Baseleader.4128

Just wanna bump this up again because I have also just ran into this issue.

Correct, they dramatically change the fractal and fights. 99CM for instance gets rid of all the first bosses and is a big bossfight against the final boss. Generally 97 and 98 are considered a bit easier than the other 2. 99CM is def a bit more difficult (and punishes low dmg a bit more). 100CM is by far the hardest atm, partly because people are still learning it and because some bugs and weirdness (some of which will be fixed the 22nd) make the fight considerably harder. THe mechanics arent very complex but failure is punished unusually heavy for fractals. So personally I would start with 97 and 98.

Ah yeah the normal mode. This is kind of true. But then Boneskinner is also absolutely nothing like say Qadim so I dont really understand that comparison still. I was thinking more of the CM which is a lot more like a raidboss. Requires CC, stability and actually a lot of coordination.

Why on earth would this be necessary? The idea of the lower tiers is lower difficulty to teach the fight, get people into fractals. What could possibly be the reason to add a CHallenge mote to sth that is specifically intended to be a stepping stone. You follow this up with another weird sentence imo. You say you want more raid mechanics in strikes but then say you want more Boneskinner strikes as opposed to KO, when it's pretty clear to me that KO is much more like a raid boss than Boneskinner is. It actually has complicated mechanics that require coordination to figure out and beat.

There are always outliers, so yeah kp is far from a perfect system. But at the end of the day, experience does count for something and on average, high kp groups are simply better than low kp ones. If you join a 30k UFE group, you almost always one shot all CM bosses. Occasionally you might not and a low kp group might, that happens. But if you really had to put your faith in a player, there is no way you're picking a guy with 520 UFE over a guy with 70k. I often hear people say kp is meaningless, but it's not. It's flawed though. If you had to bet a million dollars on a group 1-shotting every fractal CM boss, there isnt a person in the world who bets on the 500 UFE group over the 70k one.

There is not a single piece of content in the game where that kind of dps wouldn't be enough, including Harvest Temple CM. If you can do 35k reaper bench, congratulations, you can pass every dps check in the game. I've never come closer than 2k below the Soulbeast benchmark and when I play endgame content (with high kp) I beat the vast majority of other players.

You just cant expect every expansion to pull something insane like mounts, you can only do mounts once and they have. At some point just more content for the game and other smaller new additions will have to suffice for you. What other massive element can they really do? I guess player housing, although it's not something I'm personally interested in but I guess some people would love it. I just want more content, maps/story/things to do.

Personally I would recommend you find a playstyle/role among the meta builds that you enjoy, but otherwise mostly stick to the meta builds. You should ask yourself why you're deviating from a meta build, when you do so. There's nothing wrong with changing skills/traits/weapon for a bit more utility on certain fights as a healer for instance, but you should question if you're not just changing something for the sake of change. The meta builds are made because they perform their role to their maximum potential.

You're not wrong, I believe this is in a big way a business decision. However I would say that a more consistent schedule of updates, and having teams work more permanently on certain aspects of the game are good. Also, better marketing and making it easier for newer players to pick the game up can grow the population of the game which does benefit us. THese big content droughts really hurt the game I think. I do think the amount of content (over a 3y period) might be quite similar and could come at a slightly increased price which I get upsets people a bit but could simply be necessary for the studio.

Before I am called a Anet shill for thinking this is a very good idea, there is 1 thing I am sceptical about and that they will need to deliver on. While this new system will (I think) deliver a similar (maybe even more) amount of story/map content as the old, they do need to make sure that this new system still creates a similar amount of 'features' for the game that we expect from expacs. Things like masteries, elite specs/other meaningful class changes, mounts, player housing, ..... Take elite specs for instance: 9 elite specs every year is obviously entirely unworkable, but can we still expect 9 elite specs in say the next 3y? Whether that's elite specs for 3 classe per yearly expansion, or 9 all at once but only happens once every 3y I don't know. THis is my only big concern of this new system. I want to be able to look back in 3-4y (which is about an expansion+living world cycle like we have now) and see that they added the same amount of big ticket expansion-like features that such a cycle produces (or more honestly). Example Current model: expac with 9+ elite specs, story/maps, strikes, and say player housing and a new mount -> living world season with story/maps (3 year cycle) New model: expac with story/maps and a new mount -> update with story/map + strike -> update with story maps + fractal -> update with story/maps+strike expansion with story/maps and player housing -> same updates as above expansion with 9 elite specs -> same updates as above And this new model also taking 3y total.

Except it doesn't work, which they clearly stated in the blogpost. It caused issues with keeping a consisten schedule of releasing content without crunching/burning out the developers. It meant we didn't have constistent balance updates and many more issues. The Living world system was also absolutely terrible for marketing. A new expac is something that gets people hyped again and gets talked about on MMO sites. Living World Season 4 episode 1 dropping simply doesn't, even within the community. Living World season 4 was incredibly high quality and yet it seemed no one every really got hyped for a release like they did with expansions. It was also a poor business idea. You gave away content for free to the Veteran players who are already invested in your game and probobly would pay 10 bucks for a season, while putting an extra financial hurdle for a new player who's interested in the game, a financial hurdle that wasnt always clear either which can alienate a player feeling like they got lied too. I do get a degree of scepsis and it's only in 2y perhaps we'll truly know if this new model was the best way forward, but changes definitely needed to be made. I also disagree with the idea that Anet constantly swap styles without it being necessary. They dropped the original Living World idea because it was terrible, and did incredible damage to the success of the game in the first few years. The change to expac+lw was very much needed. That business model, flawed as it was, did ok for the game. But internal NCSOFT issues then diverted resources and they went forward with IBS. Once realising that again this was a bad idea, they corrected themselves to return to the expac system. And now they're making another necessary change to drop the whole idea of Living World and the way its monetized. If I'd deliver any criticism is that they didn't change some of these things sooner, not that they're changing them now.

If you want more raids, that's the last thing you should do. If people stop doing strikes, Anet will conclude this isnt a game for difficult instanced content and simply stop making it.

You could have an hours long discussion of why raids were/are fairly niche but none of it would have to do with the fact that there's some NPC roleplay going on or the fact that you have to do Spirit Run between Vale and Gorseval. It has everything to do with the game not having a proper difficulty ramp up system, which meant raids difficulty was like 0-100mph instantly and a whole host of other issues. The fact it has story was actually what possibly pulled some people into the content. See also the amount of people asking for story mode raids in countless posts on this forum. They cant spend a lot of resources on raids cause few people play it is indeed correct, which is why they invented strikes as it allows them to create content for those 2% (and more cause the nm strikes are quite easy) without spending a lot of resources on it.

Yeah the IBS strikes are very easy and the early EOD ones in normal mode arent crazy either. Try doing Kaineng CM, Harvest Temple CM, Old Lions Court CM and Xunlai Junkyard CM (with title achievement) with new people and you'll be at each of those for a couple of hours to potentially a couple of days to possibly weeks/months with HTCM. The normal modes are very doable but the EOD CMs are harder than most of the Raids, including Raid CMs.

They didnt do this because people wanted strikes because of Spirit Run or NPCs chatting. They did it because it's much easier to make. It takes way less resources. Don't need to build entire environments, can reuse models from the story/open world. They prob stopped doing raids cause it cost too much for a relatively smaller part of the community to actually play them. Strikes are much more efficient. I would have preferred raids to strikes too but it's ptob either strikes or nothing so I'm happy they made the decision. The actual design of the fights has been very good as well so that's nice.

The thing is that, if you raid a lot you know, these niche spots are almost always the ones that fill last. The amount of times you see 'w4 9/10 LF HK' is immense. The weird niche roles that require responsability always fill slowly. So waiting ages for these roles to fill only to then have to queue and receive random players as dps seems super counterproductive to me. By the time I've finally found my HK, I could have easily filled in the dps spots via the traditional LFG and had more control over who joins. I can HK personally but don't enjoy it so if I can I avoid it and I notice personally that I'm more likely to join as a HK when that's the last thing people are looking for, just a psychological thing I guess. If I see a W4 1/10 LF HK, ... I think it's less likely people join as these specialised roles.

My experiences with raids are similar tbh. Squad usually fill rather quickly. I do play on EU but mostle during hours most people work and squads still fill up.

No but a commander can quickly remove them from the squad and replace 1 person instead of the entire squad crumbling over such an issue.

I dont know at what time you play but squads fill pretty fast usually precisely because no one starts them but tons of players are waiting to join one. Unless you're playing at like 4 AM, an IBS Strike squad fills in like 2min.

We've been over this endless times but I guess here we go again. -Does anything stop people from queueing on builds that don't actually know how to perform their role? Does it look at the spec someone is playing, their boon duration, ...... What if someone queues up with a bizarre healer they think works but actually doesnt? - Is there a leader of this randomly assembled party? If someone is abusive or not performing his role, can he be removed? -Tons of GW2 encounters have unique roles that don't fit the system you propose. These can't all be included. You get to Deimos and no one can actually Handkite. Can one of your healers tank the boss, cause many bosses require one. Is one of your dps a Pylonkiter for Qadim 2? Is your healalac in w5 a druid (or other class) that knows how to push and so on and so on. It really just isn't that simple.

Mainly this yeah. I have 25k Magnetite shards and there's nothing good to spend that on. At least let me buy Mystic coins with them or sth like Strikes and Fractals have.

What do you mean by this?

Man I'm so glad someone finally brought this up because it's strange to me how people ignore it. Gw2 has been a game where you need the LFG to succeed metas for quite a while. People seem to pretend that 13 newish players can randomly come by Chak Gerent in TD and without any communication or "proper" builds kill it, which is simply not the case. The truth is that 1-2 maps that get 4 commanders and taxi people in through the LFG kill it, if you don't get into this map you don't win. Similarly with Tequatl, Echovald, Death-Brander Shatterer, Drakkar. Obviously you could randomly find yourself in this map and just join in, but you can do the same thing if you're lucky to randomly wonder in the map where a DE LFG is taxing into. The truth is that the hardcore/optimized/veteran players have always been carrying metas through Commanding, taxing, giving boons and doing higher dps, this isn't a new phenomenon. DE just pushes it all a little further.

This is not what happens though. The good students are creating a big group where all groups of people are allowed in, there is no selection whatsoever, and then ask what kind of skills people have and try to create a structure that maximizes the group's ability and the result is that everyone finishes the project with a good grade. The good players arent excluding other players and only doing the meta among them. They create squads and subgroups. Send people where people need to go and the meta almost always succeeds in these groups. Yes the meta requires a basic level of organization and veterans are more than willing to provide this. You may need to use the LFG a bit but anyone is welcome in these squads. No one is ever checked in any way and no one is ever forced to change their build (even though changing a skill to accomodate a group is the smallest of requests).

My experience is that on average high kp groups are better than low UFE groups. I join 10-15k groups now usually and you can really tell the difference with 2k groups by quite a lot. A lot of people have fractal god and pump a lot of dps. Little skips are also much more widely known. The 1 thing I do encounter is people wanting to do runs without healers and that going a lot worse than maybe a lower UFE group with a healer. I honestly just prefer spending 20s per boss more and reduce the risk of wiping to a minimum with a healer. In a 10k group you usually 1-shot everything in my experience. But when things go south, people are quick to instantly leave yeah, which is annoying.