Cameron.6450

That aspect of failure and learning as you go is what training raids essentially are though, just with a couple of players who know what they're doing to help people figure out mechanics. The term "training" is just what has fallen into common usage, for lack of a better term. Really what they are are just raid squads where the kill is not expected within a few pulls. An experienced group would expect to only take a few pulls max to get a kill, which means you don't get many chances to see different mechanics before the boss dies and the group moves on. Joining a group with 9 highly experienced players just means that you'll most likely get the kill lying on your back for most of the run, which is not what you say you're looking for.

I'd argue that most of those fights are intended for significantly larger numbers of players though, so the difficulty with a smaller group may not be the best judge of that. Similar to the way that dungeons are difficult if you go in on your own, but with a group of the intended size they're almost trivial. The best comparison we have is most likely the riftstalker fights from a few months ago, which had instances that were capped around 15 (i think). If strike missions are of a similar difficulty, then autoattacking your way to victory would still be an apt description. That being said, we have so little to go on at the moment that we will have to wait and see. I'd be happy to be proven wrong.

While I certainly agree with you to some extent, I think there are also times when certain builds are poorly balanced and are extremely unenjoyable to fight. For example turret engineer back before HoT launched was not the strongest build in the metagame, but it was painfully easy to play, very popular as a result, and extremely boring and irritating to play against. There's that aspect to balancing as well, although it can be difficult to distinguish between something being genuinely bad for the game mode, and people just being salty about not being able to beat something.

The mechanics aren't that complicated. I'll admit there are some things that can be surprising at times, but when most fights don't even reset when you die, it's pretty easy to just say "guess I'd better pay attention to that next time" and off you go. And if you want to play a build that supports allies, of course you can do that and get through easily, as long as you go in with other players. If you use a build that supports allies when there are no allies to support, then that's a problem with your decision making, not the game mechanics. And even with that being said, you can STILL get through those instances easily even without allies. It'll just take you ages to kill anything. I happen to think you're wrong here. Signposting is poor, and invulnerability phases simply break immersion and the rules of the game system. And there should be no reason why I'm forced to play in a particular style to beat an instance. The instance should have multiple options, or paths to victory, that any playstyle is possible.Look, first point is difference of opinion, I'll grant that. I don't think that invuln phases are inherently immersion or rule breaking, but it depends. If I bring an enemy to 5% hp in a few seconds, then they suddenly become invuln to deliver a monologue before dying when i sneeze on them afterwards, that's a little irritating. But invuln phases where you need to use certain mechanics to break shields or kill mobs or w/e are part of what makes bosses different and interesting to fight. Plus the player character and npc's all have access to skills with invuln, not sure why it's immersion breaking for enemies in the game world to have similar abilities. And as I said in my first reply to you, you're not "forced" to play a particular style. I actually said it's just as easy to play a healer or support in a story instance. You are perfectly entitled to play the game however you like, so long as you don't impact on someone else's enjoyment by doing so. What you are NOT entitled to though, is to have the same efficiency as someone who brings the right tool for the job. In most instances, the ultimate goal is to bring an enemy's hp to 0. If I take this into consideration when heading into an instance and bring something with lots of damage, and you just run a healing build that doesn't do any damage, then obviously we're going to have different outcomes. You can still complete the instance, you'll just be slower than I am, but that's the decision you need to make. Likewise, if the instance requires lots of movement, a full dps spec might not complete it as quickly as someone playing thief with all mobility utilities. But I can still finish the instance, just like you can still finish everything on a healer if you want to. It's just slower.

The mechanics aren't that complicated. I'll admit there are some things that can be surprising at times, but when most fights don't even reset when you die, it's pretty easy to just say "guess I'd better pay attention to that next time" and off you go. And if you want to play a build that supports allies, of course you can do that and get through easily, as long as you go in with other players. If you use a build that supports allies when there are no allies to support, then that's a problem with your decision making, not the game mechanics. And even with that being said, you can STILL get through those instances easily even without allies. It'll just take you ages to kill anything.

Again, Raids are separated from the rest of the PvE experience so it isn't PvE at all. Your assumption that I don't want to invest the time or effort is concluded from absolutely nothing other than you projecting. PvP never has to step outside of itself to complete its legendary armor as well as WvW being able to stay in it without touching anything else. If PvP and WvW can have an "arbitrary" line drawn between them, than there's no reason Raids and PvE shouldn't have one.The separation between wvw and pvp is not arbitrary though. They are two separate areas of the game, actions in one mode have no effect on the other, gear is not transferable between them, they have different balance and separate experience and rank systems. Raids share the same gear setup as everything else in pve, has the same skill balance as everything else, operates with the same experience system, and when you strip away all the bells and whistles, has the same core gameplay, ie hit an AI-controlled enemy until it's dead, or complete specific tasks while fighting AI-controlled enemies. Functionally there is very little difference between a world boss and a raid boss. The only differences are: Numbers: A world boss has the limit of 60 or so people, whatever the map cap is these days. A raid boss is set at 10. Both have a limit, it's just scaled down for raids. That's not a fundamental difference in gameplay.Enrage timers: Plenty of open world pve events and bosses in particular have a time limit as well. For all the complaining about the time limit in raids, I've seen far more world bosses fail by running out of time than raid bosses enraging. Again, not a significant difference in terms of core gameplay.Inability to res people who are fully dead: This I'll grant as a difference between other areas of pve and raids, but it's a very minor point to rest on if you want to declare that raids are a completely separate game mode to everything else in pve.Now, raids are HARD compared to most of the rest of pve, and a lot of people don't like them as a result. That's fine, nothing wrong with that, but they are still a part of PVE whether somebody likes them or not. I hate doing open world hearts, but that doesn't mean I'm going to declare that they are a different type of content to the rest of PVE as a whole. You can split PVE somewhat into open world and instanced PVE, but it's still PVE, and still the same game mode, just different areas within that game mode. I'm not fundamentally opposed to having more ways to get legendary armor, but the argument that PVE has no legendary armor because raids are not PVE is a non-starter.

It's true, surviving is impossible. That's why every week there are exactly zero groups who kill him.

Guys I want to play in my local football team but I don't want anyone to watch what I do when the ball comes near me in case they decide they don't want me on the team anymore.

I disagree. While the HoT weapons are a bit tougher now due to the increase in mystic coin price, the mastery requirements aren't really that daunting if you are actively playing through those maps. For instance, when I made an alt account, to gear my first character for fractals, I went through and completed a few of the specialisation weapon collections because they are easier and cheaper than crafting, as well as having (mostly) interesting skins for a fresh account.

Aurora and Vision are no less specific than coalescence. You need to go to THIS map, do THIS event, finish THESE achievements, etc. This is not more general. You are also assuming that everyone plays this content. Plenty of wvw or pvp players never do any living story stuff. Plenty of pure pve players I know don't do it either, because they have no interest in that content, and want to spend their time elsewhere. It is not something that "we all went through". If someone wants to finish aurora, they need to do all the LS3 achievements. If someone wants to finish vision, they need to do all the LS4 achievements. If someone wants to finish coalescence, they need to do the relevant raid bosses. No other way around it. If you really want to complete the set, you will need to go beyond open world pve. So set up a build that functions in a raid environment, learn it well enough to contribute meaningfully, and dive in. And who knows, maybe you'll find that you actually enjoy it. Many years ago I reluctantly entered wvw to get map completion because I wanted to make a legendary, and thought I would hate it. Turns out, I actually loved it and spent almost all my playtime in there for the next 3 years. Either that, or you could just continue enjoying other areas and just be comfortable with not having something that requires you to do something you don't want to, with which there is nothing wrong, but that is the decision to make.

People also pick the fractal based on the instabilities. So for example, if there were two scales of the same fractal, the lower one might actually be more difficult if it has an instability like outflanked or boon overload (or both) than a higher scale with different instabs.

No, you need to complete 50 hearts. So If you did just one heart each day, then yes it would take 50 days. Or you could do all 4 hearts on the map each day, and it would take 13 days. Even better than that, would be doing each heart AND mining the nodes as you run past them AND doing the two meta events if they pop up while you're on the map, as they also reward you with difluorite. If you have multiple characters, you can do the hearts on each of them and speed it up further, although not everyone has the patience for that. I had a bit of difluorite left over in the bank when i started (maybe about 50) and I only really needed maybe 2-3 hours one evening to finish off the full stack. might take a bit longer or shorter for some people depending on how well you know each heart, but it's certainly not a 50 day job unless you only do the minimum amount possible each day.

I'm in Melbourne, and work full time as well. There's nothing wrong with gathering a stack of mats. As other people have pointed out, you really don't need other people around to get the map currencies. Mining nodes is a solo activity, and completing hearts is a solo activity. On top of that, since everyone wants the mount, there are lots of people trying to gather mats at the moment which means the LS4 maps pretty active even during Australian evenings. It may not be something you can do in a single evening, but calling it "near impossible" is just ridiculous. If you have other responsibilities that reduce the amount of time you can spend on the game, then sure, it'll take a little longer than it did for other people, but surely that's to be expected if you can only play for an hour or less each day.

Only one of these two bolded parts can be true. Because if both are true, then Anet is really bad at allocating dev resources on the content that is more popular. If raids are that popular then they shoud have 3 , fully staffed teams working on new wings instead of LS and a small team working on new LW for that small minority of casuals once every blue moon. Given their track record in the industry, I d wager they are pretty capable of allocating resources properly. If you're going to bold parts of a quote to make you point, try not to misquote. Lorfi never said raids or cms had more people doing them than not, he said that "more people raid and do t4's+cm's than people who don't raid or barely raid THINK".

Thank you for the laugh. You're welcome. But it wasn't intended to be funny. I'm dead serious. I think that makes it funnier tbh... He speaks the truth though, but I can see why a selective few find it funny. Yeahhh, nah sorry about that. People don't keep bringing up things like AP requirements just for the fun of it. If you go back 6 years, you'd see the exact same discussions about people being toxic in their dungeon requirements that you see now from people complaining about raids. To say that it came with raids is just objectively false. Also it takes a special kind of person to specifically wish for content that people enjoy to be canned in the hope they'll quit the game. Doesn't sound like someone worth championing to me.

Thank you for the laugh. You're welcome. But it wasn't intended to be funny. I'm dead serious.I think that makes it funnier tbh...