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How to make strike missions eye candy.


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So I thought of reasons why I personally don’t care about strike missions, or don’t want to invest as much time as I raid or do fractals or anything else in the game. And that is the rewards strike missions give.

I know people will say oh no not another reward post about strikes. However we all know rewards with strikes are the reason why veterans and new people won’t invest much time into strikes.

For example we know Mike Z states strikes as “stepping stone” to raids. So let’s begin here. When you step into raids are 32 slot bags something you need to go into raids? No. When you step into raids as a first time do you need skins to look pretty to go into a raid? No. The goal is to get the correct gear that you want to max out the most stats you can possibly get with your character into the highest endgame of content.

Worrying about skins is already teaching the community to care about how you look rather than doing what it takes to beat the strike/raid. After all the start of getting into a strike or raid is having correct gear and build for your class/elite specialization.

And I believe that is the reason why most people do not care because people want to get ready for a raid with strikes but can’t since it doesn’t provide anything valuable for a raid.

So here are my thoughts on what strikes can provide on the side of skins.

A new gear stat that is in between ascended and exotic. Since fractals provide ascended and raids provide ascended it’s easy to justify that another gear stat that is right below ascended to start raids is great for new players, or players starting to raid that don’t have ascended yet.

Ascended material drops to craft ascended pieces. For example elonian leather. if not those, mats to create grand master marks. Or grandmaster marks in itself so you purchase from the fractal lobby.

A strike mission currency to purchase the new gear stat that is in between ascended and exotic.

Ascended trinket drops. Since you can clearly get an ascended armor piece in t2 fractals. Maybe even t1. It’s easy to say the chance of getting an ascended trinket would be nice for new players.

A collection that will get you ether a full set of the new stat I already talked about or a ascended set. However the collection would evolve somewhat close to the envoy collection involving you to complete strike achievements for you to obtain the armor set.

I think if arenanet added one of these suggestions new players and veterans will put more time into strike missions. However the rewards now that you get with strikes, A lot of people don’t care to do the strike missions at all. I care as much as strike missions as dungeons, actually scratch that, I care about dungeons more since dungeons have runes that can only be obtained in a specific dungeon.

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I don't think new people don't do strikes because of the rewards. I think they don't do it because it is group-based lobby content and that is just simply not fun to some.

Rewards should be an extra, not the reason to play certain content. Fun is the thing that matters. Rewards are only means to limited replayability, once all the rewards are earned, people just ignore the content if it is inherently unfun to them.

Others will just not even bother to get the rewards if they deem the content unfun.

Edit: Just wanted to say: I'm not against adding more rewards to Strike Missions, just that they shouldn't be the sole reason someone does SMs.

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I think better rewards would encourage people to do them, despite it not quite being their scene. If the intention of this was to encourage people who don't normally raid or do fractals to try this harder organized group content, they need to provide more incentive to get them to do it. As it stands right now, someone may be on the fence about doing it and not absolutely hate it, but after the first wipe they may just never attempt it again because the rewards simply aren't there to encourage them to keep trying.

Also, I still want to try the new ones out, but I'm just not in a hurry and don't think I'll do them on a regular basis simply because the rewards are so weak. This one at least gives a mastery point and such which I want, but beyond doing them each one time I don't really know why I would want to continuously come back to them.

I don't see why they can't add some more elaborate vendor for currency or add some special tokens that drop from strike missions for the whole saga in general that encourages people to continuously do these strike missions.

Give them amalgamated loadstones as rewards, give them some other item needed to craft legendaries, create a vendor that sells special cosmetics like armor/weapons/infusions/(god forbid some in-game obtainable mount skin I know will never happen) that people can spend the tokens on from the strike missions. Give people incentive outside of the general experience.

If they relied solely on the experience the player has playing the content, then these episodes would be even shorter than they already are. As it is right now, a lot of people log on just to experience the story or do a few minor achievements and come back months later. The replayability and experience being better for some of these events would help retain some people, but adding better rewards seems like a low-resource investment to keep an even greater number of people invested in the content they create.

I think it's great they're adding in an alternate version of the Boreal weapons to Drakkar, even if the drop rate is so low most people will never see them. It's a step in the right direction.

That being said, I think they could also do to well to adopt that same token principle and have players be able to obtain some of these rare drop items guaranteed, just with consistent effort.

I'm not encouraging grindy gameplay, but I think adding a way for people to get what they want guaranteed by grinding in addition to rng drops is a good compromise. Some of these ultra rare infusions I've always wanted, like the one from Shatterer, I just stopped pursuing because the drop rate is so low and the timer is so long that I just don't see the point in going back and trying to do it. BUT, if I know that after a certain number of kills I can obtain enough tokens to get that infusion, it gives me a reason to go back regardless of what drops. Otherwise it's just some prestige item they spent who knows how long developing that only an extremely small selection of the playerbase will ever receive just for the sake of allowing people to feel like snowflakes or get insanely rich from having better luck. It feels like a waste of development time taking that approach.

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Well raids can be done with exotics which everyone basically gets as soon as they hit lvl 80, either via karma or tp or other means. Ascended trinkets and backitems are already obtainable via doing pof/hot, lws3 and lws4. Ascended gears are obtainable by crafting, fractals, raids. And I assume most players interested in ascended items already have those by now. You only need it once really.

I would rather see a strike currency instead where you can buy skins, shipments and such with from npc. Something that keeps usefull on the long term. Or just scrap items giving gold like fractals do.

Rng drops, pls no. After all those Grothmar strikes I am yet to receive that rng item still. And less and less players are going to do that strike mission as they have seen it enough. I do feel the nice strike mission seems to have better rewards compared to the others altho not sure what to do with all that map currency you cannot sell nor consume for volatile magic or exp.

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Someone recently made a really good suggestion to this.Rewards - would push more people to do strike as that is the main reason not many people do the contentWhy are fractals so popular? yes its fun too but also because doing dailies earn you gold

If strike was to implement a tome design like FFXIV where every day you play the content and gives you an X amount of tomes which you gather up enough to buy gearIf stike was to reward players with an item which you would gather over days through strike mission rewards which you can later exchange for ascended armor then more people would be interested in strike. Obviously scale the amount low acquire and high price for armor pieces

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@DoRi Silvia.4159 said:If strike was to implement a tome design like FFXIV where every day you play the content and gives you an X amount of tomes which you gather up enough to buy gearIf stike was to reward players with an item which you would gather over days through strike mission rewards which you can later exchange for ascended armor then more people would be interested in strike. Obviously scale the amount low acquire and high price for armor pieces

...you mean like Dungeons? Because we all know how that turned out...

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@Trise.2865 said:

@"DoRi Silvia.4159" said:If strike was to implement a tome design like FFXIV where every day you play the content and gives you an X amount of tomes which you gather up enough to buy gearIf stike was to reward players with an item which you would gather over days through strike mission rewards which you can later exchange for ascended armor then more people would be interested in strike. Obviously scale the amount low acquire and high price for armor pieces

...you mean like Dungeons? Because we all know how that turned out...

To be fair, if they would have supported dungeons and kept them going it -could- have been great. But, anet went "Its to hard to work on them and the team who made them left us so they are abandon ware now."

Which is why they still have bugs in them that have existed since launch, and i think thats anets biggest issue. They cant stick with one thing, they have to -always- try something new.

First it was fractals, then it was raids, now its strikes.

To the topic, i wouldnt mind a currency specific to strikes one could use to obtain the rewards unique to strikes. Currency obtained through every strike(at a lesser rate for the easy ones) so everyone could get the rewards eventually.

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@Aaralyna.3104 said:Well raids can be done with exotics which everyone basically gets as soon as they hit lvl 80, either via karma or tp or other means. Ascended trinkets and backitems are already obtainable via doing pof/hot, lws3 and lws4. Ascended gears are obtainable by crafting, fractals, raids. And I assume most players interested in ascended items already have those by now. You only need it once really.

I would rather see a strike currency instead where you can buy skins, shipments and such with from npc. Something that keeps usefull on the long term. Or just scrap items giving gold like fractals do.

Rng drops, pls no. After all those Grothmar strikes I am yet to receive that rng item still. And less and less players are going to do that strike mission as they have seen it enough. I do feel the nice strike mission seems to have better rewards compared to the others altho not sure what to do with all that map currency you cannot sell nor consume for volatile magic or exp.

The thing is this is talking about new players entering strikes and raids since after all it is designed for players who haven't raided before in gw2. New players do not have ascended items. However ascended items do not have to be the rewards for the strikes but, We all agree arenanet needs to add more valuable rewards, and these ingots and few leather scraps are not worth it to new and veteran players.

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@Raknar.4735 said:I don't think new people don't do strikes because of the rewards. I think they don't do it because it is group-based lobby content and that is just simply not fun to some.

Rewards should be an extra, not the reason to play certain content. Fun is the thing that matters. Rewards are only means to limited replayability, once all the rewards are earned, people just ignore the content if it is inherently unfun to them.

Others will just not even bother to get the rewards if they deem the content unfun.

Edit: Just wanted to say: I'm not against adding more rewards to Strike Missions, just that they shouldn't be the sole reason someone does SMs.

To think that strike missions aren't fun is truly a disappointment. I do agree that people do not like instanced content, but to say that people won't try the strike at all because it's instanced means arenanet needs to make a reason for people to want to do this instanced content.

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@Ayrilana.1396 said:Strikes can often not be fun because the quality of players that you get varies so widely. You can get players that make the strike go smoothly and quickly or you can get players that make it drag out or even fail. Adding rewards won’t improve this.

Strikes not bing fun because of having bad players shouldn’t be the reason of why you don’t like it. So is dhuum cm not fun because dhuum cm is hard to pug? Is qadim 1 cm not fun because it’s hard to pug? How bout fractal cms, Those not fun?

Just because some players are bad doesn’t make strikes content in itself not fun to do. It’s called the “stepping stone” to raids so that new players can “start” raiding. Which means pugs will be bad. To simply get angry that your not carried through strikes or that strikes are arent a breeze cause of new players shouldn’t be the reason to not like strikes.

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@Ayrilana.1396 said:Strikes can often not be fun because the quality of players that you get varies so widely. You can get players that make the strike go smoothly and quickly or you can get players that make it drag out or even fail. Adding rewards won’t improve this.

But adding rewards will help bring vet players into the system where they do it because they actually want ot need something that drops.Less skilled players will exist in every mode and although it will not fix that by adding rewards, it will bring in a lot of experienced players to the table.Sadly Strike missions are pretty quiet most of the time in lfg and people are still mostly doing grothmar ... yes it's the easiest but also has good chance of drops of expensive items.

Definitely need better rewards to spice up the mission and actually a purpose of doing them

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@blambidy.3216 said:

@Ayrilana.1396 said:Strikes can often not be fun because the quality of players that you get varies so widely. You can get players that make the strike go smoothly and quickly or you can get players that make it drag out or even fail. Adding rewards won’t improve this.

Strikes not bing fun because of having bad players shouldn’t be the reason of why you don’t like it. So is dhuum cm not fun because dhuum cm is hard to pug? Is qadim 1 cm not fun because it’s hard to pug? How bout fractal cms, Those not fun?

It shouldn’t be the reason but it is.

Just because some players are bad doesn’t make strikes content in itself not fun to do. It’s called the “stepping stone” to raids so that new players can “start” raiding. Which means pugs will be bad. To simply get angry that your not carried through strikes or that strikes are arent a breeze cause of new players shouldn’t be the reason to not like strikes.

I wasn’t talking about the strike missions themselves. If you’ve ever done a raid with terrible players, you’d realize how they can ruin an otherwise enjoyable experience.

It is the stepping stone but there are players who are not making the effort to treat it as such. They do sub-auto attack DPS, fail mechanics over and over, don’t listen, and so on.

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@Ayrilana.1396 said:

@Ayrilana.1396 said:Strikes can often not be fun because the quality of players that you get varies so widely. You can get players that make the strike go smoothly and quickly or you can get players that make it drag out or even fail. Adding rewards won’t improve this.

Strikes not bing fun because of having bad players shouldn’t be the reason of why you don’t like it. So is dhuum cm not fun because dhuum cm is hard to pug? Is qadim 1 cm not fun because it’s hard to pug? How bout fractal cms, Those not fun?

It shouldn’t be the reason but it is.

Just because some players are bad doesn’t make strikes content in itself not fun to do. It’s called the “stepping stone” to raids so that new players can “start” raiding. Which means pugs will be bad. To simply get angry that your not carried through strikes or that strikes are arent a breeze cause of new players shouldn’t be the reason to not like strikes.

I wasn’t talking about the strike missions themselves. If you’ve ever done a raid with terrible players, you’d realize how they can ruin an otherwise enjoyable experience.

It is the stepping stone but there are players who are not making the effort to treat it as such. They do sub-auto attack DPS, fail mechanics over and over, don’t listen, and so on.

Agreed that truly doesn’t make any content fun. Hopefully the community will understand that you do have to use a proper build and learn and follow mechanics to finish the strikes.

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I'm always confused at comments talking about strikes being for "new players". There are dungeons, there are low level fractals, there is an entire game plus two full expansions and 3 living world seasons worth of content, 2 full seasons and 1 with only two maps, but it's there. Yet we are talking about strikes being for "new players". Why is it that the Icebrood Saga neglects the rest of the game and treats the players as if they started playing the game here? Is that why the overall challenge and difficulty of the Saga so far is this low? To prepare new players for the... expansions, expansions that they need to buy to play the Saga in the first place.

And playing all that previous content will award you more than enough Ascended items of all types, be it season currencies to buy trinkets, Ascended armor and weapons from achievements, enough materials to level your crafting and craft ascended yourself, drops from fractals and so on. There is absolutely no reason to create a new gear tier between exotic and ascended, the difference between them is already minimal. We don't need more gear tiers, Strikes need better monetary rewards so they are content that can be repeated.

Can we stop treating the Icebrood Saga as Guild Wars 3, a completely new game for completely new players? Start treating it as content released for a 7 year game, content released -after- 2 expansions? The game didn't launch on September 17, 2019, but on August 28, 2012, yet Arenanet keeps treating it as if it launched 5 months ago.

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@blambidy.3216 said:Agreed that truly doesn’t make any content fun. Hopefully the community will understand that you do have to use a proper build and learn and follow mechanics to finish the strikes.

The people Arenanet want to appeal with strikes already didn't do that for fractals when staying in their casual bubble. So why would they start now with strikes when the reward structure is far worse and there's just an empty room, one encounter plus zero lore? The actual strike is way too hard for Average Joe and that won't change; same with Boneskinner that almost all pugs are doing with overhealing a strategy our Average Joe has no idea of.Strikes just are a huge waste especially with their current reward structure. They rather cover a confession Anet had to make in not developing proper content. Imagine a fractal offensive with 3 new fractals and a decently made announcement/marketing thing. This would have helped a lot more since T1 is easy enough for players to get into challenging content, those who stay have the higher tiers with progression and the veterans get their T4 and maybe a cm.

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@"maddoctor.2738" said:I'm always confused at comments talking about strikes being for "new players". There are dungeons, there are low level fractals, there is an entire game plus two full expansions and 3 living world seasons worth of content, 2 full seasons and 1 with only two maps, but it's there. Yet we are talking about strikes being for "new players". Why is it that the Icebrood Saga neglects the rest of the game and treats the players as if they started playing the game here? Is that why the overall challenge and difficulty of the Saga so far is this low? To prepare new players for the... expansions, expansions that they need to buy to play the Saga in the first place.

And playing all that previous content will award you more than enough Ascended items of all types, be it season currencies to buy trinkets, Ascended armor and weapons from achievements, enough materials to level your crafting and craft ascended yourself, drops from fractals and so on. There is absolutely no reason to create a new gear tier between exotic and ascended, the difference between them is already minimal. We don't need more gear tiers, Strikes need better monetary rewards so they are content that can be repeated.

Can we stop treating the Icebrood Saga as Guild Wars 3, a completely new game for completely new players? Start treating it as content released for a 7 year game, content released -after- 2 expansions? The game didn't launch on September 17, 2019, but on August 28, 2012, yet Arenanet keeps treating it as if it launched 5 months ago.

I was saying rewards as examples not that those exact rewards will make these people play strikes more. We all know the true problem with strikes is definitely the rewards so the agreement is there with everyone however, the community does have to come up with the reward that would be pleasing to everyone to do more strikes.

Your saying stop acting like ice brood saga is is a whole new game that’s only for new players. But tell me where in ice brood saga that it’s meant for veterans? Veterans don’t have these problems killing strikes. Veterans don’t have gear or build problems to finish them. Veterans barely care about ice brood saga in the first place. Also mike z and arenanets vision is to bridge the gap for people to get into raids. So the community is in the correct mindset that it’s for new players. Since anyone who spends much more time studying and playing the game already have killed a raid before. The players who don’t are youngins in the game and still need much development. So to think ice brood saga isn’t designed for new players is yikes in itself.

To say there’s dungeons for new players... have you not played gw2 the last few years? When have core dungeons been sought out for new players? Do you not know how dead they are?

Fractals are a place of ascended however fractals and raids are completely different. You have much different variety in builds and classes then raids. And not many new players will invest time because you need 150 ar to do t4s.

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@"blambidy.3216" said:Since anyone who spends much more time studying and playing the game already have killed a raid before.

Not really true.

Raids are a trickier beast. They're a unique experience and community that we want to find better ways to support, the biggest challenge in creating more is the small audience they attract. We gathered data to determine why, and the most common answer was that there is a giant leap in difficulty between raids and other endgame content, and there isn't anything to help players work their way up.

https://en-forum.guildwars2.com/discussion/97028/a-message-from-andrew-gray

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If stike was to reward players with an item which you would gather over days through strike mission rewards which you can later exchange for ascended armor then more people would be interested in strike. Obviously scale the amount low acquire and high price for armor pieces

What if the Strike Mission bosses dropped Magnetite Shards like a raid boss? That's a currency which can be exchanged for ascended gear, it would encourage new players to consider trying raids (to get more shards) while also helping prepare them for the content (by getting access to ascended gear), and it would even lead players directly into the Aerodrome since that's where they have to go to buy things with the shards. It also means the content still has some value for raiders, particularly if it were given out in such a way as to get around the weekly limit. (Say, the first kill each week gives you an item which can be exchanged for forty shards like a Mini).

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@maddoctor.2738 said:

@"blambidy.3216" said:Since anyone who spends much more time studying and playing the game already have killed a raid before.

Not really true.

Raids are a trickier beast. They're a unique experience and community that we want to find better ways to support, the biggest challenge in creating more is the small audience they attract. We gathered data to determine why, and the most common answer was that there is a giant leap in difficulty between raids and other endgame content, and there isn't anything to help players work their way up.

Anyone who is willing to learn and play gw2 correctly does not fall into that category. People who actually play the game. Follow positioning. Rotation, build, guides from raiding sites will clearly eventually get a raid kill. But his reference falls into people who do not try in gw2 or people who do not care to try a correct build or rotation. Which many players in gw2 fall into that category. Which is why there is a 10 times damage margin. And why many people haven’t had a raid kill.

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