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The Voice and the Claw of the Fallen (spoiler!)


GWMO.4785

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The new strike is entertaining.

Mechanic wise, it's similar to some raid boss fight steps. It's far to short to compare it to any actual raid boss when faced by raid experienced players.

Punishment wise, it's far below raids meaning you have a lot more leeway for making positiong errors, face tanking damage, ingoring mechanics, etc.

Overall it's a good way of showing players: this is what it looks like to take on 10 man content in this game, you just might need to pay attention to mechanics more. I like it.

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@"GWMO.4785" said:Maybe. I mean there are lot of people being bored of fractals, while there is a large group that doesnt want to bother with raids duo to w/e the reason. I think strike missions really fits into that niche place. Personally i like endgame content and thus it adds up to my daily "to-do" list.

I think that's mainly down to us not getting any content, rather than a flaw with Fractal's in of themselves.Fractal CM's are imo the best content in the game, but we haven't gotten a new one in almost 3 years, and there are only two of them.Doing the same two pieces of 10-15 minute content more or less daily for 3+ years will get quite boring, even if it's by far and wide the best content in the game.

Even normal Fractals it seems like we won't be getting any new ones for a year, if ever again, which, considering it's been a year since the last one will mean even if we ever get another one it will probably have been around 2 years since that last piece of ~10 minute content.

Raids are dying for much the same reasons.The content is fantastic, some of the best in the game, and people aren't tired of that type of content, just of doing that exact same content over and over and over without anything new on the horizon.

Those dropping populations are a symptom of too little content, and the right approach to counter that would have been to develop more of it, rather than concluding dropping populations means lack of interest and therefor developing less.

And while I agree that Strikes are a neat thing to fill a casual group content niche and I'm glad they exist, as they are something I've been suggesting for over 3 years I think, they aren't a replacement by any means, since even these new harder ones take maybe 5 minutes to figure out and then beat with a 3-5 player group of somewhat proficient players.It's not the same as forming and then getting together as community regularly to play together, forming bonds which keep players engaged in the game.

Even if they may eventually serve as transitional content into endgame for some players, it does seem like there won't be anything left to transition into by the time the game gets to that place, considering how completely abandoned every piece of endgame and their communities are, since years at this point.

On top of all of that with have the Build Loadout fiasco and what a tremendous hit that was for the hardcore community, just crushing the QoL which that content requires, making it quite annoying and frustrating to play, when players where already just barely holding on in the face of no new content, it's not surprising players for that content are falling off more rapidly than ever and jumping ship.But saying people are just bored of them is imo a bit reductive. We would love to keep playing, but with no new content and the game being actively made worse for us in favour of monetization, yea, we are quite "bored" of that.

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For what it is, it does the job and can be enjoyable. Ive been in early pugs that failed while my semi-organized guild group got gold pretty easily on the first try (about 1.5 minutes left on the gold timer).

For me, the logical next step would be to add some kind of repeatable challenge mote - or, even better, scalable difficulty. Strike missions are something they can obviously add to the game more easily than full raids. If they take the extra step to add truly difficult tiers above and beyond what we have now, then they would have a sustainable model for challenging content that they could also update on a reasonable schedule.

Ive been saying for years that raids needed more difficulty levels to appeal to larger groups. The same is true of strike missions - just in the other direction - and it would be a much more sustainable content model in GW2. With three levels, the lowest being what we have in strike missions now - the medium being what we see in most raid encounters now - and the most difficult being for only the most skilled of players, strike missions could actually accomplish what they said raids would (but never really did) years ago. And with 1-3 rotating fights with each living story drop, it would give players at multiple levels something to look forward to.

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Since there's barely more than 1 lfg at the same time - if there's ever one - in EU I don't think we're on a logical step here. Even the easier version in Grothmar isn't populated and once you're in a group you see a lot of people with raid titles or fractal gods which is no surprise at all because those are the ones interested in any kind of instanced content they can get so far.

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@Vinceman.4572 said:Since there's barely more than 1 lfg at the same time - if there's ever one - in EU I don't think we're on a logical step here. Even the easier version in Grothmar isn't populated and once you're in a group you see a lot of people with raid titles or fractal gods which is no surprise at all because those are the ones interested in any kind of instanced content they can get so far.

I wondered aswell and started own groups which filled within seconds even when nothing was in lfg at all. Either the lfg is full of lurkers or i got really lucky with my lfg 4times in a row.

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@Nephalem.8921 said:

@Vinceman.4572 said:Since there's barely more than 1 lfg at the same time - if there's ever one - in EU I don't think we're on a logical step here. Even the easier version in Grothmar isn't populated and once you're in a group you see a lot of people with raid titles or fractal gods which is no surprise at all because those are the ones interested in any kind of instanced content they can get so far.

I wondered aswell and started own groups which filled within seconds even when nothing was in lfg at all. Either the lfg is full of lurkers or i got really lucky with my lfg 4times in a row.

It's probably a mix of multiple factors, very similar to dungeons.

The best guess is:

  • as usual most players are unwilling to actually start their own groups but prefer to join, which leads to groups filling up quickly
  • there probably is semi static groups just filling up, which again leads to groups being full very fast
  • I doubt there is many statics since the content is not hard enough, but those too would need to be ommited

Going by my own experience (I've only run the strike mission 1nce so far on wendnesday), we went in with 7 raiders and filled up the last 3 spots with randoms from LFG (because why not, the strike doesn't sacle so any additional dps is beneficial). The squad filled immediately. Interesting enough, also a reason to NOT implement scaling based on player count, since we would likely not taken a dice roll on randoms if the content had scaled up.

Strikes as they are right now are in an interesting place. They are not interesting enough to hold the hardcore player bases attention, but are still to difficult for open world players with no instanced content experience. The rewards are lackluster at best. I guess it will take a while to see how the community adapts to them.

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I had the chance to play Strike today and it was kind of nice. This is not going to ever be a popular opinion but I think they should have made raids like this when they first started them times ago. Hitting people with Vale Guardian AND the abysmal rewards right as everyone was cracking down on HoT being both too difficult and not rewarding enough was a huge mistake, only topped by the immense gap in content releases. The mode's population would probably be immensely higher by now and I very much doubt it would have seen as much backlash if we only ever had "Strike Missions". Legendary armor would have not been as controversial and all in all the playerbase would not see the mode as a divide among the playerbase (no such divide is seen with fractals for example because of the tiered structure). I think both raiders and non-raiders have not gotten much out of raids, even myself having played every raid several times and collected most skins/armor.

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@maxwelgm.4315 said:I think you misunderstood raids. The whole point of it was to be a challenging content. Which obviously came with its own rewards, but that was practically irrelevant. It was more about the content itself. Or at least that was the idea when they where first released. Unfortunately, the community did their usual whiny crying. And the difficulty got toned down as the power creep increased. Personally i find this a real shame as it takes away flavor of raids. But hey who am i compared to the average wimpy casuals right? Regardless, it is what it is now. And there for i find strike missions fitting nicely in that niche spot atm. its very casual friendly while it is slightly more engaging. And well.. its daily. So not complaining here.

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The content is nice generally as some one who has done roughly over half the raid wings multiple times (slowly working to finish the last few) strikes or at least this one is nice. Its certainly easier for players to instantly recognize when you need to do something (break the defiance bar when they stand back to back) and adapt on the fly. If players know semi decent optimal rotations its also quite easy to get gold reward.

I think the content is a good introduction to 10 man group content but its not the full experience of raid difficulty. Some key points that you need in raids are left unnecessary in strike missions with probable cause (no one wants to wait 20 mins for a kiter etc). That said experienced groups especially if they have a healer will just face tank damage and dps things down. While players new to the experience might have to learn how to actually avoid and do mechanics as their dps wont be optimal and their healing likely wont be as good.

Ive seen people employing different strats but it seems the best way is to just dps 1 down to about 15% then do the same to the other then try to clap both when they are in the middle.Also helps if both sub squads have at least might / quickness providers but alacrity is not needed. :)

Overall i love the back to back animations these guys do i have to say some times i wish we didnt break the bar so fast so i can watch them do those sick animations lol. I think the ice construct will have something similar with the snavir on his shoulder that we saw in the trailer.

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@GWMO.4785 said:

@"maxwelgm.4315" said:I think you misunderstood raids. The whole point of it was to be a challenging content. Which obviously came with its own rewards, but that was practically irrelevant. It was more about the content itself. Or at least that was the idea when they where first released. Unfortunately, the community did their usual whiny crying. And the difficulty got toned down as the power creep increased. Personally i find this a real shame as it takes away flavor of raids. But hey who am i compared to the average wimpy casuals right? Regardless, it is what it is now. And there for i find strike missions fitting nicely in that niche spot atm. its very casual friendly while it is slightly more engaging. And well.. its daily. So not complaining here.

Oh I know that was the point, sorry for not making this clear. I'm actually saying they should never have had this point to begin with. I like challenging content in other games and in general, just don't think it ever had a place here. GW2 has an amazing learning curve and high skill ceiling as seen by the gap in raider benchmark vs average player DPS (same goes in PvP performance), but it's just not developed with that audience ever in mind. Even when it was, the backlash was intense enough that it might have been worth it to just have released Strikes all along. HoT was an overall mess regarding the playerbase reception when it first released and Raids as "challenging content for niche players" were part of this no doubt (remember they also effectively butchered PvP by attempting it to be E-Sports at the same time).

Was it worth it? Well w123 were worth it the week each was released, w5 was extremely lackluster in amount of content but had quality, and now we have nothing in sight at all and no hopes since key people from the Fractal/Raids team left the company. So in long term I think raids were a pretty bad decision, with their current options being A) carrying on with the semi dead horse releasing raids at a snail's pace while diverting attention to Strikes, or B) taking them down the Dungeons path leaving a glaringly abandoned game mode with the 'intentional' legendary armor skins on top of it (which is why I think they'll go with A for at least a couple more mediocre wings).

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You forget that GW2 was intended to have challenging PvE content - explorable dungeons and other vanilla stuff just did not live up to the expectations. HoT finally rectified that issue. It's obvious that they have chosen yet another direction some time ago and we'll see how it turns out in the end, though I'm pretty much with Vinceman in not expecting Strikes to become a success story.

With regard to the current strike, I played it once and wasn't impressed. Boring, still faceroll easy and, of course, two blues and a green or so. With no new interesting content in the foreseeable future, I'll just follow others in the raid crowd and quit. ANet apparently isn't interested in retaining players like me anymore.

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@Yellow Rainbow.6142 said:I feel like new strike mission is almost perfect. I have been in fail group alot more than success kill. But, I am really enjoying it even fail attempt unlike raid is downright frustrating.

So whats the difference in wiping between a strike and a raid? What makes raids more frustrating to wipe at for you?

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@RaidsAreEasyAF.8652 said:

@"Yellow Rainbow.6142" said:I feel like new strike mission is almost perfect. I have been in fail group alot more than success kill. But, I am really enjoying it even fail attempt unlike raid is downright frustrating.

So whats the difference in wiping between a strike and a raid? What makes raids more frustrating to wipe at for you?Im geussing he means not killing fast enough to get the "golden chest". Otherwise i cant really see how one can fail this instance

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@RaidsAreEasyAF.8652 said:

@Yellow Rainbow.6142 said:I feel like new strike mission is almost perfect. I have been in fail group alot more than success kill. But, I am really enjoying it even fail attempt unlike raid is downright frustrating.

So whats the difference in wiping between a strike and a raid? What makes raids more frustrating to wipe at for you?

The lack of consequences from the commander for being bad and still getting silver rewards.

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@Shikaru.7618 said:

@Yellow Rainbow.6142 said:I feel like new strike mission is almost perfect. I have been in fail group alot more than success kill. But, I am really enjoying it even fail attempt unlike raid is downright frustrating.

So whats the difference in wiping between a strike and a raid? What makes raids more frustrating to wipe at for you?

The lack of consequences from the commander for being bad and still getting silver rewards.

Then your not wiping since that is everyone dying.

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