How do you all feel about Strike Missions?

[SkyShroud.2865]

It is basically a nerfed version of meta event. I bet they think that having meta event is not sustainable in long run so they decided a mini version like this.

[Sarrs.4831]

I'd like to see the group-forming tech moved to dungeons, considering how trivialized they are with current power levels, but I don't expect it.

I don't know; I don't see it having the player retention it needs to be a strong mainstay. Will I be interested in doing this content often; probably not, though it'll depend on the rewards. I'm not sure where it'll fit in the game in general with no big hook like legendary armor or ring.

I hope they do well, though. If they expand on Shiverpeaks Pass, that could be a lot of fun. The whole 'part of the open world' element of the design really reminds me of GW1 missions which is a flavor that I hope they work with. Tight time challenges with Challenge Motes could be a great way for the game to tell players 'hey, you're ready to do raids' too.

Cautiously optimistic.

[maddoctor.2738]

@"Sarrs.4831" said:Tight time challenges with Challenge Motes could be a great way for the game to tell players 'hey, you're ready to do raids' too.

I'm waiting for the time Strikes will tell players "you are ready for T1 fractals" because we haven't reached that level yet. Maybe the challenge mote will be T1 fractal level or maybe Ascalonian Catacombs level. Baby steps. Right now all the strike tells players is "you can go play in Core Tyria just fine".

[Sarrs.4831]

@"maddoctor.2738" said:I'm waiting for the time Strikes will tell players "you are ready for T1 fractals" because we haven't reached that level yet. Maybe the challenge mote will be T1 fractal level or maybe Ascalonian Catacombs level. Baby steps. Right now all the strike tells players is "you can go play in Core Tyria just fine".

...Are there really people who aren't ready for T1 fractals?

[maddoctor.2738]

@Sarrs.4831 said:

@"maddoctor.2738" said:I'm waiting for the time Strikes will tell players "you are ready for T1 fractals" because we haven't reached that level yet. Maybe the challenge mote will be T1 fractal level or maybe Ascalonian Catacombs level. Baby steps. Right now all the strike tells players is "you can go play in Core Tyria just fine".

...Are there really people who aren't ready for T1 fractals?

Those that fail the Strike :dizzy:

[Fueki.4753]

@"Sarrs.4831" said:...Are there really people who aren't ready for T1 fractals?

I've seen some people fail at T1 fractals, mainly the original Mai Trin and Charr Siege fractals though.Shattered Observatory is hard for "Newcomers", as well.

[Shikaru.7618]

@Sarrs.4831 said:

@"maddoctor.2738" said:I'm waiting for the time Strikes will tell players "you are ready for T1 fractals" because we haven't reached that level yet. Maybe the challenge mote will be T1 fractal level or maybe Ascalonian Catacombs level. Baby steps. Right now all the strike tells players is "you can go play in Core Tyria just fine".

...Are there really people who aren't ready for T1 fractals?

You have to realize that the people who are bad at the game are really really bad. I've watched streamers playing gw2 who keyboard turn, cant keep the thing they're fighting targetted because they're just spamming mouse clicks, which causes them to stop auto attacking their target. People who press every single button they've got on cd without any knowledge of what the skill does. Eg. Using epi with no adds around, using condi clear when they have no conditions. Those are the types that struggle in the strikes and t1 and theres a non trivial amount of those players in gw2.

[Fueki.4753]

@Shikaru.7618 said:keyboard turnWhere exactly is the problem with that?I'm significantly better with clicking skills and moving with the keyboard than I am with cramping my fingers, trying to press the number keys.

[Vinceman.4572]

@Fueki.4753 said:

@Shikaru.7618 said:keyboard turnWhere exactly is the problem with that?I'm significantly better with clicking skills and moving with the keyboard than I am with cramping my fingers, trying to press the number keys.

There's no problem with that but you are aeons slower than ppl using all/almost all skills with the keyboard.

[Shikaru.7618]

@Fueki.4753 said:

@Shikaru.7618 said:keyboard turnWhere exactly is the problem with that?I'm significantly better with clicking skills and moving with the keyboard than I am with cramping my fingers, trying to press the number keys.

That's fine if it works for you. I dont care how you play as long as you can produce results in my group. If you're standing still in the middle of the arena on Matthias with corruption on you because you're using keyboard turning slowly panning the camera looking for an open fountain, we're going to have a problem. If you have a green bomb on sabetha and are too slow to throw because it takes you extra clicks, it's a problem.

[maddoctor.2738]

@Fueki.4753 said:

@"Shikaru.7618" said:keyboard turnWhere exactly is the problem with that?I'm significantly better with clicking skills and moving with the keyboard than I am with cramping my fingers, trying to press the number keys.

Keyboard turning is when you turn your character using the keyboard. By default keyboard turning is disabled in Guild Wars 2 as pressing the movement keys allows proper strafe movement, even you hold any mouse button, that doesn't change. If you want to "experience" true keyboard turning and see what it is, go into your input, remove A and D from Strafe Left and Strafe Right respectively and add them to Turn Left/ Turn Right. It's a relic from the long past and I'm not sure anyone is even using that option. Even if someone might want to use it, they'd have to enter the options screen to do so.

[Astralporing.1957]

@maddoctor.2738 said:

@Fueki.4753 said:

@Shikaru.7618 said:keyboard turnWhere exactly is the problem with that?I'm significantly better with clicking skills and moving with the keyboard than I am with cramping my fingers, trying to press the number keys.

Keyboard turning is when you turn your character using the keyboard. By default keyboard turning is disabled in Guild Wars 2 as pressing the movement keys allows proper strafe movement, even you hold any mouse button, that doesn't change.It's not disabled. It's simply mapped by default at Q and E

[Xar.6279]

At my first try I was kind of negatively surprised about its difficulty. It looked too easy (took about 1 minute to kill it and didn't hit with any mechanic).While strike missions had to learn people how to play.

But doing Strike Mission with pugs is totally different experience. Also I see it as pretty good alternative to golem. To train your rotation in battle.

I believe next SM's will be harder. Maybe some CM mode. Or tiers. And it should be definitely renamed from 5-10 to 1-10.

But after all it fulfilled its task - after few minutes of doing strike mission we went to raid xD

[maddoctor.2738]

@Astralporing.1957 said:It's not disabled. It's simply mapped by default at Q and E

I admit I didn't remember that keyboard turning being on by default, mostly because Q and E are very good keys to use for more exciting things.

[Sykper.6583]

I use a bit of a hybrid of keyboard movement and mouse turning.

Depends if I'm eating/drinking anything :)

I don't necessarily know if it's a good idea to have the upper bar of mechanical difficulty brought low by players who aren't able to use both a mouse and a keyboard at once. I do know the average player, as a whole, in the game is where Arenanet thought the current Strike Mission DPS would be. Aka I still think they are fine-tuning this strike mission since they can likely observe how many people participate, how many deaths, who clears, what rewards, etc.

It's a Litmus test.

[Talindra.4958]

I think the strike is good.its good thinking to make the difficulty such that it isn't punishable for unprepared people. however, if reward can be adjusted such that people will return to repeat more frequently and that the map will not become abandon very quickly. eg. tokens reward for each completion and certain amount of this token can be somehow link to Li and later strike mission can be slightly higher difficulty with greater tokens reward.But ofc this token will be completely useless for current raiders not unless it has other nice exchange use.

[Firebeard.1746]

Strikes will fail in their goal of bringing more players into raids. They built raids for bored people in t4 CM mode fractals, not for players new to the game. In addition to mechanics more difficult than other MMOs, the gear requirements are kind of crazy. It literally takes months to build an ascended set for a given role (or even exotic set with +conc, but tbh, the exotic gears with selectable stats are less accessible than some ascended), so just jumping and learning them doesn't really get you anywhere. Gearing for raids (at least in WoW, the other MMO I played) takes maybe a month and a lot of your gear can often be shared between roles if you cover more than 1 base on a single character.

They should tweak the overtuned raids (Salvation Pass I can definitely say is), make the raid lobby like the PVP lobby, where you can freely pick a build/stats. Make it so your gear setup only matters in CM mode of raids. If the elites cry too much, buff their CM modes' difficulty so they can feel super uber. Otherwise newer players wanting to get into raids will try a few times, miserably fail because of support roles missing +conc or even due to mechanics that punish a single player dying too heavily and they just can't find enough experienced players.

[MithranArkanere.8957]

I have 1 main problem with them: trolls can force you to stay inside a public instance they are purposely boycotting.

For example, they can start the instance when there's just 3 people including you, and if you leave and re-enter, you end up in the same map again.
Then you will have to wait until the instance is completed to be able to enter a new instance.

[CptAurellian.9537]

@Firebeard.1746 said:Strikes will fail in their goal of bringing more players into raids. They built raids for bored people in t4 CM mode fractals, not for players new to the game. In addition to mechanics more difficult than other MMOs, the gear requirements are kind of crazy. It literally takes months to build an ascended set for a given role (or even exotic set with +conc, but tbh, the exotic gears with selectable stats are less accessible than some ascended), so just jumping and learning them doesn't really get you anywhere. Gearing for raids (at least in WoW, the other MMO I played) takes maybe a month and a lot of your gear can often be shared between roles if you cover more than 1 base on a single character.

They should tweak the overtuned raids (Salvation Pass I can definitely say is), make the raid lobby like the PVP lobby, where you can freely pick a build/stats. Make it so your gear setup only matters in CM mode of raids. If the elites cry too much, buff their CM modes' difficulty so they can feel super uber. Otherwise newer players wanting to get into raids will try a few times, miserably fail because of support roles missing +conc or even due to mechanics that punish a single player dying too heavily and they just can't find enough experienced players.

It's almost amusing that people still manage to get everything wrong about raids in GW2.

[maddoctor.2738]

@Firebeard.1746 said:Strikes will fail in their goal of bringing more players into raids.

Although they did state that's their goal (stepping stone to Raids) this first Strike Mission fails miserably at that because it's only gonna prepare players for the less difficult dungeons, T1 fractals and playing in the expansion zones, as all those require more skill and effort than the mission.

@"Talindra.4958" said:its good thinking to make the difficulty such that it isn't punishable for unprepared people.

Good thinking to make this group content less challenging than fighting a story boss? Mordremoth, Balthazar and a lot others, have actual mechanics and are more challenging than this joke of a boss and this is supposed to be "group" content, while the others are solo story bosses.

But the biggest fail of the Strike Mission is that it was created (supposedly) by the Raid team. The open world/living world teams make way more challenging content than this so it's puzzling why they used the Raid team to make this low effort mini-dungeon.

[Vinceman.4572]

Played the strike mission for the first time today with 9 pugs randomly joining. Literally a joke. That has nothing to do with an encounter. The stationary mob is weaker than many other open world bosses in terms of attacks. Even if it will evolve dungeons are harder than this creation.

[Fueki.4753]

@"maddoctor.2738" said:But the biggest fail of the Strike Mission is that it was created (supposedly) by the Raid team. The open world/living world teams make way more challenging content than this so it's puzzling why they used the Raid team to make this low effort mini-dungeon.Maybe the raid team has even lower expectations towards casual players than raiders have.And don't forget that some players simply can't pass this "simple" Strike Mission.

Also, the story fights are still more forgiving than this "simple" Strike Mission, given that you can keep reviving to go whittle down the boss in the story.In fact, that's the only reason why I was able to beat the herald, Balthazar on the Spire and Caudecus (both versions) without help.I still need groups to deal with Mordremoth though.

[Vinceman.4572]

@"Fueki.4753" said:And don't forget that some players simply can't pass this "simple" Strike Mission.

I doubt that you can fail the strike mission with 10 people all starting the fight together. Maybe the squad wipes the first time because they haven't understood to avoid the little snowballs and stack next to the boss but once you have figured that out you cannot fail any longer.

[maddoctor.2738]

@Fueki.4753 said:

@"maddoctor.2738" said:But the biggest fail of the Strike Mission is that it was created (supposedly) by the Raid team. The open world/living world teams make way more challenging content than this so it's puzzling why they used the Raid team to make this low effort mini-dungeon.Maybe the raid team has even lower expectations towards casual players than raiders have.

You mean lower expectations than the living world team, as the game has been more challenging ever since Season 1 started back in 2013. Even the Molten Facility living world instance released back in April 2013 was more challenging and exciting than this one. The 2 major boss fights had way more mechanics and fresh ideas than this so called "stepping stone for Raids". This strike is a relic of 2012 and it's puzzling that Path of Fire is a requirement for it, meaning elite specs, gear combinations and easier access to ascended are all included.

And don't forget that some players simply can't pass this "simple" Strike Mission.

Those players that can't pass this Strike Mission will have a very hard time playing around any of the living world maps or expansion maps as those are significantly harder. And further, not every piece of content should be doable by every player. Drop offs will always exist, because skill levels differ, it's not like the Strike Mission is needed for anything.

[CptAurellian.9537]

Is it actually possible to fail the strike mission, if not on purpose? Just played it for the first time and it's hilariously bad. The JP part is more difficult than the legendary trash mob at the end.