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[Raids] Why raids in GW2 stayed niched


Yasi.9065

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@Ayrilana.1396 said:

@Firebeard.1746 said:The only thing that separates good from a bad player is skill in this game and the skill cap required feels very high
based on the one raid i did do
.

So you only did a single raid and can adequately estimate its true difficulty based on just that?

Actually he is right. The difference between a high skilled and a low skilled player is quite gigantic. Using gw2raidar data:

On average from all raid bosses, the best groups do 218,253 dps and finish the fight in 1:54. The 30% groups do 74,507 dps and finish the fight in 6:24. This means the best groups do triple damage than the lowest groups.

Which is exactly why good players can low-man raids, do them in green gear, or even naked, while less skilled groups struggle in full ascended with full raid teams.

Edit: that's not to say the higher end is required, as those 30% teams finish Raid bosses without even touching the enrage timer.

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@maddoctor.2738 said:

@Firebeard.1746 said:The only thing that separates good from a bad player is skill in this game and the skill cap required feels very high
based on the one raid i did do
.

So you only did a single raid and can adequately estimate its true difficulty based on just that?

Actually he is right. The difference between a high skilled and a low skilled player is quite gigantic. Using gw2raidar data:

On average from all raid bosses, the best groups do 218,253 dps and finish the fight in 1:54. The 30% groups do 74,507 dps and finish the fight in 6:24. This means the best groups do triple damage than the lowest groups.

Which is exactly why good players can low-man raids, do them in green gear, or even naked, while less skilled groups struggle in full ascended with full raid teams.

Edit: that's not to say the higher end is
required
, as those 30% teams finish Raid bosses without even touching the enrage timer.

I wasn’t arguing about the gap between lowly skilled and highly skilled players. I was talking about the difficulty of the raids. They’re two entirely separate things.

The difficulty level of a particular raid is fixed just like it is for most other games. An exception being those which have an AI that modifies the difficulty.

The poster was assessing the difficulty of raids based on the one time that they did a raid. If a new player to games, did AC for the first time and found it super difficult, does that mean dungeons are super difficult?

The difficulty of something in the game and the skill level of a player are independent of each other. Otherwise Anet adding an easy mode would eventually become a super easy mode or trivial mode as players adapted to it.

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@Firebeard.1746 said:You have obviously never played boon support chrono. That's hard.I hope you are joking. Support chrono is the current gf/bf profession. Only part that slightly requires some planning is the contiuum split once every 2min. Spamming wells and signet off cd is fine otherwise.

Somebody here mentioned gorseval having a hard dps check. That boss can be 6 manned. Thats how easy it is to not hit the enrage timers.The difference between wow and gw raiding is that builds can be terrible and super bad in gw while they can't really be that bad in wow. Damage rotations are also way harder in gw and not that straight forward because there is no addon that tells you what button you have to press next. I enjoy this in gw way more because pressing 2 buttons on demon hunter and eye beam every 30sec got boring pretty fast there.But while gw rotations being way harder than the ones in wow doesn't mean that they are that hard. Wow got just so simple that i see constant complaints on the forums there that it's even too simple for most casuals.The combat system in this game is the last reason why raids failed in my opinion.I pug most raids mostly and works fine if I have time on monday evenings. Trying to find a group a few days after reset takes ages though. Not having ANY reward after the weekly lock out really hurts. Would help if the normal gold reward would stay but apparently that would be too much even if multiple easier farms already exist that award like double the g/h.I have fractal god and get like 2g for a low tier fractal completion while I get like 5-10s from a raid boss. Why can't it at least drop enough to cover the food costs.

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@maddoctor.2738 said:The idea of adding multiple difficulties is to reduce the time between raid releases. If they add multiple difficulties and at the same the time it takes longer to release raids, then they shouldn't add more difficulties, as there is no point.How would that work? Surely creating more difficulties beyond the original version of the content means more work and therefore more time spent developing it. I suppose easy mode for raids increases the target audience for a raid release, meaning Anet could justify more staff working on it, which may lead to a faster release cadence.It's already ultra slow, need ways to make it faster.Agreed.No I don't, others do and have posted especially in that mega thread about raid difficulties. And the encounters they proposed where fundamentally different to the current ones, reducing every single ability to non-existence. As for me, I made a suggestion on multiple difficulties a very long time ago, even before Path of Fire was released. It's rather simple and should take very little (if at all?) development resources: stop the easier encounter version at the early phases, disregard the rest of the encounter. No changes to mechanics at all, just do the opposite of CM, remove mechanics.That sounds like you believe more than one difficulty setting is possible with Arenanet's rescources. I am confused as to why you decided to comment on my original post.

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@Ayrilana.1396 said:

@Firebeard.1746 said:The only thing that separates good from a bad player is skill in this game and the skill cap required feels very high
based on the one raid i did do
.

So you only did a single raid and can adequately estimate its true difficulty based on just that?

Actually he is right. The difference between a high skilled and a low skilled player is quite gigantic. Using gw2raidar data:

On average from all raid bosses, the best groups do 218,253 dps and finish the fight in 1:54. The 30% groups do 74,507 dps and finish the fight in 6:24. This means the best groups do triple damage than the lowest groups.

Which is exactly why good players can low-man raids, do them in green gear, or even naked, while less skilled groups struggle in full ascended with full raid teams.

Edit: that's not to say the higher end is
required
, as those 30% teams finish Raid bosses without even touching the enrage timer.

I wasn’t arguing about the gap between lowly skilled and highly skilled players. I was talking about the difficulty of the raids. They’re two entirely separate things.

The difficulty level of a particular raid is fixed just like it is for most other games. An exception being those which have an AI that modifies the difficulty.

The poster was assessing the difficulty of raids based on the one time that they did a raid. If a new player to games, did AC for the first time and found it super difficult, does that mean dungeons are super difficult?

The difficulty of something in the game and the skill level of a player are independent of each other. Otherwise Anet adding an easy mode would eventually become a super easy mode or trivial mode as players adapted to it.

Skill gap and difficulty are related. Something that requires more skill is generally more difficult.

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@Nephalem.8921 said:

@Firebeard.1746 said:You have obviously never played boon support chrono. That's hard.I hope you are joking. Support chrono is the current gf/bf profession. Only part that slightly requires some planning is the contiuum split once every 2min. Spamming wells and signet off cd is fine otherwise.

Somebody here mentioned gorseval having a hard dps check. That boss can be 6 manned. Thats how easy it is to not hit the enrage timers.The difference between wow and gw raiding is that builds can be terrible and super bad in gw while they can't really be that bad in wow. Damage rotations are also way harder in gw and not that straight forward because there is no addon that tells you what button you have to press next. I enjoy this in gw way more because pressing 2 buttons on demon hunter and eye beam every 30sec got boring pretty fast there.But while gw rotations being way harder than the ones in wow doesn't mean that they are that hard. Wow got just so simple that i see constant complaints on the forums there that it's even too simple for most casuals.The combat system in this game is the last reason why raids failed in my opinion.I pug most raids mostly and works fine if I have time on monday evenings. Trying to find a group a few days after reset takes ages though. Not having ANY reward after the weekly lock out really hurts. Would help if the normal gold reward would stay but apparently that would be too much even if multiple easier farms already exist that award like double the g/h.I have fractal god and get like 2g for a low tier fractal completion while I get like 5-10s from a raid boss. Why can't it at least drop enough to cover the food costs.

This isn't quite accurate. Timing the sigil with the wells is difficult because the alacrity pops at the end of the well, it's tricky to time it right with the cast time of the sigil. Of you do it right afterwards, you miss sharing the alacrity. If you wait to long, you've just burned a significant amount of your buffs. Also dh is the most brain dead class in wow.

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@Cyninja.2954 said:

@Firebeard.1746 said:One last thing: the raids in this game are crazy hard compared to wow.

Raids here are between Normal and Heroic raid difficulty in WoW. The main difference being, you can not massively outgear raid content to make it aritifically easier than intended. That's what is causing some people to perceive them as harder. They are not.

You're proving my point. In WoW there is a separate way for acquiring high end gear (Mythic+ dungeons) . I'm not sure you can claim "artificially easier": the way blizz intends it is that you can eventually actually clear content, they don't want you "stuck". You can only really claim "artificially easier than the beginning of the raid tier". If you look closely at the way gear is done, you gradually accumulate more throughout the season making clearing the content easier. It's funny a game intended to be easier than WoW is actually harder if you look at the whole season in WoW. Also i didn't fully represent the impact of gear: you still have to mind mechanics, you just have a little more cushion. You can still wipe with a well geared group.

There is multiple ways to get end game gear in this game, most of them do not involve raiding. It is artificially easier. That is not to be disputed given how progression in WoW works and how people magically start clearing content which was to hard for them when it was initially released. No, players did not magically get better when they suddenly clear Mythic+7 dungeons midway into an expansion while struggling with Mythic+1 at the beginning. It's outscaling of difficulty, nothing more.

Also top end players also do not magically become better when they clear +10s at the start of an expansion and then move to +20 mythic dungeons towards the end. Similar concept at the top end: gear scaling shifts the difficulty down.

@Firebeard.1746 said:And you're wrong about difficulty. I've cleared most bosses on Heroic Antorus last expansion and it didn't feel nearly as hard as the wing i did. The number of mechanics felt way lower. I also dabbled in BoD and Uldir this expansion.

and I'm sure you were not 1 item level above the designed difficulty. I've done high level mythic dungeon and raid (mostly heroic, some mythic) content in WoW on level, being a few Mythic+ dungeons behind top end players. I know how players clear content which was originally to difficult: outscale it by 30 ilevel, then clear it. That is no argument that you cleared the content as it was designed.

@Firebeard.1746 said:1) It feels like there are way more roles to fill

10 mann WoW raids use 1-2 tanks, 1-2 healers, rest dps (usually split between a bit less melee than ranged). That's pretty similar to this games setup.

Let's see:

GW2:TankHealersBoon support (the number you need is dependent on class & gear composition you have available based on my research)Banner supportDPSWith only 10 raid members mind you

Let's see:
  • 4 supports (3 for high end raid guilds)
  • 6 dps

You are not making a strong argument if you can't even apply the basic group setup to your argument. There is no pure tank in GW2, there is no pure healer in GW2. Just like healers and buffers are not seperate entities in WoW. Or how damage dealers do more than just damage but also often crowd control.

I was comparing 10 man group setups in GW2 to 10 mann group setups in WoW. More than 10 mann in WoW simply scale up the amount of similar roles required.

@Firebeard.1746 said:2) classes are expected to perform at a crazy high level: the rotations are very difficult. I have like 4-5 buttons in Wow plus some long cd abilities i have to time

Try any thief build, condi shortbow soulbeast, Dragonhunter, banner power warrior. Those have quite simplistic rotations mostly consisting of 1-2 button and auto attacks.

The required damage on most bosses is a fraction of what classes can peform at the top end. The most limiting factor is people being incapable of dealing with mechanics on a prolonged basis. When elite raid guilds kill bosses within 2-3 minutes while they are given 10 minute timers and when more casual groups wipe on mechanics and almost never on enrage timers, that is a clear sign that the actual requirement to rotation and class performance is rather low.

Other people have said that they barely clear the boss with their experienced raid party seconds before the enrage timer hit in other discussions. So i'm taking what you're saying here about output with a grain of salt.

That is something almost NEVER stated, and something I have almost never experienced in my over 1,700 LI/LD of raiding. You are making this up, sorry. The main reason for wipes in over 90% of all cases is wipes to mechanics way before a timer expires.

@Firebeard.1746 said:So some classes are really hard, others are stupid easy? Sounds like a balance problem.

Sure, there is a difference in how difficult classes and their rotations are. Doesn't mean there is no easy classes to raid on.

@Firebeard.1746 said:3) also the vertical progression in WoW allows players to close to overpower raids. They're balanced around 15-20 ilvls below what the raid drops (with consumables) and titanforged drops from bosses you can kill or gear from other sources can help you just juke things. The only thing that separates good from a bad player is skill in this game and the skill cap required feels very high based on the one raid i did do.

So basically WoW allows you to make the content easier than intended by outscaling it.Because in the end, raid content is not that hard. Mythic WoW raids are way above GW2 raid content AND require a lot of dedication along the way in gearing up. Raids here are peanuts compared to that.

Have you raided in mythic perchance? When was the last time you did?

During Warlords of Draenor. Then Mythic Dungeons up to +12 (when top players were doing +15s) in Legion and heroic raids.

The general consensus among top end raiders is as I have stated: raid content is between Normal and Heroic WoW raid difficulty (normal being the easiest bosses on normal mode like Cairn or MO, Heroic being some of the CMs and difficult normal bosses like Dhuum normal) with maybe Dhuum CM being around easy mythic as the hardest encounter.

EDIT: obviously that consensus does not take into account people who outgear content and clear it weeks or months later. This is based on gear level being aproximately around content difficulty for which it was designed for.

No one in wow raids 10 man (it's not common at all), and i'm not sure what boons you're referring(time warp?) to but there's generally enough classes that can do that when combined with the raid size you don't have to think about it if you're building team from the generic population. In contrast, in gw 2 you have to recruit based on those roles as you're buidling your team because of how small the teams are. You still need people capable of healing and tanking in gw 2. There is some overlap but not always. It's still more bases you need to cover you're just glazing over issues for some reason (and misrepresentating wow) This isn't much use for the purpose of the OP.

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@Firebeard.1746 said:

@Firebeard.1746 said:The only thing that separates good from a bad player is skill in this game and the skill cap required feels very high
based on the one raid i did do
.

So you only did a single raid and can adequately estimate its true difficulty based on just that?

Actually he is right. The difference between a high skilled and a low skilled player is quite gigantic. Using gw2raidar data:

On average from all raid bosses, the best groups do 218,253 dps and finish the fight in 1:54. The 30% groups do 74,507 dps and finish the fight in 6:24. This means the best groups do triple damage than the lowest groups.

Which is exactly why good players can low-man raids, do them in green gear, or even naked, while less skilled groups struggle in full ascended with full raid teams.

Edit: that's not to say the higher end is
required
, as those 30% teams finish Raid bosses without even touching the enrage timer.

I wasn’t arguing about the gap between lowly skilled and highly skilled players. I was talking about the difficulty of the raids. They’re two entirely separate things.

The difficulty level of a particular raid is fixed just like it is for most other games. An exception being those which have an AI that modifies the difficulty.

The poster was assessing the difficulty of raids based on the one time that they did a raid. If a new player to games, did AC for the first time and found it super difficult, does that mean dungeons are super difficult?

The difficulty of something in the game and the skill level of a player are independent of each other. Otherwise Anet adding an easy mode would eventually become a super easy mode or trivial mode as players adapted to it.

Skill gap and difficulty are related. Something that requires more skill is generally more difficult.

They’re related but the difficulty that something is set at isn’t dependent on someone’s skill level.

Dungeons are at a certain difficulty. That difficulty doesn’t really change. What does change is a player’s skill level towards dungeons. Someone brand new to dungeons is certainly going to find them more difficult to them than someone who has done them thousands of times.

In your post it seems like you’ve experienced a fair share of WoW raids and you’re comparing your skill level with those to what you experienced with the one raid that you did in GW2. You cannot base a raid’s difficult based on single attempt. People found Teq extremely difficult and then it eventually went on farm mode and this was before elite spec power creep.

To re-hash what I have said at least once in a previous post: many games have difficulty settings. These settings are all at a fixed place that do not adjust. What does change is a player’s skill level is relation to that difficulty setting. A player new to a game is going to find it more difficult than someone that isn’t new regardless of the difficulty that the game is set at.

It makes me curious about how difficult GW2 raids truly are. The rest of the game doesn’t really pose any challenge as players usually just zerg up and auto attack, or at best, use all of their skills off cool down. Is the difficulty of raids truly so high that the average player needs an easy mode in order for something to be set down to their skill level?

There are people that struggle with the other PvE areas of the game as well. Does this mean story instances need an easy mode too to match the skill level of those players? What about those that find the easy mode difficulty still too challenging for them? Do we need a super duper easy mode on top of an easy mode?

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@Ayrilana.1396 said:

@Firebeard.1746 said:The only thing that separates good from a bad player is skill in this game and the skill cap required feels very high
based on the one raid i did do
.

So you only did a single raid and can adequately estimate its true difficulty based on just that?

Actually he is right. The difference between a high skilled and a low skilled player is quite gigantic. Using gw2raidar data:

On average from all raid bosses, the best groups do 218,253 dps and finish the fight in 1:54. The 30% groups do 74,507 dps and finish the fight in 6:24. This means the best groups do triple damage than the lowest groups.

Which is exactly why good players can low-man raids, do them in green gear, or even naked, while less skilled groups struggle in full ascended with full raid teams.

Edit: that's not to say the higher end is
required
, as those 30% teams finish Raid bosses without even touching the enrage timer.

I wasn’t arguing about the gap between lowly skilled and highly skilled players. I was talking about the difficulty of the raids. They’re two entirely separate things.

The difficulty level of a particular raid is fixed just like it is for most other games. An exception being those which have an AI that modifies the difficulty.

The poster was assessing the difficulty of raids based on the one time that they did a raid. If a new player to games, did AC for the first time and found it super difficult, does that mean dungeons are super difficult?

The difficulty of something in the game and the skill level of a player are independent of each other. Otherwise Anet adding an easy mode would eventually become a super easy mode or trivial mode as players adapted to it.

Skill gap and difficulty are related. Something that requires more skill is generally more difficult.

They’re related but the difficulty that something is set at isn’t dependent on someone’s skill level.

Dungeons are at a certain difficulty. That difficulty doesn’t really change. What does change is a player’s skill level towards dungeons. Someone brand new to dungeons is certainly going to find them more difficult to them than someone who has done them thousands of times.

In your post it seems like you’ve experienced a fair share of WoW raids and you’re comparing your skill level with those to what you experienced with the one raid that you did in GW2. You cannot base a raid’s difficult based on single attempt. People found Teq extremely difficult and then it eventually went on farm mode and this was before elite spec power creep.

To re-hash what I have said at least once in a previous post: many games have difficulty settings. These settings are all at a fixed place that do not adjust. What does change is a player’s skill level is relation to that difficulty setting. A player new to a game is going to find it more difficult than someone that isn’t new regardless of the difficulty that the game is set at.

We successfully cleared one boss. The next it went down 1/3rd even though we were playing mechanics properly. I could tell that guild was 2 has a very low floor in terms of class dps performance from that experience. I don't need to do 10 different raids to observe that and understand that perhaps the community at large isn't being well prepared to go above that floor.

My biggest frustration with raids in this game though is that there's just no community enthusiasm for them so even getting a group of people together is hard. Let alone them having the right builds, skill etc. I'm okay with a challenge and learning one. I often do content that challenges individual skill. Which is why i'm still working on my boon support chrono

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@Firebeard.1746 said:

@Firebeard.1746 said:The only thing that separates good from a bad player is skill in this game and the skill cap required feels very high
based on the one raid i did do
.

So you only did a single raid and can adequately estimate its true difficulty based on just that?

Actually he is right. The difference between a high skilled and a low skilled player is quite gigantic. Using gw2raidar data:

On average from all raid bosses, the best groups do 218,253 dps and finish the fight in 1:54. The 30% groups do 74,507 dps and finish the fight in 6:24. This means the best groups do triple damage than the lowest groups.

Which is exactly why good players can low-man raids, do them in green gear, or even naked, while less skilled groups struggle in full ascended with full raid teams.

Edit: that's not to say the higher end is
required
, as those 30% teams finish Raid bosses without even touching the enrage timer.

I wasn’t arguing about the gap between lowly skilled and highly skilled players. I was talking about the difficulty of the raids. They’re two entirely separate things.

The difficulty level of a particular raid is fixed just like it is for most other games. An exception being those which have an AI that modifies the difficulty.

The poster was assessing the difficulty of raids based on the one time that they did a raid. If a new player to games, did AC for the first time and found it super difficult, does that mean dungeons are super difficult?

The difficulty of something in the game and the skill level of a player are independent of each other. Otherwise Anet adding an easy mode would eventually become a super easy mode or trivial mode as players adapted to it.

Skill gap and difficulty are related. Something that requires more skill is generally more difficult.

They’re related but the difficulty that something is set at isn’t dependent on someone’s skill level.

Dungeons are at a certain difficulty. That difficulty doesn’t really change. What does change is a player’s skill level towards dungeons. Someone brand new to dungeons is certainly going to find them more difficult to them than someone who has done them thousands of times.

In your post it seems like you’ve experienced a fair share of WoW raids and you’re comparing your skill level with those to what you experienced with the one raid that you did in GW2. You cannot base a raid’s difficult based on single attempt. People found Teq extremely difficult and then it eventually went on farm mode and this was before elite spec power creep.

To re-hash what I have said at least once in a previous post: many games have difficulty settings. These settings are all at a fixed place that do not adjust. What does change is a player’s skill level is relation to that difficulty setting. A player new to a game is going to find it more difficult than someone that isn’t new regardless of the difficulty that the game is set at.

We successfully cleared one boss. The next it went down 1/3rd even though we were playing mechanics properly. I could tell that guild was 2 has a very low floor in terms of class dps performance from that experience. I don't need to do 10 different raids to observe that and understand that perhaps the community at large isn't being well prepared to go above that floor.

My biggest frustration with raids in this game though is that there's just no community enthusiasm for them so even getting a group of people together is hard. Let alone them having the right builds, skill etc. I'm okay with a challenge and learning one. I often do content that challenges individual skill. Which is why i'm still working on my boon support chrono

If you got it only to 1/3 then you weren’t all doing mechanics properly.

DPS matters and it’s not that difficult to dish out enough to beat any of the bosses. The HP of all of the bosses are known. Split that across your DPS players and that’s the minimum they each would need to do during the encounter. Factoring the time limit and other mechanics, you can reach a minimum DPS value which is far from the optimum reported on Snow Crows.

There’s no enthusiasm because so many players do not want to be challenged. To them being challenged isn’t fun. There are also those that want it to be so dumbed down that it’s as if the game is playing for you and there are those that don’t even want to do group content.

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@Katary.7096 said:How would that work?

By allocating resources from other parts of the game to develop that content and keep the limited raid team developing content for raiders.

I am confused as to why you decided to comment on my original post.

Because there was a discussion in that other thread about difficulty modes, and as I said, the easy mode crowd is asking for a complete rework of the encounters, to nerf and make irrelevant every single mechanic they have. My idea was usually turned down (with some exceptions) because it wasn't what the easy mode crowd wanted. I know Arenanet can potentially add more modes, but the crowd that is (and has been) asking for them wants something completely different. Which is why I'm not for new modes in the first place. But they -could- make it work.

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@Ayrilana.1396 said:

@Firebeard.1746 said:The only thing that separates good from a bad player is skill in this game and the skill cap required feels very high
based on the one raid i did do
.

So you only did a single raid and can adequately estimate its true difficulty based on just that?

Actually he is right. The difference between a high skilled and a low skilled player is quite gigantic. Using gw2raidar data:

On average from all raid bosses, the best groups do 218,253 dps and finish the fight in 1:54. The 30% groups do 74,507 dps and finish the fight in 6:24. This means the best groups do triple damage than the lowest groups.

Which is exactly why good players can low-man raids, do them in green gear, or even naked, while less skilled groups struggle in full ascended with full raid teams.

Edit: that's not to say the higher end is
required
, as those 30% teams finish Raid bosses without even touching the enrage timer.

I wasn’t arguing about the gap between lowly skilled and highly skilled players. I was talking about the difficulty of the raids. They’re two entirely separate things.

The difficulty level of a particular raid is fixed just like it is for most other games. An exception being those which have an AI that modifies the difficulty.

The poster was assessing the difficulty of raids based on the one time that they did a raid. If a new player to games, did AC for the first time and found it super difficult, does that mean dungeons are super difficult?

The difficulty of something in the game and the skill level of a player are independent of each other. Otherwise Anet adding an easy mode would eventually become a super easy mode or trivial mode as players adapted to it.

Skill gap and difficulty are related. Something that requires more skill is generally more difficult.

They’re related but the difficulty that something is set at isn’t dependent on someone’s skill level.

Dungeons are at a certain difficulty. That difficulty doesn’t really change. What does change is a player’s skill level towards dungeons. Someone brand new to dungeons is certainly going to find them more difficult to them than someone who has done them thousands of times.

In your post it seems like you’ve experienced a fair share of WoW raids and you’re comparing your skill level with those to what you experienced with the one raid that you did in GW2. You cannot base a raid’s difficult based on single attempt. People found Teq extremely difficult and then it eventually went on farm mode and this was before elite spec power creep.

To re-hash what I have said at least once in a previous post: many games have difficulty settings. These settings are all at a fixed place that do not adjust. What does change is a player’s skill level is relation to that difficulty setting. A player new to a game is going to find it more difficult than someone that isn’t new regardless of the difficulty that the game is set at.

We successfully cleared one boss. The next it went down 1/3rd even though we were playing mechanics properly. I could tell that guild was 2 has a very low floor in terms of class dps performance from that experience. I don't need to do 10 different raids to observe that and understand that perhaps the community at large isn't being well prepared to go above that floor.

My biggest frustration with raids in this game though is that there's just no community enthusiasm for them so even getting a group of people together is hard. Let alone them having the right builds, skill etc. I'm okay with a challenge and learning one. I often do content that challenges individual skill. Which is why i'm still working on my boon support chrono

If you got it only to 1/3 then you weren’t all doing mechanics properly.

DPS matters and it’s not that difficult to dish out enough to beat any of the bosses. The HP of all of the bosses are known. Split that across your DPS players and that’s the minimum they each would need to do during the encounter. Factoring the time limit and other mechanics, you can reach a minimum DPS value which is far from the optimum reported on Snow Crows.

There’s no enthusiasm because so many players do not want to be challenged. To them being challenged isn’t fun. There are also those that want it to be so dumbed down that it’s as if the game is playing for you and there are those that don’t even want to do group content.

Dps was the issue. Nothing you said invalidated my comments about the floor. My comments around WoW were to point out that this is actually harder than an mmo that focuses on it.

I wouldn't judge the community so harshly. There are causals that are okay doing hard things. The barrier to entry is time consuming because of the way gear is done and which stats are required. not every required build has exotics readily purchasable. There's other things i could say too.

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@maddoctor.2738 said:

@"Asum.4960" said:I don't think LW is for 90% of the player population at all.

Well let's take a look at some statistics to find out. using gw2efficiency data

This is from a month ago:91.5% started Heart of Thorns, 66.2% killed Mordremoth67.2% started S3E1, 59.7% finished it62.4% started S3E2, 57.2% finished it63.3% started S3E3, 55.7% finished it59.6% started S3E4, 50.8% finished it56% started S3E5, 49.9% finished it52.7% started S3E6, 46.8% finished it79.9% started Path of Fire, 62% killed Balthazar57% started S4E1, 47.1% finished it47.9% started S4E2, 42.3% finished it48.7% started S4E3, 39.9% finished it40.6% started S4E4, 35.8% finished it36.3% started S4E5, 31.7% finished it32.8% started S4E6, 29.6% finished it

It's perfectly clear that 90% of the players is NOT playing the LS, only Heart of Thorns was started by that mythical "90%"It means nothing of that sort. Remember, that with each further episode past HoT, more and moer of the gw2eff accounts counted get inactive. I'm quite sure that if you were to compare those numbers with accounts that were active at the time each episode got released, the % numbers would be way more similar to those from HoT story.The only thing the numbers you mentioned show is that the gw2 population is rapidly declining. or, at the very least, that the population of gw2 players that use gw2eff is declining.

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@maddoctor.2738 said:By allocating resources from other parts of the game to develop that content and keep the limited raid team developing content for raiders.I don't expect Arenanet to do that, but I like the approach.Because there was a discussion in that other thread about difficulty modes, and as I said, the easy mode crowd is asking for a complete rework of the encounters, to nerf and make irrelevant every single mechanic they have. My idea was usually turned down (with some exceptions) because it wasn't what the easy mode crowd wanted. I know Arenanet can potentially add more modes, but the crowd that is (and has been) asking for them wants something completely different.I see.Which is why I'm not for new modes in the first place.Understandable.

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@"Astralporing.1957" said:It means nothing of that sort. Remember, that with each further episode past HoT, more and moer of the gw2eff accounts counted get inactive. I'm quite sure that if you were to compare those numbers with accounts that were active at the time each episode got released, the % numbers would be way more similar to those from HoT story.

That same logic can be applied to the Raid population too, meaning it's not declining, at least not as much as some claim.

The only thing the numbers you mentioned show is that the gw2 population is rapidly declining. or, at the very least, that the population of gw2 players that use gw2eff is declining.

gw2efficiency population is 80% of the players that have above 35k AP, the most active and invested players in the game.gw2efficiency population is 17% of the players that have above 3k AP, a number that is still way too low for most veteran players.

The numbers of gw2efficiency declining mean the veteran population, the more active population and the most invested population of the game is rapidly declining, because among those, gw2efficiency numbers are very significant, 17% isn't a small number. And 80% is the vast majority of accounts in that bracket.

Regarding population, the question is how many "new" players (under 3k AP) enter the game when veteran players leave because under 3k gw2efficiency has very few accounts.

Btw if you increase the range and check players with 500+ AP, you can see that gw2efficiency is still a significant 5%, 5% of the accounts at 500+ AP has a gw2efficiency account. And 500 AP is literally nothing.

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@Ayrilana.1396 said:

@Firebeard.1746 said:The only thing that separates good from a bad player is skill in this game and the skill cap required feels very high
based on the one raid i did do
.

So you only did a single raid and can adequately estimate its true difficulty based on just that?

Actually he is right. The difference between a high skilled and a low skilled player is quite gigantic. Using gw2raidar data:

On average from all raid bosses, the best groups do 218,253 dps and finish the fight in 1:54. The 30% groups do 74,507 dps and finish the fight in 6:24. This means the best groups do triple damage than the lowest groups.

Which is exactly why good players can low-man raids, do them in green gear, or even naked, while less skilled groups struggle in full ascended with full raid teams.

Edit: that's not to say the higher end is
required
, as those 30% teams finish Raid bosses without even touching the enrage timer.

I wasn’t arguing about the gap between lowly skilled and highly skilled players. I was talking about the difficulty of the raids. They’re two entirely separate things.

The difficulty level of a particular raid is fixed just like it is for most other games. An exception being those which have an AI that modifies the difficulty.

The poster was assessing the difficulty of raids based on the one time that they did a raid. If a new player to games, did AC for the first time and found it super difficult, does that mean dungeons are super difficult?

The difficulty of something in the game and the skill level of a player are independent of each other. Otherwise Anet adding an easy mode would eventually become a super easy mode or trivial mode as players adapted to it.

Skill gap and difficulty are related. Something that requires more skill is generally more difficult.

They’re related but the difficulty that something is set at isn’t dependent on someone’s skill level.

Dungeons are at a certain difficulty. That difficulty doesn’t really change. What does change is a player’s skill level towards dungeons. Someone brand new to dungeons is certainly going to find them more difficult to them than someone who has done them thousands of times.

In your post it seems like you’ve experienced a fair share of WoW raids and you’re comparing your skill level with those to what you experienced with the one raid that you did in GW2. You cannot base a raid’s difficult based on single attempt. People found Teq extremely difficult and then it eventually went on farm mode and this was before elite spec power creep.

To re-hash what I have said at least once in a previous post: many games have difficulty settings. These settings are all at a fixed place that do not adjust. What does change is a player’s skill level is relation to that difficulty setting. A player new to a game is going to find it more difficult than someone that isn’t new regardless of the difficulty that the game is set at.

It makes me curious about how difficult GW2 raids truly are. The rest of the game doesn’t really pose any challenge as players usually just zerg up and auto attack, or at best, use all of their skills off cool down. Is the difficulty of raids truly so high that the average player needs an easy mode in order for something to be set down to their skill level?

There are people that struggle with the other PvE areas of the game as well. Does this mean story instances need an easy mode too to match the skill level of those players? What about those that find the easy mode difficulty still too challenging for them? Do we need a super duper easy mode on top of an easy mode?

Difficulty is not an objective standard. It's measured against the skill of the population or a player

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

-gw2 is a casual game-raids are not casual

That's it, the majority are not interested in raids. The only way the majority would be interested is if they changed the tuning so it could be played casually by a pug. The current style of high tuned raids is out dated. Players want to enjoy playing the way they want to play, with reactive gameplay, not be pigeon holed into a role to play the damage Meter/ must do optimal rotation game.

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@maddoctor.2738 said:

@"Astralporing.1957" said:It means nothing of that sort. Remember, that with each further episode past HoT, more and moer of the gw2eff accounts counted get inactive. I'm quite sure that if you were to compare those numbers with accounts that were active at the time each episode got released, the % numbers would be way more similar to those from HoT story.

That same logic can be applied to the Raid population too, meaning it's not declining, at least not as much as some claim.

The only thing the numbers you mentioned show is that the gw2 population is rapidly declining. or, at the very least, that the population of gw2 players that use gw2eff is declining.

gw2efficiency population is 80% of the players that have above 35k AP, the most active and invested players in the game.gw2efficiency population is 17% of the players that have above 3k AP, a number that is still way too low for most veteran players.

The numbers of gw2efficiency declining mean the veteran population, the more active population and the most invested population of the game is rapidly declining, because among those, gw2efficiency numbers are very significant, 17% isn't a small number. And 80% is the vast majority of accounts in that bracket.

Regarding population, the question is how many "new" players (under 3k AP) enter the game when veteran players leave because under 3k gw2efficiency has very few accounts.

Btw if you increase the range and check players with 500+ AP, you can see that gw2efficiency is still a significant 5%, 5% of the accounts at 500+ AP has a gw2efficiency account. And 500 AP is literally nothing.

How do you have those numbers? For above 35k ap, we have 524 players in US, but for EU it's already unknown (the leaderboard ends at number 1000, and that is 35395 AP, and it's hard to estimate how many people would those 395 APs to 35k cover). Numbers of players with accounts above 3k is completely unknown - Anet never released those numbers, as far as i am aware. You might try to estimate it with percentages (3k AP is around 90% mark, so ~ 1.1 million players, but again, we don't really know the actual numbers, the 11 million accounts was some time ago). And that's about the game numbers only. From what i see, gw2eff numbers also leave a lot to be desired, because the site doesn't track APs at all.

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@Astralporing.1957 said:

@Astralporing.1957 said:It means nothing of that sort. Remember, that with each further episode past HoT, more and moer of the gw2eff accounts counted get inactive. I'm quite sure that if you were to compare those numbers with accounts that were active at the time each episode got released, the % numbers would be way more similar to those from HoT story.

That same logic can be applied to the Raid population too, meaning it's not declining, at least not as much as some claim.

The only thing the numbers you mentioned show is that the gw2 population is rapidly declining. or, at the very least, that the population of gw2 players that use gw2eff is declining.

gw2efficiency population is 80% of the players that have above 35k AP, the most active and invested players in the game.gw2efficiency population is 17% of the players that have above 3k AP, a number that is still way too low for most veteran players.

The numbers of gw2efficiency declining mean the veteran population, the more active population and the most invested population of the game is rapidly declining, because among those, gw2efficiency numbers are very significant, 17% isn't a small number. And 80% is the vast majority of accounts in that bracket.

Regarding population, the question is how many "new" players (under 3k AP) enter the game when veteran players leave because under 3k gw2efficiency has very few accounts.

Btw if you increase the range and check players with 500+ AP, you can see that gw2efficiency is still a significant 5%, 5% of the accounts at 500+ AP has a gw2efficiency account. And 500 AP is literally nothing.

How do you have those numbers? For above 35k ap, we have 524 players in US, but for EU it's already unknown (the leaderboard ends at number 1000, and that is 35395 AP, and it's hard to estimate how many people would those 395 APs to 35k cover). Numbers of players with accounts above 3k is completely unknown - Anet never released those numbers, as far as i am aware. You might try to estimate it with percentages (3k AP is around 90% mark, so ~ 1.1 million players, but again, we don't really know the actual numbers, the 11 million accounts was some time ago). And that's about the game numbers only. From what i see, gw2eff numbers also leave a lot to be desired, because the site
doesn't
track APs at all.

The numbers are all estimates. ~1524 players have above 35k, you can compare this with Exalted Achiever on gw2efficiency to get the percentage. Yes we don't know how many players exist in those 395 missing AP, but regardless it's clear that the vast majority of players in the 35k+ bracket have a gw2efficiency account. I estimated close to 80% (using the 1524 players that we do know gives about 88%)

Now for the 3k AP accounts, I used my extensive friend list and guild member lists to get a number close to 3k AP being the "break point" to 90%, meaning the top 10% has above 3k AP. Arenanet told us about the 11 million accounts, meaning close to 1.1 mil accounts have above 3k AP. Actual numbers are unknown but it's a good estimate. The number I got from my lists is below 3k, 2889 to be exact, but I use 3k for simplicity. Meaning the actual percentage will be higher.

The last "problem" is getting gw2eff AP numbers, which is impossible, the site cannot track AP because the official API doesn't track it either, the number of AP isn't stored anywhere but is calculated based on what you finished. And since 2017 if I recall there was a massive purge on the API, most historical achievements are lost, meaning gw2efficiency cannot know if you completed it or not.

That said, you can use the number of accounts that have the Respected Achiever title (5k) which gives us about 13%, which is a very good number, comparing that 1.1 mil with gw2efficiency members that are at 5k+. The number of players that have a gw2efficiency account and have between 3k and 5k AP aren't counted here, so the actual number should be higher than 13% but 13% is a rough minimum.

At 3k we earn the achievement vembraces (hellfire and radiant) and using those we get some even closer numbers, which is where my 17% estimate came from. Again, the actual number of AP needed for the 10% breakpoint is 111 AP lower than 3k, which means the percentages above don't include a lot of players.

Now I might mis-remembering the actual numbers since I'm away of my PC at the moment, but should be close to those. I'm on EU so the 2889 number for the 10% break point is from the EU data, not NA, NA tends to have even lower numbers when it comes to AP. I have a player in my lists with 2889 AP that is at 90% and a player with 2886 AP that is at 80%, so that's a very good estimate for the EU break point.

As for 11 million accounts being "old news", any new accounts created will only push the 10% break point lower and lower

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@yann.1946 said:

@Firebeard.1746 said:The only thing that separates good from a bad player is skill in this game and the skill cap required feels very high
based on the one raid i did do
.

So you only did a single raid and can adequately estimate its true difficulty based on just that?

Actually he is right. The difference between a high skilled and a low skilled player is quite gigantic. Using gw2raidar data:

On average from all raid bosses, the best groups do 218,253 dps and finish the fight in 1:54. The 30% groups do 74,507 dps and finish the fight in 6:24. This means the best groups do triple damage than the lowest groups.

Which is exactly why good players can low-man raids, do them in green gear, or even naked, while less skilled groups struggle in full ascended with full raid teams.

Edit: that's not to say the higher end is
required
, as those 30% teams finish Raid bosses without even touching the enrage timer.

I wasn’t arguing about the gap between lowly skilled and highly skilled players. I was talking about the difficulty of the raids. They’re two entirely separate things.

The difficulty level of a particular raid is fixed just like it is for most other games. An exception being those which have an AI that modifies the difficulty.

The poster was assessing the difficulty of raids based on the one time that they did a raid. If a new player to games, did AC for the first time and found it super difficult, does that mean dungeons are super difficult?

The difficulty of something in the game and the skill level of a player are independent of each other. Otherwise Anet adding an easy mode would eventually become a super easy mode or trivial mode as players adapted to it.

Skill gap and difficulty are related. Something that requires more skill is generally more difficult.

They’re related but the difficulty that something is set at isn’t dependent on someone’s skill level.

Dungeons are at a certain difficulty. That difficulty doesn’t really change. What does change is a player’s skill level towards dungeons. Someone brand new to dungeons is certainly going to find them more difficult to them than someone who has done them thousands of times.

In your post it seems like you’ve experienced a fair share of WoW raids and you’re comparing your skill level with those to what you experienced with the one raid that you did in GW2. You cannot base a raid’s difficult based on single attempt. People found Teq extremely difficult and then it eventually went on farm mode and this was before elite spec power creep.

To re-hash what I have said at least once in a previous post: many games have difficulty settings. These settings are all at a fixed place that do not adjust. What does change is a player’s skill level is relation to that difficulty setting. A player new to a game is going to find it more difficult than someone that isn’t new regardless of the difficulty that the game is set at.

It makes me curious about how difficult GW2 raids truly are. The rest of the game doesn’t really pose any challenge as players usually just zerg up and auto attack, or at best, use all of their skills off cool down. Is the difficulty of raids truly so high that the average player needs an easy mode in order for something to be set down to their skill level?

There are people that struggle with the other PvE areas of the game as well. Does this mean story instances need an easy mode too to match the skill level of those players? What about those that find the easy mode difficulty still too challenging for them? Do we need a super duper easy mode on top of an easy mode?

Difficulty is not an objective standard. It's measured against the skill of the population or a player

You’re conflating the difficulty level something is set at and one’s skill level.

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@Astralporing.1957 said:

@"Ayrilana.1396" said:You’re conflating the difficulty level something is set at and one’s skill level.More like conflating "difficulty level" with how difficult something is to individual players.
"difficulty level" may be absolute, but actual difficulty is relative
.

Which I had mentioned in my posts that the previous poster missed.

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@Xar.6279 said:

  1. Small support from ArenaNet (not enough new wings, bosses). Progression is most important part of raiding. While GW2 lacks of real progression. Raids are based on farming same things over and over here.

  2. Most of the gw2 community is very casual.

  3. Whole PvE in GW2 is not engaging for many people (and pointless) which liked this game mode in other games. They do not feel the need to do it.

  4. Alot of people which likes raids already checked GW2 PvE and they didn't like it. And information which tells that there's no real PvE in GW2 has gone into the world. So raiders avoid this game.

  5. Underdeveloped raiding rewards system.

  6. Instability of ArenaNet. No schedules. Real plans. I mean. It looks like they do things at the last minute, which are not part of a larger whole.

These points means that GW2 probably won't be raiding mmo ever. It's probably possible to change it, but it would require A LOT of ArenaNet work. I mean working 24/7 as some other companies do, etc, etc.

You have a big point there. Before coming here i played wow as a raider. Every once and a while a post would pop up that asked

..has anyone tried gw2? At which point a hundred replies would go..if you like pvp as end game then go play it. But if you like dungeons and raids as end game , then forget it, that game has no pve end game. There is no trinity so everything is a mess, but if pvp is your thing you will like it.

And thats what people still think about the game, i believed it too for years. I think the game needs an expansion and with that they should advertise the heck out if it and we could see some big numbers come in.

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@Zuldari.3940 said:

@"Xar.6279" said:
  1. Small support from ArenaNet (not enough new wings, bosses). Progression is most important part of raiding. While GW2 lacks of real progression. Raids are based on farming same things over and over here.
  2. Most of the gw2 community is very casual.
  3. Whole PvE in GW2 is not engaging for many people (and pointless) which liked this game mode in other games. They do not feel the need to do it.
  4. Alot of people which likes raids already checked GW2 PvE and they didn't like it. And information which tells that there's no real PvE in GW2 has gone into the world. So raiders avoid this game.
  5. Underdeveloped raiding rewards system.
  6. Instability of ArenaNet. No schedules. Real plans. I mean. It looks like they do things at the last minute, which are not part of a larger whole.

These points means that GW2 probably won't be raiding mmo ever. It's probably possible to change it, but it would require A LOT of ArenaNet work. I mean working 24/7 as some other companies do, etc, etc.

You have a big point there. Before coming here i played wow as a raider. Every once and a while a post would pop up that asked

..has anyone tried gw2? At which point a hundred replies would go..if you like pvp as end game then go play it. But if you like dungeons and raids as end game , then forget it, that game has no pve end game. There is no trinity so everything is a mess, but if pvp is your thing you will like it.

And thats what people still think about the game, i believed it too for years. I think the game needs an expansion and with that they should advertise the heck out if it and we could see some big numbers come in.

It looked like HoT expansion is going to change that thinking. And actually HoT did it. Raids around 2016 really was a thing in GW2. People were motivated to be better. Speed-kill, and low-man scene were alive these times. But unfortunately it all changed with next years. A lot of people believed that PoF will be the same. Or even better. But it wasn't. PvE in PoF began to return to the state before HoT. And right now its that casual as it was in the core game. Some people may like it. They're fine with doing same things over and over again. To kill some time etc, etc. But a lot of pve'rs don't like this kind of pve. It's pointless for them. And boring. Same for me. I'm more pvp'er than pve'r to be honest. But when pve is very good, then I'm fine with playing it.

So you are right. PvP looks like the only competitive game mode in this game after all. Of course this mode isn't perfect. I would even say its kind of "dead", because of some bad decisions made by ArenaNet over years. Also what's more important: it lacks of PvP devs. But its still better than PvE for sure. Also we know the exact plans for PvP development: swiss torunaments, 2v2 / 3v3 tournaments.While PvE is one big unknown.

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