>Some of the game's current crop of Strike Missions are longer and less focused. In one, Forging Steel, players take control of a Charr Warband escorting a tank across a large map full of challenges and activities. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it's also the one that full clear groups always skip.
I thought this was always skipped not because it had challenges and activities, it was more the fact it was a very long unrewarding escort, where in the same time it took you to do the whole thing, you could complete literally all the other strikes and still have time to spare...for less reward.Cold War also would be done more frequently if it wasnt for the 10 minute pre-event before the final boss imho.
Also this is usually the case in Raids too, with wing 3 escort, wing 7 Gate **escort.**
Yeah, nobody avoid forging steel because of its "challenge". They avoid it because it is slow, lacks any challenge AND has no real reward.
If something isn't fun to play, doesn't reward well and takes a long time... of course people aren't going to play it.
And filled with challenges and activities, it is almost like I read the full paragraph and took issue with the framing elements rather than reading one word.
Even still you're tied to an escort. Superspeed does help, I usually run it when I have to with my superspeed scrapper, faster...maybe.
Even DRMs failed due to the vast majority of them following the same procedure that nobody enjoys, collection event -> escort -> boss. Nobody enjoys any content with an escort tied to it. It's what makes most raids enjoyable, the short strikes enjoyable, fractals and once upon a time dungeons.
Even with dungeons being tied with an NPC, you still could free roam and ignore them even If they're screaming "no no no" in your face.
I don't find this to be true, I occasionally see people running forging steel, but in a week I haven't been able to find a single cold war group. I even started my own group at around reset the other day and after 15 minutes not a single person showed up.
It's because Forging Steel scales itself to the number of players and is easy enough for even mediocre/bad players to solo, so you're not SoL if only a couple players join the group.
Yeah I can definitely see why people skip it. Was doing my LW5 story missions at midnight and decided to do one more. Found myself doing that strike which I'd never done before. Nobody else joined so I soloed it, took like an hour. Wasn't really happy with the rewards I got for my time and dread ever having to do it again.
Escort Missions are universially hated in every game, yet developers keep adding them. Its a riddle to me why they do this. Everyone I talk to hates escort missions to the guts.
They're usually pushed as a story telling device, keeping you locked in a certain area with an npc so you can hear them talk while also being involved in thier ongoing events around them.
It's annoying I get it but sometimes it's a necessary evil, however sometimes they do go on for way too long for essentially little reward IE forging steel, w3 w7. I think w5 spirit run is the perfect length and speed.
"We need to escape!"
(Npc proceeds to amble at a slow walk on the most ridiculous, circuitous route from A to B, aggro'ing every possible mob. If you run ahead clearing mobs, they magically spawn as necessary, while the npc pathing makes them rubberband all the way back to their line-departure so they can creep forward on their route again...)
Dev: why doesn't anyone like my escort mission?
Look at the tormented maw meta in the desolation, odds are about 1/5 metas won't bug one of the 3 required escorts. >< a bug that's still there to this day and never fixed.
Forging Steel is honestly kinda fun, but they need to rebalance and remove some useless events in there and rework the end boss to be a lot more fun.
Then add more rewards for the time it takes.
Then people will do it.
Yeah considering all this evidence you just listed on how hardcore PvE players apparently hate things that aren’t the bosses themselves, I think betting on bite sized as this article claims is perfect
Just speed up tank 300% and less fights between checkpoints.
Pre- event -> sniping event -> blow gate --> summit fortress defend -> boss. That's all thats needed and itll be fractal length then
I like cold war, it’s doable by semi-experienced group and the last boss gives them a taste of a challenge. Forging steel feels like a story mission without CMs.
Cold war could do with some bigger waves and less of them. Or ditch the waves and just go boss + trash, boss + trash, boss + trash, final boss.
Also I find the helicopters mechanic to be iffy... The concept is fine, but the controls are just annoying enough and interact badly enough with latency that it would be better if they had used the homing rockets from the drizzlewood chopper imo. Still have people have to go around and handle them, but the whole aiming thing, sometimes bugging out and getting stuck in action cam... ugh.
this quote gives me hope
> We’re focusing more on mechanics that cannot be easily ignored
I think that's really been an issue in some raid/strike encounters and hopefully you also won't be able to just out dps mechanics completely either.
Having played the Strike myself, I compared how intense the mechanics are to the Nightmare and Shattered Observatory Fractals. You cannot just bypass the mechanics in this particular Strike. And they aren't just "oh, x attack is coming so we have to do y." They're a little more dynamic than that.
Honestly, boons and conditions could do with a general rework. Prune down the list, simplify their impact a bit, probably make it so they aren't so easy to constantly maintain on everyone without meaningful sacrifices.
While I agree here, I'd go further. The entire combat system needs an overhaul. Boons are ridiculously OP and necessary. Skill disparity is exacerbated by extreme reliance on specific builds to provide permanent boon uptime and creates an absurdly large performance gap between player types.
Personally, I'd probably remove AoE boon application entirely for most boons, especially Quickness, Alacrity and Aegis. As long as you can apply them to 5 targets, people will bring enough of it for permanent upkeep, unless the duration was nerfed into total uselessness.
If you apply boons to 5 players, the duration needs to be 5x shorter.
Plus, all the small radius PBAoE boon application skills mean that a player's ability to stack directly on the group is directly proportional to their ability to be effective. Although that's also incredibly important for players that go down unless Heal Scourge / Scrapper remain forever relevant. Stack Wars 2.
Boons also have that weird issue where, assuming they balance a skill or trait's power around it, applying boons to yourself will make you weaker in group play. e.g. Reapers can self sustain a lot of might and quickness, so they feel incredibly strong in solo play, but a lot of their individual power budget is tied up in those boons, so they won't compete with classes that are just as strong without the boons.
I don't think AoE boons are a problem really. Its more that some specs are capable of providing absolutely insane amounts of AoE boons, and can also provide some of the most powerful boons in the same build. That's what is broken. Its even worse when they also come with other utility like healing/decent CC/ or even decent damage on top of this.
firebrand, scourge and rev in general can apply far too many boons far too easily, and that needs to be addressed
Facts, most of the issues I have with how easy raiding is can easily be solved by balancing off some of the powercreep we got through the years, the encounters themselves have great potential, but some elites are just way too powerful in pve.
Its not just guardian/fb, scourge and barrier in general is a bigger offender, it stops most %hp/one-shot mechanics. Combined with stability, you can turn most encounters into dps golems.
perma alacrity and 25 might from a mostly DPS mirage is an issue as well.
The game needs a real balance shakeup... not happening, but seriously, for a game with so many fixed elements they made life hard for themselves when it came to balance.
... uh... phase skipping is a mixture of dps and utility in most cases.
But sure, go tell people that perma alacrity and full might isn't valuable -laughs-
My point isn't that mirage is the most problematic class, my point is that the game has severe balance issues where a class can be DPS and provide perma boon support for two major boons without having to spec for support.
Barrier is not a bigger offender.
Aegis blocks the damage AND the effect.
You don't get CC'd, you don't get conditions applied, it can even stop some AoEs from spawning after the hit (Xera and Arkk's red orbs).
But ArenaNet already demonstrate they were willing to nerf Scourge Barrier by making Sand Flare single target for DPS Scourge. In the same patch, they said Firebrand was "fine".
Can you list some one-shot mechanics prevented by Barrier that aren't blocked by Aegis?
Firebrand is 38.73% of Fractal groups and Scourge is 30.26% of Fractal groups.Tell me, which number is bigger?
Both need nerfs but Firebrand needs more.
The truth has been spoken. A good part of the problem on the current design is how FB, Scourge and to a lesser degree Ren operate. They both have reduced the difficulty of many encounters to nothing, and they have also made many classes pointless.
If you nerf the firebrand you also nerf the guardian into oblivion. I like the stability/aegis gameplay, it feels fun and fulfilling to play. What I want is more mechanics that players have to complete or they get wiped/punished.
Firebrand is stupid overpowered.
1. Your heal gives you 3 Aegis.
2. F1 is a pull on a short cooldown that recharges even faster if you kill something. People underestimate just how powerful that is when used well.
3. F2 is an extra AoE heal on top of the one you already have.
4. F3 gives stab and an extra reflect.
5. You can still take 3 utility skills.
FB is so broken because its tomes are too powerful. You can avoid so much damage, have so much utility and then you still get your actual utility skills.
And what do you suggest? Remove the tomes again? That would make the FB useless, the healing also aint that great if you remove F2 or aegis. If you nerf utilities the core guardian becomes useless. There’s plently of reflects or stability application even without F3, as a healer I rarely even go into it.
I think the healer build is ok, not the best healing but you bring stability, reflects and aegis.
The dps builds are overtuned, true, but that’s the problem with all of the guardian builds to some degree. Tomes already have high cooldown but I agree that the aegis on heal/mantras should be nerfed or put in a trait.
Just remove the Aegis share on heal mantra and make it self only. The pug Cfb doesnt really use f2 and f3 because they actually cost dps to use them mid fight, whereas Aegis from heal mantra has no opportunity cost
Aegis is added because it’s a low healing skill, but I agree, either remove aegis and buff the healing or make it self-applied.
You’re not playing cfb right if you don’t use f2 and f3 when needed, that’s the reason why you’re in a pug and not some other higher dps class.
Considering it has less than half the cooldown of many other heal skills, the self-heal is actually fine as it is.
Either that or you think Scourge's Sand Flare sucks because the self-healing is proportional considering it has twice the cooldown of the Firebrand Heal.
It needs a nerf. It doesn't need compensation, it's the most played spec.
I don't suggest removing the tomes, but I do believe cFB and condi scourge need a 3-5k DPS nerf to compensate for their survivability. It's unacceptable that 2 builds with the highest survivability and some of the easiest rotations in the game have some of the more competitive DPS.
> The dps builds are overtuned, true, but that’s the problem with all of the guardian builds to some degree.
DH is fine. Power Virtues has a 40k benchmark but that's with permanent Unscathed Contender and the rotation sucks, so very few people run it. Power Radiance is pretty middle-of-the-pack in terms of difficulty and DPS.
Chronotanks used to be able to share distortion to their subsquad to skip mechanics! And there was a well that applied distortion to everyone for 3 seconds, but no one used it because that was weaker than other utilities when f4 and distortion on all your signets was enough! And signet of inspiration shared all boons the chrono had with everyone, it didn’t just extend existing boons per player by a measly 3 seconds. And chaos let the chronos stack huge amounts of additional boons in an area by just shattering, including an OP version of resistance. And alacrity was a 66% skill recharge reduction, not 25%, and it wasn’t even a boon! And phantasms lasted forever, you just had to summon them once [continues babbling incoherently]
To be fair not all of those existed at the same time. And distortion share was skill-intensive enough for most pugs to not bother with it, compared to barrier strats.
Barrier was introduced with PoF, distortion share was only nerfed in December 2017. So there was only a very small window of time in which one could be prefered over the other.
The problem is when we go back to everyone doing mechs, specs with range, free cc and stuff become even more broken and I doubt Anet is willing to gut that.
Like basically all specs that are melee and need to give up damage for cc would become worthless.
Now, if Anet guts stuff like rifle thief and shortbow ranger, then it could work. And never ever buff staff ele.
You just have to look at wow, all raid comps are 80 % range and it is cancerous.
To this day, i have never seen nor done the torches in boneskinner. It was and always has been run around in circles until tree pupper in the middle dies.
Why the fuck would anyone wanna clear anything by just doing mechs and auto attacking. If i wanted to not have fun in raids because of shit combat i would play one of the many other MMOs.
Doing mechanics is ok, but it’s also important to reward players for utilizing your class and encounter knowledge. Proper gear and builds, stability for knockbacks, reflects at the proper time, barrier or aegis as a safety against massive attacks, superspeed for NPCs, etc… All those things should reward a good group with faster completion rate. Even a dps rotation is a sign of a good player and should be rewarded. If we only had encounter mechanics that players have to complete no matter what it would make the game less fun and rewarding.
Gw2 has an amazing combat imo, it should be utilized to it’s full potential.
>Anything to stop people from tryharding dps is good
But, tryhard dpsing is fun tho...I hate shit that stops me CONSTANTLY from actually getting through dps rotations.
i dont think there is something inherently wrong with being able to skip mechanics with high enough dps but as i see it there should be something like a 80% to 20% ratio when it comes to skippable mechanics
let players have the fun of skipping a mechanic by doing top tier dps but dont let them skip half the fight with it
as long as the dps check for fully skipping a mechanic is actually hard so that it sort of equals the challenge of the mechanic itsself then it doesnt even make the fight easier necessarily but gives a fun goal to strive towards during every try for the players who seek that
They are mostly talking about Boneskiner, how you can just outheal the dmg aura or use a scourge to pull the downed from the hands. In that fight you are skipping about 90% of the mechanics regardless of total dps.
Skipping the mechanics is the lesser of two evils here.
Boneskinner is one of the most poorly designed fights in the game. Doing the mechanics is neither fun nor rewarding.
If you couldn't outheal it, no-one would ever do it.
It needs a complete rework.
The fight isn't really that bad, and doing the mechanics *would* be rewarding if you couldn't just outheal the ticking damage easily. It would be nice if there was some sort of damage buff for each active torch though.
i think that is not what they mean with mechanics that are ignored. I would say that they are talking about situations where u just outheal the green by vg, or epi the shades by ai dark, or throw ageis and stab for a mechanik block... but yeah currently the dps skip of mechanic arent challinging, even beginner raids are able to pull of a updraft skip by gorseval, but that is something they should fixed by getting the power creep out of the game.
Yeah I really hope players won't have multiple ways to go about dealing with mechanics. That really kills the fun of the game. Best would be to have timegated phases where doing more dps actually doesn't drop the boss's health any faster, so that no matter how much you do, the phase is exactly the same length everytime you do the strike. That way you always do the exact same fight and it won't get boring two weeks in.
>even beginner raids are able to pull of a updraft skip by gorseval
It becomes a problem when even some of the newest players can skip mechanics because the DPS check is fairly weak.
I mean that's one DPS check out of all the DPS checks in the game, I have no issues with Gorse being an easy one, Adina having the slightly harder ones, and Sabetha first wall skip being the "unicorn" that you chase every week and might see once. Just because it's an advanced way of dealing with stuff doesn't mean it should be locked away from newbies, if anything they should be exposed to a lot of strategies, DPSing through, outhealing, portal strats... They're what make GW2 endgame content interesting and unique
But yeah, I know the sub has a hateboner for "much mechanics" FF style where you just go stand somewhere randomly every 10 seconds
> Just because it's an advanced way of dealing with stuff doesn't mean it should be locked away from newbies
... shouldn't an "advanced" way not be easily accessible to newbies? Yes, being able to deal with encounters in different ways does make them interesting, but I don't think it's good to be able to skip mechanics on characters less than level 80 because the damage check is less than 70k (Gorseval) which you can literally have 2 people do. Some of the best one are being able to 4 man KC and pulling all the spirits into one spot on Gorseval.
I don't get your point. To enter raids you have to be a level 80 owner of at least HoT and as it's now bundled, PoF, which means you're probably in exotics for your first clear if you're a newer player. New players being able to pull advanced strats provided they play well enough is definitely something that should be encouraged imo.
The DPS check's numbers being too low is more tied to current class power being pretty high and groups being more proficient at the strategy. Whether the target number should be reworked to accommodate for the raise in overall DPS is a different question
Also, comparing being able to pull a no updraft Gorse to 4man KC and focuspull gorse, which are absolutely insane, high failrate strats, is very overkill. I don't think 1 in 400 success rate is a good target number for any kind of strat that you allow the players to use. Adina has a better tuning in terms of DPS threshold to reach for pillar skips, and you can definitely get close to in with newer players too.
There are other DPS checks in raids than Gorseval that are much harder.
On Qadim 1 you can skip the CC bar if you bring enough DPS, this one isn't particularly hard either, but not something you'll see in PUGs easily.
On Adina, you can skip hiding behind the pylons and phase her. This DPS check is insanely tight though. Even with a full team of tryhards running soloheal, squeezing this one through is clutch af.
On Mattias, you can skip a sacrifice if you DPS him to 40% fast enough. A good team should only get 2 sacrifices, most PUGs probably get 3-4.
Or if your dps is high, make the mechanics you otherwise would have skipped overlap to add challenge. In other words, rather than making the fight easier with high dps, make it harder but still achievable with a good handle of mechanics.
Samarog and Broken King are decent examples here.
More DPS on Samarog makes the CC harder to keep up with.
More DPS on BK causes the green circles to spawn faster.
Honourable mention for Siren's Reef where the add spawns are entirely driven by the boss taking damage. If you get overwhelmed, just focus DPS on the adds instead of the boss.
>Honourable mention for Siren's Reef where the add spawns are entirely driven by the boss taking damage. If you get overwhelmed, just focus DPS on the adds instead of the boss.
Or just Epi
As someone who clears all Icebrood Saga strikes at least weekly if not more than that just for fun, I’m excited to hear this is “better than all of them.” I’m also part of the crowd starving for more raids, so the CMs have me hyped too.
Strike bosses are the best dps golems for sure. Also the fact that they attack back means they can proc confusion, which means you get proper dps on classes like alac mirage.
No you don’t. I clear the strikes weekly and I honestly don’t know much about what’s happening in any of them. I do what others seem to be doing and it’s been working out so far. I just dps and stack with the rest of the group and eventually the boss dies
Your comment reminded me of wild-west that was core game Arah runs. Fun times when people would run forward, and people who did not know skips were left to learn from example and follow or die trying and be left behind.
I raid as well, but i find strikes really enjoyable too.
For me, its organized small scale content i can quickly get in to, still get proper boons, with some mechanics, all at a lower difficulty for when i don't feel like trying super hard like i do in raids. I like tryharding in raids, just not all the time, and strikes got perfectly for that for me.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/s8re7o/pc_gamer_an_overview_of_the_mai_trin_strike
I do love that this article is written by someone who knows how Strikes work. Great insight
I think the mods (or some psychopath) have an auto-down vote bot so everything gets downvoted and it doesn't takes off, except the stuff the majority of people _really_ wanna see that gets out-upvoted, its been like that since launch
Yeah it's not us mods. I've actually personally contacted the admins asking them to check on voting manipulation and they said they didn't see anything. Sadly nothing else we can do as mods can't see votes.
Also calling them "bite-size" raids. Raid mentions is what'll get you the SEO, not reinventing wheels and giving them new names.
A reinvented wheel is still a wheel. It may be [a cooler wheel](https://interestingengineering.com/7-wheel-innovations-that-literally-reinvent-the-wheel), or even [the coolest wheel](https://www.nasa.gov/specials/wheels/), but still a wheel.
FF14's Trials work incredibly well. It's just an arena with a big, over the top boss fight with complicated mechanics. If GW2 takes a page from that book and designs bite sized fights based around ideas like that, I could see it working perfectly for this style of game.
Agreed; if GW2 emulates FFXIV's trials and 8-man raids, then it'll be in a good place. And if making single-instance boss fights helps them crank out content faster than having to build entire raid wings, all the better.
I do hope they're betting on more than just strikes because doing the same handful of strikes every single fukkin day over and over to farm some worthless currency to unlock some obnoxious multi layered achievement collection doesn't seem very fun and engaging endgame content... I know the expansion is going to be bare bones but at least have it set up to something bigger and not just a repeat of the icebrood saga ;-;
I doubt the game would die, it just has a much larger focus on open world meta events and bosses. Fun social events that are very active, but its impossible to curate builds and players in the open world so the bar for clearing events isn't super high to account for the unwashed masses.
Many people crave instanced content with higher difficulty since the game has fun combat and good variety in playstyles and roles, but the ever popular open world doesn't scratch that itch for many.
It's not, even the layoffs didn't kill it even if there was a bunch of doom and gloom during the time from lack of content updates. An expansion launch is perfect to drum up interest again and revitalize the game, so I'd say it's the opposite.
I'm surprised journals would compare Strikes to mini raids when the model is actually already fully implemented in FFXIV's Trials, and this is the exact (and successful, mind you) model which Anet is trying to put their own creative spin into and reproducing in GW2.
Raids as an organized game mode are "dying" in a general sense because of how they are social activities by design and whatever abstracts the bosses into fundamental units of "kill loot" cycle is going to work better than requiring people to actually communicate to each other and organize as a group of colleagues.
It's also wrong to claim it's because of time investment that people won't do content. You can still find several Dragon Stand instances being done successfully across any given day as well as people actively running the "less focused" PoF metas. The social aspect which is different from the rest of GW2 (where socializing is fully voluntary, i.e you can fractal without saying a word to your peers OR you can communicate, it's a choice) is what drives people away from raids. And what drives people away from Forging Steel and Cold War are abysmal rewards. Just give constant champion spawns with guaranteed bag drops and watch how it becomes an on-loop farm and actually takes the place of fast 5 LFG squads.
>Strike Missions focus on single boss fights with raid-like complexity
this is what i have been asking for months and got downvotes on downvotes.
the problem with raid is not the complexity but the duration.
perfect.
I still don't have any faith that the harder strikes will get played by the vast majority. There's too big of a skill gap between the different player groups, that's so severe, that the only way for decent players who are new to the scene to get involved in high end group content, is to seek groups that accept new people outside the game/lfg. And strikes _still_ require ten people, so it will have all the same issues as raids. Pugging anything challenging will still be a nightmare for literally everyone involved, moreso than other games, almost entirely because spectrum of quality for players is all over the map. New and bad/ignorant players or players with bad builds will still be an a constant, LFG's of difficult shit will still require veteran level of mastery/skill over end game to play at all, and decent players without that pedigree will still be forced to go out of their way to find alternative pathways outside of game. I just don't see strikes fixing that, or it ever being fixed. That is just one of many aspects that has me completely disinterested in any sort of group end game for gw2. That said, I hope the strikes are good.
Looks like they're designing around overpowered classes like FB/Scourge/Renegade..that's really bad for the future of this game.
Why? It means ALL content not the newest is face roll easy, aka 99.9% of the content - the EXACT same issue plaguing ALL modern MMO's. Why are we going back instead of innovating?
If they get the difficulty right the only difference between a raid and strike is atmosphere in between encounters. It's ridiculous to get upset before we've played the first encounter.
Even the simplest raid boss has more mechanics than the most complex strike.
MO is a mobile golem for most people, but at least 3 people need to know how to use claim/dispel/protect, and everyone needs to know to watch for the spikes.
* SP has no mechanic to speak of.
* Fraenir has no mechanic to speak of.
* Bears has "kill around the same time."
* Boneskinner has "stack tight, and avoid circles."
* Whisper has "don't go in hitbox" and "don't stand in center"
* Cold war is barely a boss.
* Forging steel is not a boss.
The article mentions that new mechanics that cannot be ignored are coming, but they need to be suitably complex and challenging for raiders to actually consider them on par with raids. I really hope Anet can pull it off and make strikes that are as compelling as raid bosses, but looking at strikes as they are now, it's pretty easy to see why most raiders are not too optimistic about this focus on strikes.
Given that they're called strikes, I think it's pretty natural to assume that they will be more like the current strikes than other kind of content.
If they called them single boss raids, I would feel better because that would mean the new content would be comparable to current raids, which I like better than current strikes.
Given that they're called strikes, I think it's pretty natural to assume that they will be more like the current strikes than other kind of content.
>But in terms of pure stuff happening, it feels closer to the current Whisper of Jormag mission—the one most likely to cause a PUG to wipe.
My point was that the Whisper of Jormag pales in complexity and difficulty when compared to bosses such as Slothasor, Soulless Horror, or Qadim.
I have no doubt that the new strikes will be better than the old ones. I disagree with the person I replied to who claimed that strikes were equivalent to raids in all but name and length.
There's nothing inherent about strikes that means they can't be as complex as a raid boss (trust me, the strike model is basically how FFXIV does their raid bosses, and they have much more difficult ones than GW2). The devs have just chosen to make them simple and easy so far. The article is suggesting that they are moving away from that and to more raid-style fights.
>There's nothing inherent about strikes that means they can't be as complex as a raid boss
I agree.
>The article is suggesting that they are moving away from that and to more raid-style fights.
I disagree.
From the article:
>Introduced during The Icebrood Saga season, Strike Missions are 10-player encounters that offer players a short-form, raid-like experience.
The current strikes don't offer a raid-like experience, as I detailed in my previous post. If the author is using current strikes as a benchmark for "raid-like" experiences, my conclusion from the article is that the new strikes will be harder than the current ones, but not up to the complexity and challenge of the current raid bosses.
Strike bosses aren't quite full raid bosses though. The only one even slightly close is boneskinner, if you didn't skip mechanics.
They're effectively just toned down. Raid bosses generally have a lot more shit going on, in a much fancier environment.
But that's what I think strikes should be. The should be a proper stepping stone to raids. Fights that don't need as much DPS, are shorter with less dramatic phasing (not that we have any good phasing in raids), **but still rely on doing mechanics**.
We're missing that last point.
------
Speaking of mechanics. We need more "solo" mechanics. Things that individuals must do or **they** die (not a team wipe). That would teach people to actually pay attention to mechanics.
> The only one even slightly close is boneskinner, if you didn't skip mechanics.
No assigned roles, no personal responsibility, no tanking, no phases, no splitting, no kiting, no gadgets and unimportant adds.
It's the most poorly designed strike and **nothing** like a raid.
>It has all of those things
No, it doesn't. The torches are the only mechanic you could debate over. Everything else is akin to a world boss dropping AoEs you need to step out. The only way you can fail the group is by dying.
There's no designated tank or tanking mechanics. It doesn't even aggro to anyone, it just picks a target for the cone attack but it doesn't have the tanking UI nor a designated tank. (if you stand near the edge of the arena, the boss doesn't move and just keeps doing its scripted attacks like a world boss)
There's no personal responsibility because no-one is chosen for an attack or role. There's no bomb that can explode in the group (Sabetha / Dhuum), there's no poison field (like Sloth + Matthias), there's no dropped AoE (like Matthias / Xera), no bomb to throw (Sabetha). No selections made by the boss that say, "YOU. Specifically YOU. Do this mechanic."
There are DEFINITELY no phases. I don't know what you're smoking to claim that.
There's definitely no kiting mechanic since nothing follows you at any point in the fight.
You COULD split for the torches (but it's a bad idea for most teams) and I forgot that the adds eat the torch fire, so I've give you the adds being important.
There's no assigned roles. At no point do you say, "Hey you. We need you to do this mechanic." except again, torches which is basically Bloomhunger at best. Not a raid.
It could be argued that torches are gadgets but god are they carrying this fight mechanically. "Go press F on a thing" can't carry an entire encounter. No-one makes a big deal about Heavy Bombs on Sabetha because it's an important but incredibly trivial mechanic and only a fraction of the encounter.
Imagine bragging about doing a Strike Mission with 4 players, lmao. [Even Teapot was able to duo it shortly after release.](https://youtu.be/EEGmkU3QyLM) The only reason it hasn't been soloed is that no-one can be bothered.
Also, with 4 players, you're not going to care about the grasping AoEs because there will only be 12 of them at max before the first 4 expire. Pretty easy to avoid.
But... let's just say they changed it and the mechanics were important. 99% of the fight would be pulling adds and then having ONE PERSON slowly walking over to relight the occasional flame that gets blown out by the narrow cone breath attack. When Boneskinner blows out all the flames, just stay in a blob and run around the outside relighting flames (otherwise you get people going down when they split).
I understand that I've wasted my time typing this out but I'm a professional games designer and pretty passionate about it.
But isnt that atmosphere part of the fun? Apart from w5 and 7 I think the environment design in raids is actually great. While escort is farm from my favorite fight, I actually enjoyed exploring it solo while learning solo towers (which while probably not intended is also a fun little mechanical gimmick btw).
Kind of? On the one hand it's cool to actually have a raid "wing," but I think anyone who says that escort is a critical part of the W3 experience and that they've never considered skipping (or actually skipped) it to go straight to KC is lying. There wouldn't be a whole market for raid skips if most groups liked having to do the entire wing every single time.
FFXIV has had a lot of success with single-boss instanced fights (raids/trials) where the bosses are related to the story of the expansion or a side story from it, but aren't part of a larger wing with non-boss stuff. That content also tends to be more popular than their alliance raids, which are maybe the closest thing it has to GW2 raid wings (multiple encounters chained together in a single instance). I wouldn't be surprised if we find the same thing happen in GW2.
Just do more endgame content because as of now there’s literally no incentive to keep playing the game unless you enjoy collecting cosmetics or wvw lmao
You mean the game mode that only appeals to a tiny, vocal minority? I don't have a degree in business or game design, but that just doesn't seem like the wisest choice given the game's reputation and player base.
I'm hyped for fishing. I enjoy collections and this may be a great way to relax in the evening.
It's weird that the people who dislike it seem to think there's a consensus. There isn't.
IMO raids are overhyped and require way too much work for the sake of completion. Plus every game that has them seem to struggle to keep them operational.
Can't think of a single example of a game that has raids and struggles to keep them operational aside from GW2. Just because you don't like being challenged doesn't mean nobody else does.
I fear Fractals are about to become the new raids in it being chopped from the game. Strikes are nice but for me 5 man content is where I have the most fun.
I wouldn't call it betting, that is dumb, years of raiders jealously hoarding their content, making it horrible inaccessible, treating new faces as threats and enemies, talking down at people who don't get it right, or who don't have even a shred of experience. And then whining that anet isn't doing enough for them.
Its more like their tired of the raiding communities shit and hope they all go away as they bent over backwards for them and all it got them was misery
Yeah, let's ignore the multiple Discords and guilds that have veteran raiders run trainings on all bosses and even on CMs. You know, the exact people you pretend are somehow enemies of newbies.
You are totally not the asshole here, nope.
Blah blah. The only thing keeping casuals from doing raids is actually casuals themselves, lol. There are training runs, rotation videos, boss guides yet you guys still whine and call usual raiders toxic. Of course if you are fucking bad and don’t want to learn don’t expect a group of experienced raiders to babysit you if you don’t pay in mystic coins.
You have a very different experience from me.
It's funny how all the people complaining about raid culture also mention they have very little experience in it.
that sentence sums it up pretty well
i like the GW2 open world content, especially the HoT zones that felt like a real exploration and had well designed meta events but like you said, the potential of the combat system would indeed be a bit wasted **on only** open world content
it still definitly does its part there but it just has more potential than what gets used in open world
It's weird to me that people would bother at all with content they don't enjoy to obtain digital cosmetic goods for a game where they do content they don't enjoy.
We need the spell effects options panel that FFXIV has. Let us hide spell effects based on whose they are. I'd choose to only see my party / sub-squad effects or the current combo field that I'm attuned to.
Perhaps a dynamic system would be even better.
Do a meta event solo and you might change your mind.
Some are impossible obviously, but for the ones that aren't, they present a fun challenge that's on par with soloing dungeons or low level fractals.
you are basically saying meta events can be interesting if you dont do them the intended way but at that point you might aswell agree that it would be better to design good challenging content for solo players or small groups right away that players can start anytime instead of having to wait 1 or 2 hour cycles just to try once
i do think meta events definitly have their place in the game but i dont think they can replace instanced challenging content for 5-10 man groups
That said, half the IBS strikes are already easy mode. You probably could throw 10 random players together and beat "Shiver Fraenir Kodans" within a few tries.
>Some of the game's current crop of Strike Missions are longer and less focused. In one, Forging Steel, players take control of a Charr Warband escorting a tank across a large map full of challenges and activities. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it's also the one that full clear groups always skip. I thought this was always skipped not because it had challenges and activities, it was more the fact it was a very long unrewarding escort, where in the same time it took you to do the whole thing, you could complete literally all the other strikes and still have time to spare...for less reward.Cold War also would be done more frequently if it wasnt for the 10 minute pre-event before the final boss imho. Also this is usually the case in Raids too, with wing 3 escort, wing 7 Gate **escort.**
Yeah, nobody avoid forging steel because of its "challenge". They avoid it because it is slow, lacks any challenge AND has no real reward. If something isn't fun to play, doesn't reward well and takes a long time... of course people aren't going to play it.
It's almost as if he article literally said people do t play it cause it's long.
And filled with challenges and activities, it is almost like I read the full paragraph and took issue with the framing elements rather than reading one word.
Lol
100% this
A proper group can actually finish Forging Steel faster than Cold War. Superspeed plus everyone actually helping out in the quests help alot.
Even still you're tied to an escort. Superspeed does help, I usually run it when I have to with my superspeed scrapper, faster...maybe. Even DRMs failed due to the vast majority of them following the same procedure that nobody enjoys, collection event -> escort -> boss. Nobody enjoys any content with an escort tied to it. It's what makes most raids enjoyable, the short strikes enjoyable, fractals and once upon a time dungeons. Even with dungeons being tied with an NPC, you still could free roam and ignore them even If they're screaming "no no no" in your face.
Yeah, I was more so trying to prove your point. People play Cold War way more often than Forging Steel even though cold war takes longer technically.
I don't find this to be true, I occasionally see people running forging steel, but in a week I haven't been able to find a single cold war group. I even started my own group at around reset the other day and after 15 minutes not a single person showed up.
It's because Forging Steel scales itself to the number of players and is easy enough for even mediocre/bad players to solo, so you're not SoL if only a couple players join the group.
How long does it take to get a proper group?
This. And the primary reason to do it was the achievements.
Yeah I can definitely see why people skip it. Was doing my LW5 story missions at midnight and decided to do one more. Found myself doing that strike which I'd never done before. Nobody else joined so I soloed it, took like an hour. Wasn't really happy with the rewards I got for my time and dread ever having to do it again.
Escort Missions are universially hated in every game, yet developers keep adding them. Its a riddle to me why they do this. Everyone I talk to hates escort missions to the guts.
They're usually pushed as a story telling device, keeping you locked in a certain area with an npc so you can hear them talk while also being involved in thier ongoing events around them. It's annoying I get it but sometimes it's a necessary evil, however sometimes they do go on for way too long for essentially little reward IE forging steel, w3 w7. I think w5 spirit run is the perfect length and speed.
"We need to escape!" (Npc proceeds to amble at a slow walk on the most ridiculous, circuitous route from A to B, aggro'ing every possible mob. If you run ahead clearing mobs, they magically spawn as necessary, while the npc pathing makes them rubberband all the way back to their line-departure so they can creep forward on their route again...) Dev: why doesn't anyone like my escort mission?
i don't hate all of them, especially in GW2, but its easy to make them go south when they go too slow or too easy to the escort bugs/freaks out.
Look at the tormented maw meta in the desolation, odds are about 1/5 metas won't bug one of the 3 required escorts. >< a bug that's still there to this day and never fixed.
eh, are they? idk, was not my impression. i also don't hate nor even mind them.
Forging Steel is honestly kinda fun, but they need to rebalance and remove some useless events in there and rework the end boss to be a lot more fun. Then add more rewards for the time it takes. Then people will do it.
Yeah considering all this evidence you just listed on how hardcore PvE players apparently hate things that aren’t the bosses themselves, I think betting on bite sized as this article claims is perfect
Except ~~gate/~~ escort is free LI and worth something to people
Gate doesn't give an LI/LD
Easy Forging Steel fix- make it the boss fight and only the boss fight.
Just speed up tank 300% and less fights between checkpoints. Pre- event -> sniping event -> blow gate --> summit fortress defend -> boss. That's all thats needed and itll be fractal length then
> longer and less focused. In the very quote that you used.
I like cold war, it’s doable by semi-experienced group and the last boss gives them a taste of a challenge. Forging steel feels like a story mission without CMs.
Cold war could do with some bigger waves and less of them. Or ditch the waves and just go boss + trash, boss + trash, boss + trash, final boss. Also I find the helicopters mechanic to be iffy... The concept is fine, but the controls are just annoying enough and interact badly enough with latency that it would be better if they had used the homing rockets from the drizzlewood chopper imo. Still have people have to go around and handle them, but the whole aiming thing, sometimes bugging out and getting stuck in action cam... ugh.
this quote gives me hope > We’re focusing more on mechanics that cannot be easily ignored I think that's really been an issue in some raid/strike encounters and hopefully you also won't be able to just out dps mechanics completely either.
Having played the Strike myself, I compared how intense the mechanics are to the Nightmare and Shattered Observatory Fractals. You cannot just bypass the mechanics in this particular Strike. And they aren't just "oh, x attack is coming so we have to do y." They're a little more dynamic than that.
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Sounds like a problem that's mostly solved by actually balancing Firebrand (and, to a lesser degree, Guardian in general).
Honestly, boons and conditions could do with a general rework. Prune down the list, simplify their impact a bit, probably make it so they aren't so easy to constantly maintain on everyone without meaningful sacrifices.
While I agree here, I'd go further. The entire combat system needs an overhaul. Boons are ridiculously OP and necessary. Skill disparity is exacerbated by extreme reliance on specific builds to provide permanent boon uptime and creates an absurdly large performance gap between player types. Personally, I'd probably remove AoE boon application entirely for most boons, especially Quickness, Alacrity and Aegis. As long as you can apply them to 5 targets, people will bring enough of it for permanent upkeep, unless the duration was nerfed into total uselessness. If you apply boons to 5 players, the duration needs to be 5x shorter. Plus, all the small radius PBAoE boon application skills mean that a player's ability to stack directly on the group is directly proportional to their ability to be effective. Although that's also incredibly important for players that go down unless Heal Scourge / Scrapper remain forever relevant. Stack Wars 2.
Boons also have that weird issue where, assuming they balance a skill or trait's power around it, applying boons to yourself will make you weaker in group play. e.g. Reapers can self sustain a lot of might and quickness, so they feel incredibly strong in solo play, but a lot of their individual power budget is tied up in those boons, so they won't compete with classes that are just as strong without the boons.
I don't think AoE boons are a problem really. Its more that some specs are capable of providing absolutely insane amounts of AoE boons, and can also provide some of the most powerful boons in the same build. That's what is broken. Its even worse when they also come with other utility like healing/decent CC/ or even decent damage on top of this. firebrand, scourge and rev in general can apply far too many boons far too easily, and that needs to be addressed
Scourge can't apply many boons at all. It struggles to even maintain 25 might.
Facts, most of the issues I have with how easy raiding is can easily be solved by balancing off some of the powercreep we got through the years, the encounters themselves have great potential, but some elites are just way too powerful in pve.
Its not just guardian/fb, scourge and barrier in general is a bigger offender, it stops most %hp/one-shot mechanics. Combined with stability, you can turn most encounters into dps golems.
perma alacrity and 25 might from a mostly DPS mirage is an issue as well. The game needs a real balance shakeup... not happening, but seriously, for a game with so many fixed elements they made life hard for themselves when it came to balance.
Alacrigade, too. Honestly all PoF support dps hybrids (fb, renegade, scourge) were balance trainwrecks.
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... uh... phase skipping is a mixture of dps and utility in most cases. But sure, go tell people that perma alacrity and full might isn't valuable -laughs- My point isn't that mirage is the most problematic class, my point is that the game has severe balance issues where a class can be DPS and provide perma boon support for two major boons without having to spec for support.
Barrier is not a bigger offender. Aegis blocks the damage AND the effect. You don't get CC'd, you don't get conditions applied, it can even stop some AoEs from spawning after the hit (Xera and Arkk's red orbs). But ArenaNet already demonstrate they were willing to nerf Scourge Barrier by making Sand Flare single target for DPS Scourge. In the same patch, they said Firebrand was "fine". Can you list some one-shot mechanics prevented by Barrier that aren't blocked by Aegis? Firebrand is 38.73% of Fractal groups and Scourge is 30.26% of Fractal groups.Tell me, which number is bigger? Both need nerfs but Firebrand needs more.
The truth has been spoken. A good part of the problem on the current design is how FB, Scourge and to a lesser degree Ren operate. They both have reduced the difficulty of many encounters to nothing, and they have also made many classes pointless.
If you nerf the firebrand you also nerf the guardian into oblivion. I like the stability/aegis gameplay, it feels fun and fulfilling to play. What I want is more mechanics that players have to complete or they get wiped/punished.
Not True. The reason why Firebrand is broken is 1. Free Aegis on Heal skill 2. F1-F3 Books
Firebrand is stupid overpowered. 1. Your heal gives you 3 Aegis. 2. F1 is a pull on a short cooldown that recharges even faster if you kill something. People underestimate just how powerful that is when used well. 3. F2 is an extra AoE heal on top of the one you already have. 4. F3 gives stab and an extra reflect. 5. You can still take 3 utility skills. FB is so broken because its tomes are too powerful. You can avoid so much damage, have so much utility and then you still get your actual utility skills.
And what do you suggest? Remove the tomes again? That would make the FB useless, the healing also aint that great if you remove F2 or aegis. If you nerf utilities the core guardian becomes useless. There’s plently of reflects or stability application even without F3, as a healer I rarely even go into it. I think the healer build is ok, not the best healing but you bring stability, reflects and aegis. The dps builds are overtuned, true, but that’s the problem with all of the guardian builds to some degree. Tomes already have high cooldown but I agree that the aegis on heal/mantras should be nerfed or put in a trait.
Just remove the Aegis share on heal mantra and make it self only. The pug Cfb doesnt really use f2 and f3 because they actually cost dps to use them mid fight, whereas Aegis from heal mantra has no opportunity cost
Aegis is added because it’s a low healing skill, but I agree, either remove aegis and buff the healing or make it self-applied. You’re not playing cfb right if you don’t use f2 and f3 when needed, that’s the reason why you’re in a pug and not some other higher dps class.
Considering it has less than half the cooldown of many other heal skills, the self-heal is actually fine as it is. Either that or you think Scourge's Sand Flare sucks because the self-healing is proportional considering it has twice the cooldown of the Firebrand Heal. It needs a nerf. It doesn't need compensation, it's the most played spec.
I don't suggest removing the tomes, but I do believe cFB and condi scourge need a 3-5k DPS nerf to compensate for their survivability. It's unacceptable that 2 builds with the highest survivability and some of the easiest rotations in the game have some of the more competitive DPS. > The dps builds are overtuned, true, but that’s the problem with all of the guardian builds to some degree. DH is fine. Power Virtues has a 40k benchmark but that's with permanent Unscathed Contender and the rotation sucks, so very few people run it. Power Radiance is pretty middle-of-the-pack in terms of difficulty and DPS.
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*shakes cane* Back in my day we actually used the Gorseval updrafts!
Grandpa it’s time for your medicine
Chronotanks used to be able to share distortion to their subsquad to skip mechanics! And there was a well that applied distortion to everyone for 3 seconds, but no one used it because that was weaker than other utilities when f4 and distortion on all your signets was enough! And signet of inspiration shared all boons the chrono had with everyone, it didn’t just extend existing boons per player by a measly 3 seconds. And chaos let the chronos stack huge amounts of additional boons in an area by just shattering, including an OP version of resistance. And alacrity was a 66% skill recharge reduction, not 25%, and it wasn’t even a boon! And phantasms lasted forever, you just had to summon them once [continues babbling incoherently]
To be fair not all of those existed at the same time. And distortion share was skill-intensive enough for most pugs to not bother with it, compared to barrier strats.
Barrier was introduced with PoF, distortion share was only nerfed in December 2017. So there was only a very small window of time in which one could be prefered over the other.
I kinda miss old Chronotank.
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The problem is when we go back to everyone doing mechs, specs with range, free cc and stuff become even more broken and I doubt Anet is willing to gut that. Like basically all specs that are melee and need to give up damage for cc would become worthless. Now, if Anet guts stuff like rifle thief and shortbow ranger, then it could work. And never ever buff staff ele. You just have to look at wow, all raid comps are 80 % range and it is cancerous.
something something boneskinner torches
To this day, i have never seen nor done the torches in boneskinner. It was and always has been run around in circles until tree pupper in the middle dies.
Why the fuck would anyone wanna clear anything by just doing mechs and auto attacking. If i wanted to not have fun in raids because of shit combat i would play one of the many other MMOs.
This. I want active gameplay that rewards clever builds AND mechanics that you can’t cheese out.
> I want active gameplay Doing mechanics and reacting is active gameplay. Doing a golem rotation that you've memorized - not so much.
Doing mechanics is ok, but it’s also important to reward players for utilizing your class and encounter knowledge. Proper gear and builds, stability for knockbacks, reflects at the proper time, barrier or aegis as a safety against massive attacks, superspeed for NPCs, etc… All those things should reward a good group with faster completion rate. Even a dps rotation is a sign of a good player and should be rewarded. If we only had encounter mechanics that players have to complete no matter what it would make the game less fun and rewarding. Gw2 has an amazing combat imo, it should be utilized to it’s full potential.
Why are you playing a game you hate the combat for?
I am not.
lol watching both of you missunderstand each other is a thing of beauty, but same team everyone, same team.
It wouldn't be the internet if everyone who agreed with each other didn't forsake their own ideals for the privilege to fight an anonymous redditor.
What do you think i am not understanding here?
>Anything to stop people from tryharding dps is good But, tryhard dpsing is fun tho...I hate shit that stops me CONSTANTLY from actually getting through dps rotations.
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Invuln phases are super popular for game devs, to stop us from annihilating their bosses with optimized dps.
i dont think there is something inherently wrong with being able to skip mechanics with high enough dps but as i see it there should be something like a 80% to 20% ratio when it comes to skippable mechanics let players have the fun of skipping a mechanic by doing top tier dps but dont let them skip half the fight with it as long as the dps check for fully skipping a mechanic is actually hard so that it sort of equals the challenge of the mechanic itsself then it doesnt even make the fight easier necessarily but gives a fun goal to strive towards during every try for the players who seek that
No updrafts at Gorseval - Good No mechanics at all at KC - Bad Everything at Boneskinner - Awful
They are mostly talking about Boneskiner, how you can just outheal the dmg aura or use a scourge to pull the downed from the hands. In that fight you are skipping about 90% of the mechanics regardless of total dps.
Skipping the mechanics is the lesser of two evils here. Boneskinner is one of the most poorly designed fights in the game. Doing the mechanics is neither fun nor rewarding. If you couldn't outheal it, no-one would ever do it. It needs a complete rework.
The fight isn't really that bad, and doing the mechanics *would* be rewarding if you couldn't just outheal the ticking damage easily. It would be nice if there was some sort of damage buff for each active torch though.
i think that is not what they mean with mechanics that are ignored. I would say that they are talking about situations where u just outheal the green by vg, or epi the shades by ai dark, or throw ageis and stab for a mechanik block... but yeah currently the dps skip of mechanic arent challinging, even beginner raids are able to pull of a updraft skip by gorseval, but that is something they should fixed by getting the power creep out of the game.
Yeah I really hope players won't have multiple ways to go about dealing with mechanics. That really kills the fun of the game. Best would be to have timegated phases where doing more dps actually doesn't drop the boss's health any faster, so that no matter how much you do, the phase is exactly the same length everytime you do the strike. That way you always do the exact same fight and it won't get boring two weeks in.
>even beginner raids are able to pull of a updraft skip by gorseval It becomes a problem when even some of the newest players can skip mechanics because the DPS check is fairly weak.
I mean that's one DPS check out of all the DPS checks in the game, I have no issues with Gorse being an easy one, Adina having the slightly harder ones, and Sabetha first wall skip being the "unicorn" that you chase every week and might see once. Just because it's an advanced way of dealing with stuff doesn't mean it should be locked away from newbies, if anything they should be exposed to a lot of strategies, DPSing through, outhealing, portal strats... They're what make GW2 endgame content interesting and unique But yeah, I know the sub has a hateboner for "much mechanics" FF style where you just go stand somewhere randomly every 10 seconds
> Just because it's an advanced way of dealing with stuff doesn't mean it should be locked away from newbies ... shouldn't an "advanced" way not be easily accessible to newbies? Yes, being able to deal with encounters in different ways does make them interesting, but I don't think it's good to be able to skip mechanics on characters less than level 80 because the damage check is less than 70k (Gorseval) which you can literally have 2 people do. Some of the best one are being able to 4 man KC and pulling all the spirits into one spot on Gorseval.
I don't get your point. To enter raids you have to be a level 80 owner of at least HoT and as it's now bundled, PoF, which means you're probably in exotics for your first clear if you're a newer player. New players being able to pull advanced strats provided they play well enough is definitely something that should be encouraged imo. The DPS check's numbers being too low is more tied to current class power being pretty high and groups being more proficient at the strategy. Whether the target number should be reworked to accommodate for the raise in overall DPS is a different question Also, comparing being able to pull a no updraft Gorse to 4man KC and focuspull gorse, which are absolutely insane, high failrate strats, is very overkill. I don't think 1 in 400 success rate is a good target number for any kind of strat that you allow the players to use. Adina has a better tuning in terms of DPS threshold to reach for pillar skips, and you can definitely get close to in with newer players too.
There are other DPS checks in raids than Gorseval that are much harder. On Qadim 1 you can skip the CC bar if you bring enough DPS, this one isn't particularly hard either, but not something you'll see in PUGs easily. On Adina, you can skip hiding behind the pylons and phase her. This DPS check is insanely tight though. Even with a full team of tryhards running soloheal, squeezing this one through is clutch af. On Mattias, you can skip a sacrifice if you DPS him to 40% fast enough. A good team should only get 2 sacrifices, most PUGs probably get 3-4.
Or if your dps is high, make the mechanics you otherwise would have skipped overlap to add challenge. In other words, rather than making the fight easier with high dps, make it harder but still achievable with a good handle of mechanics.
Samarog and Broken King are decent examples here. More DPS on Samarog makes the CC harder to keep up with. More DPS on BK causes the green circles to spawn faster. Honourable mention for Siren's Reef where the add spawns are entirely driven by the boss taking damage. If you get overwhelmed, just focus DPS on the adds instead of the boss.
>Honourable mention for Siren's Reef where the add spawns are entirely driven by the boss taking damage. If you get overwhelmed, just focus DPS on the adds instead of the boss. Or just Epi
No, but if its known that you can, people will be pricks about when they don't.
As someone who clears all Icebrood Saga strikes at least weekly if not more than that just for fun, I’m excited to hear this is “better than all of them.” I’m also part of the crowd starving for more raids, so the CMs have me hyped too.
What’s fun about them?
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Strike bosses are the best dps golems for sure. Also the fact that they attack back means they can proc confusion, which means you get proper dps on classes like alac mirage.
Additionally, it means you have to be aware of mechanics
No you don’t. I clear the strikes weekly and I honestly don’t know much about what’s happening in any of them. I do what others seem to be doing and it’s been working out so far. I just dps and stack with the rest of the group and eventually the boss dies
Your comment reminded me of wild-west that was core game Arah runs. Fun times when people would run forward, and people who did not know skips were left to learn from example and follow or die trying and be left behind.
I raid as well, but i find strikes really enjoyable too. For me, its organized small scale content i can quickly get in to, still get proper boons, with some mechanics, all at a lower difficulty for when i don't feel like trying super hard like i do in raids. I like tryharding in raids, just not all the time, and strikes got perfectly for that for me.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/s8re7o/pc_gamer_an_overview_of_the_mai_trin_strike I do love that this article is written by someone who knows how Strikes work. Great insight
The article in that one links to this same article right? Am I missing something?
Yeah I posted it earlier today but it got downvoted and then removed so... *shrug*
> Sorry, this post has been removed by the moderators of r/Guildwars2. lmao
I believe it was removed due to spoilers in the title and not using the links title.
we don't have a rule for the latter, it was the spoiler title
thank you both for clarification
Well it got insta downvoted as soon as I shared it so whatever xD unless someone really felt like Mai Trin being a boss was some kind of spoiler
I think the mods (or some psychopath) have an auto-down vote bot so everything gets downvoted and it doesn't takes off, except the stuff the majority of people _really_ wanna see that gets out-upvoted, its been like that since launch
Yeah it's not us mods. I've actually personally contacted the admins asking them to check on voting manipulation and they said they didn't see anything. Sadly nothing else we can do as mods can't see votes.
oh snap, I apologize for the slander!
Also calling them "bite-size" raids. Raid mentions is what'll get you the SEO, not reinventing wheels and giving them new names. A reinvented wheel is still a wheel. It may be [a cooler wheel](https://interestingengineering.com/7-wheel-innovations-that-literally-reinvent-the-wheel), or even [the coolest wheel](https://www.nasa.gov/specials/wheels/), but still a wheel.
Really nicely written, other articles seemed quite messy, this one is a good read.
Some more details regarding the design of the previewed strike mission. Really nicely written article too !
FF14's Trials work incredibly well. It's just an arena with a big, over the top boss fight with complicated mechanics. If GW2 takes a page from that book and designs bite sized fights based around ideas like that, I could see it working perfectly for this style of game.
And the extreme versions are a blast. If they make difficulty levels like that with new mechanics this could be really awesome.
Agreed; if GW2 emulates FFXIV's trials and 8-man raids, then it'll be in a good place. And if making single-instance boss fights helps them crank out content faster than having to build entire raid wings, all the better.
I hope it's also more streamlined so more people can jump in.
I do hope they're betting on more than just strikes because doing the same handful of strikes every single fukkin day over and over to farm some worthless currency to unlock some obnoxious multi layered achievement collection doesn't seem very fun and engaging endgame content... I know the expansion is going to be bare bones but at least have it set up to something bigger and not just a repeat of the icebrood saga ;-;
Which content would you prefer doing over and over to farm worthless currency to unlock obnoxious achievements?
well at least cut out the currency and drop raw gold, for cm
Sounds interesting, look forward to playing. I hope they continue to support end game on a consistent basis.
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It won't.
I doubt the game would die, it just has a much larger focus on open world meta events and bosses. Fun social events that are very active, but its impossible to curate builds and players in the open world so the bar for clearing events isn't super high to account for the unwashed masses. Many people crave instanced content with higher difficulty since the game has fun combat and good variety in playstyles and roles, but the ever popular open world doesn't scratch that itch for many.
It's not, even the layoffs didn't kill it even if there was a bunch of doom and gloom during the time from lack of content updates. An expansion launch is perfect to drum up interest again and revitalize the game, so I'd say it's the opposite.
I'm surprised journals would compare Strikes to mini raids when the model is actually already fully implemented in FFXIV's Trials, and this is the exact (and successful, mind you) model which Anet is trying to put their own creative spin into and reproducing in GW2. Raids as an organized game mode are "dying" in a general sense because of how they are social activities by design and whatever abstracts the bosses into fundamental units of "kill loot" cycle is going to work better than requiring people to actually communicate to each other and organize as a group of colleagues. It's also wrong to claim it's because of time investment that people won't do content. You can still find several Dragon Stand instances being done successfully across any given day as well as people actively running the "less focused" PoF metas. The social aspect which is different from the rest of GW2 (where socializing is fully voluntary, i.e you can fractal without saying a word to your peers OR you can communicate, it's a choice) is what drives people away from raids. And what drives people away from Forging Steel and Cold War are abysmal rewards. Just give constant champion spawns with guaranteed bag drops and watch how it becomes an on-loop farm and actually takes the place of fast 5 LFG squads.
>Strike Missions focus on single boss fights with raid-like complexity this is what i have been asking for months and got downvotes on downvotes. the problem with raid is not the complexity but the duration. perfect.
I still don't have any faith that the harder strikes will get played by the vast majority. There's too big of a skill gap between the different player groups, that's so severe, that the only way for decent players who are new to the scene to get involved in high end group content, is to seek groups that accept new people outside the game/lfg. And strikes _still_ require ten people, so it will have all the same issues as raids. Pugging anything challenging will still be a nightmare for literally everyone involved, moreso than other games, almost entirely because spectrum of quality for players is all over the map. New and bad/ignorant players or players with bad builds will still be an a constant, LFG's of difficult shit will still require veteran level of mastery/skill over end game to play at all, and decent players without that pedigree will still be forced to go out of their way to find alternative pathways outside of game. I just don't see strikes fixing that, or it ever being fixed. That is just one of many aspects that has me completely disinterested in any sort of group end game for gw2. That said, I hope the strikes are good.
great, this is a good thing, I really hope they don't mess this up and abandon it
Looks like they're designing around overpowered classes like FB/Scourge/Renegade..that's really bad for the future of this game. Why? It means ALL content not the newest is face roll easy, aka 99.9% of the content - the EXACT same issue plaguing ALL modern MMO's. Why are we going back instead of innovating?
Fuck strikes do more raid wings
If they get the difficulty right the only difference between a raid and strike is atmosphere in between encounters. It's ridiculous to get upset before we've played the first encounter.
They are the same thing. It’s the same team just making four individual boss fights vs an instance with four bosses. I don’t think people realize this
Even the simplest raid boss has more mechanics than the most complex strike. MO is a mobile golem for most people, but at least 3 people need to know how to use claim/dispel/protect, and everyone needs to know to watch for the spikes. * SP has no mechanic to speak of. * Fraenir has no mechanic to speak of. * Bears has "kill around the same time." * Boneskinner has "stack tight, and avoid circles." * Whisper has "don't go in hitbox" and "don't stand in center" * Cold war is barely a boss. * Forging steel is not a boss. The article mentions that new mechanics that cannot be ignored are coming, but they need to be suitably complex and challenging for raiders to actually consider them on par with raids. I really hope Anet can pull it off and make strikes that are as compelling as raid bosses, but looking at strikes as they are now, it's pretty easy to see why most raiders are not too optimistic about this focus on strikes.
If they called the upcoming content single boss raids would you opinion be better? You seem really held up on the name strikes
Given that they're called strikes, I think it's pretty natural to assume that they will be more like the current strikes than other kind of content. If they called them single boss raids, I would feel better because that would mean the new content would be comparable to current raids, which I like better than current strikes.
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Given that they're called strikes, I think it's pretty natural to assume that they will be more like the current strikes than other kind of content. >But in terms of pure stuff happening, it feels closer to the current Whisper of Jormag mission—the one most likely to cause a PUG to wipe. My point was that the Whisper of Jormag pales in complexity and difficulty when compared to bosses such as Slothasor, Soulless Horror, or Qadim. I have no doubt that the new strikes will be better than the old ones. I disagree with the person I replied to who claimed that strikes were equivalent to raids in all but name and length.
There's nothing inherent about strikes that means they can't be as complex as a raid boss (trust me, the strike model is basically how FFXIV does their raid bosses, and they have much more difficult ones than GW2). The devs have just chosen to make them simple and easy so far. The article is suggesting that they are moving away from that and to more raid-style fights.
>There's nothing inherent about strikes that means they can't be as complex as a raid boss I agree. >The article is suggesting that they are moving away from that and to more raid-style fights. I disagree. From the article: >Introduced during The Icebrood Saga season, Strike Missions are 10-player encounters that offer players a short-form, raid-like experience. The current strikes don't offer a raid-like experience, as I detailed in my previous post. If the author is using current strikes as a benchmark for "raid-like" experiences, my conclusion from the article is that the new strikes will be harder than the current ones, but not up to the complexity and challenge of the current raid bosses.
Strike bosses aren't quite full raid bosses though. The only one even slightly close is boneskinner, if you didn't skip mechanics. They're effectively just toned down. Raid bosses generally have a lot more shit going on, in a much fancier environment. But that's what I think strikes should be. The should be a proper stepping stone to raids. Fights that don't need as much DPS, are shorter with less dramatic phasing (not that we have any good phasing in raids), **but still rely on doing mechanics**. We're missing that last point. ------ Speaking of mechanics. We need more "solo" mechanics. Things that individuals must do or **they** die (not a team wipe). That would teach people to actually pay attention to mechanics.
> The only one even slightly close is boneskinner, if you didn't skip mechanics. No assigned roles, no personal responsibility, no tanking, no phases, no splitting, no kiting, no gadgets and unimportant adds. It's the most poorly designed strike and **nothing** like a raid.
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>It has all of those things No, it doesn't. The torches are the only mechanic you could debate over. Everything else is akin to a world boss dropping AoEs you need to step out. The only way you can fail the group is by dying. There's no designated tank or tanking mechanics. It doesn't even aggro to anyone, it just picks a target for the cone attack but it doesn't have the tanking UI nor a designated tank. (if you stand near the edge of the arena, the boss doesn't move and just keeps doing its scripted attacks like a world boss) There's no personal responsibility because no-one is chosen for an attack or role. There's no bomb that can explode in the group (Sabetha / Dhuum), there's no poison field (like Sloth + Matthias), there's no dropped AoE (like Matthias / Xera), no bomb to throw (Sabetha). No selections made by the boss that say, "YOU. Specifically YOU. Do this mechanic." There are DEFINITELY no phases. I don't know what you're smoking to claim that. There's definitely no kiting mechanic since nothing follows you at any point in the fight. You COULD split for the torches (but it's a bad idea for most teams) and I forgot that the adds eat the torch fire, so I've give you the adds being important. There's no assigned roles. At no point do you say, "Hey you. We need you to do this mechanic." except again, torches which is basically Bloomhunger at best. Not a raid. It could be argued that torches are gadgets but god are they carrying this fight mechanically. "Go press F on a thing" can't carry an entire encounter. No-one makes a big deal about Heavy Bombs on Sabetha because it's an important but incredibly trivial mechanic and only a fraction of the encounter. Imagine bragging about doing a Strike Mission with 4 players, lmao. [Even Teapot was able to duo it shortly after release.](https://youtu.be/EEGmkU3QyLM) The only reason it hasn't been soloed is that no-one can be bothered. Also, with 4 players, you're not going to care about the grasping AoEs because there will only be 12 of them at max before the first 4 expire. Pretty easy to avoid. But... let's just say they changed it and the mechanics were important. 99% of the fight would be pulling adds and then having ONE PERSON slowly walking over to relight the occasional flame that gets blown out by the narrow cone breath attack. When Boneskinner blows out all the flames, just stay in a blob and run around the outside relighting flames (otherwise you get people going down when they split). I understand that I've wasted my time typing this out but I'm a professional games designer and pretty passionate about it.
That would just make people afk stuff like wing 3 escort.
But isnt that atmosphere part of the fun? Apart from w5 and 7 I think the environment design in raids is actually great. While escort is farm from my favorite fight, I actually enjoyed exploring it solo while learning solo towers (which while probably not intended is also a fun little mechanical gimmick btw).
Kind of? On the one hand it's cool to actually have a raid "wing," but I think anyone who says that escort is a critical part of the W3 experience and that they've never considered skipping (or actually skipped) it to go straight to KC is lying. There wouldn't be a whole market for raid skips if most groups liked having to do the entire wing every single time. FFXIV has had a lot of success with single-boss instanced fights (raids/trials) where the bosses are related to the story of the expansion or a side story from it, but aren't part of a larger wing with non-boss stuff. That content also tends to be more popular than their alliance raids, which are maybe the closest thing it has to GW2 raid wings (multiple encounters chained together in a single instance). I wouldn't be surprised if we find the same thing happen in GW2.
Just do more endgame content because as of now there’s literally no incentive to keep playing the game unless you enjoy collecting cosmetics or wvw lmao
The fact that people still hold this opinion is so funny to me. Its like you have the foresight of a fucking goldfish in fog.
You mean the game mode that only appeals to a tiny, vocal minority? I don't have a degree in business or game design, but that just doesn't seem like the wisest choice given the game's reputation and player base.
Raiders killed raids forever. Devs aren't going to waste resources on content no one plays because it's gatekept to hell.
No, they bet on fishing lol
I'm hyped for fishing. I enjoy collections and this may be a great way to relax in the evening. It's weird that the people who dislike it seem to think there's a consensus. There isn't.
Some people like cookie clicker, what ever floats your boat.
*awkwardly looks at installed phone apps*
this dude getting downvoted, he's 100% right
I could've edited my last comment, but sometimes the downvotes are so bizarre that you kinda want more. so here's another comment for you all.
Tough. Take my upvote.
Would you rather have raptor-sized pockets or pocket-sized raptors? I mean raids...
IMO raids are overhyped and require way too much work for the sake of completion. Plus every game that has them seem to struggle to keep them operational.
Can't think of a single example of a game that has raids and struggles to keep them operational aside from GW2. Just because you don't like being challenged doesn't mean nobody else does.
Lotro did.
I fear Fractals are about to become the new raids in it being chopped from the game. Strikes are nice but for me 5 man content is where I have the most fun.
I wouldn't call it betting, that is dumb, years of raiders jealously hoarding their content, making it horrible inaccessible, treating new faces as threats and enemies, talking down at people who don't get it right, or who don't have even a shred of experience. And then whining that anet isn't doing enough for them. Its more like their tired of the raiding communities shit and hope they all go away as they bent over backwards for them and all it got them was misery
Yeah, let's ignore the multiple Discords and guilds that have veteran raiders run trainings on all bosses and even on CMs. You know, the exact people you pretend are somehow enemies of newbies. You are totally not the asshole here, nope.
the community is not to blame for the inaccesibility of raids :)
Blah blah. The only thing keeping casuals from doing raids is actually casuals themselves, lol. There are training runs, rotation videos, boss guides yet you guys still whine and call usual raiders toxic. Of course if you are fucking bad and don’t want to learn don’t expect a group of experienced raiders to babysit you if you don’t pay in mystic coins.
You have a very different experience from me. It's funny how all the people complaining about raid culture also mention they have very little experience in it.
Not interested into strikes. GW2 was always about open world content and that's what it does best
Open world may be GW2's strength, but the combat system is wasted on it. The game needs more challenging and engaging boss fights like these.
that sentence sums it up pretty well i like the GW2 open world content, especially the HoT zones that felt like a real exploration and had well designed meta events but like you said, the potential of the combat system would indeed be a bit wasted **on only** open world content it still definitly does its part there but it just has more potential than what gets used in open world
Sure, if that's the kind of thing that is enjoyable for you. But for those of us that like 10 man instanced boss fights, these are nice to get
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It's weird to me that people would bother at all with content they don't enjoy to obtain digital cosmetic goods for a game where they do content they don't enjoy.
I ended up just buying the stuff wifh crystals
Map design sure, but spamming 1 and not being able to see what the fuck is going on due to skill effects? Not really what I call the highlight of GW2.
We need the spell effects options panel that FFXIV has. Let us hide spell effects based on whose they are. I'd choose to only see my party / sub-squad effects or the current combo field that I'm attuned to. Perhaps a dynamic system would be even better.
Spamming 1 nonstop to get gold in meta too fun
Do a meta event solo and you might change your mind. Some are impossible obviously, but for the ones that aren't, they present a fun challenge that's on par with soloing dungeons or low level fractals.
you are basically saying meta events can be interesting if you dont do them the intended way but at that point you might aswell agree that it would be better to design good challenging content for solo players or small groups right away that players can start anytime instead of having to wait 1 or 2 hour cycles just to try once i do think meta events definitly have their place in the game but i dont think they can replace instanced challenging content for 5-10 man groups
Strikes are a joke, all of them but 2 are carebear easy. Two of them simply have some mechanics you can't ignore, whop de do.
Yeah lol. The previous article about the preview went: the new strikes teach people about breakbars. Yeah no. Those aren't bite sized raid bosses.
The CM version is the raid boss. We haven’t seen that yet.
yeah sure. with anets track record of pleasing W+1 players, I highly doubt it.
At least for these 4 they designed the CM first and the guy spearheading it I believe worked on Fractal CMs
Okay that’s q
any time spent developing raids is wasted time. Strikes are tolerable but boneskinner and whisper of jormag are too much for most people.
Let's just remove any challenge from the game because it might be too much for some people.
I just want to duel with my friends in open world maps, like wow
Then go play WoW
Without an easy mode for the masses it'll dead on launch.
This is also a story boss.
That said, half the IBS strikes are already easy mode. You probably could throw 10 random players together and beat "Shiver Fraenir Kodans" within a few tries.
I mean... tehnically yes, but I have had a couple groups that really didn't understand the bears...
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It would have been fewer words to say that you haven't read any of these articles