devzero.4093

I don't believe this is the case in normal mode. While it's inconvenient and I always aegis tank outside bubble for various reasons, you can just run into the bubble like everyone else. The only thing I don't like about that strat is Deimos' weird pathing sometimes. I know this because sometimes I collect a tear and run into the bubble when I'm alone up there with the HK and when I run back out next to Deimos, he sometimes still decides to wander into mid for no reason. It's as if the pathing doesn't update fast enough. The other nice convenience is being able to aegis the pizza attack when tanking in mid at the beginning of the encounter (before oil). But otherwise I always dodge the pizza attack because I tend to be a bit too greedy with my aegis. At least in low kp pugs DPS never asked me to aegis the pizza attack. Is the pizza attack generally aegis'd in high kp/static groups? I never felt like this was even remotely a problem during the fight but maybe that's because I run minstrels. I feel like DPS not doing the tears mechanic is when health starts to become an issue.

Skin only: hmm maybe if it's trivial to do, but after reading a bit in those other linked threads it seems like there may be a huge technical limitation to mix and match gear with differing weights. I think the common ground would be to have the player be able to swap between the weight classes but be locked in to only using pieces of the same weight. Gear with stats: No. I feel like we would lose a bit of class fantasy in the process and I don't know what implications this would have on exotic or ascended gear. For legendary gear this means you're done after the first set. Is that good/bad? I don't really know, I'm 5/6 pieces in and will get my completed set either next week or the week after. I feel like the game is going in the direction of making legendaries easier to obtain and making them also more useful so this seems like something they might actually do.

You mean that I should be able to use my legendary heavy armor set on my Mesmer too with the stats / infusion slots / etc. or just the cosmetic look?

Keeping my inventory neatly organized is a constant struggle and in my opinion there is no other way around this other than manually keeping things sorted daily and maybe having larger bags and bank space. If you sort ever day, you generally don't end up in the situation that it becomes an unorganized mess that takes hours to clean up. I personally like having different "sections" (archipelagos) in my bag where I store related items, it works out well enough for me. Me too. I had this happen with Envoy I where I held onto everything until I completed it because I didn't want to spend the time to research which items I can keep, sell or delete.

In instanced group content if you're not communicating then you're getting removed. Simple as. Edit: I don't think this has to be said, but I'll say it anyway to prevent misunderstandings. Not communicating of course doesn't warrant getting senseless hate. We don't have enough information so we can only speculate. During what content do you get hate mail? PvP? Either way I do agree that you should be able to disable receiving mail from other players if you wish to do so. While we're at it the block system could use some improvements too.

I only ever get unsolicited gold and love through the mail. We must be playing different games.

This has been my experience so far as well, I was mainly pointing out a disadvantage of using an LFG vs having a guild or static that get to know your skill level. LFG can be a mixed bag for sure. Yes "know mechanics" it is up to interpretation. You're asking if the person knows the mechanics of the fight, not if they know and are able to execute the mechanics of the fight (slight but important difference). Someone who has never done raids might understand it to be the former and not the latter. "Know mechanics" requires some degree of experience, so in fact you are asking for some experience when you ask "know mechanics", as you've just described in your post. I think it might be better to just ask for 1KP tbh. I have no issues with KP, even though it's not a completely reliable way to determine skill it's better than nothing.

That's where the "know mechanics" part comes in. As I already said, I do no KP runs that just ask people to know the mechanics. If you join my group and do your job properly, I don't care what prior experience you have. The problem I have with "know mechanics" is that it's up to interpretation what this actually means. I know what you mean with "know mechanics" of course and most who raid know this too, but a new player might read up some guides and watch some videos and technically "know mechanics" and could even explain them to you, but when it comes to the fight he won't be able to deal with the mechanics despite knowing how it's supposed to work. When you've done the same boss many times you know what you have to focus your attention to whereas someone relatively new to the boss will be paying attention to everything, likely getting distracted and then dying or wiping the raid because their attention wasn't there where it was supposed to be. The other issue with the LFG is that you only rarely get to see the same people again so you are only able to judge their skill level based on what you see in that run. In one of my training runs I remember tanking Deimos for 3 hours without dying a single time and the next day in an exp run I get yeeted off the platform, die to mind crush twice because of bad timing and dodge off the platform back to back. To the first group I was a good tank and for the second group I was a bad tank. I normally don't die on Deimos but people in the second group can't know that, they only got to experience my bad day.

I just finished the Icebrood Saga story the other day and after the third dragon response mission I was praying for it to be the last one only to get another, and then another, and another, and another and another and... I wanted it all to end. I know that it must have been better paced when it was first released but good lord just dumping that many dragon response missions back to back on us to complete the story is a bit excessive. I'm aware of the resource limitations during that time but stil... I feel like they should have left it at the 2-3 most important ones for the story and then just concluded the story. The others could have been optional, not part of the story. I must add that I was really happy when I saw a few other lost souls doing the same DRM with me as it meant that it wouldn't be a completely terrible and depressing experience and actually had a bit of fun during those moments. But mostly it was just a bad solo experience.

I can of course only speak for myself when commanding, but if you can't fill the role that I'm looking for in an exp (experienced) run you won't be able to join my groups. I can't compare roles today to the roles back then as I've not experienced it myself, but we still have role requirements that "need" (I'll get to this later) to be met for smooth runs. Be it boonhealer, boondps, handkite, pusher or whatever. If there are no slots left you don't get to join, it's all on a first come first serve basis unless someone doesn't mind swapping roles for you. I'll give you an example of what I mean: I create a group and we have 9/10 players and we're only missing a qdps so I put up an LFG looking for a qdps. Instead of a qdps a normal dps joins. Yes, we probably can do the content without a qdps, but the thing is, I don't want to, not in an exp run. I politely inform the player that we're looking for a qdps and if he can't qdps or fill another role (role swapping with someone else if they don't mind) then I'll ask him to leave. Ultimately, if he doesn't leave by free will I will ensure that he does by kicking him, as boons are non-negotiable for me. Is this toxic behavior or gatekeeping for you or is it different now because it's not difficult to fill a role like boondps/boonhealer nowadays? There are exceptions to this of course. In non-experienced runs, such as training runs, if a complete newbie joins and has no idea what a boondps even is then I'll let them stay to experience the raid, even if it means I'm handicapping the group for this player. I try to avoid this situation as much as possible but it did happen a few times. My training runs have no expectations or requirements and I don't expect a full clear, we get as far as we get. I never thought of it this way but I think you hit the nail on the head with "ppl just went into raids like it was open world meta". This is seemingly what a lot of new players are doing even today in the experienced raid tab, which is why people ask for killproof. The funny and ironic thing is that if Anet would have "gatekept" the experienced raid tab like they do with T4 fractals, there would have been less opportunities for animosity to develop. I think it would have changed the way people perceived the situation going from "other players are gatekeeping me" to "I need to raid more to unlock the experienced tab". Similar how you need to level up your fractal level to be able to join/create T4 groups. What do you guys who think killproof/requirements are gatekeeping think about the personal fractal level and the T4 LFG tab being locked until you level up high enough? Ignore agony for a second.

Well here's a question to the experienced raiders that have been here since nearly the beginning of raids: if you had a newbie group with mostly bad specs, how bad was it, could you still clear wings? Of course the player base gets better as time progresses and power creeps in, so it won't be the same back then as it is now but it would be good to know for reference. I ask this because the other week I was in a newbie group with extremely low dps, we're talking dps somewhat above healer dps for some players but we were able to clear W1 regardless. I know dps was very low because I did 30% of the damage on one boss and I'm an average dps at best (I main healing firebrand and prefer it to dpsing). We were heavily handicapped in comparison to other groups I've been in and we still were able to clear it without too much trouble. I guess what I'm asking is, was it a necessity to require certain specs to be able to clear the content or did the content just get much easier/faster because you can skip mechanics (like it is now). Another way of asking this is, if I had LFG'd with mostly newbies back then like I did the other week, could I still have cleared W1?

Do you think gatekeeping is still an issue? I can only assume what your definition of gatekeeping is as everyone seems to have different thresholds for it so correct me if I'm wrong. Gatekeeping is setting KP (or any other) requirements for people to join groups. I wasn't playing back then that's true, but I would have tried to make my own groups just like I do now when there are KP/LI groups in the LFG that I don't fulfill or if there are no other groups that I can join but I would like to raid. With this in mind, I don't see how it's possible to gatekeep anyone from doing raids now or in the past. For me "gatekeeping" implies that others are able to actively hinder me, which is not the case.

Ok, but have you considered that not everyone can afford a pair of nice boots? More seriously, requirements are fine. If you don't meet them or don't like them just make your own group without them. I started casually raiding a few months ago almost entirely through the in game LFG. I've been part of training runs, kp runs, my own training runs without expectations/requirements, etc., and I've got 4/6 legendary armor pieces now and I don't know how any small but vocal faction of players could possibly hope to gatekeep me (or other new players) from this content.

This rarely happens but it happened again in Voice and Claw today and sometimes it also happens with Cosmic Observatory and Boneskinner. My graphics settings are all set to the lowest. I know the mechanics off by heart so I can deal with it but it feels really bad to play when you don't have visual cues through boss animations. I don't remember other instanced content like fractals or raids having this issue. I can only guess, but the invisible behavior of bosses is very similar to the character limit graphics setting when you target a player and then they get loaded in, then when you untarget them they go invisible again (like when Boneskinner jumps away, or the two Voice and Claw Bears disappear shortly). Same thing seems to be happening to the bosses, even though loading seems to take a lot longer than with player's characters.

At this point in the thread I'm afraid to ask, but what do you guys mean with elitism?