Anet, lets have a talk about Strike CMs

[Delita Silverburg.8632]

I've decided to make this post after watching for the past few days the iterative process of Temple of Febe CM. (HP Bug, bug fix with teeny tiny nerf, content still basically unclearable.)

I'll start with the TLDR: Who exactly are you designing this new content for? Seems like this is designed for the top 1% of the top1% and no one else. Dedicated raiders who like to clear CMs each week, don't want to touch this thing. You have to be extremely dedicated in progression, and even with that have some unrealistic dps check to reach.

Firstly, I want to encourage friendly discussion around this topic from the people who might choose to comment on my post here, and with that said, let's get into it.

I think there is a very real fear from this past week for us as enjoyers of 10 person instanced content. Let's give this a quick rundown, then I will identify in my opinion the real concern I have with the nature of this.

The challenge mode of Temple of Febe was released this week. The content has basically the exact same mechanics. But you have to respect them now. Most mechanics are the exact same with maybe a larger area, or more hp, or you have to touch an orb twice instead of just once. 

1. We got exactly 2 new strikes this year. Half as much as EoD, and 1/3 as much as Icebrood saga. Raids are nowhere to be seen, and we have to now purchase an expac every year, just for TWO new encounters? A CM vs a NM with no new mechanics means to us that it is one encounter, not two. It also says to us, that no dev time went into the CM. It's extremely disappointing almost to the point of not wanting to buy the next expac, which I can't see as a good business focus for the company.
2. Now after the top tier players have tried this content, they can't clear it. Initially the boss had 4x the HP of Dhuum CM. (160 million) Granted, this was a bug, but after the patch to fix said bug, it's now still at 144M. Why? It makes no sense. The point here is. your normal raid group isn't clearing this. Heck as of typing this, the best attempt is 21% HP remaining, and this is by the top tier groups. People that put dozens of hours of practice in. Respectable? Absolutely! Realistic? Not even close.
3. What I don't get, is why the dev team has moved away from the concept of NM is really easy for 80-90% of people doing the content, CM is doable for 40-50% of players & if you want a REAL challenge, add a title. The perfect example for this is Xunlai Junkyard. This has what I would define as 3 difficulty modes. NM, CM & Gazed into the Void. This was a marvelously designed encounter (save for all the unnecessary running between the 3 zones) because it can cater to anyone in your player base. THIS is what we should see more of, not Harvest Temple CM, or now Temple of Febe CM. THIS is what your players really want.
4. My final note of criticism, is around time. I firmly believe that an encounter should take no more than 8 minutes in 10 person instanced content on average. Anything that goes beyond that leads to significant fatigue on a player. The most egregious example of this is Kaineng Overlook. and the CM of this encounter is even worse, primarily because the mechanics stack up towards the end of the fight. For my group of players, this encounter was easy all the way until the final platform, then one critical mistake and you kill half the group and have to start over. IMO, this is also a poor design choice. It leads to groups like mine, which are experienced and capable, but not the top top 1%, saying "Lets just take this one out of our rotation."

I guess to summarize my overall point of this post, I just don't understand the core philosophy of the dev team when it comes to strikes? You go from Completely easy like Mai Trin / Cosmic Observatory to basically flipping the "No one is clearing this switch" with Temple of Febe / Harvest Temple CM. Weren't these supposed to funnel people to raids and be the stepping stone? I am pretty demoralized personally as to how I can justify the next expac given the state of Strikes as they are now. There were definitely some glimmers of hope throughout them that I do believe a good solution does exist for the whole community, but I am so confused by what has been presented that I'm unsure what to think.

Would love to hear other's thoughts or if I'm on an island alone with this. Thanks for reading.

[enigmatic.3576]

What's wrong with having something for those that want the challenge?  CMs are essentially the replacement for raids until those themselves get replaced with whatever they have next.

[Delita Silverburg.8632]

I think challenging content is just fine. I refer you back to my point 3 of my post for what I believe is a good way to have both extremely challenging and still clearable content.

[Draygo.9473]

The problem with any argument that wants to state "This is what the players want" is arguing something you cannot know. What you are saying is "This is what I think the players want". 

My personal guess is that anet wants a repeat of the HTCM release. It gave them a lot of buzz, and made people who otherwise don't want to look at guild wars 2 a look. Anet has these metrics and numbers, and HTCM did generate a lot of buzz around the game. If this is their intent, I don't blame anet attempting it again. Eventually this will get figured out like HTCM and more and more people will clear it. Anets goals are probably not just to placate the existing playerbase, but to continually attract new players to the game, and I would assume that would include players that want to be pushed to the limits. 

Personally I would like more difficulty tiers to these fights, currently we have Story, Strike, and Strike CM tiers. Ultimately though it would mean more dev time and its up to anet to decide if its worth it. 

 

[Delita Silverburg.8632]

1 hour ago, Draygo.9473 said:

The problem with any argument that wants to state "This is what the players want" is arguing something you cannot know. What you are saying is "This is what I think the players want". 

My personal guess is that anet wants a repeat of the HTCM release. It gave them a lot of buzz, and made people who otherwise don't want to look at guild wars 2 a look. Anet has these metrics and numbers, and HTCM did generate a lot of buzz around the game. If this is their intent, I don't blame anet attempting it again. Eventually this will get figured out like HTCM and more and more people will clear it. Anets goals are probably not just to placate the existing playerbase, but to continually attract new players to the game, and I would assume that would include players that want to be pushed to the limits. 

Personally I would like more difficulty tiers to these fights, currently we have Story, Strike, and Strike CM tiers. Ultimately though it would mean more dev time and its up to anet to decide if its worth it. 

 

Very good points, but when I say this is what the players want, it's definitely my opinion on the subject. based on conversations I've had with several others. Not necessarily just one person's opinion, but a collective of, at the very least my group of friends I am playing with. (so a very small sample of approx 20-30 ppl) As for the solution itself that I proposed, it covers multiple levels of experience from casual players to the hardcore extremists that loved HTCM. Truth be told though, if you look at metrics collected on even gw2efficiency, we're talking less than 1% of registered accounts have cleared HTCM at this point (Including those who just bought a clear, and those with alt accounts that should really count as 1 person). As for marketing to ppl outside the player base, that is what I was define as extremely concerning given that while it might create some small buzz, it's not healthy long term as I've already seen streamers who used to promote GW2 daily moving to other MMO platforms due to the nature of the content and community's opinion on 10 person content from various sources.

[Draygo.9473]

I think an MMO like Guild Wars should seek to cater to more than one archtype of player when possible. Having really challenging content I would feel is a good in the long term. Guild wars has a reputation at this point as a rather casual game. That in itself will bias its playerbase, but it doesnt mean that Anet should only cater to that playerbase and not try to establish players that value difficult content. 

The fact that HTCM is sellable is a point against your argument though...

 

[Cuks.8241]

You can't do much with 2 strikes. Especially if one is not good. This is not a vertical gearing game where eventually you will become strong enough to clear the encounter. There's a ceiling for players that most will never breach unless we see more crazy power creep.

Now if you have EOD. 5 (4+1) good strikes with cms, 10 encounters basically, that ramp up in difficulty, there is plenty of content for everyone. If you are a cm level player and HT cm is above your ceiling , that's fine, plenty of other content. And HT normal is probably a nice fight for you anyway, because it's just a good fight. With 2 (and one not good) well you won't please many players in any case.

Also there is a place in raiding for hard dps check bosses with not too difficult mechanics. They usually serve as gatekeepers, a gear check for your group. But that's not the type to be the final boss of a wing or a raid, those should be mechanically rich. And are more relevant for vertical gearing games that basically tell you "your gear is fine now, you're ready for the raid" and become trivial from there on.

 

[SoftFootpaws.9134]

i think the issue is that they're developing content that is either faceroll easy or only targeted towards the highest end, top 1%. there's no inbetween anymore.

 

do you know why raids were so good and still are despite all the powercreep? its because they're all about mechanics. you can skip some mechanics with raw dps, but for the most part you have to do them and the fights are more about learning your role and performing it perfectly rather than a 10min dps golem.

 

i mean, i'd rather do the living world season 2 story achivements again than spread one more time at dagda (veteran in-joke).

 

spongecake gameplay was a major critisism of dungeons in core and arenanet abandoned it for good reason (for a while ,at least). i feel like its a lazy way of designing content when you run out of ideas to do for mechanics, or don't know how to make the mechanics challenging without exhausting your party hoping they'll make a mistake. the current state of challenge modes is basically to drag it on for as long as possible to force repeating dps, healing and cc checks. actually, starting with end of dragons and continuing on into secrets of the obscure, this has affected normal modes as well.

 

it's kind of in the same league as relying on one shots, having no breakbars, disabling reviving and so on. artificial difficulty for the sake of it.

 

unfortuantely, doing checks of any kind isn't the same thing as having an interesting encounter, only one that is gated towards specific builds and playing styles. on top of this its balancing content around a single third-party tool which isn't always available, or even completely reliable.

Edited March 1 by SoftFootpaws.9134

[Crit.5123]

Honestly i agree with OP 100% on the first 3 points. Im not quite aligned with No.4 but we can get to that :).

Aiming CM content at the 0.1% of players makes no sense at all. As OP said if you want to gate content to these people, then make it the title. Your above average end game player can then engage with the content weekly and it still leaves a challange for the people that want to hardcore grind it for months.

NM for everyone, CM for your more end game focused raid/strike players and Title for the hardcore gamers in the community. Everybody wins.

As for point 4, im not quite with you on this. I love KOcm, imo it is one of the best encounters in the game but i do agree that wiping on the final phase sucks. Happened to everyone A LOT while learning. What they need is a training mote of sorts, where you can pick a phase to jump stright into and practice. No rewards for it ofc but you can then perfect each part as a group and bring it all together at the end.

Anywhoo, thats my 2c on the matter. Anet missed the mark with ToFcm by a long way,

Edited March 1 by Crit.5123

[GeraldBC.4927]

I wholeheartedly agree with every point in the OP. I can't even add anything, he lays it out pretty well. 

 

When even snowcrows is biting its teeth out, I do not believe one second that this encounter was internally tested. There's no way anyone at Anet has actually beaten this boss, at least without either godmoding themselves or nerfing it for internal testing and then buffing it again for release. I will even give a few suggestions on what parts need nerfing specifically so that it becomes a CM you can actually reliably clear every week.

• Cerus' health pool needs to be cut in half. Remember that when designing a boss encounter, the more mechanics you force the players to play down, the more you need to reduce the boss' health to make up for it.
• The duration on the malice adds' cc immunity and resistance needs to be reduced to 15 seconds AT THE VERY MOST. I'd say take it further and make it 10 seconds. If you want, you can slam protection onto those temporary buffs to really hammer home the whole 'the add is hard to kill unless you carry it out far enough' aspect. But having to stand on the literal edge like you do right now is untenable. I'd say even requiring a 1200 distance is too much because you're basically forcing the squad to lean on the blink+portal crutch. 
• The large gluttony orbs giving him 3 stacks is overblown, and the fact that at least 2 people need to soak each is weird as well. And the fact that they travel as fast as they do forces squads yet again to rely on mesmers. 
• Cerus gaining a 5% damage increase PER STACK is too much. At this point, you might as well achieve the same result by not doing the damage increase and instead making him instanuke the squad the moment he reaches a certain threshold. I get that this mechanic is supposed to be a reference to Deimos, but Deimos only got a 1% increase per hand, and that's only if the hands actually reached him, which was easier to prevent than most of Cerus' mechanics are. 
• The telegraph on the Envy attack is too short, especially when it's the add casting it. Also the attack doesn't quite line up with the telegraph. If you stand a little to the side of where it's supposed to start but opposite from where it travels, you still get hit by it.

[Delita Silverburg.8632]

I really appreciate the feedback from everyone on this post; and for those that happened to agree with my perspective, you've given me some sense of confidence that I'm not the only one confused here. So thanks for that. And for those that don't necessarily agree with my position, I understand where you are coming from to some extent, but my goal will always be to try to find a middle ground that hopefully the devs might read to affect what they create as an experience for us as their players (customers, really) that could perhaps make the majority happy. My concern with encounters such as HTCM and ToFCM, is that they seem to cater to a very VERY small subset of our 10 person instanced content community.

My group doesn't even want to start progression on the off chance it might get nerfed to a more reasonable clear level. There is no hype anymore. 😞

I would love to either see more than 2 strikes a year to give us more options on what to tackle weekly, and an implementation of more titles as extreme difficulty. My group of players ONLY do 10 person content at this point, so for us this is a very important topic.

[AliamRationem.5172]

Are you an avid CM raider who loves playing condi virtuoso?  Well, have I got the strike for you!

[Reznov.5423]

What's wrong with throwing a bone to sweat lord tryhards like teapot with cm?

[AliamRationem.5172]

15 minutes ago, Reznov.5423 said:

What's wrong with throwing a bone to sweat lord tryhards like teapot with cm?

Do you have any idea the level of dedication it takes to roll out of bed, put that shower, shave, and a haircut off yet another day, throw on that bath robe and log onto twitch for another grueling day of progression raiding?

I expect not.

[Dibit.6259]

Febe cm has some problems atm, but then again so did htcm so I figure players will learn the method to beat it or anet will adjust things depending on what data they receive.

I like that fact there's hard content in the game, when you get into end game content people tend to improve and progress that what was first difficult becomes easy, so having stuff harder than the usual end game content makes sense for those wanting to progress.

Only thing I agree with what most people have said was the difference in difficult between Co and Febe cm. Eod has a good mix of level of difficultly with their strike cms, but Soto cms are like night and day.

It would also get boring if they only created content for one group of people, granted it is a larger group but there is much more content available for them than the "hardcore" people in the game. Let them have fun too 🙂

[NtNaTn.6590]

People have had easy content in this game for over 10 years. Let the "1% of the 1%" as you put it have their fun. 

[mandala.8507]

On 2/29/2024 at 6:01 PM, Draygo.9473 said:

The fact that HTCM is sellable is a point against your argument though...

Just like OP has no concrete evidence of the overall playerbase's sentiments around the difficulty of encounters like this, you don't have evidence HTCM is somehow a selling point for the game.

Where is this significant volume of players that saw HTCM and decided to give GW2 a try who weren't going to be pulled in by other parts of the game anyway? It just doesn't exist, because GW2 is actually a terrible game for people who want to spend the majority of their time doing ultra-difficult content.

You can't say "you don't know that to be the case" while also pulling a notion out of thin air with no evidence that HTCM somehow was this monumental event for GW2. I promise, it wasn't. GW2 people heard about it. A miniscule portion of other MMO communities heard about it. But in truth, it just seemed like there was a lot of buzz about it because it got the bigger content creators in our isolated GW2 scene hyped up and they told their communities and friends it was a big deal because they were excited. It has had pretty much zero lasting impact on the makeup of the playerbase of GW2 and practically no one outside of the game would know what you were talking about if you mentioned HTCM to them.

I'm glad the EoD team got a chance to make an encounter like that, but there's zero shot it was a profit-generating endeavor for them. Making content like this is literally akin to lighting money on fire if you can't establish a large and loyal cohort of players because of it, which HTCM has obviously not accomplished. 4k account clears total on efficiency, and a solid chunk of those are surely sold kills and alt account clears.

People familiar with prog scenes from other MMOs understand it actually has nothing to do with the highest difficulty tier of the encounter and everything to do with the implementation of incrementality that hooks players of ALL skill levels into a progression ecosystem with multitudes of complexities and commitment requirements.

It's actually a consistent complaint in games like WoW when the raid content is catered too heavily to the highest tier of players, and prominent World's First competitors from that game have come out and said they don't like it when the developers of that game focus too much on how the content will play in the World First race and ignore the negative effects that will have on the playerbase at large.

We're seeing that in real time now with this Cerus CM. Anet is preserving the status quo of a bug that enabled a weeklong progression at the expense of the content being approachable to anyone but a select group of hardcore gamers. And while I won't call it an outright mistake, it is for sure a choice that has both negative and positive consequences, and time will tell which are more impactful.

[maxwelgm.4315]

2 hours ago, mandala.8507 said:

Just like OP has no concrete evidence of the overall playerbase's sentiments around the difficulty of encounters like this, you don't have evidence HTCM is somehow a selling point for the game.

Where is this significant volume of players that saw HTCM and decided to give GW2 a try who weren't going to be pulled in by other parts of the game anyway? It just doesn't exist, because GW2 is actually a terrible game for people who want to spend the majority of their time doing ultra-difficult content.

You can't say "you don't know that to be the case" while also pulling a notion out of thin air with no evidence that HTCM somehow was this monumental event for GW2. I promise, it wasn't. GW2 people heard about it. A miniscule portion of other MMO communities heard about it. But in truth, it just seemed like there was a lot of buzz about it because it got the bigger content creators in our isolated GW2 scene hyped up and they told their communities and friends it was a big deal because they were excited. It has had pretty much zero lasting impact on the makeup of the playerbase of GW2 and practically no one outside of the game would know what you were talking about if you mentioned HTCM to them.

I'm glad the EoD team got a chance to make an encounter like that, but there's zero shot it was a profit-generating endeavor for them. Making content like this is literally akin to lighting money on fire if you can't establish a large and loyal cohort of players because of it, which HTCM has obviously not accomplished. 4k account clears total on efficiency, and a solid chunk of those are surely sold kills and alt account clears.

People familiar with prog scenes from other MMOs understand it actually has nothing to do with the highest difficulty tier of the encounter and everything to do with the implementation of incrementality that hooks players of ALL skill levels into a progression ecosystem with multitudes of complexities and commitment requirements.

It's actually a consistent complaint in games like WoW when the raid content is catered too heavily to the highest tier of players, and prominent World's First competitors from that game have come out and said they don't like it when the developers of that game focus too much on how the content will play in the World First race and ignore the negative effects that will have on the playerbase at large.

We're seeing that in real time now with this Cerus CM. Anet is preserving the status quo of a bug that enabled a weeklong progression at the expense of the content being approachable to anyone but a select group of hardcore gamers. And while I won't call it an outright mistake, it is for sure a choice that has both negative and positive consequences, and time will tell which are more impactful.

Pretty much this. Anet is _not_ catering even to the 0.1%  with this, their "bug" HP and further patching is clearly meant to the couple dozen or so very specific players that would stream progression as a race. Other people who regularly complete HTCM themselves are waiting for an update due to how hilariously tuned it is.

Making a spectator encounter like other games has both good and bad consequences for sure but the one certain thing is that Anet has not catered to this crowd before and does _not_ update this type of content with enough regularity to retain this player base.

[Nephalem.8921]

This cm is massively overtuned for the sake of a world first twitch race. The mechanics are just normal mode mechanics altered a tiny bit and boss hp increased by more than 2.5! It is difficult because various mechanics overlap which make some of them impossible to be dealt with. Having to leave the circle and soak orbs at the same time for example. And the add edge mechanic is pointless. why another portal requirement?

It is questionable if the last 10% phase possible at all. huge aoe dmg on top of spread mechanics which itself hits hard and the boss gets empowered stacks and oneshots after 60sec anyways. 

And then there is a title on top. They copy wow mythic here. releasing massively overtuned bosses which are sometimes mathematically impossible to beat on release for a world first race. i prefer ff14 approach where the inhouse design team has to beat the content before it gets released. The devs have to play the game then though. It is more likely that the devs assumed 75% bench and balanced for that. Downtime is hard to anticipate though and the heal check in last phase coupled with spreads is making bs damage look tame.

 

Edited March 3 by Nephalem.8921

[Shadowmoon.7986]

The world race should have been about doing the title for doing cm cm, not about getting a normal cm clear.  Watching sc grind 50 hours on this content looks miserable.

[Morte de Angelis.7986]

7 hours ago, mandala.8507 said:

It's actually a consistent complaint in games like WoW when the raid content is catered too heavily to the highest tier of players, and prominent World's First competitors from that game have come out and said they don't like it when the developers of that game focus too much on how the content will play in the World First race and ignore the negative effects that will have on the playerbase at large.

There is so winning with the WoW playerbase, if Mythic is too hard people complain that fights were catered to the World First Race, too easy people complain its too easy and was over too fast.  WoW has also started nerfing bosses mechanics or HP periodically if there are too many guilds that are stuck on bosses even months after the World First as concluded because they don't have passive damage increases.  A large majority of the end bosses are very different to the fights the World First guilds did.  The WoW playerbase also has a tendency to blame any inconvenient change on the World First Raiders.

While I have yet to attempt HTCM or Febe CM as I don't have a static group to prog them with, the fact that I was able to walk into CO CM but basically no knowledge of Normal with minor instruction of "Don't get hit by the laser", "Move if you get targeted by soul feast" and "Move back if you have a target on you" in ~1.5 hrs in a majority Pug Group was a real let down.  I wasn't expecting anything WoW Mythic Levels of a raid boss but it too me way longer to learn how to do Nightmare and Shattered Observatory CM when they first came out years ago but like someone else said GW2 has always positioned itself as the casual MMO that doesn't have very difficult encounters so it is a bit out of place even if I like the challenging content.

[A Hamster.2580]

On 2/29/2024 at 10:41 AM, Delita Silverburg.8632 said:

I'll start with the TLDR: Who exactly are you designing this new content for? Seems like this is designed for the top 1% of the top1% and no one else. 

As someone who has never attempted HTCM and all strikes that were released after HTCM, I like that they release this new cm at this difficulty. I might not be able to clear this cm this year or the next, but I have a long term goal to strive for.

 

There was a time where I was an "open world only player" and can never imagine myself clearing all raid cm's, but I eventually did clear them and got all the titles. I plan on doing the same with all strike cm's.

 

Right now, I am enjoying WvW and have not touched instance content in a while, but I can see myself coming back to this and feel excited just watching the top groups progging this on twitch. So when you ask who this is designed for, I would say it is designed as a potential goal for the entire player base.

 

Don't hate on the dedicated top .00001% just because you are not strong enough to even attempt it. Just become a better player then come back.

Edited March 3 by A Hamster.2580

[Drag You Down.2615]

10 minutes ago, A Hamster.2580 said:

As someone who has never attempted HTCM and all strikes that were released after HTCM, I like that they release this new cm at this difficulty. I might not be able to clear this cm this year or the next, but I have a long term goal to strive for.

 

There was a time where I was an "open world only player" and can never imagine myself clearing all raid cm's, but I eventually did clear them and got all the titles. I plan on doing the same with all strike cm's.

 

Right now, I am enjoying WvW and have not touched instance content in a while, but I can see myself coming back to this and feel excited just watching the top groups progging this on twitch. So when you ask who this is designed for, I would say it is designed as a potential goal for the entire player base.

 

Don't hate on the dedicated top .00001% just because you are not strong enough to even attempt it. Just become a better player then come back.

Did you try it yourself? If you haven't, I strongly suggest you to try it first and then you may decide to edit something.  It feels different. 

Also, when a PAYED content is dedicated to less than 1% of people, the game is going to have some serious problem. To the most people, the possibility to pass this will be 0. This is the power of dps check. It is not fun at all. Also if a payed content is too "exclusive", the customer will have to consider if they want to pay for something like this again or not. Because even they pay, they will likely to be rejected by the content since the designer wants to make it impossible for them. They should allow more people to at least be able to enjoy it, not necessarily pass it. Increasing the difficulty by the complexity rather than dps check.

This is different with HTCM. HTCM is mechanically hard but requires less dps as this one. Using dps check as a tool to increase the difficulty is will literally block the players from doing it. 

You will need at least 30k dps to be able to join the fight, this is the baseline. You should be able to do 40k at least on a golem in order to achieve this. And you will still fail. Plus you need to find 8 dps people like this, not 1 but 8. Clearly, only the players from the big guilds can find this kind of group. 

[Salt Mode.3780]

1 hour ago, A Hamster.2580 said:

As someone who has never attempted HTCM and all strikes that were released after HTCM, I like that they release this new cm at this difficulty. I might not be able to clear this cm this year or the next, but I have a long term goal to strive for.

 

There was a time where I was an "open world only player" and can never imagine myself clearing all raid cm's, but I eventually did clear them and got all the titles. I plan on doing the same with all strike cm's.

 

Right now, I am enjoying WvW and have not touched instance content in a while, but I can see myself coming back to this and feel excited just watching the top groups progging this on twitch. So when you ask who this is designed for, I would say it is designed as a potential goal for the entire player base.

 

Don't hate on the dedicated top .00001% just because you are not strong enough to even attempt it. Just become a better player then come back.

I'm progging HTCM and I can say although there are soft cap for dps checks the strike itself has been done with 6 people only. When a fight is artificially hard because of HP rather than mechanics it becomes another issue. 

Currently, it locks every other dps class because cVirts are the only class that can handle the dps on both malice and at the same time maintain dps on boss this itself is an issue. If a fight lacks class diversity which ANET has been so desperately try to make sure every class can play a part, this fight is not doing it. IF EVER cVirts get a nerf from ANET this fight will be impossible to do as it was the only class that can handle specific mechanics of the fight.

[andreiblue.8231]

On 2/29/2024 at 9:16 PM, enigmatic.3576 said:

What's wrong with having something for those that want the challenge?  CMs are essentially the replacement for raids until those themselves get replaced with whatever they have next.

The difference is that those who want it will just grind at it until they finally kill it one single time then never touch it again. Why would they invest in content that can be done by less than 0.001% of players and even those only do it once instead of doing challenging but reasonable encounters which get done weekly by a larger community? IBS are the easiest and also the most popular strikes, always having a group in the lfg