You can do raids with 0 experience, here s how I did it.

[maddoctor.2738]

@"xenon.3264" said:If most ppl care about playing easy mode maybe this is the reason why the chose gw2.

The reality is that "most ppl" don't care about playing an easy mode because "most ppl" stay away of the current really easy instanced content, they won't suddenly go play an easier version of Raids.

[Cyninja.2954]

@"xenon.3264" said:It is a game.Ever been in a real life meeting? You do what is enjoyable by most of the people if you want most if not everyone to have fun

If most ppl care about playing easy mode maybe this is the reason why the chose gw2.

This is not mhw nor darksoul and this is a game I chose for the absence of vertical progression and raids (7 years ago was one of the main point of the game : we do not raid like in wow)

So the small hardcore community can complain but if most players want something different the only doable thing is a different tier raids like fractals

True, I agree.

But here is where I disagree:

• this means more developer resources on instanced content (I'm fine with that, but do you think a vast majority of the pve playerbase is willing to sacrifice these developer resources in other areas?). If these resources are taken from raids, fine, that is a priority decision from the developers
• easier raids makes raids not be raids any longer. Essentially this is what is happening now, and we are calling them strikes
• rewards will be adapted to the easier difficulty, so for all the people who simply want the raid rewards, those will not be available via easier content

So yes, if it makes sense to introduce easier "raid like" content so more players are willing to participate in it from a developer resource and content perspective: absolutely do. I have my doubts since wht I believe is:

• many of the players who do not care about raids, are not raiding, which is perfectly fine. These players might be interested in easier instanced content, or not given how we have dungeons and fractals already
• there is a small subset of players who are not raiding but want the raid rewards, these players will no fit at any point in time since rewards will be scaled to content difficulty
• there is players actively raiding who enjoy the challenge of raids. These again will probably participate in Strikes as long as they find enjoyment in this easier content.

[xenon.3264]

Raid as content for skilled group can be a solution.

Anyway about

Easier raids are not raid anymore

I agree . Let's accept that raid do not have space in this game like the did not at start as a precise choice and move on.

No raid was what moved me from wow any single resource spent for raid is against what this game was presented as

[maddoctor.2738]

@xenon.3264 said:Let's accept that raid do not have space in this game like the did not at start as a precise choice and move on.

The game started with content advertised and aimed at raiders from other mmorpgs. Content that failed to deliver.

No raid was what moved me from wow any single resource spent for raid is against what this game was presented as

It's the opposite. The way the game turned out, a farm fiesta for skill-less players is what goes against what this game was presented as.

[Lucyller.4658]

First, excuse my way of speaking, I'm not a native speaker.

Eyah, just putting my own experience after reading (almost) the whole thread.I've mostly started raid around april 2019, and even if, yes, it's near impossible to join a random party in the LFG, it's completely normal.

Yes, the requirement for raid is stupid. I often see 300,400 kp... I've seen once 1k kp needed. Uff. (even for the joke, it's maybe a little too much.)I personnally hate faking the LI, the same goes for fractal. So what did I do to actually learn ? I've puts some request at the Lion Arch to joins Guild doing training as a DPS.Joined 3 guilds like that, 1 doing full clear frequently, another doing mostly "try" (the lead was almost learning them) and the third was forgettable.

During those 5/6 months i've gone from 10-ish LI to 110. I dont do lot of raids, I even "forgot" to do them for a month at a time but I never had a difficulty finding a party after being on some communities. I dont even talks with them outside of raid, they're just nice enough to play with me when they put a raid recruitement on discord. Yes, you cant raid when YOU want but when the time is fixed but that's the point when you have to put 10 differents peoples in the same party.The only "trick" is to DO YOUR WORK. you want to join a raid ? WORK FOR IT. joining a guild is really easy... Really, my only good point is that I'm a correct dps (around 80/90% of the dps of a weaver).I cant switch to a support role, I dont have any infusion, I often have the wrong food and I got teleported almost once every try at VG.

People complaining about the difficulty to join a raid are the kind who just open the LFG, join a party and see themself being kick after 5 minutes because they didn't respond of the message sent by the commander.

Wont throw rose to all the com', but I found it mentally tiring to lead raids. If you're not with your guildies, you have to babysit 9 peoples, none wanting to play with you and some leaving after 1 fail, just because you failed to throw a bomb at sabetha.

The whole "you're terrible to kick new player" can be resumed with this point :

If someone refuse to respond to your question : Kick him.

And, sadly yes, new players often ignore you or play mute to dodge your suspicion. Sorry to break it to you but we're not child, it dont work. :anguished:

I rarely see new player being nice and when it happen, a LOT of people try to help them. Specially in gw2 and it's astonishing.When I do dungeons (I love ascalon/caudecus) new player often dont talk, dont try to help, dont want to interact with you and I wont complain about it, that's normal they're starting the game (rarely go beyond 3k ap) and doesnt have the full experience of gw2 (both in the community and the gameplay).

When you do a raid, you should already be able to do T4 fractal "easily". (if you want to at least kill 1 boss) and from what I often see in training and even some raid. some doesnt know what's the gameplay of the class they play. :bleep_bloop:

...Well, that was a long rent who've gone everywhere but you got the point I think. Maybe.Sorry. :confounded:

[xenon.3264]

@maddoctor.2738 said:

@xenon.3264 said:Let's accept that raid do not have space in this game like the did not at start as a precise choice and move on.

The game started with content advertised and aimed at raiders from other mmorpgs. Content that failed to deliver.

No. The game aimed to player from other mobs who were bored to hell of raids and vertical progression.

No raid was what moved me from wow any single resource spent for raid is against what this game was presented as

It's the opposite. The way the game turned out, a farm fiesta for skill-less players is what goes against what this game was presented as.

Farm fiesta? U do not have to farm anything but shiny skin and .... Oh right train for raids. So if we could please remove that stupid gate ppl could enjoy the game again

[xenon.3264]

@"Lucyller.4658" said:When you do a raid, you should already be able to do T4 fractal "easily". (if you want to at least kill 1 boss) and from what I often see in training and even some raid. some doesnt know what's the gameplay of the class they play. :bleep_bloop:

I can do easily all T4 to 100 but this is stupid.

Not everyone ca. Do T4 . I'd say most cannot even do T3

So why cut out those players?

Let raids wcale on difficult like fractals. Why are you against this? Just your elitist feeling?

[yann.1946]

@xenon.3264 said:

@maddoctor.2738 said:

@xenon.3264 said:Let's accept that raid do not have space in this game like the did not at start as a precise choice and move on.

The game started with content advertised and aimed at raiders from other mmorpgs. Content that failed to deliver.

No. The game aimed to player from other mobs who were bored to hell of raids and vertical progression.

No raid was what moved me from wow any single resource spent for raid is against what this game was presented as

It's the opposite. The way the game turned out, a farm fiesta for skill-less players is what goes against what this game was presented as.

Farm fiesta? U do not have to farm anything but shiny skin and .... Oh right train for raids. So if we could please remove that stupid gate ppl could enjoy the game again

Dungeons where advertised as raid like. So you are slightly off base here.

[Cyninja.2954]

@xenon.3264 said:

@"Lucyller.4658" said:When you do a raid, you should already be able to do T4 fractal "easily". (if you want to at least kill 1 boss) and from what I often see in training and even some raid. some doesnt know what's the gameplay of the class they play. :bleep_bloop:

I can do easily all T4 to 100 but this is stupid.

Not everyone ca. Do T4 . I'd say most cannot even do T3

So why cut out those players?

Let raids wcale on difficult like fractals. Why are you against this? Just your elitist feeling?

First off T4 fractals are not hard. In fact, if you took a group of 5 scourges, you could F2 through pretty much all of them. There are cheese builds which negate T4 fractals. Meta comps if played half way well destroy the content. People keep talking about T4 as though being able to press buttons and actually knowing what a classes skills do is an accomplishment. It is not.

Second, raids were added as most challenging pve content. Here, let me link to a past developer response on this matter:

@"Crystal Reid.2481" said:New forum, so I'll jump in with a new post on this.

We won't be adding a different difficulty tier at this time. Raids need to continue to remain the most challenging content in the game, and they aren't designed to be accessible by everyone from a skill perspective. Could they be more accessible from a "finding 9 other players to play with" side? Sure. That isn't always an easy problem to solve, and any solution would detract away from the team making more raid content. We'd love to get more content out to you guys faster really.

I see a lot of comments about W4 difficulty, so I'll add some notes on that as well. Balance came in later than expected since we had far more bosses and content to test than usual. Are we totally happy with how balance turned out? Yes and no. The Mursaat Overseer base difficulty is too easy, but we were very happy with the CM difficulty. For the next release we'd like to get difficulty tuned more back in line with Spirit Vale. However, some of that original difficulty and magic is hard to re-capture. You never forget your first raid boss kill.

• https://en-forum.guildwars2.com/discussion/comment/113984/#Comment_113984

Raids were always conceived as content for a niche group of players and that is where they remain currently (and even that failed given how raids are supposed to be organized group content, yet by now even PUG raids do full clears weekly).

Now the central question at this point in time is: has the niche group of players grown to small? With the followup question of: if yes, what is the correct approach to deal with this problem?

From a standpoint of all content should be for the masses, raids are not designed nor where they ever designed that way. It's simple: if you are not able and/or willing to raid currently, you are not the target group. Period.

I've addressed the rewards issue in other threads and in this one too. Players who want the raid rewards but don't want to improve far enough to be able to acquire those rewards are and should not be a major deciding factor for the developers to make changes. The only proper changes from a developer standpoint are:

• does this content warrant the attention and resoucres it is getting?
• how can we improve participation in this content without compromising the content?
• if the content is unsustainable, which changes need to be made in terms of difficulty, access and rewards to get back to a level we are comfortable with?

At no point should access for all players factor in with niche content.

[Astralporing.1957]

@"yann.1946" said:Dungeons where advertised as raid like. So you are slightly off base here.No, they were advertised as this game's equivalent to raids. Like the gw2 trinity (damage, control, support) was supposed to be this game's equivalent to holy trinity of dps, tank, heal. Notice, how "Equivalent" here doesn't mean "similar". It doesn't even mean being targeted at the same player demographics - dungeons were meant to be hard, but they always kept adding that they were for everyone, not just a small subset of players. Yes, that's a bit contradictory, but that's marketing for you. When the game started, they obviously went with "for everyone", not with "hard", which shows their real intentions for that content.

[maddoctor.2738]

@"xenon.3264" said:No. The game aimed to player from other mobs who were bored to hell of raids and vertical progression.

Let's not twist facts here. Explorable modes for dungeons and the Orr temple events were aimed directly at players that like Raids in other mmorpgs.

Farm fiesta?

Farming the easiest content is what the majority of this playerbase is doing while the rest of the game "aimed" at them rots without players,

[Ayrilana.1396]

@maddoctor.2738 said:

@xenon.3264 said:No. The game aimed to player from other mobs who were bored to hell of raids and vertical progression.

Let's not twist facts here. Explorable modes for dungeons and the Orr temple events were aimed directly at players that like Raids in other mmorpgs.

Is there a source? I’m not saying you’re wrong (or right) but I’m curious

[yann.1946]

@Astralporing.1957 said:

@"yann.1946" said:Dungeons where advertised as raid like. So you are slightly off base here.No, they were advertised as this game's

equivalent

to raids. Like the gw2 trinity (damage, control, support) was supposed to be this game's equivalent to holy trinity of dps, tank, heal. Notice, how "Equivalent" here doesn't mean "similar". It doesn't even mean being targeted at the same player demographics - dungeons were meant to be hard, but they always kept adding that they were for everyone, not just a small subset of players. Yes, that's a bit contradictory, but that's marketing for you. When the game started, they obviously went with "for everyone", not with "hard", which shows their real intentions for that content.

Sure, If you want to play the semantic game. But it remains that their was supposed to be variant of raidcontent in this game.

And the combat in this game is designed to reward skillful play.

[Ultramex.1506]

My 2 problems are my laptop and supportThe fps lag make thing more difficult than it should beI prefer support but it seem there should only be 2 supports in squad and does it require more skill than dps?

[xenon.3264]

@yann.1946 said:

@xenon.3264 said:

@maddoctor.2738 said:

@xenon.3264 said:Let's accept that raid do not have space in this game like the did not at start as a precise choice and move on.

The game started with content advertised and aimed at raiders from other mmorpgs. Content that failed to deliver.

No. The game aimed to player from other mobs who were bored to hell of raids and vertical progression.

No raid was what moved me from wow any single resource spent for raid is against what this game was presented as

It's the opposite. The way the game turned out, a farm fiesta for skill-less players is what goes against what this game was presented as.

Farm fiesta? U do not have to farm anything but shiny skin and .... Oh right train for raids. So if we could please remove that stupid gate ppl could enjoy the game again

Dungeons where advertised as raid like. So you are slightly off base here.

5 man content is not raid.

[xenon.3264]

@Cyninja.2954 said:

@xenon.3264 said:

@"Lucyller.4658" said:When you do a raid, you should already be able to do T4 fractal "easily". (if you want to at least kill 1 boss) and from what I often see in training and even some raid. some doesnt know what's the gameplay of the class they play. :bleep_bloop:

I can do easily all T4 to 100 but this is stupid.

Not everyone ca. Do T4 . I'd say most cannot even do T3

So why cut out those players?

Let raids wcale on difficult like fractals. Why are you against this? Just your elitist feeling?

First off T4 fractals are not hard. In fact, if you took a group of 5 scourges, you could F2 through pretty much all of them. There are cheese builds which negate T4 fractals. Meta comps if played half way well destroy the content. People keep talking about T4 as though being able to press buttons and actually knowing what a classes skills do is an accomplishment. It is not.

Second, raids were added as most challenging pve content. Here, let me link to a past developer response on this matter:

@"Crystal Reid.2481" said:New forum, so I'll jump in with a new post on this.

We won't be adding a different difficulty tier at this time.

Raids need to continue to remain the most challenging content in the game, and they aren't designed to be accessible by everyone from a skill perspective.

Could they be more accessible from a "finding 9 other players to play with" side? Sure. That isn't always an easy problem to solve, and any solution would detract away from the team making more raid content. We'd love to get more content out to you guys faster really.

I see a lot of comments about W4 difficulty, so I'll add some notes on that as well. Balance came in later than expected since we had far more bosses and content to test than usual. Are we totally happy with how balance turned out? Yes and no. The Mursaat Overseer base difficulty is too easy, but we were very happy with the CM difficulty. For the next release we'd like to get difficulty tuned more back in line with Spirit Vale. However, some of that original difficulty and magic is hard to re-capture. You never forget your first raid boss kill.

• https://en-forum.guildwars2.com/discussion/comment/113984/#Comment_113984

Raids were always conceived as content for a niche group of players and that is where they remain currently (and even that failed given how raids are supposed to be organized group content, yet by now even PUG raids do full clears weekly).

Now the central question at this point in time is:

has the niche group of players grown to small

? With the followup question of:

if yes, what is the correct approach to deal with this problem

?

From a standpoint of all content should be for the masses, raids are not designed nor where they ever designed that way. It's simple: if you are not able and/or willing to raid currently, you are not the target group. Period.

I've addressed the rewards issue in other threads and in this one too. Players who want the raid rewards but don't want to improve far enough to be able to acquire those rewards are and should not be a major deciding factor for the developers to make changes. The only proper changes from a developer standpoint are:

• does this content warrant the attention and resoucres it is getting?
• how can we improve participation in this content without compromising the content?
• if the content is unsustainable, which changes need to be made in terms of difficulty, access and rewards to get back to a level we are comfortable with?

At no point should access for all players factor in with niche content.

Ok not the target but since it seems not enough people do it they had to reduce the number of developers dedicated to them and now the change to strikes

I think they should reduce to 5 men content so that it will be easier to find group and reduce difficulty in tier to let everyone experience the content

Arah explorable was the endgame ages ago but u can still create a group and try

[Tyson.5160]

This is what Mike Z said in a recent interview regarding raid difficulty.

Is there room for a ‘story’ difficulty in raids and other high-end content?

MZ: There is. There’s a constant, constant tug. Do we go build new raids for the raid group, or do we pull somebody to go make the old raids easier? The Bastion of the Penitent is one that we get a lot of comments on, because it’s the Saul D’Alessio story and the mursaat. It’s a very powerful, moving story, and it was very self-contained to that raid. So unless you’re a raider, you never see it.

I would not rule it out. The thing that we need to be careful about is how we manage that expectation. Because if we go back and release ‘story mode’ for an individual raid, that is taking time away from other things like being able to build additional raid content for the raiders. We want to make sure that we’re trying to service both groups.

[Astralporing.1957]

@yann.1946 said:

@Astralporing.1957 said:

@yann.1946 said:Dungeons where advertised as raid like. So you are slightly off base here.No, they were advertised as this game's

equivalent

to raids. Like the gw2 trinity (damage, control, support) was supposed to be this game's equivalent to holy trinity of dps, tank, heal. Notice, how "Equivalent" here doesn't mean "similar". It doesn't even mean being targeted at the same player demographics - dungeons were meant to be hard, but they always kept adding that they were for everyone, not just a small subset of players. Yes, that's a bit contradictory, but that's marketing for you. When the game started, they obviously went with "for everyone", not with "hard", which shows their real intentions for that content.

Sure, If you want to play the semantic game. But it remains that their was supposed to be variant of raidcontent in this game.Was it? Or perhaps you were reading way too much from one single statement, without bothering to remember the whole context?

Besides, "raidcontent" is a very wide bag. It can contain WoW's Mythic difficulty tier, but it also contains things like LFR, or FF XIV's story mode. It was very clear from the beginning, that if GW2's Dungeons were to be an equivalent of raids, it would be an equivalent of the latter modes, not the former ones. The dev reassurances that they meant for them to be something that could be done by everyone should have been a big hint here.

And the combat in this game is designed to reward skillful play.Dungeons definitely rewarded skillful play - by completion times. A skillful team could do AC path in less than 10 minutes, while an average pug would take half an hour. Notice though, that both groups were still supposed to complete it (and they did). Again, this should tell you something about what type of "raids" dungeons might have been a reflection of.

[Vinceman.4572]

@"xenon.3264" said:5 man content is not raid.

The definition of a raid or raiding as an activity has nothing to with a set number of players. It can be 1 but also infinite.

Ok not the target but since it seems not enough people do it they had to reduce the number of developers dedicated to them and now the change to strikes

There's not such a statement that they reduced the number of developers of raids & fractals. And as well none of the fact that they change their direction from raids to strike missions. From what is known strike missions are a plus, an addition. Namely for the more casual player to have some interesting & replayable content because let's face it: In the long run living story is keeping players in the game just for 1-2 weeks and then you're done with the new map and the game heavily lacks content. Almost since years it's the same thing, a ls episode is being released, there is a new map, players are playing story, explore the map, playing the meta several times and then they're done. Achievement hunters - not a big majority - will stay longer and if the map has a good potential for easy gold per hour it'll turn out a farming map for the "insane" crowd which will result in another, previous farming map being less grinded.Average Joe isn't pleased with that. He is getting some free content every 3-4 months, yeah and he will consume it especially due to the reason that it is free of cost. But if this content doesn't keep him in the game he won't spend money at all and in the long run Anet cannot maintain this game. It's just not profitable that way, that's business and what cost a lot of employees their job at the beginning of this year.

Arah explorable was the endgame ages ago but u can still create a group and try

Lots of players still can't get through Arah P1-P4 although we have a huge amount of power creep. I'm regularly helping groups through otherwise they would be lost and as in the past not being able to kill Lupicus. Not to mention other bosses/mechanics on the way.

[maddoctor.2738]

@Ayrilana.1396 said:

@maddoctor.2738 said:

@"xenon.3264" said:No. The game aimed to player from other mobs who were bored to hell of raids and vertical progression.

Let's not twist facts here. Explorable modes for dungeons and the Orr temple events were aimed directly at players that like Raids in other mmorpgs.

Is there a source? I’m not saying you’re wrong (or right) but I’m curious

Here you go:http://pc.gamespy.com/pc/guild-wars-2/1223876p1.html

"The 'explorable' dungeon modes are definitely for the more hardcore crowd,"These explorable dungeons are meant to attract the crowd that would normally be raiding in other MMOs.

It's a bit clear that explorable modes of dungeons were aimed at the demographic/crowd of Raiders, no double meanings there or that they were for everyone or anything like that. They were for the Hardcore crowd and for those that are normally raiding in other MMOs. Meaning the game was attracting RAIDERS

The part

also noting that the world bosses outside the dungeons serve the same purposeIs also interesting

Also, for some months after release the dungeons of Guild Wars 2 were compared to WoW raids in difficulty. Even major reviews were reporting that the dungeons were really hard. Of course the players (and the developers) were using a brand new combat system and we were all newbies. Once we got experienced and found the "stack in a corner" meta they all became easy, but for a time explorable dungeons were for the hardcore crowd and that's the exact demographic they were aimed at.

[Astralporing.1957]

@maddoctor.2738They later explained on the beta forums (because people asked - i have asked as well), that they didn't really mean the dungeons will be only for a small subset of the community, only that they will be harder than the open world events and the story mode, and they will require some preparation.

I don't remember the exact wording and i can't give you the quote, unfortunately. I have tried to look for it for the last few years, but unfortunately it doesn't seem like the stuff got archived in any way. It is possible my memory is faulty, but i don't think so - i was quite concerned about this matter then, and i kept asking until i saw few answers that satisfied me. And I am 100% certain that the answers that you would have liked would not have satisfied me at all.

[maddoctor.2738]

@Astralporing.1957 said:@"maddoctor.2738"They later explained on the beta forums (because people asked - i have asked as well), that they didn't really mean the dungeons will be only for a small subset of the community, only that they will be harder than the open world events and the story mode, and they will require some preparation.

Does it matter? The game was sold and marketed to include content for specific demographic of Raiders and Ascalonian Catacombs back in the beta was considered harder than a lot of Raids in WoW. Yes you could death-rush it, but that wasn't in any way fun or enjoyable.

I was there and remember the outrage towards the extreme difficulty of AC, and I was there on release to see the comments about the difficulty of explorable dungeons. Guild Wars 2 reviews of the time also confirm that dungeons were really really hard. I was there when a guild broke up because they couldn't kill Giganticus Lupicus and I'm sure the vast majority of casual players still struggle with that fight even after all the power creep. That and Simin were the best fights in the vanilla game.

Also, I was there reading a vast amount of posts, asking for an EASIER MODE for dungeons, something that never actually happened.In the end that "preparation" and "coordination" that dungeons required boiled down to "stack and use full damage gear", and a few well placed reflect skills.

[Astralporing.1957]

You forget that the initial posts were due to people doing dungeons at their advertised level, in a mix of blue and green random gear. As soon as people started doing them with exotic-geared level 80's, complains practically stopped.

AC done by level 35 characters in greens are still quite hard for an average player.

[maddoctor.2738]

@Astralporing.1957 said:You forget that the initial posts were due to people doing dungeons at their advertised level, in a mix of blue and green random gear. As soon as people started doing them with exotic-geared level 80's, complains practically stopped.

AC done by level 35 characters in greens are still quite hard for an average player.

No the complaints did not stop once they got fully geared with exotics and at level 80. There are posts asking for easy modes for dungeons way after the release of the game. And besides, Arah, Honor of the Waves and Crucible of Eternity were always level 80 content, still got complaints for those. It wasn't gear that allowed players to beat dungeons, it was tactics, the bland and boring, stack in a corner, stack might, damage fast, kill, rinse repeat. It was horrible that the most efficient tactic in the game, was also the dumbest.

[Astralporing.1957]

@maddoctor.2738 said:

@"Astralporing.1957" said:You forget that the initial posts were due to people doing dungeons at their advertised level, in a mix of blue and green random gear. As soon as people started doing them with exotic-geared level 80's, complains practically stopped.

AC done by level 35 characters in greens are still quite hard for an average player.

No the complaints did not stop once they got fully geared with exotics and at level 80. There are posts asking for easy modes for dungeons way after the release of the game. And besides, Arah, Honor of the Waves and Crucible of Eternity were always level 80 content, still got complaints for those. It wasn't gear that allowed players to beat dungeons, it was tactics, the bland and boring, stack in a corner, stack might, damage fast, kill, rinse repeat. It was horrible that the most efficient tactic in the game, was also the dumbest.They were also made significantly easier to compensate for the "no ressing in combat" changes. I remember doing Subject Alpha before and after that patch, and it was a completely different experience.

(also, the best noob strategy for Lupicus, one that was very safe with high success rate? Just range him from safe distance, ressing when necessary. Stacking was a guaranteed wipe for 90% of the pug groups. Most Arah horror stories i saw was from grups that read a guide and didn't realize the guides assumed certain skill and organization level. Pugs that didn't read those guides had it actually better. Even if some paths could take up to 3 hours)