Firebeard.1746

I really just want to see if they're releasing a legendary. I can't say I'm excited because that would imply that they are releasing one, but I will be if they do release one. DRMs are okay. I feel tied to WvW more than anything else right now because I'm trying to grind a full legendary set. I do other game modes, sure, but I'm not really driven to touch IB very much unless it gives legendaries. I actually love the IB maps for the most part, I've loved its story. I would enjoy DRMs more if I finished the CM Achieves or they weren't there at all XD. My biggest critique of IB saga is I feel like they should have chosen ONE PVE mode and improved it, we've had visions, we've had strikes, we've had DRMs and I feel like we would have had something better if they released a little less but went all-in on one and improved it based on our feedback and how we interact with the game/strikes. I feel like the strikes were a test of how puggable they can make things and what players will pug in the long run. Then they weren't happy they were fast, so they wanted to try a longer one (CW) that no one wants to touch with a 10ft pole and that's where it ended. And honestly they would have made waves if they made strike versions of the raids, but anet never revisits old content.

This. I don't rPvP any more but I felt like whenever I walked into a normal PVP match I roflstomped, and then in ranked I had the same issues you'd mention -> Doesn't matter if I outplayed everyone, we still lost. The only way you'll get better is by playing more ranked and watching streamers who do and are good at it.

Good point, maybe it's a terrible idea and if they do anything at all, it should just be the same thing other MMOs do: different difficulty levels.

I feel like it would be a mistake for Anet to abandon raids because of the cultural overhead they carry in MMOs at large. In fact what they've already done with Dungeons is bad IMO, but I'll address that later. Given the negative feedback on my original idea and other ideas presented, I have a better idea, and still think people should talk on this thread. I can identify these issues: 1) There's no incentive for grouping with new people - the rewards only come faster the more experienced your group 2) People in GW2 at large are used to pugging, even if they enjoy group content. This goes for fractals, dungeons DRMs. I rarely run with guildies and guildies rarely ping. I usually do a scheduled activity with my guild of a different sort if anything at all. 3) Raids tend to have "pony trick" mechanics with devastating results if people don't know it. They usually require skills beyond just dodging a breaking bars that are normally only applicable that fight (Druid pusher in VG, Druid push in SH (still different than VG though as push skills are different between the the two), hand kite in Deimos, Mushrooms in Sloth, etc. This means getting in a PuG with anyone is a massive liability. 4) Raid training - culturally I have to say this is a very foreign concept. Most training runs I've been in don't necessarily focus on kills which I've never seen in another MMO and is a testament to the technical complexity of GW2 raids. This is demoralizing in the context of trying to break into the larger raid scene - people want to see KP to want you around .5) An unsolvable problem - scale. I say unsolvable because making the parties bigger with the pony trick mechanics will only make them more frustrating IMO. I don't see Anet doing an entire refactor of old raids to solve this. And maybe they shouldn't. The pony tricks, as annoying as they are are part of the original mechanics. I think that Strikes and raids need to be merged, i.e. there is a strike version and a raid version for each encounter. This solves #2. The strike versions are intended to be PuGGable and all operate much like IB strikes in terms of reward structure, the only caveat being Maguuma ones give magnetite shards instead of IB strike crystals and the PoF ones give gaeting crystals instead of IB strike Crystals. The strike rewards a special crafting material in the weekly strike chest that can convert into LIs and LDs, LIs don't drop in the strike versions (maybe you get 1 of this currency per boss per week in the chest but you need 3 to buy an LI, this makes raids still superior for getting legendary gear and rewards in general). The echo system could easily be overloaded to accomplish this. People will still be rewarded more for doing raids than strikes and people who can't commit to statics can still experience the content and eventually get the rewards (albeit slower, which is fair in context). To toss a bone to the raid community, they could add raid versions of all the current IB strikes. The IB raids could drop 3x of the above mentioned LI/LD conversion currency per boss so they could be used as progress towards legendary rewards for current raiders. Additionally, the strike versions should be done in a way that mimics the actual raid mechanics, so if players notice they do well in the strike, then they can go ahead and do the raid version with their current group (it would be nice if the strike mission grades them on mechanics and suggest they continue, but that's asking for a lot. Maybe after completing the strike it gives a poll to the group asking if they want to attempt the raid and somewhere on the strike UI it explains what passing the raid version in the strike looks like so the group can have some good judgement on their decision). An example I've experienced like this was Argus the unmaker in Legion -> I did LFR tons and tons and enough of the mechanics were there that I did fine in my Heroic PuG the night before BFA launch (snagging my spellwing in just the nick of time!). This solves #3 and makes strikes a true bridge between raids and strikes, which they aren't currently. #3 builds on the issue in #2, you have to be in a group that has the pony trick experience in order to succeed in raids. Basically you can PuG the strikes until you find yourself in a good enough group to do the raid version. To solve #1, I would have extra rewards for helping a group beat a raid with at least 3 players that haven't finished it that week yet. Probably mostly raw gold 1-2 and maybe 1 rare. That way if you like to lurk strikes and are a proficient raider, it could be very lucrative and you could help the community by training people in your strikes. number 4 is solved by the above. The strikes themselves become raid training and now the community can loosely help each other and then commit to raiding if they happen to find themselves in a proficient group. I got nothing for #5 but feel like it's a non-issue if there's more community involvement as a whole. But really, doing this, everyone wins. People who like strikes get more content and more incentive to do them, raiders get more raids. ANd it's not really a heavy lift for Anet either. It's mostly copy pasta of current content with tweaking on both ends, the IB strikes to raid conversions and vice versa. Also, most modern MMOs have different difficulty settings, it's a glaring omission that the raid system was never adapted to the hyper casual nature of this MMO. A much larger issue I want to briefly address is the fact that Anet is accumulating way too many disparate systems with all their PVE content experiments. I think they need a raid system (groups of 10) and a dungeons system (groups of 5) and all content of that size plays into that system. My above suggestions create this cohesive raid system. I would tweak DRMs and Dungeons to work with Fractals as part of a greater dungeon system (and they could even add dailies for each dungeon/raid type to encourage more participation). I feel like abandoned content that doesn't integrate with anything else won't age well. Perhaps dungeons should reward some fractal currencies if you have the masteries, same for DRMs. They could take the more popular content from the non-fractal modes and make fractals out of them.

Well my mental issues might be part of the problem here. I'm perfectly fine not getting them. But I have some half-baked collection items laying around from when i thought I'd raid. I don't want to throw them away because they need to be processed, but on the flip side, it's getting harder and harder to even find groups when I care. My OCD wants those out of my inventory ONE DAY. I also don't want to throw them away just in case I have a reason to complete the collections (or the gods smile on me and give me the CHoya confetti infusion which I'll be able to trade for the raids I need against the few sellers). I would be 100% happy if I could just finish the Envoy collections and coalescence. I already have the precursor for coalescence + partially completed alembic apparatus, so there's no way around junk there, I have to complete it. But envoy? I can just buy the recipes & salvage it for globs of dark matter for other leggies. I'll just add: the only ways of completing legendary armor being raiding, PVP and WvW is not good moving forward. As others have mentioned the latter 2 are very grindy and the first has its problems. Also, all 3 of those game modes have seen the least dev cycles. That's really crazy to put out all this awesome content, and then expect people to ignore it with your weakest.

Sad news. I'm sorry.

1) I don't think it's good game design to force people to play game modes they don't like, making the special ones tradeable essentially gives the different types of players economic leverage to trade with each other. With the announcement of LA, I feel like the impetus will be higher to earn them and this design decision will not pay off in that context. Eventually players wake up and quit when they realize they're not having fun, not matter the size of the carrot they're supposed to chase. 2) I think this could only serve to revitalize the raid community in NA, if only to bring experienced raiders back to play with each other. community pings are failing far more often at organizing on NA raid academy. I'm not sure how the elites are doing, but I bet they're bleeding every now and then due to attrition. LA gives a definite end point to where raids are still useful as far as progression goes. People who don't want to bother with raids can get a legendary for every slot through another means as slumbering conflux and conflux aren't exclusive to each other. I would see raid legendaries being the most valuable just because of how few people do them. 3) Also, I feel like the extra pips in WvW for 10k rank are pointless. by that point you'd be able to buy anything you want as far as the skirmish ticket legendary precursors are concerned. This basically gives you payback for being this far.

If you're talking weapons, that's not 100% accurate: I think you could only claim that Gen1 are actually "open world" Gen 2 require stabilized dark energy balls, which require matrices from fractals (in the very least). Also, the first 4 Gen2 legendaries also require particular fractals.

SAB has historically started the Tuesday on or just before April Fool's if I understand correctly.

It occurred to me that as it stands for legendaries, outside of legendary weapons, there's a lot of requiring people to invest very hard into particular game types for the given legendary. Raids require collections and materials, the Skirmish ticket grinds are no joke (and the irony of hitting rank 10000 in WvW is that perhaps the skirmish tickets have almost no practical purpose after that point, you'd have enough for everything from that game mode). This is a HUGE problem. Lots of people don't enjoy ranked PVP, they're not going to want to do that or tournaments for the neck, lots of people don't raid. In contrast, lots of people feel very "done" with these game modes once they're making the legendaries because There's no reason to go back. I think that the devs should implement systems to make items for achievements and materials for legendaries between game modes acquireable by trade in some way, either drops that can be traded and turned in at the vendor, or perhaps allow people to sell components directly. This will allow people to do what they enjoy the most but still progress their character in that direction if they so desire. It'll spur tons of economic activity and it can kill the "doneness" feeling once you earn the legendaries from the game modes you enjoy, now you can keep enjoying them and earn extra cash by helping other people in their journey for full Legendary armory sets. Also, if you just want to play the OW and earn money that way, it becomes a doable strategy as well. It lets players decide how they want to play and still progress their accounts. Just an idea.

Meh, he's stuck in T1 for now, it doesn't start mattering until t2 and beyond. You can cover the AR with pots + Mistlock singularities for the 5 fractals it matters in in T1. But @OP, yes, if you intend to climb AR matters. That basically means start compiling an ascended gear set. Discretize.eu tracks "meta" builds. Lots of people play off-meta, but some people get their panties in a knot if you're not playing meta.

The problem is the LI is worthless without corresponding achieves, which require you to kill a slew of bosses, and IIRC, the armor ones require multiple kills of specific bosses, perhaps in a particular order. It's been a while since I looked into it. This is actually something that started turning me off to raiding in addition to my chaotic schedule making a static all but impossible. in contrast, every other legendary armor just requires currency. The trinkets (minus the back) from PVP/WvW aren't that bad, even though their components come from achieves, because it's a very natural achieve, kill x players, win x matches, capture x targets. It's something that happens naturally. If the raid acheives were similar, then maybe I'd try more often.

I main a male sylvari, if my /stretch is nerfed, I'm going to be so mad about that sweet animation I lost after all that work.

Im not sure where to start. Why do you need 25min to reach the endboss? this shouldnt take more than 8-10min. 25min is the time it takes to reach that area solo.I hope you are vastly exaggerating with 18min per try. A cm group needs 4min for the fight and it has higher health there.This reads like everyone was doing 3k dps max when they could do 30k. I joined some t3 and t4s normals there for fun and the majority of the players used their 0 dps open world builds. The health of the boss is not too high, the builds are too bad. T4 is the highest level. Dont use open world builds in there. Given fractals were supposed to be designed around having any build initially, I'd say you saying this indicates bad design. Sure, make the 30k dps sponge for the CM, but if people are doing it on normal, it should fall over a little easier IMO. They should really only be forcing meta in CMs and raids, for the sanity and sake of the community. This applies to t1 and t2. T4 is pve endgame and it is vastly easier than the cm. All builds still work and dont block progression since there is not a single hard dps check unless the boss bugs.But T4 should not be balanced for bad builds. Whats the point of lower tiers then? Not all fractals have a cm and T4 is supposed to be highest difficulty. You dont have to play meta. A meta team kills that boss in ~3min. Pug meta in 4min thats why i said you shouldnt take longer than 8-10min because that means you have like 1/3 of the dps of a normal hfb pug if you factor in the timegates. The 18min mentioned earlier would be way less GROUP dps than a SOLO renegade.Proof: ~15min for p1 which is the entire normal fight. It has also quite a lot more hp in cm. @Asum.4960 said: Im not sure where to start. Why do you need 25min to reach the endboss? this shouldnt take more than 8-10min. 25min is the time it takes to reach that area solo.I hope you are vastly exaggerating with 18min per try. A cm group needs 4min for the fight and it has higher health there.This reads like everyone was doing 3k dps max when they could do 30k. I joined some t3 and t4s normals there for fun and the majority of the players used their 0 dps open world builds. The health of the boss is not too high, the builds are too bad. T4 is the highest level. Dont use open world builds in there. Given fractals were supposed to be designed around having any build initially, I'd say you saying this indicates bad design. Sure, make the 30k dps sponge for the CM, but if people are doing it on normal, it should fall over a little easier IMO. They should really only be forcing meta in CMs and raids, for the sanity and sake of the community. Tbf, for this fight to take 18 minutes on normal T4 as the OP claims, all party members would have to do <2800 DPS each. Expecting more than that in T4 is hardly "pushing meta" (30-40k DPS, time to kill less than 3 minutes).Even Fractal CM's or Raids are far from requiring the most effective builds to beat. Non meta builds are one thing, bad builds another, and as I always like to remind players who are struggling, there are builds literally just auto attacking for 15-20k DPS you can go for, there really isn't any excuse to do much less than that, and that has nothing to do with elitism or pushing meta. What both of you are completely missing is that fractals are a progression system with hard ties to your current gear set. it's incredibly expensive to change your infusions around and tedious. Not only that, but it's also a significant investment to get the extra infusion slots on rings + back. ALso, ascended gear ain't cheap either if you actually need the other set. Attuning rings costs 24s. Infusing them is free. Only backpack infusion is kinda expensive with 250 ectos.False: it costs a ton of fractal relics for the materials. They sure as heck haven't dropped enough to infuse both rings even where I am now at the upper part of T3. It's not just the attuning dude. I also mentioned swapping the infusions between gear and earning them. If you don't have enough high infusions for a second set, you're paying a lot of gold and tedium to move them around. Also if someone doesn't have a second set of ascended gear, which is entirely possible depending on how young their account is, you're asking them to plop 300-400g to get a new set. Ascended gear barely drops every now and then in T3. It's not like it's candy yet. I don't know what people are running, but I can tell that others in my t3 groups are normally not running DPS builds. They're only hitting 5k tops, usually and I use warhorn to give might, so even with that buff on a boss, they're not doing much. I'm assuming they're stacking toughness and/or healing. If the other gear types shouldn't be used, the game shouldn't allow them in the game mode, period (or auto-convert stats or something). Especially with how much investment goes to 1 set of fully ascended gear. Ironically enough, I think one of the few people I bump into in t3 every now and them copied my build I distinctly remember them running a DPS build before and I was running charts when I bumped into them again and I noticed they were playing heal tempest. I also out-DPS'd them XD. Fun fact, heal tempest can do more damage than HB. At least I seem to do more damage than them on charts (or all the ones I've bumped into are lousy). Because they were never forced to overthink their builds and role. Sunqua suddenly acts as a blocker. I also encountered the support issue in t3 and thats why people in t4 call their role when they join. 2-3 healers, hammer heralds, MMtank necros and rifle deadeyes. I've seen everything. But you can sort out the multiple healer thing before you start.Players shouldnt complain about inflated hp when they bring multiple healers. They shouldnt run 3k dps builds like mm necro in instanced content unless they are new and do t1.There wouldnt be a problem if all the people struggling would accept some help and read guides on discretize. Some players want to play their ego builds no matter how bad it performs and then it isnt the games fault anymore. I had arguments with rifle DEs in sirens reef for example. Honestly I feel like this is a toxic attitude. as I mentioned before, balance CMs and Raids around metas like that. This game was not conceived with the notion of the PVE meta as-is right now. And to be honest, I think it's egotistical to tell people how to play. There's more pieces of the GW2 meta than any other MMO and that's part of what makes crafting effective groups hard. I find that broken. I'm fine with there being some content that uses it, but I feel like if Anet wants to respect 90%+ of their player base, they should design the game around some of their original goals. You're also making the assumption that these players are making sub-optimal choices when in reality, they may have adjusted their builds to get through the fractal tiers like I have. Just finding enough people for a lower tier is hard enough (t3 is the pits). It's even worse trying to pack it with the meta as-is. Wiping over and over on a fragile build is not better than just clearing a little slower. To an experienced player the first part never happens. Though even so, I've seen glass cannon players go down easy too. Not all the time, but if they die early in the fight, their DPS is lower than someone with a sturdier build that lasts longer. That's food for thought. You're always going to be better than people learning. how you treat them will determine the fate of the community for fractals moving forward. just remember we already lost 1 end-game activity being supported (raids). Might want to make better decisions than the raiding community with respect to how you interact with players climbing the ladder. It's nice you're helping carry every now and then, but you want them to feel welcomed too.

Im not sure where to start. Why do you need 25min to reach the endboss? this shouldnt take more than 8-10min. 25min is the time it takes to reach that area solo.I hope you are vastly exaggerating with 18min per try. A cm group needs 4min for the fight and it has higher health there.This reads like everyone was doing 3k dps max when they could do 30k. I joined some t3 and t4s normals there for fun and the majority of the players used their 0 dps open world builds. The health of the boss is not too high, the builds are too bad. T4 is the highest level. Dont use open world builds in there. Given fractals were supposed to be designed around having any build initially, I'd say you saying this indicates bad design. Sure, make the 30k dps sponge for the CM, but if people are doing it on normal, it should fall over a little easier IMO. They should really only be forcing meta in CMs and raids, for the sanity and sake of the community. This applies to t1 and t2. T4 is pve endgame and it is vastly easier than the cm. All builds still work and dont block progression since there is not a single hard dps check unless the boss bugs.But T4 should not be balanced for bad builds. Whats the point of lower tiers then? Not all fractals have a cm and T4 is supposed to be highest difficulty. You dont have to play meta. A meta team kills that boss in ~3min. Pug meta in 4min thats why i said you shouldnt take longer than 8-10min because that means you have like 1/3 of the dps of a normal hfb pug if you factor in the timegates. The 18min mentioned earlier would be way less GROUP dps than a SOLO renegade.Proof: ~15min for p1 which is the entire normal fight. It has also quite a lot more hp in cm. @Asum.4960 said: Im not sure where to start. Why do you need 25min to reach the endboss? this shouldnt take more than 8-10min. 25min is the time it takes to reach that area solo.I hope you are vastly exaggerating with 18min per try. A cm group needs 4min for the fight and it has higher health there.This reads like everyone was doing 3k dps max when they could do 30k. I joined some t3 and t4s normals there for fun and the majority of the players used their 0 dps open world builds. The health of the boss is not too high, the builds are too bad. T4 is the highest level. Dont use open world builds in there. Given fractals were supposed to be designed around having any build initially, I'd say you saying this indicates bad design. Sure, make the 30k dps sponge for the CM, but if people are doing it on normal, it should fall over a little easier IMO. They should really only be forcing meta in CMs and raids, for the sanity and sake of the community. Tbf, for this fight to take 18 minutes on normal T4 as the OP claims, all party members would have to do <2800 DPS each. Expecting more than that in T4 is hardly "pushing meta" (30-40k DPS, time to kill less than 3 minutes).Even Fractal CM's or Raids are far from requiring the most effective builds to beat. Non meta builds are one thing, bad builds another, and as I always like to remind players who are struggling, there are builds literally just auto attacking for 15-20k DPS you can go for, there really isn't any excuse to do much less than that, and that has nothing to do with elitism or pushing meta.What both of you are completely missing is that fractals are a progression system with hard ties to your current gear set. it's incredibly expensive to change your infusions around and tedious. Not only that, but it's also a significant investment to get the extra infusion slots on rings + back. ALso, ascended gear ain't cheap either if you actually need the other set. The reason this matters is climbing out of t2-3 without being some form of balanced stats and/or support is very difficult if not impossible. I had intended to climb as both a weaver and heal tempest but when i realized how long it would take me to infuse gear for both sets, I picked the one with more successful runs and that was heal tempest. I've hard carried groups with other supports with massive heals, so it's still pretty fungible, but if people are intolerant to support or mixed builds, they're essentially going to cut players out from joining t4 mainstream (and cut them off from making a meta set). I'm still going to want to keep my heal tempest geared in case I end up in an all glass cannon group again. Also, it beats a bad heal brand as far as keeping people alive. And going back to OP, Sunqua fairly annoying beacuse 90% of the time, my t3 groups are people with mixed stats and/or supports, because that's what's gotten them that far.

So if you look at games in general, the successful ones pander to both their elites and lay players in some way. I was in this boat, but i think that there's some value in having challenging PVE content in the game, even if they don't implement raids, imo they should at least do strikes + CMs that hit raid-level difficulty. And the only differentiation between the rewards is magnitude. That way, the community has a long-term reason to be involved as a whole, but hardcore players still get to show off/beat everyone to the punch on the next raid armor set or whatever.

Im not sure where to start. Why do you need 25min to reach the endboss? this shouldnt take more than 8-10min. 25min is the time it takes to reach that area solo.I hope you are vastly exaggerating with 18min per try. A cm group needs 4min for the fight and it has higher health there.This reads like everyone was doing 3k dps max when they could do 30k. I joined some t3 and t4s normals there for fun and the majority of the players used their 0 dps open world builds. The health of the boss is not too high, the builds are too bad. T4 is the highest level. Dont use open world builds in there. Given fractals were supposed to be designed around having any build initially, I'd say you saying this indicates bad design. Sure, make the 30k dps sponge for the CM, but if people are doing it on normal, it should fall over a little easier IMO. They should really only be forcing meta in CMs and raids, for the sanity and sake of the community.

Having the same issue. Edit: it just let me in, but down detector did show a spike in AWS issues. Edit2: even after logging in I'd still get notifications that I was disconnected from the login server periodically. I'm off for a while now.

EU economy tends to differ from NA significantly, but I'll look at some of this. in my OP I was mostly talking about core POF not LWS4. The economy is the same since trading post is cross region.I thought when i tried a farm from that link it didn't come out the same, but that's interesting. I had no idea.

~~EU economy tends to differ from NA significantly, but I'll look at some of this. in my OP I was mostly talking about core POF not LWS4. ~~

Can they compete with HoT at all in terms of g/hour outside of really rare drops of some sort? There's no baubles, so VB bauble farms are out of the question. They don't really play into legendary progression as strongly either. I'm curious, if you focus on PoF maps, which ones are you doing and why? PoF to me fills like filler so if you skipped core Tyria you can get prepared to do HoT and/or harder instanced content.

I had to like your post, only for this comment.

The only challenging parts of PoF maps are generally the forged areas. I didn't find them that "maze like" It really just feels like a mount check depending on where you want to go.

There's a word for it, called "balance." Honestly I'm 100% still salty about this too.

How do you get big or entrenched in the first place? Advertising and making splashes, both in the airwaves and among communities. The OP said nothing about timing, but I think they're on spot in not doing a good job of occupying any sort of presence. This game is something you have to look for. I found it while looking for a replacement to my MOBA addiction. sPVP wasn't so horrid back then and was my primary activity. But I only even considered it because I knew it was a WoW competitor and felt done with WoW at the time and knew I wanted to get into an MMO. I also completely missed the end game systems and didn't stay long. Like I toyed with them, but they didn't really suck me in until after I came back after WoW and realized I wanted to push deeper.