were mostly used was because in the era without dps meters it was much harder to do proper estimation of more complicated rotations. Additionally, the "meta" was extremely niche, and something you could have easily ignored in the whole PvE content, both OW and instanced. In fact, because you could not easily see your damage output, 99% of the population was completely unaware of how big the dps difference between average players and 100% efficient ones was, and noticing dps differences between two similar rotations was often beyond the capability of even most hardcore players.

Still, constant weapon switching for most classes, attunement dance for eles (and kit swapping madness for engis) were completely a thing then, if you wanted to be truly serious about efficiency.

Also, the "power creep" people keep bringing about is mostly a myth. While it did indeed happen both times after the expac hit, people keep forgetting that each of those cases were preceded by massive wave of nerfs. For example, i keep hearing about how PoF introduced power creep. This is indeed true - but at the same time it is also true that the highest dps builds are builds from the height of HoT era, and nothing in PoF times could even come close to some of those.

For the engineer, yes. But for other classes... it really was easier. All of the specializations keep adding more and more stuff to maintain, which creeps the power until everything gets nerfed and it becomes the new standard. The core classes had less skills available to them, so they used less skills to do their damage. I still remember many of them:

Mesmer: You made sword phantasms and then used auto attacks, blurred frenzy, and at the start of the fight, mantra of pain.Elementalist: you camped fire in staff using lava font, unless you're using FGS in which case you corner rushed enemies to death.Necromancer: You shroud-flashed for buffs and auto attacked with dagger. Lich form off cooldown.Warrior: You camped Greatsword and used 100 blades whenever possible.Guardian: This one actually required switching. You'd use Scepter 2, then switch to greatsword and use the symbol and spin.Thief: Backstab into heartseekerRanger: No clue what this one wasEngineer: Beethoven's the 5th.

This was when quickness was a rare unique buff, so outside of Time Warp mo;st classes didn't even get it. On some of these, maybe you could eke out a few extra DPS by swapping weapons around, but for most of them that wasn't really an option.

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@Cyninja.2954 said:If you think muscle memory or rotation or practice is not needed in WvW, you are not playing serious WvW. You are basically playing the open world pve variant of WvW, which is fine. But in both cases you are not tackling challenging content.

I'm quite sure some of the high performance GvG or Skrim guilds (or even WvW commanders) would take offence with your comment that your performance is equal to theirs without serious practice or dedication.

muscle memory doesn't help you as much because you have to react to an ever changing situation. Which is fine for me. I keep my cooldowns in mind and try to anticipate the enemies moves. My damage is fine.

Raids are both 'challenging' as you have to memorize the perfect rotations and boss mechanics and at the same time incredible boring and one dimensional - you just play down your list of memorized skills and mechanic reactions and that's basically it. Boring.

It is hard to imagine how something can be hard AND boring at the same time. ANET managed to pull it off. Doing a raid does not feel good. It does not feel rewarding. Afterwards it is a feeling of 'oh that's it. Hmpf'. Sad.

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@Obtena.7952 said:

@Asum.4960 said:Sometimes all the game needs is to provide a ramp for people to get up to and then to give them a little push.

This I can agree with ... NOTHING in this game prepares a player for endgame content. It's a big failure in that sense. It's worse the harder the endgame content gets.

Hence .... players' requests for an easy mode raid platform. Even players recognize this massive gap to get into raids. Honestly, I think if Anet felt raids needed to be a bigger thing in GW2 ... this would be THE way to do it.

I wouldn't say there is nothing at all, as for me personally climbing Fractals way back until doing CM's (or rather just what is now 99CM back then) did make me feel pretty prepared for Raids in terms of personal skill level.The big hurdle for me was finding 9 other people I was comfortable with and to breach that initial anxiety over thinking that Raids were this super difficult content for super hardcore players which just wasn't for me.But after reading some guides and watching some videos, even as someone who learns best by doing, it was fine tbh.It didn't look that different to what I was already doing and I realised this barrier between the rest of the game and Raids was mostly just something I had put up myself in my head.

It's just that a lot of people don't want to put in the effort, so even though it was fine for me I can recognize that the game needs to do a bit more to provide a smoother transition into that more hardcore environment.

Personally I think one or two training mini Raid Wings, just to facilitate the forming of 10 man groups in a low pressure environment and going through clear presentations of mechanics you find across Raids would be a better approach than an across the board easy mode, but whatever works.

@"VAHNeunzehnsechundsiebzig.3618" said:Raids are both 'challenging' as you have to memorize the perfect rotations and boss mechanics and at the same time incredible boring and one dimensional - you just play down your list of memorized skills and mechanic reactions and that's basically it. Boring.

It is hard to imagine how something can be hard AND boring at the same time. ANET managed to pull it off. Doing a raid does not feel good. It does not feel rewarding. Afterwards it is a feeling of 'oh that's it. Hmpf'. Sad.

You have to be really good at the game to get to a level where everything goes as predicted to a point where it's actually just boring, in which case it's also not hard anymore.Even after 2+ years of Raiding I still get thrills at times, be it due something going wrong and pulling an unexpected comeback or doing some of the CM's which really keep you on your toes, it's still a good time.

Really the only way I can see a Raid being boring is if you either are just exceptional as a player, as well as everybody else in the Squad, executing eveything perfectly for months on end, or if you are getting carried by others who are really good while having no mechanical responsibilities yourself at all.

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@"VAHNeunzehnsechundsiebzig.3618" said:

@Cyninja.2954 said:If you think muscle memory or rotation or practice is not needed in WvW, you are not playing serious WvW. You are basically playing the open world pve variant of WvW, which is fine. But in both cases you are not tackling challenging content.

I'm quite sure some of the high performance GvG or Skrim guilds (or even WvW commanders) would take offence with your comment that your performance is equal to theirs without serious practice or dedication.

muscle memory doesn't help you as much because you have to react to an ever changing situation. Which is fine for me. I keep my cooldowns in mind and try to anticipate the enemies moves. My damage is fine.

Muscle memory is of essential use when in high pitched situations even against human opponents. I'm not talking about public blobs here. I'm talking good roamers fighting each other, guild groups taking on enemy blobs twice their size or fighting each other.

Being able to react when jumped out of stealth and with a fraction of a second to respond can be the difference between porting back to that waypoint or having a good fight. Though between two good guild groups, first engage is often the deciding factor, true.

@"VAHNeunzehnsechundsiebzig.3618" said:Raids are both 'challenging' as you have to memorize the perfect rotations and boss mechanics and at the same time incredible boring and one dimensional - you just play down your list of memorized skills and mechanic reactions and that's basically it. Boring.

I doubt you are any where near the skill level where everything runs smooth. I'm not disputing that AI opponents can be less challegning than human opponents (which depends on how difficult the encounter is designed and how skilled the human opponents are). I'm saying you are not a person to make that call. If you want to talk down on content, be sure to have at least mastered that content. Everything else comes of as arrogant and very condescending. If you don't like scripted encounters, that's fine.

As far as rotations. Power thief is pretty close to just autoattacking for very high power damage. Condition shortbow Soulbeast is the same for condition builds. There is classes which have literally no rotation which are perfectly fine for any raid boss.

@"VAHNeunzehnsechundsiebzig.3618" said:It is hard to imagine how something can be hard AND boring at the same time. ANET managed to pull it off. Doing a raid does not feel good. It does not feel rewarding. Afterwards it is a feeling of 'oh that's it. Hmpf'. Sad.

So you do not like raiding. Nothing wrong with that. Play what you enjoy and move on.

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@Asum.4960 said:

@Asum.4960 said:Sometimes all the game needs is to provide a ramp for people to get up to and then to give them a little push.

This I can agree with ... NOTHING in this game prepares a player for endgame content. It's a big failure in that sense. It's worse the harder the endgame content gets.

Hence .... players' requests for an easy mode raid platform. Even players recognize this massive gap to get into raids. Honestly, I think if Anet felt raids needed to be a bigger thing in GW2 ... this would be THE way to do it.

I wouldn't say there is nothing at all, as for me personally climbing Fractals way back until doing CM's (or rather just what is now 99CM back then) did make me feel pretty prepared for Raids in terms of personal skill level.The big hurdle for me was finding 9 other people I was comfortable with and to breach that initial anxiety over thinking that Raids were this super difficult content for super hardcore players which just wasn't for me.But after reading some guides and watching some videos, even as someone who learns best by doing, it was fine tbh.It didn't look that different to what I was already doing and I realised this barrier between the rest of the game and Raids was mostly just something I had put up myself in my head.

It's just that a lot of people don't want to put in the effort, so even though it was fine for me I can recognize that the game needs to do a bit more to provide a smoother transition into that more hardcore environment.

Can't disagree with any of that. It's true that people don't want to put in the effort. I think the real question is if they should have to. If we think of players from level 1 to 10 and the game is designed around level 4 and lots of level 4 people play the game ... you would think that Anet would continue to serve level 4, maybe 5 or even 6. Any reasonable game developer wouldn't even think about putting Level 10 in the game .. but here we are and wondering why raids are niche ...

Yes level 99 CM's prepare you for Raids ... That's a level 9 content that most average level 4,5,6 people in this game don't care to exercise their brains with. So with that in mind, Anet just kept upping the end game content level in raids .... it's really hard to envision what their goal was with that approach IF their goal was to make a highly accessible end game content for most of the players in this game. It simply can't be.

It was put simply already ... raids are niche because they target the players on the fringe and their aren't many of them compared to the kinds of players this game targeted on release.

The tragedy is that this game structure is not really satisfactory to anyone ... level 8,9,10 people want more raids. Level 4,5,6 people why Anet abandoned them with this 'hard' content ... and Anet has to figure out how to appease BOTH now, at great expense.

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@Obtena.7952 said:

@Asum.4960 said:Sometimes all the game needs is to provide a ramp for people to get up to and then to give them a little push.

This I can agree with ... NOTHING in this game prepares a player for endgame content. It's a big failure in that sense. It's worse the harder the endgame content gets.

Hence .... players' requests for an easy mode raid platform. Even players recognize this massive gap to get into raids. Honestly, I think if Anet felt raids needed to be a bigger thing in GW2 ... this would be THE way to do it.

I wouldn't say there is nothing at all, as for me personally climbing Fractals way back until doing CM's (or rather just what is now 99CM back then) did make me feel pretty prepared for Raids in terms of personal skill level.The big hurdle for me was finding 9 other people I was comfortable with and to breach that initial anxiety over thinking that Raids were this super difficult content for super hardcore players which just wasn't for me.But after reading some guides and watching some videos, even as someone who learns best by doing, it was fine tbh.It didn't look that different to what I was already doing and I realised this barrier between the rest of the game and Raids was mostly just something I had put up myself in my head.

It's just that a lot of people don't want to put in the effort, so even though it was fine for me I can recognize that the game needs to do a bit more to provide a smoother transition into that more hardcore environment.

Can't disagree with any of that. It's true that people don't want to put in the effort. I think the real question is if they should have to. If we think of players from level 1 to 10 and the game is designed around level 4 and lots of level 4 people play the game ... you would think that Anet would continue to serve level 4, maybe 5 or even 6. Any reasonable game developer wouldn't even think about putting Level 10 in the game .. but here we are and wondering why raids are niche ...

Yes level 99 CM's prepare you for Raids ... That's a level 9 content that most average level 4,5,6 people in this game don't care to exercise their brains with. So with that in mind, Anet just kept upping the end game content level in raids .... it's really hard to envision what their goal was with that approach IF their goal was to make a highly accessible end game content for most of the players in this game. It simply can't be.

It was put simply already ... raids are niche because they target the players on the fringe and their aren't many of them compared to the kinds of players this game targeted on release.

The tragedy is that this game structure is not really satisfactory to anyone ... level 8,9,10 people want more raids. Level 4,5,6 people why Anet abandoned them with this 'hard' content ... and Anet has to figure out how to appease BOTH now, at great expense.

I agree Raids are niche and always will be so, I just think the niche is a lot smaller than it could be. And I do think a lot of people are missing out on great content they not only could do but would really enjoy, just because of some misconceptions about the content that's being propagated and sometimes even just self-imposed.

Also Raids aren't all equal. If Dhuum CM (or let's say just W5) maybe is the 10, you also have W4 (1-3) which maybe is a 5 or 6.So there are easier entry point's already, it's just either not enough, or not telegraphed well enough, especially not at all ingame.

But as I said in earlier posts, another problem is that the vast majority of the content released isn't even at 4 on this scale by a long shot and barely clears the 1 or 2.Considering we are pretty deep into endgame at this point with two max level expansions and all of the living world, imo there just needs to be more of an effort to sprinkle in content on a scale of 2,3,4 and 5, so that there isn't as much of a leap to that content, and so it doesn't feel like people "have to put in that effort", but rather they progress naturally as the content progresses.

It just seems HoT initially daring to go to 3 or 4 with some of it's prenerf content and the complains that came with that scared Anet off way too much. When they had to realise that people don't always know what they want with a quick complaint being easier than adapting and improving, even if that probably leads to more engagement and fun with the game longterm for them.

And I might be just wrong here, but I just can't believe people truly enjoy and are long term engaged by walking around and pressing F on things.That just seems too dire for me with all these amazing gameplay systems rotting away as backdrop to that.

What I do not understand though is the sentiment of being abandoned by some casuals with the introduction of the harder content.That level of player was in the game before Raids got introduced too and was introduced to precisely serve those players as well, rather than just the 1-4.If anyone has reason to feel abandoned it is that hardcore crowd, waiting for example for a single new Fractal CM since over 2 years, for it probably to never come.Meanwhile it seems for the once and done LW no expenses are spared.

Just thinking of all these amazing instances like Fahranur they created over the years, just to only be blasted through once without a care or challenge, instead of turning it into some long lived interesting repeatable group content after the fact to be experienced so many more times.The development work is already mostly done, no hyper casual would miss out or be abandoned by not participating, but nothing is done with it.This is also where I think the complete abandonment of Dungeons as a concept was a mistake.Having anything in the game to keep people grouping up to tackle something even just slightly more challenging than Open World and Story together, while being visible and accessible from the open world would be a huge boon in combating this complete degradation of player skill as well as player isolation that's been happening.

I just want anything that teaches and then requires at least absolute base knowledge about the game outside of Raids and Fractals at this point, considering Open World and especially Story utterly failed to provide that.Because yes, if someone doesn't know what dodging is or how breakbars work, let alone what makes a half decent build and how to play it, because you can still get though all of Open World and Story just fine without any of that, then Raids seems like this impossibly far away thing when it really shouldn't be.

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@Blood Red Arachnid.2493 said:

@"Astralporing.1957" said:That's not completely true. The reason why simple rotation were mostly used was because in the era without dps meters it was much harder to do proper estimation of more complicated rotations. Additionally, the "meta" was extremely niche, and something you could have easily ignored in the whole PvE content, both OW and instanced. In fact, because you could not easily see your damage output, 99% of the population was completely unaware of how big the dps difference between average players and 100% efficient ones was, and noticing dps differences between two similar rotations was often beyond the capability of even most hardcore players.

Still, constant weapon switching for most classes, attunement dance for eles (and kit swapping madness for engis) were completely a thing then, if you wanted to be truly serious about efficiency.

Also, the "power creep" people keep bringing about is mostly a myth. While it did indeed happen both times after the expac hit, people keep forgetting that each of those cases were preceded by massive wave of nerfs. For example, i keep hearing about how PoF introduced power creep. This is indeed true - but at the same time it is also true that the highest dps builds are builds from the height of HoT era, and nothing in PoF times could even come close to some of those.

For the engineer, yes. But for other classes... it really was easier. All of the specializations keep adding more and more stuff to maintain, which creeps the power until everything gets nerfed and it becomes the new standard. The core classes had less skills available to them, so they used less skills to do their damage. I still remember many of them:

Mesmer: You made sword phantasms and then used auto attacks, blurred frenzy, and at the start of the fight, mantra of pain.Elementalist: you camped fire in staff using lava font, unless you're using FGS in which case you corner rushed enemies to death.Necromancer: You shroud-flashed for buffs and auto attacked with dagger. Lich form off cooldown.Warrior: You camped Greatsword and used 100 blades whenever possible.Guardian: This one actually required switching. You'd use Scepter 2, then switch to greatsword and use the symbol and spin.Thief: Backstab into heartseekerRanger: No clue what this one wasEngineer: Beethoven's the 5th.

This was when quickness was a rare unique buff, so outside of Time Warp mo;st classes didn't even get it. On some of these, maybe you could eke out a few extra DPS by swapping weapons around, but for most of them that wasn't really an option.

That was well before elite specializations. Yes they made rotations more complex 5 years ago, but they've been simplifying them since then.Holosmith rotation was simplified, in the most recent patch, no more overheat, no more kitsChronomancer rotation was simplified, multiple timesWeaver rotation was simplified, no more conjures, it looks complex but it's "use all your skills" kind of thingDaredevil and Deadeye never had rotations to begin withCondi Ranger was removed and Condi Soulbeast has a very simple rotation

The only really complex rotations remaining in the game are Condi Renegade and Condi Engineer. I suspect they will be simplified soon because it's unreasonable to have only two such complex rotations in the game while the others are rather simple. And Condi Weaver but I don't see anyone playing that anymore, Condi Engineer is also rare.

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