Quick clarification, this article is confirmed to be legitimate, I was actually sent it a few weeks back by Trig one of the devs who confirmed that the person being interviewed is Grouch.
No they should make the changes, to the boons and bring back the special buffs that classes had like banner, frost spirit and so on. The fact that that was removed from the game and then every class was given basically the ability to generate every boon broke the game. This is what happens when you try to "include everyone" and be more "inclusive". The game in its current form feels like it doesn't matter what class I play because I know that someone in the group will be able to provide all boons all the time. Rev + chrono used to be the meta for boon sharing now its Rev + any basically. Its a bad design. Alac should have never been a boon. This game is has become watered down pillow fight. Its sad. I came back after 6 years and I haven't even bothered to get the last 3 expansions. I am still sitting on PoF b/c I am on the fence of coming back for this exact reason. I could not believe the changes they made when I logged into the game after being gone for so long. They really destroyed the classes in my opinion.
@@ciscocomputertech When you add those kind of special buffs that only one class can give, you instantly boil down the meta game to exactly one possible composition, like it was in the past. You needed 1 person for the spotter buff, 1 person to bring banner buffs, 1 person that could give alacrity to 10 people. Since only 1 class was able to do these things, you had manditory filled slots with exactly one class. This is bad. People complain about that they can't join, because you need a specific thing TODAY! Today where it is easier than ever to join with what you like to play and eventhough most classes can do most things, they still feel unique to play. The game is in a better state concerning this, than it ever was. Restricting it more again while the community is already increadibly small, is a sure path to destroying the population even further. As @pinnacull said: You are lost.
As far as raid goes, I think it's important to think about some of the reasons why raid isn't so popular. 1.) The demand that players have experience (Oh, how much LI do you have?) is one reason I think you don't find it in LFG much. Don't get me wrong, there are some that will teach you, but there are a lot who won't bother. (granted, this is the case for a lot of the content but the pool of 'experienced players who understand well enough to teach' is soooo small that you'd have to teach new people almost every time you go in and that just become exhausting when you just want to finish your raids.) 2.) The amount of time it can take to clear a raid wing if players don't know it. There are a lot of players who have limited time. There's so much other stuff to do that dedicating that amount of time to do raids is a lot. As a player who does fractals, dailies, bonus dailies, and tries to do the hearts/chest hunt in JW, I know I personally have little time for other things on work days... or days off for that matter because IRL. (Story? I've done the entire story on one character. I just haven't taken the time to do it on others.) 3.) A lot of players don't understand mechanics. And that's any kind of mechanics. Even in open world metas, the concept of CCing mobs is lost on most. They simply doesn't think to CC when the defiance bar comes up, if they even know what it means. I've noticed if I call for CC in chat, some will. Others don't even know what their CC is. 4.) The speed with which we level in GW2 means people have no idea what their skills do. Raids require some understanding of your character. Many haven't even looked at their skills. They simply find a build on a website and do what it tells them without understanding why. As a result, they a.) don't get the damage they need. and b.) have no idea which utility skills to take when faced with certain issues (like condi clense in a high condi fight or stability in a fight with a lot of knockdowns.) 5.) Time zones. A lot of times, I know I personally struggle due to when most raids are scheduled. They are scheduled too early and I'm not there on time. They are scheduled too late and I run out of time due to work schedule. It can be really hard to get a full group that is regularly on at the same time. Oh, and I think the reason they expect this new raid wing to be a hit... is it will be required for the new legendaries. Just a guess.
@@nou2716 Not sure why you're beefing so hard with people in the comments by misconstruing what they say. It's like you want to be mad. Maybe you should listen to what the new players have to say instead of telling them they're wrong, hm? You didn't even ask why it was hard, you simply assumed.
@@nou2716this comment right here is why players don’t want to do it. They don’t want to deal with people like you anymore. Just want to log in and have fun. Demoralizing people aren’t fun to be around.
Having only played the game for ~1 year or so, I'd consider myself a newish player. I'd tried nearly every bit of content I could get my hands on. The friend that got me into the game would help me find groups and show me mechanics. I never, ever had as much grief in the game with any other mode as I did with raiding, and I'm someone who did mythic raiding for years on WoW and 20-40man heroics before that - so I was no mere newbie. The amount of angry people insulting me in chat during raids for messing up one or two things was astronomical. So high that I stopped raiding completely. I even got someone whispering me that I was bad and should drop group. MY group that my friend and I made to pug? We were still going through quite easily, and yet people felt it right to tell me to leave? It killed all the fun I'd get out of downing a new boss when people are asking if they're "running with bots". (Okay that was a funny one but I got it twice from two different people) I'm not sure if the community realizes just how bad they are to new players in that mode. It's so, SO much worse than WvW or fractals or anything else in the game. The players left me dreading raids. I'd almost go so far as to say I was treated worse in Gw2 raids than in WoW raids. If there's such a small amount of the community doing them and if an even smaller, vocal amount of people are pushing out newbies from trying the mode, then it's almost certain to die.
Same. Hardcore raider in ESO,Swtor, Destiny/2, but I did one raid in my 2k hours and I haven’t been bothered to go back. it’s a bad environment, and GW2 has an elitist problem across the board, due to people forgetting how it was before they learned everything. Also, even having to listen to people talk about irrelevant stupid shit in the discord while doing group activities is a detractor. Like give me the raid instructions and shut up about politics.
This is the exact reason I'm reluctant to try it. I'd only try it with a group of people I'm comfortable with like my guild but it's not popular so they stopped raiding. I was looking for a fun raid guild. Fractals and strikes are hard bosses too but people are much more friendly there and can have a laugh like "oops, let's try that again." One of the times I did fractals, I carried the group with my boyfriend because the other 3 people were drunk and dead and laughing
@@snuggleshuggles4257 honestly, sometimes it’s your own guild that’s bad. I’ve left 4-5 guilds in my time here simply cuz how they treat others and how they talk about people behind their backs. Especially in discord. Don’t have time for all the crap. No one is perfect, but in this game you almost need to be or you’ll get some derogatory comments left and right.
Sorry to hear man, that doesn't sound enjoyable at all. There are still some positive people who enjoy raiding and if you go back to it and chat to the squad I'm sure you will find them. GW2 has moved onto a speed clearing mentality so slower groups trigger the jaded and generally unhappy minority. If you can look past that and be willing to kick/block toxic players then I'm sure you can get back to enjoying the content. The LFG is a crapshoot sometimes, if you're leading groups then you're already miles better than the many who complain but never take it upon themselves to start a group.
My biggest issue with GW2 Raids is how... *Inaccessible* they are to someone like me, who has Autism I constantly have a fear of being mocked and put on a blacklist site, I blame TF2's MVM mode for giving me that fear I know Spear Warrior, for me, is a super easy thing to use, but I feel like I would be mocked for the crime of choosing the easy build and not learning 300 rotations that I will easily forget and be mocked for forgetting Bad enough the only remotely worthwhile thing from them is Legendary Armor and a Legendary Ring, and only the Ring is worthwhile now that Obsidian Armor is something to do instead, everything else is essentially cosmetic in Raids now Honestly I should probably only do the POF raids because they are the only way to get the Coalescence, the PVE Legendary Ring
i genuinely think if they clean up and remake the entire LFG system then it will vastly improve the amount of people that play group content such as raids, strikes, ect.
lfg is done normally, the problem is that the requirements for the player are 1 million dps, 100% ap time of all boons available in the game, 1 million completed races, knowledge of all glitches, etc. no, sanks, i am not nolifer, i want just play the game.
To improve LFG they have to remove specialized roles that are specific for 1 encounter only. Think hand kite or QTP pylons. Once it's just generic boons, heals, and dps; designing a party queing system can be more fluid and easier.
@@ОранГутанович-у3х Bull. Those LFGs stay up because people are willing to let it stay for hours to fill. Every build is overtuned for pretty much every content currently present, especially DPS. Nolifers wouldn't even bother with lfg.
@@ОранГутанович-у3х Auto-queing, and a damage threshold can remedy that. Like zero credit if you don't do at least 10% of the damage or 60% boon uptime. Or
So my 2 coppers worth here. I've played since mostly the beginning and there has always been this weird upper class/speedrunner/efficiency feel to those that try and do instanced content in GW2. It started with people over optimizing dungeon runs and then demanding a certain amount of AP. Then there was the fractal crowd that when they started would bounce you completely out of the party if you didnt have the right gear/build/AT since fractal were the BIG content. Then raids came out and that then received the same thing as fractals. Strikes were underwhelmed since the people that did raids did not like both the rewards or the one and done nature of them. In all this content there has always felt to have a barrier to entry by those trying to be the most efficient as possible.
Honestly LFG UI might be massively underrated on the issue list - IMO the fact you can just queue for a PvP game is the most important reason why anybody still plays sPvP, and raids being the least populated game mode illustrate perfectly how community can build up barriers to entry stricter than intended.
I’ve played GW2 since launch and have done every bit of content aside from Raids. For some reason, my introvert self won’t join a discord to team up with people and learn how to do raids. I think it’s more a result of the social requirements of raids. I’d say the majority of GW2 players are introvert/solo type players. Not saying they aren’t in a Guild but I feel like most players do their own thing most times. Doing raids requires you to interact with other humans which in today’s society can be a big roadblock for many players.
I'd argue that WvW and to an extent PvP is inherently more social if you want to commit and perform on a high level there... But you totally can just roam or not interact with others a lot, while in the raids you cannot. Competitive game modes contain both casual/solo and hardcore/group approaches to play. In PvE, casual/solo is story and open world, while group/hardcore of raids and strikes kind of always stands aside as its own thing.
Gw2 is one of the most diverse games for group play. Pretty much all content has squad play in mind. Just because you or other people are too scared to talk to other humans in a fun gaming environment doesn't mean they should nerf content with it in mind.
OMG ur comment is so relevant, this is exactly how it is !!!!!! I do enjoy raid mechanics, encounters and graphics, but it's so hard to force myself to massively communicate with other real players 😢
@@nou2716 No one is saying anything should be nerfed in this comment. Just sharing our thoughts on why Raids aren’t popular, which clearly they aren’t as detailed in this video. Hope you feel better bud!
Anet: Nobody plays raids Also Anet: We haven’t released a new one in 5 years. Also Anet: Our LFG system is completely ill equipped to handle raids. Also Anet: We compare activity of our weekly reward limited content to our daily reward content and somehow can’t figure out why the daily is played more. Also Anet: We have no onboarding system to raiding and rely entirely on our community. Also Anet: We never revisit raids to fix bugs or add challenge modes to encounters that don’t have them. Also Anet: We only look at raids to see which classes get the most play so we can nerf them and prevent any fun from being had in raids. What Anet is actually trying to say is that they don’t want anyone to play raids. From their perspective true end game content doesn’t make them money but they don’t realize these are the players that stick around with the game the longest.
So fucking true it's sad. Anet shoots themselves with the foot by not catering to the most hardcore players at least a little bit. That last point especially pisses me off, because no one except for the top 0.01% of the playerbase can even play a class at the level that would exhibit that it's broken, whether it is or not, and yet they still will nerf that class down based purely on those 0.01% of players as if it really affects anyone. Almost every GW2 player is trash!
Idk man if you look at Anet employee count , compare to with all of which they're maintaining and creating i'm not really shocked that some things go unchecked for a long time especially in this gaming era in which if you don't pump out content constantly people lose their minds. Rainbowsixsiege one season said there will not be any new content or battlepass we'll focus on fixing the bugs and balacing , players lost their shit and their playercount dropped insanly. Ofc there are problems with gw2 and Anet but in a sea full of shit game devs they're a bright diamond IMO
Disagreeld about the fact that raid make people stick the longest. Just like in wow and FF14, their key playerbase are the hardcore casual who play through easy content everyday all day. The raid scene just create more visibility and hype
@@PrimarchRoboleonFrenchyman Those players will get bored eventually, and some other casual player will replace them. That's why end game players are more important, they are the ones converting new players. Nobody joins Guild Wars 2 because they want to play boring open world content all day. They see these people doing Febe CM, HT CM, Wing 8 and they are inspired to try that some day.
I wouldn't mind a complete removal of quickness and alac... but only if the base 'speed' was sped up a little. Some specs feel horrible to play without quickness.
If EoD and SotO strikes were actually rewarding, maybe more people would do it. If you look on fast farming, one ToF daily rewards you roughly 1g 37s. If you use even cheap food and utility you'll quickly get less than 1g. Even me, a filthy casual, can tell that it's very low rewards even when doing daily clears, the only thing carrying them is the weekly mystic coins and mystic clover.
You can buy 10 mystic coins a week with strikes. On top of getting gold and loots for doing them once a week. You basically make 40g by doing the EoD and SotO weekly strike achievements, that takes like one hour.
@@vukkulvar9769 Yea, but that's 10 player content requiring meta builds, group search, coordination and communication. Meanwhile you can solo farm T1 Fractals (granted, with Fractal God's bonus Encryptions) and make 40-60g in that same time. Playing much easier content, solo.
@@vukkulvar9769 I spent 4 hours gathering people for 1 strike mission, and another half an hour was spent on the complite it, as mentioned above, I'd rather run fractals without any problems.
@@ОранГутанович-у3х im sorry i call bullsht on this just like your comment on other thread you just exaggerating,if you spent 4 hour to gather people to do strike then you definitely doesnt know how to promote your group or you promote to do hard CM strike( HTCM),half an hour to clear one strike?are you doing HT/KO CM?fck as someone doing CM event most CM can be done super quick ( XJJ,AH,OLC,CO) if we talking about normal then i was once train 5 new players on KO strike because they need it for turtle, all of them used OPW build,it doesnt take long and only 1 wipe. i mean you say you do fractal,then you should know its bullsht to do 1 strike for half an hour,because some fractal CM are harder than normal strike
What did EoD and SotO Strikes do differently than IBS Strikes? Public Strike rotation. Making it easy to go in is the crucial step for making it accessible.
The portion of players that experience raids don't mean anything as there's so much relevant endgame content in GW2. In WoW, the current raid is like 90% of what's relevant content at any point in time - ofc 90%+ of the playerbase will play it. In GW2, playing 2 hours of meta train can be your entire endgame if you choose so. Or doing WvW, PvP, Fractals, Fishing. You can't compare GW2 raid participation to any other MMO really.
@@heyitsme1618 indeed, whenever something about X game is bad, shills will tell you can't compare them since they're not the same !!! It's like saying you can't compare writing or gameplay quality of BG3 & Witcher 3 vs Skyrim.
Nah you absolutely can, at least in WoW the amount of endgame that is just doing achievements, farming rep, farming skins in old content, dungeons, m+, alts and so on is massive, raiding as an endgame is actually relatively niche in WoW too haha.
I think GW2 shines the brightest with its open world PvE and WvW content. Some of the almost natural forming groups tackling one or a string of events, because they all have their own goals and reasons to do them, to just go off on their merry way when it's over. That magic is gone in instanced PvE, and I feel like that is one of the key reasons why it's a dying gamemode, other than some toxicity and bad LFG. It's also the main reason that doesn't make me want to participate, I now have to perform well for someone else's sake, and that person is usually flaming at me at the same time. Maybe it's my rebellious attitude towards people who claim authority, but at that point I just leave and focus on the things I like to do.
100% boon uptime should be impossible, 70-90% should be achievable with top tier skill, the rest of us should be in the 50% area. They could slowly nerf the boon uptime over time, so the players adjust to the new situation.
The cope from that chat when the people who make the game admit no one plays those game modes. I'm so fucking happy you didn't have any other talking heads during this. Thank you for goin solo on this one. Truthfully, Thank you, Made this way more pleasant to watch.
Fractals should have been the focus as an end-game content rather than raids. Much easier to get a group together and easier for new players to get in...
i've had some bad experiences with fractals as a new player i won't lie, there's the usual high masteries/high agony res players, that join lower tier fractals and essentially pressure everyone into playing fast because they want the daily req, we even see cheese and literal bugs that people abuse or exploit to skip content in them, which is bad for us because the drops of enemies there are actually quite decent, the worst part is that i've experienced a lot of passive aggressiveness when asking if we can play a little slower and actually kill enemies for drops, hasn't happened once or twice either, it's been quite common in all honesty, so i stopped doing fractals at T2 and took like a 6 month break from the game because of that.
it's not just alacrity and quickness...those are symptoms of bad design : That skills don't have nonlinear dynamical tradeoffs. Not linear tradeoffs (like -200 power or something) im talking about tradeoffs like Frenzy (Attack 2x fast, takes 2x damage) which is the kind of design where you have to actually think about the skill being pressed. That is the ultimate issue : There is no need to think before hitting a skill because the optimal state of playing the game is to just hit your skills on cooldown...there's no real tradeoffs to useing them at a real-time descision making level. Remember : Frenzy back in GW1 was perma-able. You could in fact spam Frenzy...but most people wouldn't spam it because that was not a good idea (because of taking 2x damage).
They can't make regeneration not have 100% uptime without reworking healer to be able to properly heal. And regeneration being 100% uptime can be better than the alternative, it forces people to learn mechanics if healing is only slow and steady and mistakes can't be recovered with a burst of healing.
I just started GW2 for the first time 2-3 months ago. We found a guild that was starting and recruiting new and veteran players. Fortunately for me one of those total legend vets decided to start a raid group in this guild. Best content to be progressing through, starting at Wing 1 and working our way through slowly. We've completed wing 1 and have one more boss in both Wing 2 and 4 to complete. I think we killed the first two in Wing 7 as well, was close on the last one there. I'm so lucky because I love raiding!!
I mean you can keep making super hard content. If you want numbers, it needs to be playable by the average, mediocre (as in "middle") player. The more conditions you have to satisfy, the lower the number of players, that's it. If you have to: - sit 30m in a lobby looking for a group - spend 2h trying to clear content - have to repeat 7 times because you need to prepare like you're going on a job interview - have to actually be decent - have to tryhard, can't play a random build - trade off some other content that is also rewarding - have a lot of players involved, compounding the need for every single person to satisfy all the conditions then you can't be surprised that the content remains unpopular. Popular content will always: - bz relatively short - be accessible to bad players or bad builds - involve fewer players - have decent rewards for bad players, and improving rewards for players that perform better
Exactly this, they cd learn a thing or two from how FFXIV does raids by maybe adding an extreme version of the raid and making the base raids be fairly casual
In the same vein as permanent boons being a problem, I dislike any time a game lets you gear for crit chance. The fact that you can gear in GW2 to critically hit 100% of the time is lame. It takes all the fun out of critical hits as a concept. If crits aren’t random, then they should be contextual and earned. Hitting an exposed area or meeting circumstantial qualifications to guarantee a crit is rewarding. Always critting is just like always having boons, pointless. It also overcentralizes gearing. If you don’t crit, you waste investment. So you always try to maximize your crit chance without losing out on other modifiers. It hurts the flexibility of stat systems.
This falls back on the topic of permanent boons. If fury didn't have 100% uptime, it would become one of the burst window boons that maxed out crit for 5-10 seconds. It could be argued that if this happened, fury could even be buffed to grant more crit chance, allowing for more stats to become viable.
thought i was the only one that has issue with gw2 boons system because no one mentioning about boons. stopped playing gw2 because of the boons system. gw2 boons system creates this spammy and stand/stack on top of each other meta/gameplay which i hate the most in mmos this problem is more prominent in WvW for me at least, i love big pvp zerg fest in mmos but sadly not in gw2 because of its boons system. wish boons system in gw2 are situational use.
Very good video! I don't play Guild Wars 2 too much anymore but I really like keeping up with the news and your (insightful) thoughts on what's going on.
First of all, even an old and dying game can always bounce back. It requires effort from the game's developers, marketing, and some community goodwill, but it is possible. I've worked on one such old game, with decent core playerbase but slowly declining, and it was quite a journey trying to figure out its pain points and the way to fix them with what little resources our skeleton crew had -- but in the end, the numbers went up, user acquisition dept did its magic and the game had lived for a while longer than everyone had thought. Or look how wow bounced back from bleeding players to welcoming everyone home. Bold decisions and good marketing are the key here, which may be bad news for Anet on the other hand :D Second of all, there are ways to keep the game as fun, to keep the power level comfortable, and to fix the boon issue at the same time. Long story short, buff player stats baseline, lower boons uptime / efficiency accordingly. Will make it easier for boonless open world peepos, maybe a bit harder for top players (not that they've been struggling with all the power creep), but will also make boons actually functional and interesting system to use once again. I'll probably write about it in more detail in a post elsewhere
@@zawiasfx thing is as for now normal raid already easy enough to learn/pug,what i gather from comment section and from the wild it just that many people too scared to try or they looking at it at face value in terms of rewards. I agree 100% about cm and lcm,gotta give something exp player to chase on and i tink anet should apply what they did with convergence to raid,higher chance of better reward,more engaging and give faster open world legendaries material
@@joyboy6067 theyre easy cause theyre powercrept. There are reasons some instanced content is way less played than other. If they add stupid slave roles, like hand kite, or w/e are they called on ko cm / ht cm, playrate will be abysmal. Majority of ppl want to fight, not run back and forth away from team.
This is already the case with most encounters. There are only a few encounters you can't get into while being brain dead. and even on those it usually comes down to: don't stand in the bad, or know where to move at different phases during the fight.
I personally basically don't play 10 player content. I don't know anyone in my friend group personally who does. Compared to others, I have at least played it a bit to get some achievements or collections done. But not more than I had to. Others avoid this completely. Why? Because of players. Raids are gatekept by those who know what they are doing. You can't just go into the LFG and queue up for a Raid. You decipher some cryptic group names in the LFG, change your build accordingly and join the group. For me, this usually worked out fine. I also have pretty thick skin when it comes to toxic comments and can actually be honest and ask questions without fear. But on average, Raids and Fractals are way more toxic than PvP. GW2 is casual. Most people play it to relax for 1-2 hours after work or on the weekend. We don't have to stress out at that time, giving myself getting virtually jelled at and tackle some heavy learning curve against a gatekeeping toxic community of neckbeards. Better rewards wouldn't help that. Strike Missions improved that situation briefly. I played them for quite some time. Then I had a 4 month off-time and when I came back, Strikes looked like Raids on the LFG to me, with absurd cryptic names and me not knowing what's up and where I need to go - and no way of getting into it. If the raid/strike community wants to keep those game modes, they have to become more inclusive and have to make sure, beginner-freindly groups are accessible 90% of the time, not just occasionally every weekend if you are lucky.
While there are a lot of beginners, you have to slice off those who aren't interested in training at any given time and those who really can't perform roles realistically because they don't even know their gear stats or where to get them from. And that's assuming people in a training group even answer back to you, as unfortunately chat-silent casuals are more commonplace than otherwise. And even most people willing to teach aren't knowledgeable about every class using or performing their role correctly with the changing meta, which can lower expectations from commander doing a successful training when runs can fail from just a single person failing a mechanic or severely underperforming. Expecting such goodwill 90% of the time for content which only rewards you only once a day or week is unrealistic. But it's not just a thankless service, the newbies aren't exempt from being toxic themselves and eroding a commander's goodwill over time. The latter I wager is the bigger reason why so few commanders are willing to teach harder content at all. Teaching isn't difficult at all, it's communicating with people that's hard.
@@Dreamonology I'd disagree on those. Maybe it takes less effort, but I can personally attest WvW set is FAR more time-consuming than the raid set doing just half of available wings. The weekly clears themselves are absolutely rewarding for the raw gold alone. I tend to believe the population is stagnant because new players are intimidated by raid mechanics which are gatekept in training communities and third-party sites outside the game itself. And alongside them few commanders would be willing to teach raids through public LFG.
As a new player to the game, one of the craziest things I've stumbled on is how the community treats dps benchmarks. I made a reaper and was smashing bosses and it felt really good so I decided to spawn a golem and see what my DPS was. Came out to about 13-14k. I was kind of confused because a video I watched mentioned a deadeye putting out 30k DPS while providing Quickness. I tried that build as well and it felt miserable. APPARENTLY... I'm supposed to be putting boons on myself and conditions on the golem to check DPS. It will NEVER make sense to me to do that. Like I get that in a group you can expect to have these buffs on, but why do things to artificially boost your damage? You can still go off of benchmarks without adding boons. It just doesn't feel genuine to me. The GW2 community is just built different, man. The whole 100% uptime on buffs is one thing, but I just cannot wrap my head around adding buffs to myself that I wouldn't provide on my own to check DPS. So as far as I'm concerned, I do about 14k DPS. If your buffs make my numbers go up, great. But that's the base DPS I'm bringing to the table.
In this game you play with boon supports in instanced endgame PvE content. If you don't have boons like quickness and alacrity and might on you, then either the group composition is sub optimal, or the support players are not doing their job correctly. So in a group, where you can expect pretty much 100% uptime on these boons, you can easily use them in a benchmark. It would just not make sense, if you wouldn't have these boons 100%... but you do. The only reason you would not assume 100% boon uptime, is to see how they would perform for example in the open world or in the story... but why would you need a benchmark for that kind of content? The benchmark is the thing to aim for. What is this build capable of with the right gear and rotation. Why would you create a benchmark that does not show the full potential?
@@Harlequinlynnette not putting buffs on myself from the computer is a skill issue? Can I get your tag so I can just make sure now I don't ever group with you.
@@jozzetv No, I understand the whole thing that groups will have these builds to make sure you all have these buffs up 100% of the time. This is just the only game I've ever played that works this way. Granted that's because this is the only game that allows 100% uptime on buffs like this. Also, as a new player, it is incredibly daunting to see the community like this when interested in trying out strikes and raids and fractals. Doing anything in a group means I have to be playing 1 of a defined set of allowed builds or I'm "not contributing" and means I'm probably gonna be kicked. If I'm not 100% uptime on group alac/quick/prot/regen/whatever then it "doesn't work". So honestly, I haven't even really tried to do much of that content, yet. I can't just enjoy the game and play what seems fun to me, I have to do what the community tells me to do.
This entire fiasco can be traced back to the Chronomancer elite spec and Anet betraying their original design philosophy by giving it quickness as a unique boon. They seem just as clueless then as they are now.
If we didn't have quickness, people would cancel their skills accidentally way more than they already do, though the idea of gearing up for a burst phase is cool in concept. Alacrity is either all or nothing as a boon because it makes no sense to want alacrity if it isn't permanent. With protection uptime being permanent, we now have ironically even less class diversity on encounters where one would want big damage mitigation (such as HTCM) because you need to turn to unique effects like revenant's dwarf elite skill to mitigate damage beyond protection, or something like guardian and mesmer to give group aegis for blocks, etc. Basically boons are just a requisite of teambuilding now and the idea of what boons were intended to be are now in other unique effects (many of which were systematically removed from the game, ironically) and this is just where we are now.
It was the exact same for me… I played the game since launch and never touched raids… Or other harder pve instanced content (all the CMs) And look at me now… - after 1 1/2 years since i started - all 3 leggy armors completed, more than 1500 LI and it was a real blast! You just can use the same way i tried back then. Its pretty simple tbh… Do your research first Find a good build you are very comfortable to play and outfit it properly. Thats the most important step. Dont go in with a celestial build f.e. You need a dedicated and proper build because people will NEED you to f.e. do dmg also a dps. Thats VERY easily achievable by taking f.e. A low intensity version of mechanist. You can put your mech skills on autocast and play it with one kit or even none at all. Extremely easy with quite decent dps. Or the pistol pistol unload deadeye which is essentially an afk build You will most of the time outperform other players…yeah you cant outperform people doing proper rotations but who cares? 15k is enough dmg to clear contents. If you do like 20k in real fights you have nothing to worry about! And with those builds that is extremely easy to achieve. But back to the point…outfit the build properly (exotic is enough!!) and learn how to play it and what your buttons/build does). Like what does a reflect or dazes, etc And then just visit Mukluks get to the point videos of the raid encounters to get to know the fights Stay away from CMs or people asking for x LI - you wont have fun there Just go to f.e. Lions arch or the aerodome and ask it anyone is doing training runs. Or just go there and people will actively ask for newer players to join They wont have any issue with you… - you have a proper build (which runs itself) - you have a vague idea about the encounter You are good to go 😊
@@Cross_111 Thanks for the advice! Looks like I will have to change from my celestial build haha. I'm playing as mech. thankfully the guilds I'm in are doing training runs. I think I should try those. I've only been playing for about a month now, so I'm exploring the other things the game has to offer as well, but yeah, raids is by far the only thing I try to avoid. Hopefully it gets better in time. I wouldn't mind it being in the open world.
There's waaay more LFGs that have 250 LI/kills required or similar and it's a real hassle to actually just find a group that you can join as a newer player. I've had evenings where I checked often and never saw one without a requirement. I actually get seriously pissed whenever I see the groups that are like 50+ kills; like, you do realize you asking specifically for players who have killed a boss EVERY week for an entire year right. Way less kills should be MORE than enough to actually make the point that "you should know the mechanics and have done it at least once". And let's be clear, newer does not necessarily equal bad. In short, the reason why nobody is doing raids is because the community is making it very hard for people to get into. Commanders doing the recruitment very differently can also be a huge reason for confusion, which doesn't really help the situation.
I have been a player since Guild Wars 1 & head start with Guild Wars 2. I used to run the GW1 endgame (FoW, UW, RoT & HM dungeons) but I haven't touched a raid in GW2. Ever. Why? Kill proof (kp) toxicity. Any groups I have ever tried to join, even trainers, have asked for some kind of kp and I have either been kicked when saying "I have never completed a raid" or I have left immediately. The majority of the niche raiding community are elitist pigs, therefore I have ZERO motivation to EVER try the content out, despite some significant narrative beats being present (the Mursaat especially for Bastion of the Penitent). So, I avoid it like the plague. The raid community killed the preferred mode. It is as simple as that. Anyone else saying otherwise or trying to defend it are deluded and you should feel ashamed of yourselves. Re. boons, I have stopped running quickness/alacrity builds in open world squads. I am so sick to death of always having to bring one or the other when all I wanna do is just chill & clip some buttons to see pretty dmg numbers. I would LOVE it if ArenaNet removed both of them next reset. I really would. I cannot stand how fast the open world maps are getting now. There is no sense of challenge anymore. This is compounded by ArenaNet constantly nerfing the challenging encounters (Soo Won & Eparch spring to mind here).
I'm lucky when I see the open world "raid" in Janthir Wilds succeed. It's hard to imagine many open worlders wanting to jump into actual raid content when the open world version fails so often.
I've seen it fail once in the last 2 weeks and I did it 7 times. Random LFG 15mins before the timer at both non peak and peak hours. I even tagged up for Decima a couple of times. The only difficult part is getting people to stop dpsing if there's a bigger discrepancy between Greer and Decima... But it still worked 6 out of 7 times. EU server, because apparently this matters. I can't relate to 90% of the things people say in this comment section so it must be a difference in servers.
Okay. So if they wanted to talk about their game. In a medium that people would hear them. Wouldn't they have gotten more traction and eyeballs posting this through their own official channels rather than some website that looks like its after your digits? Just saying what a majority are thinking.
they dont have to adjust every encounter just increase the damage of the class skills by the value needed to compensate for quick and alac being gone. This way you have same dps and can reduce the spam as well as enjoy key class abilities, animations and just class design, so that PVE doesnt feel like its about spamming your 10-15 skills no matter the class/build/encounter. For healers it probably doesn't matter at all, but in case they are weak either add some healing to the skills or reduce base cd of stuff that heals with like 10-15%.
I played a raid after a long time away from the game. They have absolutely gutted the damage on alac mirage and I felt embarrassed when I looked at arc dps.... Anet are doing a woeful job at balancing classes.
I've always wanted to raid in GW2, and have been to few, but the problem is always in finding the raid group. I feel it is super tedious atm to find people to play raids or high level fractals with. On the other hand, i would hate to see the raid content leave GW2. I don't pretend i have answers to this, improving the lfg-system could be a start.
"Raids are less popular than PvP". As Day 1 player, where grinding dungeons & eventually growing a speedrun culture was the only way to keep being invested into the game as PvE enjoyer, I had to abandon it. Because A-Net wasn't able to fix walls & objects in dungeons & ultimately abandoned them as PvE content. IN OVER 2 YEARS. Kinda killed the whole franchise for me, ngl. Not even gonna look into GW3, whenever it's gonna come out. It's still ArenaNet overall.
GW3 news would sadden me greatly, I just came back to GW2 after a 4 year break and enjoy it alot again. Hearing an entirely new game emerge having to start from scratch again would make me feel like any progress I get in now is wasted entirely because surely the GW2 population will plummit whenever GW3 would actually launch....
The only reason why they're admitting all this now is because GW3 is progressing very well in development and they're finally letting the cat out of the bag.
Raid is for sure the worse content in gw2, it is difficult, ppl are toxic, it take so much time and effort for something not worth and irrelevant for the character progress, the problem in this kind of content is the rewards, like dungeon, nobody play because the rewards sucks
What about the much cheaper raid legendary armor? Would that not be a good incentive or is that gone now with the OW PvE armor? And another question: Would you find challanging encounters fun in a community (so not talking pug adventures). As a veteran raider i only really do raids anymore, because it is a fun thing to do with friends, but also with random people. I got my static i have been with for years now and here and there we have some people leave and new people join. So we just like to take on the content together and improove more and more to get more done in less time. It's about groth, the banter and the satisfaction of finishing a task. In pug raids i usually like it because i can usually help a group out. Wispering the commander that if they have any questions, that they can ask me. Just don't start teaching people without the commanders consent, and then usually everything is fine. I also found some fun people this way. Once i joined a random raid at odd hours and in text we had so much fun, that at the end, we converted to a party and had some fun in someones home instance. We did a jumping puzzle in there and did a rollerbeetle race they created. It was overall a fun experience. Sometimes things can be tough in pug raids, if you are looking for a clear. But if you don't have that expectation, you can just go with the flow and have some really fun interactions. And that's what it is all about: fun.
@@sephirothdoug raid being difficult it just myth that spread around like plague,toxic people are everywhere, i play this game for half and a year and found out the hard way opw player are the most toxic somehow,its hard to be raid player when theres new player join in blank,if they tell them nicely they said it was passive aggressive, if they tell them as it is they said it was toxic
I feel like even in vanilla the combat had issues, just different ones. I remember trying out dungeons during that time. They just felt utterly unfair and frustrating. The game was balanced around movement and using dodge roll as an emergency, but then they loaded up the dungeons with projectiles which couldn’t miss. I remember dungeon teams being multiple mesmers and guardians because they were the only ones that brought sufficient projectile protection. It was very zergy where you were trying to kill everything before the duration on the walls ran out. Quickness/alac isn’t any better but the point is I don’t think they’ve ever really gotten combat fully correct.
If they made difficulty tiers for Raids, many more people would be playing them. They made them for Fractals and it still baffles me why they didn’t do it for 10 man content.
@@vukkulvar9769 challenge modes in raids are not what anyone means by difficulty modes. They barely add anything to the encounter aside from a couple bosses and are also a HARDER VERSION of the raid, which is the opposite of what is needed. It is already difficult to get new players into raids, making a harder mode for an already difficult boss (which is every boss if you're a new player) is idiotic. In my opinion what we need are 4 difficulty modes; an easy mode, a normal mode, a hard mode, and challenge mode. Self explanatory; easy mode for new players, normal modes for people who have hands, these could be the current bosses, then hard modes which are more difficult versions of our current bosses, these could potentially be the incorporated challenge modes. Then there could be another ACTUAL challenge mode that makes the boss much more difficult, like they did with Cerus CM.
I cleared W1-4 tens of times, W7 multiple times but I can't get into W5-6 through LFG at all. If I wanted to play these wings, I would have to join static. New players probably have this problem with all wings.
There’s something incredibly ironic talking about buffs no longer interacting with the game but at the same time removing every single unique class buff in the game that did exactly that. And removing those have been imo the biggest regression since I started playing
there's one thing that they forgot to mention when discussing the playerbase for all of the different areas of the game. In PvP, WvW, etc, the reward structure is there constantly, meaning that as long as you're within that type of gameplay, you're rewarding for playing it, even if lower than what many would want. However, in Raids, you're only rewarded for beating that boss 1/week, meaning once you complete it, what's the incentive to continue playing it for that week?
there's always time to fix the boon fiasco . The problem is that players will react badly and then start complain. Game will become hard in a patch . But if they want to salvage this , they have to press the big red button
The interesting thing is that anet know all the answers why GW2 isn't doing as good as it could, but they stubbornly move into the same direction. "The definition of insanity..."
If raids had been given more love and attention, I think they would be more popular. In general, MMOs that release more raid content will get more raiders. Build it and they will come, UNLESS it's riddled with issues like HoT and PoF raids were. Anet kinda stumbled over the first hurdle, honestly. Another thing is how awkward each encounter is designed, likely due to no trinity system. Tanking (if a tank even exists) is different per encounter. Unique roles mean you need to actively co-ordinate, and I believe this is uncommon in a lot of raiding MMOs, since your role tends to determine what mechanics you deal with (correct me if I'm dead wrong.) Some roles are so punishing that if you screw up, EVERYONE dies, or close to it. In some cases these roles aren't exactly necessary, but they're treated as standard in today's community meta. Hand Kiter, Push Druid, Pylon Kiter, Slubling Kiter, Dhuum Kiter, etc. If you don't have them, your raid is usually dead in the water. Strikes were an improvement, but the difficulty dial fluctuates all over the place, and they still suffer from bugs. Then the lack of meaningful rewards killed strikes as regular content for me, and I've never gone back to them routinely. I hear half of new players viewing raid groups as friendly and helpful, and the other half traumatised by how bad they were treated. Very curious how there is such a difference in views. It's not often people mention what kind of group they were running with to determine if they were with the right group in the first place, but I'm still ashamed in the community for responding to new raiders with disdain rather than trying to be helpful.
Oh, you mean the “game” mode where I’m REQUIRED to go to freaking classes like I’m in school to learn how to do them “properly”, and I’m required KP that I can’t get without doing them like your first job application asking your for experience, just to get yelled at anyways for not min-maxing the way randos want you to…. ISNT POPULAR????? Shocker.
You don't require classes. There are literally guides around every corner. Raids have mechanics; If you don't do them "properly" you fail those mechanics. That is just how it works and mechanics are not that complicated. All over youtube and twitch people explain them, and most of them are self explainatory: Don't stand in front of the boss, when he does a swipe attack ... duh. Don't stand in the bad red or firery field... duh. You probably want to stand in those green fields. Didn't work? oh look there are points over them showing how many people need to be in it... duh. I'm not trying to mock you, just want you to realize, that most of the stuff you think is in raiding, is actually not there. A lot of the mechanics are easy to deal with, you might just need to experience them once or twice and you are fine. If people tell you, that you need to extensively learn those things, then they are lying to you. All it takes is a guide video and a low KP group that is fine with taking you with or joining a PvE community or try to gather a few players for you own group. The last part might be the hardest one... but it is possible. And if i'm only at that time and see your group, i will probably join you and not really care if wipes are happening. There are too many misconceptions and fears about raids out there, mostly propagated by people who do not usually raid much.
@@jozzetv I don't think they meant the raids themselves are difficult, I believe they meant the social aspect is what holds them back. The toxicity and the expectations
@@eon6274 I do agree that this is what holds people back. I'm trying to tell people, that most people don't really care. You will have maybe 1/10 people in a raid that actually gets vocal about damage in raids and this is only happening in very rare occasions. It's been months since I have seen any of that. If you get whispers about is, the block button is easily accessible. I really wonder where people find all those toxic players. Years of raiding and I only met a handful.
@@jozzetv your perspective is coming from someone that is already in the raiding community. You just don’t understand the barrier to entry because you passed it so long ago, and it’s changed. Yea it might not be as hard as we think it is but if it was so easy why is this even a talking point? Why was this video made? Clearly there’s a barrier holding many people back and I’m not alone. But thanks for basically calling me shit at the game 👍it’s totally not people like you I don’t wanna deal with when I’m trying to learn raids
Just have 2 LFG options 1. Create room & join as we use now 2. Choose your role and random match(also option to not fix role just like fractalT1 4 dps go brrr etc.) like FFXIV
for random matches and selecting roles for it, anet would need to take the stance that there are actually roles you can fill. Theys still think that there are no roles, but still create content that is clearly favored by having players assign roles. As a developer you can't claim that there are no roles, when you make it possible to create builds that capture those roles. A build that goes completely into buffing and healing others is a healer. There, they created a role. They have a stat that is healing power. Even if they don't use that, they could still make role assignments possible by just self assigning yourself a role, like Throne and Liberty does. You can just assign yourself the role as a healer and you can queue for a group. Anet should do the same. Accept that in endgame PvE roles have been established. Otherwise a queue system for matchmaking will never be possible.
Never done raids or strikes due to being gatekeep by players, when i make my own raid n strikes nobody joins, has in my server is kinda like everyone already has their own teams to run things, so if these get removed tommorow it wont even bother me but same time i would be happy for people to understand how we the ones that get gatekeep feel. That is why i always wondered why they dont just invest doing dungeons cause its less of a pain and players can easily do them and join, or make solo content, like a lest say a Big tree which has tons of floors that you can do it daily to gain mats etc, there is so much that can be done.
Yet somehow im here with 400h in gw2 doing weekly raid clears with pugs. Nobody gatekeeps shit unless you are bad and burden to your group. Study the fight, practice your rotation and job and go, everybody will welcome you even without kp. Just say " no kp, I know the mechs and state your role, like w1 cannons 1-3.
@@lkajdklajscklj2112 Things are different in every server, you simply had a better introduction to raids then most of us, also how can you be a burden to a group if you never played with them, also in my server you sayin "no kp, but know the mechs etc" its not gonna work, again the expirience its different in every server and there is gatekeeping so lets stop saying "Nobody is gatekeeping" cause its making yourselfs look dumb, cause there tons of evidence.
@@glassdos3175 Idk that feels like misinformation, for little knowledge i have about raids party system you only queue with people of your server, so the server you on matters, but one thing most likely we agree is that in NA most likely they more into Raids then EU.
@@Exirock no, it's not missinformation, for PvE LFG only the region (na or eu) and not the world (server) matters. And as far as I am aware of the GW2 discours raids and the raid lfg are way more popular on EU.
Of course PvP is far better positioned than Raids. I started playing GW2 3 years ago and I tried all that game has to offer (even crafted soem Legos already) except Raids because - you guessed it - I needed "experience". Funny story, you actually need to do something to get experience. Plus I needed a "steady schedule", I had that in WoW (raided between 2012 and 2020) and I stopped raiding there cause of that.
I honestly dont like the majority of the raid encounters. Vale guardian was S+++ tier and after that it was like meh. Matthias is cool, wing 4 is cool but the rest of it requires a lot of coordination with voice chat which I cba to do. The horrible memories of doing the stupid spirit run and wiping on sabatha just because 1 guy fucked up the cannon, so trash. Dont get me started on the glenna run, twisted castle, yuck. I am just glad not to be doing that content again. I really think anet should have just done a mythic+ style system on all the dungeons and the fractals should have been roughly the same difficulty as nightmare cm. Not everyone can be bothered to schedule their life around meeting their guild on discord these days.
Attack speed and skill cooldown modification becoming not only baseline and permanently expected, but completely within the hands of other people to control them and in turn control how it feels to play your class, was an incredibly degenerative decision for the game. Boons do not feel good to have because they are so plentiful and permanent. They are expected. They are the baseline. Not having them feels terrible. It’s strictly a negative-weighted interaction. Toxic game design.
If we are talking Cerus CM kills for a second... for me it usually comes down to community attitude in general. I have killed Cerus CM, but after we were done people just left the group instead of working on reclears. I don't want to jump into the dicord driven lfg with random people, when i was only so far able to kill it with people i know once. I would like to do reclears first, to get consistency, but players dropped the fight as soon as they got the kill once. Now I would have to join another group again with new people and probably have to redo parts of progression with others again, because they can't dodge an attack where they can distort the initial hit for 2 seconds... The same happened back in the day, when i joined raid tournaments. The group burned itself out, because they went try hard instead of going at it slow and steady. And there i was again searching for a new group because people break under self assigned pressure. Stop with that "all or nothing" mindset. You kill the boss once, big whoop. Stay with the group and kill it a few more times. If you are burned out after the first kill, then you were already doing something wrong. Now that i don't have that much time to play anymore i've just resigned killing it more or getting the LCM or EoS titles. I'm sick of people burning out. All they have to do is their rotation and dodging a few times while being protected. At some point when i have more time and fucks to give, i will learn the virtuoso dps rotation and see if i hugely misunderstand the issue or not.
This is an issue I really struggle to combat as well, it's very hard to keep groups together in GW2. It boils down to a lack of content imo, and also a lack of competition/goals available to players. Paradoxically this actually makes people BURN HARD whenever something pops up, because it's always 'the last one' especially with tournaments I know teams go absolutely insane in order to do their best to win and end up burning out afterwards lol.
When they decided not to make a public Strike rotation in EoD, that is when I stopped caring about them. Having to go into LFG to start a Strike group is the biggest deterrent of Raids and Strikes.
For me the biggest problem with the direction anet took with boons is the knock on effect it had on WvW. WvW has become so one dimensional over the last few years and has led to a state where everyone just stacks as many people and boons in one place as possible. Roaming, havoc, clouding, 15-20 man gvg guild are all completely dead, and every match up is the same. I hope anet considers some big changes in the next couple of years.
I have played since beta and i don't even know where raids are or how to get into them i care so little about that kind of content mostly because i have had my fill of that crap after years of raiding in wow.
I have played since beta and I know where raids are. I care a little about that kind of content mostly because I have *not* had my fill of that crap after years of *not* raiding in wow. :p They're in the Lion's Arch Aerodome. In the southern most part of Lion's Arch, south of the portals there, inside the Stingray building. There's also a place to test your characters rotations on a dummy with different settings. The Raid doors are neatly lined up on the wall.
The Raid scene is also just losing its established players. People have moved on from Gw2 whether its for specific game reasons, or reasons of life. Its not receiving that influx of new players to offset the bleeding either. I also, often, get players from the LFG who instant leave if a group wipes on the first or 2nd pull of a boss because of some small mistakes. Don't get me wrong, I get people have lives outside the game, but its terrible for community culture when its a 50/50 that the rando I grabbed from the LFG will stay with the group after a few failed attempts. And since there already is a bit of a culture problem for Guild Wars 2, losing the established raiders while not having a new base to fill the cracks is basically a death sentence. The worst part is that Anet KNOW how to populate areas of the game for content. Return To has always worked for the open world, the last WvW rush was a massive success, the solution isn't just within reach, its in their hands! A rotating Raid Rush would be a great way to influx new/returning/experience players back into the scene for the week, and maybe even create some retention for new players who learn about the Legendary Armor. I have an even crazier idea with Raids that would be a cheap, but effective way to create content for them: Introduce a new raid type, call it some fancy name like "Mist-touched", and introduce random modifiers to the fights similar to T4 fractal. Add unique rare drops to them or new items that are LOCKED to the "Mist" versions to help maintain the population. Even if that is a bad idea, its something that they ALREADY have the technology to implement into the existing raid space. The Raid scene has just had to exist and run itself for the past 5 years without an ounce of help from Anet. Everyone left because they got tired of waiting for that content and just started playing other content or entirely different games as a result.
That is one of the biggest issues in the raid community. People claim anet caters to the 1% of players, but they have not released content relevant for them for ~4 years and it only started picking up again with something like cerus CM. In those 4 years a lot of players have just left for things like wow or ffxiv. Those most valuable players are gone, the players who opened training groups, that brought new people into the community, that helped out groups even without any rewards given by anet. There are some left, but if you don't provide any relevant content for 4 years.. of cause your population will shrink. Same happened to PvP. All they did was cater to open world and story gamers for years. Now they are stuck with people who don't want to engage with these communities because of strange misconceptions and because they met a toxic commander a few times. And people probably wont join progression runs for w8 either, because everyone except the raider community thinks that they need to stay away from it because of some mythical toxic raid creatures or social anxiety.
Losing the established raiders and not having many mentors left, leaving a larger pool of toxic people flows down to the new players who are learning the raids while dealing with these people. Personally I quit raids altogether because of the toxicity towards mistakes, even in groups I made and labeled as training. A self feeding cycle where the toxic players will drive off the new players, leaving the raiding pool growing much much slowly if at all. I don't know what else to say other than I'd LOVE to do raids but I avoid them because of the players.
Yes some of the most enjoyable times I have in GW2 now is just the weekly keyfarm. The combat and pace is so different and its satisfying to use your limited skills optimally. Which reminds me that another side effect of Perma Boons is the bloat in all the effects for Weapon & Utility skills.
The place where boons annoy me the most is actually WvW, where unkillable boonballs break into keeps literally just to farm people. The counter? Make your own boonball and smash into their boonball, hoping your random stuff hits harder than their random stuff. It's absolutely atrocious gameplay and is honestly one of the main reasons I despise WvW. The only time I've had fun in large scale WvW is when you have an improvised, disorganized attack vs an improvised, disorganized defense. It's easier to get some damage in and to pick of stragglers. In PvE you are stacking even if you are fully ranged because you want those boons otherwise you're a pool noodle, the game would be more interesting if you were responsible for your own boons rather than always relying on your supports to give them. Yes, I want longbow rangers/rifle mechanists to be able to sit at 1200 range and snipe the boss if they choose to do so.
The only thing carrying pve hard content was heal scourge, and they got rid of it, even knowing that it's not OP, it's just helpful for learning groups
For quickness/alac, they should add a “blackout” mode to some instanced content that disables certain boons. Way to make a new difficulty mode without an actual challenge mode
The Guild Wars 2 problem from where I see it is a lack of identity, and systems that are decades past where they should have been innovated. There are a few examples of systems that are old and should have been replaced a long time ago. - Interface: This is the biggest shame in Guild Wars 2, and in MMOs in general. The lack of customisation of the interface is criminal. When I hear Mukluk complain about new weapons that use buffs on the buff bar with the tiny and plentiful amount of buffs, you realise just how ridiculous it is to be able to find anything in that mess. In addition to it being annoying to see you also have the issue of accessibility as the core player base gets older. This coupled with the fact that not everyone likes that standard interface and you have a really poor experience. - LFG: There needs to be a content finder system. Whether that be a 'dungeon finder' or a 'strike finder' where it automatches you with people to do the content. Not all content needs to be delivered this way, but make it more accessible. - Boons: I agree that boons have made the game objectively worse, specifically permanent boons. The fact that there is like a 10fold increase between the average player and a high performing player is crazy that this is left to stand. Without this being addressed it makes it way less new player / unskilled player friendly and so they'll stick with the content they can complete, world content alone. - Uninspired weapon skills: How many times do you enjoy the fantasy of a weapon but it's for a build you don't / can't play. For me it's fairly regularly. In some ways it would be good to be able to build any weapon as a support / power / condi weapon just by changing some abilities on the weapons. It would be good to have less 'dead' skills and it would be great to not have to "use 1 ability, swap... Use another ability, swap... etc". - More job fantasy diversity: I love the theme of Chrono, but I can't play it in many content because I just die. I love the idea of a tanky Paladin but the guardian is so squishy that I feel like I melt at the sight of an enemy. Sure this might be a skill issue, but the fact that I can't just pick it up and perform at a basic level to me signifies that there is a core issue with the game and the classes that means newer players are just going to have a bad time playing the game and not dying constantly. I don't think this can be solved because it's so much work that I think it needs to be done in Guild Wars 3. - Performance: DX11 was great and much needed and had a massive performance boost. But it's still an old DX version and the game is still not optimised. Every... Other... MMO... Runs... Better... Anyway, that's my 5c
One of the biggest problems is finding a guild with decent people to play the game with. That was one of the leading reasons besides EoD and Soto being steaming piles of turds with a price tag on them.
This is the kind of self awareness I like hearing from devs myself that will keep me as a loyal player. On the topic of strikes and raids though, I hope they learned never to lock their rewards behind the masteries while still giving access like they did with the Icebrood fast 5. Personally lead to such a salty situation running then and not being able to get shit back for it.
Eh. Everyone should know this stuff. If Grouch wanted to be real with us, he'd give us his thoughts on Cal turning WvW into his personal playground. Truly repulsive behavior from a developer.
@@synapse913you might be a more venerable player in which case I’ll call your critique fair. I been only playing for about 6 months and landed my light legend armor plus 2 weapons and getting ready for about 6 more pieces of legends myself. Have loved most of it and honestly I understand a lot from dev view so I like what I’m hearing. I haven’t had a bad experience gameplay wise but in terms of balance I can’t disagree with any of this
@@clawdane2611 Sorry to come off as doom and gloom, and I'm truly glad you're enjoying GW2, but give it time. Eventually, you'll be dreading balance patch notes, you'll begin noticing how the same classes are always getting buffed/nerfed, the same old glitch/exploits aren't being fixed, the same playstyle always being catered to. Eventually you'll find out that whomever the balance lead is at the given moment is benefitting from those changes/non changes because they play that way, and screw everyone else.
@@synapse913 once again fair critique from a venerable player. I have played enough games to see how that pattern goes. At same time I am one who will look at those glitches, exploits, and bugs and will find ways to either use and get them noticed more, and better avoid them to not let them break my game. I like encouraging proper balance in a game. Even if im a minmaxer who will break it without a moments hesitation if allow.
The honesty is actually fairly reassuring, shows they do try to be sensible and in touch with reality. I'm absolutely fine with it at broader scope and looking forward to gw3. I hope after T&L slowdown ncsoft allows them to scale up the team for GW3 again and deliver a big product, similar as with GW2 launch.
You do know that GW3 is not confirmed right? At max it's in some sort of shareholder review stage, which means not a single line of code has been written, i.e. if it gets to be a thing it won't probably even be in this decade.
If all encounters are now designed with permanent uptime in mind why not just make them mostly rolled into everyone's baseline stats and greatly reduce the uptime for situational use. A lot less rebalancing needed but removes the boom spam meta we are in
Doing raids in gw2 was one of the most fun times i had in an mmo. Never understood people who say its hard to join raids, while you could easily find a guild that does training runs etc to get experience, same goes for fractals or strikes. But idk maybe that has changed in the last 2 years?
GW2's harder encounters suffer from way too many confusing, stupid and colorful indicators/target rings. On top of super repetitive keyboard mashing for max dps, the frigging game feels like dance dance revolution rather than raiding.
speaking from a joe average perspective, I'd argue raids are not popular in GW2 because raids are not necessary... I raided in FF14, tried raiding in WoW (hated it honestly that was back in the days of 40 mans) and I'll be honest I didn't *SUPER* like raiding in FF14, liked it a crapton more than WoW... but honestly it was the only path to XYZ gear... so I did it for a while not cause I loved it, but cause there was no other option for XYZ gear, and ultimately I just decided I didn't care about XYZ gear in FF14 and quit raiding. I've done a few raids in GW2 and they're fun enough, no more or less so than FF14 but... I had ascended gear at the time and even tolerated WvW long enough to get a few gifts of battle to make a few weapons, so I don't *NEED* to raid in GW2, I'm an open world / story player and dabble into fractals a little and... that's it. I'm good. With Soto I have legendary armor now so I'm doubly good. SO, I don't raid, it's fun enough but I don't have the time or inclination for that particular flavor of grind... tolerate WvW long enough to get a gift of battle as fast as possible... and I don't even know what the sPVP lobby looks like and I've been playing GW2 since the 3 day headstart.
I don't know why but GW2 raiding is just.. not fun compared to other MMORPG raiding. I love the casual open world and WvW, and I think strikes are really cool. But full raids WITH trash is awful. Note, I haven't actually done a strike but I love the concept of 1 or 2 boss encounters WITH NO TRASH since they're much easier to get into and learn. But PvE rotations just feel so janky, and there aren't enough cosmetics or other rewards to make me want to do them.. it's a shame that WoW is still my favorite endgame PvE game since I hate it but still play it to raid. WoW raiding should not be miles easier than GW2 but well it is
food for thought, what would happen if quick, alac and other broken boons get a "revealed" debuf where it can't be applied anymore after a threshold of like 10 seconds of boon time per cap and you have like a cooldown for idk 20-30 seconds before those boons can be applied again.
I would love to try raiding. I did a lot of raiding in ESO. It's pretty hard to find groups for endgame raiding in that game but it seems even harder in GW2.
I don't raid because of how rude others are. I hate the dps meters because that's all people care about and if you rez anyone your dps obviously drops a lot
Hello youtube, it is I, the unpaid arenanet game design consultant. They should have mega versions of boons you get by capping the duration or the intensity. For example, at 25 stacks of Might, you consume all that might and gain Mega Might 300% increased damage for x seconds. And then it prevents you from gaining might for x seconds after.
They can’t remove alac and quickness without causing all kinds of problems, but they could give themselves a framework for moving forward by giving EVERYONE the equivalent of those boons as a base stat bump. It would make most encounters just a little easier for casuals and pugs, but probably wouldn’t effect the better players.
The central design choices this game has made are not conducive to compelling organized group PvE content. Teapot mentions the boon system and how it compares to games like WoW, but that's not even the worst of it. The lack of tanking removes that entire dynamic from raid design and replaces it with nothing. As raiders our only option to control enemy positioning is to stack up in a group. In other games enemy movement and positioning is a key component of encounter design where in GW2 it's entirely missing. We have "healers" in this game, but they're a pale shadow of what comprises the role in other games. As healers we have no ability to target a specific ally at range and support them. The UI doesn't even support it! We just spam PBAoE effects to all players equally. And why not? It's not like this is WoW, where we have healers with very different skill sets serving a variety of functions. There is no tank, so there's no need for heavy single-target healing or damage mitigation support. You don't have healers who specialize in healing over time, burst healing, single-target, multi-target, cleansing, buffing, etc. We all just sort of spam everything on everyone all at once and everyone gets all the boons and all the healing they need. And if they don't, there's nothing you could have done about it because the basic concept here was never to have healers in the first place so that everyone could take care of themselves with their own dodges, heals, and defensive cooldowns, right? This is not something they can fix. So even if they fix other major issues like LFG and consistently release rewarding content to draw players back in (let's face it, 5 years of no raids has something to do with the state of raids in 2024!), they can't fix the issues that make GW2 raiding just not as fun or interesting as its competitors. Here's hoping if there is a GW3 they learn from that mistake first and foremost.
Simple solution to lack of specialized classes would be role attunement. you get big bonus to skills/stats for your raid role with mayby disadvantage to other (so you won't be able to min max into an omni role).
I wonder if holding a raid tournament where boon DPS and providing alacrity/quick as a healer are banned and some other large sources (like the alacrity relic) are banned is something worth giving a go if there is enough interest? It would give a really good look into how raids would be if quickness and alacrity were not 100% uptime boons (outside of whatever a build can give itself like necro's). Possibly opening up solo heal comps for some wings (like druid being able to choose its higher healing trait instead of the boon trait) and if having 9 DPS instead of 6 DPS with 2 boon DPS would compensate for the loss of the boons.
![Felix "Unfair" | [Stray Kids : SKZ-PLAYER]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/Oswujxm2Ag0/mqdefault.jpg)
Quick clarification, this article is confirmed to be legitimate, I was actually sent it a few weeks back by Trig one of the devs who confirmed that the person being interviewed is Grouch.
No they should make the changes, to the boons and bring back the special buffs that classes had like banner, frost spirit and so on. The fact that that was removed from the game and then every class was given basically the ability to generate every boon broke the game. This is what happens when you try to "include everyone" and be more "inclusive". The game in its current form feels like it doesn't matter what class I play because I know that someone in the group will be able to provide all boons all the time. Rev + chrono used to be the meta for boon sharing now its Rev + any basically. Its a bad design. Alac should have never been a boon. This game is has become watered down pillow fight. Its sad. I came back after 6 years and I haven't even bothered to get the last 3 expansions. I am still sitting on PoF b/c I am on the fence of coming back for this exact reason. I could not believe the changes they made when I logged into the game after being gone for so long. They really destroyed the classes in my opinion.
@@ciscocomputertech You are lost.
Thanks for the fact check!
@@ciscocomputertech When you add those kind of special buffs that only one class can give, you instantly boil down the meta game to exactly one possible composition, like it was in the past. You needed 1 person for the spotter buff, 1 person to bring banner buffs, 1 person that could give alacrity to 10 people. Since only 1 class was able to do these things, you had manditory filled slots with exactly one class. This is bad. People complain about that they can't join, because you need a specific thing TODAY! Today where it is easier than ever to join with what you like to play and eventhough most classes can do most things, they still feel unique to play. The game is in a better state concerning this, than it ever was. Restricting it more again while the community is already increadibly small, is a sure path to destroying the population even further.
As @pinnacull said: You are lost.
I believe it. Grouch was in your chat at some point talking about the same things. He even asked about boons once, and well, we all agreed lol
As far as raid goes, I think it's important to think about some of the reasons why raid isn't so popular.
1.) The demand that players have experience (Oh, how much LI do you have?) is one reason I think you don't find it in LFG much. Don't get me wrong, there are some that will teach you, but there are a lot who won't bother. (granted, this is the case for a lot of the content but the pool of 'experienced players who understand well enough to teach' is soooo small that you'd have to teach new people almost every time you go in and that just become exhausting when you just want to finish your raids.)
2.) The amount of time it can take to clear a raid wing if players don't know it. There are a lot of players who have limited time. There's so much other stuff to do that dedicating that amount of time to do raids is a lot. As a player who does fractals, dailies, bonus dailies, and tries to do the hearts/chest hunt in JW, I know I personally have little time for other things on work days... or days off for that matter because IRL. (Story? I've done the entire story on one character. I just haven't taken the time to do it on others.)
3.) A lot of players don't understand mechanics. And that's any kind of mechanics. Even in open world metas, the concept of CCing mobs is lost on most. They simply doesn't think to CC when the defiance bar comes up, if they even know what it means. I've noticed if I call for CC in chat, some will. Others don't even know what their CC is.
4.) The speed with which we level in GW2 means people have no idea what their skills do. Raids require some understanding of your character. Many haven't even looked at their skills. They simply find a build on a website and do what it tells them without understanding why. As a result, they a.) don't get the damage they need. and b.) have no idea which utility skills to take when faced with certain issues (like condi clense in a high condi fight or stability in a fight with a lot of knockdowns.)
5.) Time zones. A lot of times, I know I personally struggle due to when most raids are scheduled. They are scheduled too early and I'm not there on time. They are scheduled too late and I run out of time due to work schedule. It can be really hard to get a full group that is regularly on at the same time.
Oh, and I think the reason they expect this new raid wing to be a hit... is it will be required for the new legendaries. Just a guess.
as a newer player, it is incredibly hard to get into a raid group. i loved raiding in other mmo's would love to do these.
You can literally sign up for a training raid in most guilds. How is it "incredibly hard"
@@nou2716 Not sure why you're beefing so hard with people in the comments by misconstruing what they say. It's like you want to be mad. Maybe you should listen to what the new players have to say instead of telling them they're wrong, hm? You didn't even ask why it was hard, you simply assumed.
@@nou2716"most guilds" I'm pretty sure most guilds don't even raid
@@nou2716this comment right here is why players don’t want to do it. They don’t want to deal with people like you anymore. Just want to log in and have fun. Demoralizing people aren’t fun to be around.
@@battlebots1 Guilds that have to do with the relative content.
Having only played the game for ~1 year or so, I'd consider myself a newish player. I'd tried nearly every bit of content I could get my hands on. The friend that got me into the game would help me find groups and show me mechanics. I never, ever had as much grief in the game with any other mode as I did with raiding, and I'm someone who did mythic raiding for years on WoW and 20-40man heroics before that - so I was no mere newbie.
The amount of angry people insulting me in chat during raids for messing up one or two things was astronomical. So high that I stopped raiding completely. I even got someone whispering me that I was bad and should drop group. MY group that my friend and I made to pug? We were still going through quite easily, and yet people felt it right to tell me to leave? It killed all the fun I'd get out of downing a new boss when people are asking if they're "running with bots". (Okay that was a funny one but I got it twice from two different people) I'm not sure if the community realizes just how bad they are to new players in that mode. It's so, SO much worse than WvW or fractals or anything else in the game. The players left me dreading raids.
I'd almost go so far as to say I was treated worse in Gw2 raids than in WoW raids. If there's such a small amount of the community doing them and if an even smaller, vocal amount of people are pushing out newbies from trying the mode, then it's almost certain to die.
Same. Hardcore raider in ESO,Swtor, Destiny/2, but I did one raid in my 2k hours and I haven’t been bothered to go back. it’s a bad environment, and GW2 has an elitist problem across the board, due to people forgetting how it was before they learned everything. Also, even having to listen to people talk about irrelevant stupid shit in the discord while doing group activities is a detractor. Like give me the raid instructions and shut up about politics.
This is the exact reason I'm reluctant to try it. I'd only try it with a group of people I'm comfortable with like my guild but it's not popular so they stopped raiding. I was looking for a fun raid guild. Fractals and strikes are hard bosses too but people are much more friendly there and can have a laugh like "oops, let's try that again." One of the times I did fractals, I carried the group with my boyfriend because the other 3 people were drunk and dead and laughing
@@snuggleshuggles4257 honestly, sometimes it’s your own guild that’s bad. I’ve left 4-5 guilds in my time here simply cuz how they treat others and how they talk about people behind their backs. Especially in discord. Don’t have time for all the crap. No one is perfect, but in this game you almost need to be or you’ll get some derogatory comments left and right.
Sorry to hear man, that doesn't sound enjoyable at all. There are still some positive people who enjoy raiding and if you go back to it and chat to the squad I'm sure you will find them. GW2 has moved onto a speed clearing mentality so slower groups trigger the jaded and generally unhappy minority. If you can look past that and be willing to kick/block toxic players then I'm sure you can get back to enjoying the content. The LFG is a crapshoot sometimes, if you're leading groups then you're already miles better than the many who complain but never take it upon themselves to start a group.
My biggest issue with GW2 Raids is how... *Inaccessible* they are to someone like me, who has Autism
I constantly have a fear of being mocked and put on a blacklist site, I blame TF2's MVM mode for giving me that fear
I know Spear Warrior, for me, is a super easy thing to use, but I feel like I would be mocked for the crime of choosing the easy build and not learning 300 rotations that I will easily forget and be mocked for forgetting
Bad enough the only remotely worthwhile thing from them is Legendary Armor and a Legendary Ring, and only the Ring is worthwhile now that Obsidian Armor is something to do instead, everything else is essentially cosmetic in Raids now
Honestly I should probably only do the POF raids because they are the only way to get the Coalescence, the PVE Legendary Ring
i genuinely think if they clean up and remake the entire LFG system then it will vastly improve the amount of people that play group content such as raids, strikes, ect.
LFG is a bitbof a disaster.
lfg is done normally, the problem is that the requirements for the player are 1 million dps, 100% ap time of all boons available in the game, 1 million completed races, knowledge of all glitches, etc. no, sanks, i am not nolifer, i want just play the game.
To improve LFG they have to remove specialized roles that are specific for 1 encounter only. Think hand kite or QTP pylons. Once it's just generic boons, heals, and dps; designing a party queing system can be more fluid and easier.
@@ОранГутанович-у3х Bull. Those LFGs stay up because people are willing to let it stay for hours to fill. Every build is overtuned for pretty much every content currently present, especially DPS.
Nolifers wouldn't even bother with lfg.
@@ОранГутанович-у3х Auto-queing, and a damage threshold can remedy that. Like zero credit if you don't do at least 10% of the damage or 60% boon uptime. Or
So my 2 coppers worth here. I've played since mostly the beginning and there has always been this weird upper class/speedrunner/efficiency feel to those that try and do instanced content in GW2. It started with people over optimizing dungeon runs and then demanding a certain amount of AP. Then there was the fractal crowd that when they started would bounce you completely out of the party if you didnt have the right gear/build/AT since fractal were the BIG content. Then raids came out and that then received the same thing as fractals. Strikes were underwhelmed since the people that did raids did not like both the rewards or the one and done nature of them. In all this content there has always felt to have a barrier to entry by those trying to be the most efficient as possible.
Honestly LFG UI might be massively underrated on the issue list - IMO the fact you can just queue for a PvP game is the most important reason why anybody still plays sPvP, and raids being the least populated game mode illustrate perfectly how community can build up barriers to entry stricter than intended.
I’ve played GW2 since launch and have done every bit of content aside from Raids.
For some reason, my introvert self won’t join a discord to team up with people and learn how to do raids.
I think it’s more a result of the social requirements of raids.
I’d say the majority of GW2 players are introvert/solo type players. Not saying they aren’t in a Guild but I feel like most players do their own thing most times.
Doing raids requires you to interact with other humans which in today’s society can be a big roadblock for many players.
I'd argue that WvW and to an extent PvP is inherently more social if you want to commit and perform on a high level there... But you totally can just roam or not interact with others a lot, while in the raids you cannot.
Competitive game modes contain both casual/solo and hardcore/group approaches to play. In PvE, casual/solo is story and open world, while group/hardcore of raids and strikes kind of always stands aside as its own thing.
Same!!
Gw2 is one of the most diverse games for group play. Pretty much all content has squad play in mind. Just because you or other people are too scared to talk to other humans in a fun gaming environment doesn't mean they should nerf content with it in mind.
OMG ur comment is so relevant, this is exactly how it is !!!!!! I do enjoy raid mechanics, encounters and graphics, but it's so hard to force myself to massively communicate with other real players 😢
@@nou2716 No one is saying anything should be nerfed in this comment. Just sharing our thoughts on why Raids aren’t popular, which clearly they aren’t as detailed in this video. Hope you feel better bud!
Anet: Nobody plays raids
Also Anet: We haven’t released a new one in 5 years.
Also Anet: Our LFG system is completely ill equipped to handle raids.
Also Anet: We compare activity of our weekly reward limited content to our daily reward content and somehow can’t figure out why the daily is played more.
Also Anet: We have no onboarding system to raiding and rely entirely on our community.
Also Anet: We never revisit raids to fix bugs or add challenge modes to encounters that don’t have them.
Also Anet: We only look at raids to see which classes get the most play so we can nerf them and prevent any fun from being had in raids.
What Anet is actually trying to say is that they don’t want anyone to play raids. From their perspective true end game content doesn’t make them money but they don’t realize these are the players that stick around with the game the longest.
So fucking true it's sad.
Anet shoots themselves with the foot by not catering to the most hardcore players at least a little bit. That last point especially pisses me off, because no one except for the top 0.01% of the playerbase can even play a class at the level that would exhibit that it's broken, whether it is or not, and yet they still will nerf that class down based purely on those 0.01% of players as if it really affects anyone. Almost every GW2 player is trash!
Idk man if you look at Anet employee count , compare to with all of which they're maintaining and creating i'm not really shocked that some things go unchecked for a long time
especially in this gaming era in which if you don't pump out content constantly people lose their minds. Rainbowsixsiege one season said there will not be any new content or battlepass we'll focus on fixing the bugs and balacing , players lost their shit and their playercount dropped insanly.
Ofc there are problems with gw2 and Anet but in a sea full of shit game devs they're a bright diamond IMO
Disagreeld about the fact that raid make people stick the longest. Just like in wow and FF14, their key playerbase are the hardcore casual who play through easy content everyday all day.
The raid scene just create more visibility and hype
@@PrimarchRoboleonFrenchyman Those players will get bored eventually, and some other casual player will replace them. That's why end game players are more important, they are the ones converting new players. Nobody joins Guild Wars 2 because they want to play boring open world content all day. They see these people doing Febe CM, HT CM, Wing 8 and they are inspired to try that some day.
And the fact the game has no automated dungeon finder to get you into group content is a massive failure for any AAA mmo
Ah yes, a real life sports website, the perfect place to market your MMORPG videogame.
"Secrets of the Obscure" = actually just Anet's marketing 😂
So the game mode that is inaccessible to most players because it doesn't have an easy mode for training is dead huh.... surprising..
I wouldn't mind a complete removal of quickness and alac... but only if the base 'speed' was sped up a little. Some specs feel horrible to play without quickness.
especially hammer skills
Just bake it into the game.
A lot of the gatekeeping prevented me from ever raiding even though I raid in other games. Not surprised the population is pretty low
If EoD and SotO strikes were actually rewarding, maybe more people would do it. If you look on fast farming, one ToF daily rewards you roughly 1g 37s. If you use even cheap food and utility you'll quickly get less than 1g. Even me, a filthy casual, can tell that it's very low rewards even when doing daily clears, the only thing carrying them is the weekly mystic coins and mystic clover.
You can buy 10 mystic coins a week with strikes. On top of getting gold and loots for doing them once a week.
You basically make 40g by doing the EoD and SotO weekly strike achievements, that takes like one hour.
@@vukkulvar9769 Yea, but that's 10 player content requiring meta builds, group search, coordination and communication. Meanwhile you can solo farm T1 Fractals (granted, with Fractal God's bonus Encryptions) and make 40-60g in that same time. Playing much easier content, solo.
@@vukkulvar9769 I spent 4 hours gathering people for 1 strike mission, and another half an hour was spent on the complite it, as mentioned above, I'd rather run fractals without any problems.
@@ОранГутанович-у3х im sorry i call bullsht on this just like your comment on other thread you just exaggerating,if you spent 4 hour to gather people to do strike then you definitely doesnt know how to promote your group or you promote to do hard CM strike( HTCM),half an hour to clear one strike?are you doing HT/KO CM?fck as someone doing CM event most CM can be done super quick ( XJJ,AH,OLC,CO) if we talking about normal then i was once train 5 new players on KO strike because they need it for turtle, all of them used OPW build,it doesnt take long and only 1 wipe.
i mean you say you do fractal,then you should know its bullsht to do 1 strike for half an hour,because some fractal CM are harder than normal strike
What did EoD and SotO Strikes do differently than IBS Strikes? Public Strike rotation. Making it easy to go in is the crucial step for making it accessible.
The portion of players that experience raids don't mean anything as there's so much relevant endgame content in GW2. In WoW, the current raid is like 90% of what's relevant content at any point in time - ofc 90%+ of the playerbase will play it. In GW2, playing 2 hours of meta train can be your entire endgame if you choose so. Or doing WvW, PvP, Fractals, Fishing. You can't compare GW2 raid participation to any other MMO really.
This 100%
Not this 100%. Pure copium.
@@heyitsme1618 indeed, whenever something about X game is bad, shills will tell you can't compare them since they're not the same !!! It's like saying you can't compare writing or gameplay quality of BG3 & Witcher 3 vs Skyrim.
@@heyitsme1618 Well you're wrong
Nah you absolutely can, at least in WoW the amount of endgame that is just doing achievements, farming rep, farming skins in old content, dungeons, m+, alts and so on is massive, raiding as an endgame is actually relatively niche in WoW too haha.
I think GW2 shines the brightest with its open world PvE and WvW content.
Some of the almost natural forming groups tackling one or a string of events, because they all have their own goals and reasons to do them, to just go off on their merry way when it's over.
That magic is gone in instanced PvE, and I feel like that is one of the key reasons why it's a dying gamemode, other than some toxicity and bad LFG.
It's also the main reason that doesn't make me want to participate, I now have to perform well for someone else's sake, and that person is usually flaming at me at the same time.
Maybe it's my rebellious attitude towards people who claim authority, but at that point I just leave and focus on the things I like to do.
100% boon uptime should be impossible, 70-90% should be achievable with top tier skill, the rest of us should be in the 50% area.
They could slowly nerf the boon uptime over time, so the players adjust to the new situation.
The cope from that chat when the people who make the game admit no one plays those game modes. I'm so fucking happy you didn't have any other talking heads during this. Thank you for goin solo on this one. Truthfully, Thank you, Made this way more pleasant to watch.
Fractals should have been the focus as an end-game content rather than raids. Much easier to get a group together and easier for new players to get in...
i've had some bad experiences with fractals as a new player i won't lie, there's the usual high masteries/high agony res players, that join lower tier fractals and essentially pressure everyone into playing fast because they want the daily req, we even see cheese and literal bugs that people abuse or exploit to skip content in them, which is bad for us because the drops of enemies there are actually quite decent, the worst part is that i've experienced a lot of passive aggressiveness when asking if we can play a little slower and actually kill enemies for drops, hasn't happened once or twice either, it's been quite common in all honesty, so i stopped doing fractals at T2 and took like a 6 month break from the game because of that.
it's not just alacrity and quickness...those are symptoms of bad design : That skills don't have nonlinear dynamical tradeoffs. Not linear tradeoffs (like -200 power or something) im talking about tradeoffs like Frenzy (Attack 2x fast, takes 2x damage) which is the kind of design where you have to actually think about the skill being pressed.
That is the ultimate issue : There is no need to think before hitting a skill because the optimal state of playing the game is to just hit your skills on cooldown...there's no real tradeoffs to useing them at a real-time descision making level.
Remember : Frenzy back in GW1 was perma-able. You could in fact spam Frenzy...but most people wouldn't spam it because that was not a good idea (because of taking 2x damage).
They can't make regeneration not have 100% uptime without reworking healer to be able to properly heal.
And regeneration being 100% uptime can be better than the alternative, it forces people to learn mechanics if healing is only slow and steady and mistakes can't be recovered with a burst of healing.
I just started GW2 for the first time 2-3 months ago. We found a guild that was starting and recruiting new and veteran players. Fortunately for me one of those total legend vets decided to start a raid group in this guild. Best content to be progressing through, starting at Wing 1 and working our way through slowly. We've completed wing 1 and have one more boss in both Wing 2 and 4 to complete. I think we killed the first two in Wing 7 as well, was close on the last one there. I'm so lucky because I love raiding!!
I mean you can keep making super hard content. If you want numbers, it needs to be playable by the average, mediocre (as in "middle") player.
The more conditions you have to satisfy, the lower the number of players, that's it.
If you have to:
- sit 30m in a lobby looking for a group
- spend 2h trying to clear content
- have to repeat 7 times because you need to prepare like you're going on a job interview
- have to actually be decent
- have to tryhard, can't play a random build
- trade off some other content that is also rewarding
- have a lot of players involved, compounding the need for every single person to satisfy all the conditions
then you can't be surprised that the content remains unpopular.
Popular content will always:
- bz relatively short
- be accessible to bad players or bad builds
- involve fewer players
- have decent rewards for bad players, and improving rewards for players that perform better
Gamedevs, want to make money? Hire this person and do everything they tell you.
Exactly this, they cd learn a thing or two from how FFXIV does raids by maybe adding an extreme version of the raid and making the base raids be fairly casual
This comment is so stupid, like its insane. No, raids shouldnt be cleared by mediocre players, no raid in any game is clearable by mediocre players.
@@sesper3871 ok
In the same vein as permanent boons being a problem, I dislike any time a game lets you gear for crit chance. The fact that you can gear in GW2 to critically hit 100% of the time is lame.
It takes all the fun out of critical hits as a concept. If crits aren’t random, then they should be contextual and earned. Hitting an exposed area or meeting circumstantial qualifications to guarantee a crit is rewarding. Always critting is just like always having boons, pointless.
It also overcentralizes gearing. If you don’t crit, you waste investment. So you always try to maximize your crit chance without losing out on other modifiers. It hurts the flexibility of stat systems.
This falls back on the topic of permanent boons. If fury didn't have 100% uptime, it would become one of the burst window boons that maxed out crit for 5-10 seconds. It could be argued that if this happened, fury could even be buffed to grant more crit chance, allowing for more stats to become viable.
@@HexPhoenix True, or simply a damage amp buff to crit damage that rewarded smarter use of contextual crits.
thought i was the only one that has issue with gw2 boons system because no one mentioning about boons. stopped playing gw2 because of the boons system. gw2 boons system creates this spammy and stand/stack on top of each other meta/gameplay which i hate the most in mmos this problem is more prominent in WvW for me at least, i love big pvp zerg fest in mmos but sadly not in gw2 because of its boons system. wish boons system in gw2 are situational use.
Very good video! I don't play Guild Wars 2 too much anymore but I really like keeping up with the news and your (insightful) thoughts on what's going on.
First of all, even an old and dying game can always bounce back. It requires effort from the game's developers, marketing, and some community goodwill, but it is possible.
I've worked on one such old game, with decent core playerbase but slowly declining, and it was quite a journey trying to figure out its pain points and the way to fix them with what little resources our skeleton crew had -- but in the end, the numbers went up, user acquisition dept did its magic and the game had lived for a while longer than everyone had thought. Or look how wow bounced back from bleeding players to welcoming everyone home. Bold decisions and good marketing are the key here, which may be bad news for Anet on the other hand :D
Second of all, there are ways to keep the game as fun, to keep the power level comfortable, and to fix the boon issue at the same time. Long story short, buff player stats baseline, lower boons uptime / efficiency accordingly. Will make it easier for boonless open world peepos, maybe a bit harder for top players (not that they've been struggling with all the power creep), but will also make boons actually functional and interesting system to use once again. I'll probably write about it in more detail in a post elsewhere
11:00 lets be real. we want raids popular, nm must be easy to learn/pug, cm doable by advanced pugs. only lcm should be for premades/statics/top 1%
@@zawiasfx thing is as for now normal raid already easy enough to learn/pug,what i gather from comment section and from the wild it just that many people too scared to try or they looking at it at face value in terms of rewards.
I agree 100% about cm and lcm,gotta give something exp player to chase on and i tink anet should apply what they did with convergence to raid,higher chance of better reward,more engaging and give faster open world legendaries material
@@joyboy6067 theyre easy cause theyre powercrept. There are reasons some instanced content is way less played than other. If they add stupid slave roles, like hand kite, or w/e are they called on ko cm / ht cm, playrate will be abysmal. Majority of ppl want to fight, not run back and forth away from team.
This is already the case with most encounters. There are only a few encounters you can't get into while being brain dead. and even on those it usually comes down to: don't stand in the bad, or know where to move at different phases during the fight.
I personally basically don't play 10 player content. I don't know anyone in my friend group personally who does.
Compared to others, I have at least played it a bit to get some achievements or collections done. But not more than I had to.
Others avoid this completely.
Why? Because of players.
Raids are gatekept by those who know what they are doing. You can't just go into the LFG and queue up for a Raid. You decipher some cryptic group names in the LFG, change your build accordingly and join the group. For me, this usually worked out fine. I also have pretty thick skin when it comes to toxic comments and can actually be honest and ask questions without fear. But on average, Raids and Fractals are way more toxic than PvP.
GW2 is casual. Most people play it to relax for 1-2 hours after work or on the weekend. We don't have to stress out at that time, giving myself getting virtually jelled at and tackle some heavy learning curve against a gatekeeping toxic community of neckbeards. Better rewards wouldn't help that.
Strike Missions improved that situation briefly. I played them for quite some time. Then I had a 4 month off-time and when I came back, Strikes looked like Raids on the LFG to me, with absurd cryptic names and me not knowing what's up and where I need to go - and no way of getting into it.
If the raid/strike community wants to keep those game modes, they have to become more inclusive and have to make sure, beginner-freindly groups are accessible 90% of the time, not just occasionally every weekend if you are lucky.
While there are a lot of beginners, you have to slice off those who aren't interested in training at any given time and those who really can't perform roles realistically because they don't even know their gear stats or where to get them from. And that's assuming people in a training group even answer back to you, as unfortunately chat-silent casuals are more commonplace than otherwise.
And even most people willing to teach aren't knowledgeable about every class using or performing their role correctly with the changing meta, which can lower expectations from commander doing a successful training when runs can fail from just a single person failing a mechanic or severely underperforming.
Expecting such goodwill 90% of the time for content which only rewards you only once a day or week is unrealistic.
But it's not just a thankless service, the newbies aren't exempt from being toxic themselves and eroding a commander's goodwill over time. The latter I wager is the bigger reason why so few commanders are willing to teach harder content at all.
Teaching isn't difficult at all, it's communicating with people that's hard.
@@Dreamonology I'd disagree on those.
Maybe it takes less effort, but I can personally attest WvW set is FAR more time-consuming than the raid set doing just half of available wings.
The weekly clears themselves are absolutely rewarding for the raw gold alone. I tend to believe the population is stagnant because new players are intimidated by raid mechanics which are gatekept in training communities and third-party sites outside the game itself. And alongside them few commanders would be willing to teach raids through public LFG.
As a new player to the game, one of the craziest things I've stumbled on is how the community treats dps benchmarks. I made a reaper and was smashing bosses and it felt really good so I decided to spawn a golem and see what my DPS was. Came out to about 13-14k. I was kind of confused because a video I watched mentioned a deadeye putting out 30k DPS while providing Quickness. I tried that build as well and it felt miserable. APPARENTLY... I'm supposed to be putting boons on myself and conditions on the golem to check DPS. It will NEVER make sense to me to do that. Like I get that in a group you can expect to have these buffs on, but why do things to artificially boost your damage? You can still go off of benchmarks without adding boons. It just doesn't feel genuine to me. The GW2 community is just built different, man. The whole 100% uptime on buffs is one thing, but I just cannot wrap my head around adding buffs to myself that I wouldn't provide on my own to check DPS. So as far as I'm concerned, I do about 14k DPS. If your buffs make my numbers go up, great. But that's the base DPS I'm bringing to the table.
In this game you play with boon supports in instanced endgame PvE content. If you don't have boons like quickness and alacrity and might on you, then either the group composition is sub optimal, or the support players are not doing their job correctly. So in a group, where you can expect pretty much 100% uptime on these boons, you can easily use them in a benchmark. It would just not make sense, if you wouldn't have these boons 100%... but you do.
The only reason you would not assume 100% boon uptime, is to see how they would perform for example in the open world or in the story... but why would you need a benchmark for that kind of content? The benchmark is the thing to aim for. What is this build capable of with the right gear and rotation. Why would you create a benchmark that does not show the full potential?
skill issue, get good casual.
Sucks to suck I guess
@@Harlequinlynnette not putting buffs on myself from the computer is a skill issue? Can I get your tag so I can just make sure now I don't ever group with you.
@@jozzetv No, I understand the whole thing that groups will have these builds to make sure you all have these buffs up 100% of the time. This is just the only game I've ever played that works this way. Granted that's because this is the only game that allows 100% uptime on buffs like this. Also, as a new player, it is incredibly daunting to see the community like this when interested in trying out strikes and raids and fractals. Doing anything in a group means I have to be playing 1 of a defined set of allowed builds or I'm "not contributing" and means I'm probably gonna be kicked. If I'm not 100% uptime on group alac/quick/prot/regen/whatever then it "doesn't work". So honestly, I haven't even really tried to do much of that content, yet. I can't just enjoy the game and play what seems fun to me, I have to do what the community tells me to do.
"You can't put the genie back in the bottle" -- but they did with GW1 and smiter's boon :D
I would love to play raids but I despise trying to wrangle 10 people. It needs a mode scaled for 5.
That's called dungeons.
It's not the raids that has a problem.
This entire fiasco can be traced back to the Chronomancer elite spec and Anet betraying their original design philosophy by giving it quickness as a unique boon.
They seem just as clueless then as they are now.
If we didn't have quickness, people would cancel their skills accidentally way more than they already do, though the idea of gearing up for a burst phase is cool in concept. Alacrity is either all or nothing as a boon because it makes no sense to want alacrity if it isn't permanent. With protection uptime being permanent, we now have ironically even less class diversity on encounters where one would want big damage mitigation (such as HTCM) because you need to turn to unique effects like revenant's dwarf elite skill to mitigate damage beyond protection, or something like guardian and mesmer to give group aegis for blocks, etc.
Basically boons are just a requisite of teambuilding now and the idea of what boons were intended to be are now in other unique effects (many of which were systematically removed from the game, ironically) and this is just where we are now.
As a new player, I can say... raids is very intimidating. I don't like feeling that anxiety. I'll play anything but raids.
It was the exact same for me…
I played the game since launch and never touched raids…
Or other harder pve instanced content (all the CMs)
And look at me now… - after 1 1/2 years since i started - all 3 leggy armors completed, more than 1500 LI and it was a real blast!
You just can use the same way i tried back then.
Its pretty simple tbh…
Do your research first
Find a good build you are very comfortable to play and outfit it properly. Thats the most important step. Dont go in with a celestial build f.e.
You need a dedicated and proper build because people will NEED you to f.e. do dmg also a dps.
Thats VERY easily achievable by taking f.e. A low intensity version of mechanist. You can put your mech skills on autocast and play it with one kit or even none at all. Extremely easy with quite decent dps. Or the pistol pistol unload deadeye which is essentially an afk build
You will most of the time outperform other players…yeah you cant outperform people doing proper rotations but who cares? 15k is enough dmg to clear contents. If you do like 20k in real fights you have nothing to worry about!
And with those builds that is extremely easy to achieve.
But back to the point…outfit the build properly (exotic is enough!!) and learn how to play it and what your buttons/build does).
Like what does a reflect or dazes, etc
And then just visit Mukluks get to the point videos of the raid encounters to get to know the fights
Stay away from CMs or people asking for x LI - you wont have fun there
Just go to f.e. Lions arch or the aerodome and ask it anyone is doing training runs. Or just go there and people will actively ask for newer players to join
They wont have any issue with you…
- you have a proper build (which runs itself)
- you have a vague idea about the encounter
You are good to go 😊
@@Cross_111 Thanks for the advice! Looks like I will have to change from my celestial build haha. I'm playing as mech. thankfully the guilds I'm in are doing training runs. I think I should try those. I've only been playing for about a month now, so I'm exploring the other things the game has to offer as well, but yeah, raids is by far the only thing I try to avoid. Hopefully it gets better in time. I wouldn't mind it being in the open world.
There's waaay more LFGs that have 250 LI/kills required or similar and it's a real hassle to actually just find a group that you can join as a newer player. I've had evenings where I checked often and never saw one without a requirement. I actually get seriously pissed whenever I see the groups that are like 50+ kills; like, you do realize you asking specifically for players who have killed a boss EVERY week for an entire year right. Way less kills should be MORE than enough to actually make the point that "you should know the mechanics and have done it at least once".
And let's be clear, newer does not necessarily equal bad.
In short, the reason why nobody is doing raids is because the community is making it very hard for people to get into. Commanders doing the recruitment very differently can also be a huge reason for confusion, which doesn't really help the situation.
I have been a player since Guild Wars 1 & head start with Guild Wars 2. I used to run the GW1 endgame (FoW, UW, RoT & HM dungeons) but I haven't touched a raid in GW2. Ever.
Why? Kill proof (kp) toxicity. Any groups I have ever tried to join, even trainers, have asked for some kind of kp and I have either been kicked when saying "I have never completed a raid" or I have left immediately. The majority of the niche raiding community are elitist pigs, therefore I have ZERO motivation to EVER try the content out, despite some significant narrative beats being present (the Mursaat especially for Bastion of the Penitent). So, I avoid it like the plague. The raid community killed the preferred mode. It is as simple as that. Anyone else saying otherwise or trying to defend it are deluded and you should feel ashamed of yourselves.
Re. boons, I have stopped running quickness/alacrity builds in open world squads. I am so sick to death of always having to bring one or the other when all I wanna do is just chill & clip some buttons to see pretty dmg numbers. I would LOVE it if ArenaNet removed both of them next reset. I really would. I cannot stand how fast the open world maps are getting now. There is no sense of challenge anymore. This is compounded by ArenaNet constantly nerfing the challenging encounters (Soo Won & Eparch spring to mind here).
This is exactly it, the culture is fucked and I don't really know how the devs could do anything about it.
I actually heard the alacrity and quickness info first on Mukluk's coverage of this very same article 😄
I'm lucky when I see the open world "raid" in Janthir Wilds succeed. It's hard to imagine many open worlders wanting to jump into actual raid content when the open world version fails so often.
I've seen it fail once in the last 2 weeks and I did it 7 times. Random LFG 15mins before the timer at both non peak and peak hours. I even tagged up for Decima a couple of times.
The only difficult part is getting people to stop dpsing if there's a bigger discrepancy between Greer and Decima... But it still worked 6 out of 7 times.
EU server, because apparently this matters. I can't relate to 90% of the things people say in this comment section so it must be a difference in servers.
Wdym? the meta in the second map of JW isnt the "raid" they didnt release that part of the expa
Okay. So if they wanted to talk about their game. In a medium that people would hear them. Wouldn't they have gotten more traction and eyeballs posting this through their own official channels rather than some website that looks like its after your digits? Just saying what a majority are thinking.
they dont have to adjust every encounter just increase the damage of the class skills by the value needed to compensate for quick and alac being gone. This way you have same dps and can reduce the spam as well as enjoy key class abilities, animations and just class design, so that PVE doesnt feel like its about spamming your 10-15 skills no matter the class/build/encounter. For healers it probably doesn't matter at all, but in case they are weak either add some healing to the skills or reduce base cd of stuff that heals with like 10-15%.
People want to raid but finding a group is ridiculous.
I played a raid after a long time away from the game. They have absolutely gutted the damage on alac mirage and I felt embarrassed when I looked at arc dps.... Anet are doing a woeful job at balancing classes.
I've always wanted to raid in GW2, and have been to few, but the problem is always in finding the raid group. I feel it is super tedious atm to find people to play raids or high level fractals with. On the other hand, i would hate to see the raid content leave GW2. I don't pretend i have answers to this, improving the lfg-system could be a start.
"Raids are less popular than PvP".
As Day 1 player, where grinding dungeons & eventually growing a speedrun culture was the only way to keep being invested into the game as PvE enjoyer, I had to abandon it.
Because A-Net wasn't able to fix walls & objects in dungeons & ultimately abandoned them as PvE content.
IN OVER 2 YEARS. Kinda killed the whole franchise for me, ngl. Not even gonna look into GW3, whenever it's gonna come out. It's still ArenaNet overall.
At this very point i feel like talking about GW2 succeeding should be considered a legit mental illness .
GW3 news would sadden me greatly, I just came back to GW2 after a 4 year break and enjoy it alot again. Hearing an entirely new game emerge having to start from scratch again would make me feel like any progress I get in now is wasted entirely because surely the GW2 population will plummit whenever GW3 would actually launch....
bro this is a video game, its not like real life when starting from scratch is actually disastrous. after all, games are only pixels.
@velDANTe U clearly dont understand MMOs then and the amm of dedication ppl put in
The only reason why they're admitting all this now is because GW3 is progressing very well in development and they're finally letting the cat out of the bag.
saw teapot progressing WoW nerub palace raid on twitch, no wonder, the endgame in GW2 is lackluster as hell for a PvE player
Endgame PvE is completing achievements and collections.
I like the way you phrased your comment, as if WoW was his hidden mistress
Raid is for sure the worse content in gw2, it is difficult, ppl are toxic, it take so much time and effort for something not worth and irrelevant for the character progress, the problem in this kind of content is the rewards, like dungeon, nobody play because the rewards sucks
What about the much cheaper raid legendary armor? Would that not be a good incentive or is that gone now with the OW PvE armor? And another question: Would you find challanging encounters fun in a community (so not talking pug adventures).
As a veteran raider i only really do raids anymore, because it is a fun thing to do with friends, but also with random people. I got my static i have been with for years now and here and there we have some people leave and new people join. So we just like to take on the content together and improove more and more to get more done in less time. It's about groth, the banter and the satisfaction of finishing a task. In pug raids i usually like it because i can usually help a group out. Wispering the commander that if they have any questions, that they can ask me. Just don't start teaching people without the commanders consent, and then usually everything is fine. I also found some fun people this way.
Once i joined a random raid at odd hours and in text we had so much fun, that at the end, we converted to a party and had some fun in someones home instance. We did a jumping puzzle in there and did a rollerbeetle race they created. It was overall a fun experience. Sometimes things can be tough in pug raids, if you are looking for a clear. But if you don't have that expectation, you can just go with the flow and have some really fun interactions. And that's what it is all about: fun.
@@sephirothdoug the difficulty of raids is actually a joke, but I understand, gw2 player base doesn’t have hands to actually play games.
@@sephirothdoug raid being difficult it just myth that spread around like plague,toxic people are everywhere, i play this game for half and a year and found out the hard way opw player are the most toxic somehow,its hard to be raid player when theres new player join in blank,if they tell them nicely they said it was passive aggressive, if they tell them as it is they said it was toxic
Most of the raids are pretty easy. Rewards are good as well being envoy armor, access to ascended gear, and gold
No, its the best content gw has but sadly snowflakes like you are ruining the image of raids. Fucking noob lmal
I feel like even in vanilla the combat had issues, just different ones. I remember trying out dungeons during that time. They just felt utterly unfair and frustrating. The game was balanced around movement and using dodge roll as an emergency, but then they loaded up the dungeons with projectiles which couldn’t miss.
I remember dungeon teams being multiple mesmers and guardians because they were the only ones that brought sufficient projectile protection. It was very zergy where you were trying to kill everything before the duration on the walls ran out.
Quickness/alac isn’t any better but the point is I don’t think they’ve ever really gotten combat fully correct.
I wouldn't be surprised if ANet would start feature test their ideas for GW3 in GW2 soon.
If they made difficulty tiers for Raids, many more people would be playing them. They made them for Fractals and it still baffles me why they didn’t do it for 10 man content.
There's already challenge mode and normal mode.
@@vukkulvar9769 challenge modes in raids are not what anyone means by difficulty modes. They barely add anything to the encounter aside from a couple bosses and are also a HARDER VERSION of the raid, which is the opposite of what is needed. It is already difficult to get new players into raids, making a harder mode for an already difficult boss (which is every boss if you're a new player) is idiotic.
In my opinion what we need are 4 difficulty modes; an easy mode, a normal mode, a hard mode, and challenge mode. Self explanatory; easy mode for new players, normal modes for people who have hands, these could be the current bosses, then hard modes which are more difficult versions of our current bosses, these could potentially be the incorporated challenge modes. Then there could be another ACTUAL challenge mode that makes the boss much more difficult, like they did with Cerus CM.
I cleared W1-4 tens of times, W7 multiple times but I can't get into W5-6 through LFG at all. If I wanted to play these wings, I would have to join static. New players probably have this problem with all wings.
There’s something incredibly ironic talking about buffs no longer interacting with the game but at the same time removing every single unique class buff in the game that did exactly that. And removing those have been imo the biggest regression since I started playing
there's one thing that they forgot to mention when discussing the playerbase for all of the different areas of the game. In PvP, WvW, etc, the reward structure is there constantly, meaning that as long as you're within that type of gameplay, you're rewarding for playing it, even if lower than what many would want. However, in Raids, you're only rewarded for beating that boss 1/week, meaning once you complete it, what's the incentive to continue playing it for that week?
there's always time to fix the boon fiasco . The problem is that players will react badly and then start complain. Game will become hard in a patch . But if they want to salvage this , they have to press the big red button
The interesting thing is that anet know all the answers why GW2 isn't doing as good as it could, but they stubbornly move into the same direction. "The definition of insanity..."
Do they though?
If raids had been given more love and attention, I think they would be more popular. In general, MMOs that release more raid content will get more raiders. Build it and they will come, UNLESS it's riddled with issues like HoT and PoF raids were. Anet kinda stumbled over the first hurdle, honestly.
Another thing is how awkward each encounter is designed, likely due to no trinity system. Tanking (if a tank even exists) is different per encounter. Unique roles mean you need to actively co-ordinate, and I believe this is uncommon in a lot of raiding MMOs, since your role tends to determine what mechanics you deal with (correct me if I'm dead wrong.) Some roles are so punishing that if you screw up, EVERYONE dies, or close to it. In some cases these roles aren't exactly necessary, but they're treated as standard in today's community meta. Hand Kiter, Push Druid, Pylon Kiter, Slubling Kiter, Dhuum Kiter, etc. If you don't have them, your raid is usually dead in the water.
Strikes were an improvement, but the difficulty dial fluctuates all over the place, and they still suffer from bugs. Then the lack of meaningful rewards killed strikes as regular content for me, and I've never gone back to them routinely.
I hear half of new players viewing raid groups as friendly and helpful, and the other half traumatised by how bad they were treated. Very curious how there is such a difference in views. It's not often people mention what kind of group they were running with to determine if they were with the right group in the first place, but I'm still ashamed in the community for responding to new raiders with disdain rather than trying to be helpful.
Oh, you mean the “game” mode where I’m REQUIRED to go to freaking classes like I’m in school to learn how to do them “properly”, and I’m required KP that I can’t get without doing them like your first job application asking your for experience, just to get yelled at anyways for not min-maxing the way randos want you to…. ISNT POPULAR????? Shocker.
You don't require classes. There are literally guides around every corner. Raids have mechanics; If you don't do them "properly" you fail those mechanics. That is just how it works and mechanics are not that complicated. All over youtube and twitch people explain them, and most of them are self explainatory: Don't stand in front of the boss, when he does a swipe attack ... duh. Don't stand in the bad red or firery field... duh. You probably want to stand in those green fields. Didn't work? oh look there are points over them showing how many people need to be in it... duh.
I'm not trying to mock you, just want you to realize, that most of the stuff you think is in raiding, is actually not there. A lot of the mechanics are easy to deal with, you might just need to experience them once or twice and you are fine. If people tell you, that you need to extensively learn those things, then they are lying to you. All it takes is a guide video and a low KP group that is fine with taking you with or joining a PvE community or try to gather a few players for you own group. The last part might be the hardest one... but it is possible. And if i'm only at that time and see your group, i will probably join you and not really care if wipes are happening.
There are too many misconceptions and fears about raids out there, mostly propagated by people who do not usually raid much.
@@jozzetv I don't think they meant the raids themselves are difficult, I believe they meant the social aspect is what holds them back. The toxicity and the expectations
@@eon6274 I do agree that this is what holds people back. I'm trying to tell people, that most people don't really care. You will have maybe 1/10 people in a raid that actually gets vocal about damage in raids and this is only happening in very rare occasions.
It's been months since I have seen any of that. If you get whispers about is, the block button is easily accessible.
I really wonder where people find all those toxic players. Years of raiding and I only met a handful.
@@jozzetv your perspective is coming from someone that is already in the raiding community. You just don’t understand the barrier to entry because you passed it so long ago, and it’s changed. Yea it might not be as hard as we think it is but if it was so easy why is this even a talking point? Why was this video made? Clearly there’s a barrier holding many people back and I’m not alone. But thanks for basically calling me shit at the game 👍it’s totally not people like you I don’t wanna deal with when I’m trying to learn raids
@@eon6274 you nailed it.
Just have 2 LFG options 1. Create room & join as we use now 2. Choose your role and random match(also option to not fix role just like fractalT1 4 dps go brrr etc.) like FFXIV
for random matches and selecting roles for it, anet would need to take the stance that there are actually roles you can fill. Theys still think that there are no roles, but still create content that is clearly favored by having players assign roles. As a developer you can't claim that there are no roles, when you make it possible to create builds that capture those roles. A build that goes completely into buffing and healing others is a healer. There, they created a role. They have a stat that is healing power. Even if they don't use that, they could still make role assignments possible by just self assigning yourself a role, like Throne and Liberty does. You can just assign yourself the role as a healer and you can queue for a group. Anet should do the same. Accept that in endgame PvE roles have been established. Otherwise a queue system for matchmaking will never be possible.
Never done raids or strikes due to being gatekeep by players, when i make my own raid n strikes nobody joins, has in my server is kinda like everyone already has their own teams to run things, so if these get removed tommorow it wont even bother me but same time i would be happy for people to understand how we the ones that get gatekeep feel.
That is why i always wondered why they dont just invest doing dungeons cause its less of a pain and players can easily do them and join, or make solo content, like a lest say a Big tree which has tons of floors that you can do it daily to gain mats etc, there is so much that can be done.
Yet somehow im here with 400h in gw2 doing weekly raid clears with pugs. Nobody gatekeeps shit unless you are bad and burden to your group. Study the fight, practice your rotation and job and go, everybody will welcome you even without kp. Just say " no kp, I know the mechs and state your role, like w1 cannons 1-3.
@@lkajdklajscklj2112 Things are different in every server, you simply had a better introduction to raids then most of us, also how can you be a burden to a group if you never played with them, also in my server you sayin "no kp, but know the mechs etc" its not gonna work, again the expirience its different in every server and there is gatekeeping so lets stop saying "Nobody is gatekeeping" cause its making yourselfs look dumb, cause there tons of evidence.
The servers never mattered for raids. The only thing that dose matter is playing on EU or NA.
@@glassdos3175 Idk that feels like misinformation, for little knowledge i have about raids party system you only queue with people of your server, so the server you on matters, but one thing most likely we agree is that in NA most likely they more into Raids then EU.
@@Exirock no, it's not missinformation, for PvE LFG only the region (na or eu) and not the world (server) matters. And as far as I am aware of the GW2 discours raids and the raid lfg are way more popular on EU.
Boons are noobstink.
Boon backwards is noob. Coincidence? I think not!
Of course PvP is far better positioned than Raids.
I started playing GW2 3 years ago and I tried all that game has to offer (even crafted soem Legos already) except Raids because - you guessed it - I needed "experience". Funny story, you actually need to do something to get experience. Plus I needed a "steady schedule", I had that in WoW (raided between 2012 and 2020) and I stopped raiding there cause of that.
I honestly dont like the majority of the raid encounters. Vale guardian was S+++ tier and after that it was like meh. Matthias is cool, wing 4 is cool but the rest of it requires a lot of coordination with voice chat which I cba to do. The horrible memories of doing the stupid spirit run and wiping on sabatha just because 1 guy fucked up the cannon, so trash. Dont get me started on the glenna run, twisted castle, yuck. I am just glad not to be doing that content again.
I really think anet should have just done a mythic+ style system on all the dungeons and the fractals should have been roughly the same difficulty as nightmare cm. Not everyone can be bothered to schedule their life around meeting their guild on discord these days.
Attack speed and skill cooldown modification becoming not only baseline and permanently expected, but completely within the hands of other people to control them and in turn control how it feels to play your class, was an incredibly degenerative decision for the game.
Boons do not feel good to have because they are so plentiful and permanent. They are expected. They are the baseline. Not having them feels terrible. It’s strictly a negative-weighted interaction. Toxic game design.
If we are talking Cerus CM kills for a second... for me it usually comes down to community attitude in general. I have killed Cerus CM, but after we were done people just left the group instead of working on reclears. I don't want to jump into the dicord driven lfg with random people, when i was only so far able to kill it with people i know once. I would like to do reclears first, to get consistency, but players dropped the fight as soon as they got the kill once.
Now I would have to join another group again with new people and probably have to redo parts of progression with others again, because they can't dodge an attack where they can distort the initial hit for 2 seconds...
The same happened back in the day, when i joined raid tournaments. The group burned itself out, because they went try hard instead of going at it slow and steady. And there i was again searching for a new group because people break under self assigned pressure. Stop with that "all or nothing" mindset. You kill the boss once, big whoop. Stay with the group and kill it a few more times. If you are burned out after the first kill, then you were already doing something wrong.
Now that i don't have that much time to play anymore i've just resigned killing it more or getting the LCM or EoS titles. I'm sick of people burning out. All they have to do is their rotation and dodging a few times while being protected. At some point when i have more time and fucks to give, i will learn the virtuoso dps rotation and see if i hugely misunderstand the issue or not.
This is an issue I really struggle to combat as well, it's very hard to keep groups together in GW2. It boils down to a lack of content imo, and also a lack of competition/goals available to players. Paradoxically this actually makes people BURN HARD whenever something pops up, because it's always 'the last one' especially with tournaments I know teams go absolutely insane in order to do their best to win and end up burning out afterwards lol.
When they decided not to make a public Strike rotation in EoD, that is when I stopped caring about them. Having to go into LFG to start a Strike group is the biggest deterrent of Raids and Strikes.
For me the biggest problem with the direction anet took with boons is the knock on effect it had on WvW. WvW has become so one dimensional over the last few years and has led to a state where everyone just stacks as many people and boons in one place as possible. Roaming, havoc, clouding, 15-20 man gvg guild are all completely dead, and every match up is the same. I hope anet considers some big changes in the next couple of years.
Clouding still works. Its why people hated Maguuma because all they did was cloud and kill stupid blobs.
I have played since beta and i don't even know where raids are or how to get into them i care so little about that kind of content mostly because i have had my fill of that crap after years of raiding in wow.
I have played since beta and I know where raids are. I care a little about that kind of content mostly because I have *not* had my fill of that crap after years of *not* raiding in wow. :p
They're in the Lion's Arch Aerodome. In the southern most part of Lion's Arch, south of the portals there, inside the Stingray building. There's also a place to test your characters rotations on a dummy with different settings. The Raid doors are neatly lined up on the wall.
"my fill of that crap" - What is that crap? What was the experience in WoW, that is now expected to be in GW2, a completely different game?
The Raid scene is also just losing its established players. People have moved on from Gw2 whether its for specific game reasons, or reasons of life. Its not receiving that influx of new players to offset the bleeding either. I also, often, get players from the LFG who instant leave if a group wipes on the first or 2nd pull of a boss because of some small mistakes.
Don't get me wrong, I get people have lives outside the game, but its terrible for community culture when its a 50/50 that the rando I grabbed from the LFG will stay with the group after a few failed attempts.
And since there already is a bit of a culture problem for Guild Wars 2, losing the established raiders while not having a new base to fill the cracks is basically a death sentence. The worst part is that Anet KNOW how to populate areas of the game for content. Return To has always worked for the open world, the last WvW rush was a massive success, the solution isn't just within reach, its in their hands! A rotating Raid Rush would be a great way to influx new/returning/experience players back into the scene for the week, and maybe even create some retention for new players who learn about the Legendary Armor.
I have an even crazier idea with Raids that would be a cheap, but effective way to create content for them: Introduce a new raid type, call it some fancy name like "Mist-touched", and introduce random modifiers to the fights similar to T4 fractal. Add unique rare drops to them or new items that are LOCKED to the "Mist" versions to help maintain the population.
Even if that is a bad idea, its something that they ALREADY have the technology to implement into the existing raid space. The Raid scene has just had to exist and run itself for the past 5 years without an ounce of help from Anet. Everyone left because they got tired of waiting for that content and just started playing other content or entirely different games as a result.
That is one of the biggest issues in the raid community. People claim anet caters to the 1% of players, but they have not released content relevant for them for ~4 years and it only started picking up again with something like cerus CM. In those 4 years a lot of players have just left for things like wow or ffxiv. Those most valuable players are gone, the players who opened training groups, that brought new people into the community, that helped out groups even without any rewards given by anet. There are some left, but if you don't provide any relevant content for 4 years.. of cause your population will shrink. Same happened to PvP. All they did was cater to open world and story gamers for years. Now they are stuck with people who don't want to engage with these communities because of strange misconceptions and because they met a toxic commander a few times. And people probably wont join progression runs for w8 either, because everyone except the raider community thinks that they need to stay away from it because of some mythical toxic raid creatures or social anxiety.
Losing the established raiders and not having many mentors left, leaving a larger pool of toxic people flows down to the new players who are learning the raids while dealing with these people. Personally I quit raids altogether because of the toxicity towards mistakes, even in groups I made and labeled as training. A self feeding cycle where the toxic players will drive off the new players, leaving the raiding pool growing much much slowly if at all. I don't know what else to say other than I'd LOVE to do raids but I avoid them because of the players.
Raiders learning raiding is niche, 10 years later. Water is wet. More at 11.
Yes some of the most enjoyable times I have in GW2 now is just the weekly keyfarm. The combat and pace is so different and its satisfying to use your limited skills optimally. Which reminds me that another side effect of Perma Boons is the bloat in all the effects for Weapon & Utility skills.
The place where boons annoy me the most is actually WvW, where unkillable boonballs break into keeps literally just to farm people. The counter? Make your own boonball and smash into their boonball, hoping your random stuff hits harder than their random stuff. It's absolutely atrocious gameplay and is honestly one of the main reasons I despise WvW. The only time I've had fun in large scale WvW is when you have an improvised, disorganized attack vs an improvised, disorganized defense. It's easier to get some damage in and to pick of stragglers.
In PvE you are stacking even if you are fully ranged because you want those boons otherwise you're a pool noodle, the game would be more interesting if you were responsible for your own boons rather than always relying on your supports to give them.
Yes, I want longbow rangers/rifle mechanists to be able to sit at 1200 range and snipe the boss if they choose to do so.
Quick alac shouldnt exist, but here we are.
The only thing carrying pve hard content was heal scourge, and they got rid of it, even knowing that it's not OP, it's just helpful for learning groups
For quickness/alac, they should add a “blackout” mode to some instanced content that disables certain boons. Way to make a new difficulty mode without an actual challenge mode
The Guild Wars 2 problem from where I see it is a lack of identity, and systems that are decades past where they should have been innovated.
There are a few examples of systems that are old and should have been replaced a long time ago.
- Interface: This is the biggest shame in Guild Wars 2, and in MMOs in general. The lack of customisation of the interface is criminal. When I hear Mukluk complain about new weapons that use buffs on the buff bar with the tiny and plentiful amount of buffs, you realise just how ridiculous it is to be able to find anything in that mess. In addition to it being annoying to see you also have the issue of accessibility as the core player base gets older. This coupled with the fact that not everyone likes that standard interface and you have a really poor experience.
- LFG: There needs to be a content finder system. Whether that be a 'dungeon finder' or a 'strike finder' where it automatches you with people to do the content. Not all content needs to be delivered this way, but make it more accessible.
- Boons: I agree that boons have made the game objectively worse, specifically permanent boons. The fact that there is like a 10fold increase between the average player and a high performing player is crazy that this is left to stand. Without this being addressed it makes it way less new player / unskilled player friendly and so they'll stick with the content they can complete, world content alone.
- Uninspired weapon skills: How many times do you enjoy the fantasy of a weapon but it's for a build you don't / can't play. For me it's fairly regularly. In some ways it would be good to be able to build any weapon as a support / power / condi weapon just by changing some abilities on the weapons. It would be good to have less 'dead' skills and it would be great to not have to "use 1 ability, swap... Use another ability, swap... etc".
- More job fantasy diversity: I love the theme of Chrono, but I can't play it in many content because I just die. I love the idea of a tanky Paladin but the guardian is so squishy that I feel like I melt at the sight of an enemy. Sure this might be a skill issue, but the fact that I can't just pick it up and perform at a basic level to me signifies that there is a core issue with the game and the classes that means newer players are just going to have a bad time playing the game and not dying constantly. I don't think this can be solved because it's so much work that I think it needs to be done in Guild Wars 3.
- Performance: DX11 was great and much needed and had a massive performance boost. But it's still an old DX version and the game is still not optimised. Every... Other... MMO... Runs... Better...
Anyway, that's my 5c
One of the biggest problems is finding a guild with decent people to play the game with. That was one of the leading reasons besides EoD and Soto being steaming piles of turds with a price tag on them.
This is the kind of self awareness I like hearing from devs myself that will keep me as a loyal player.
On the topic of strikes and raids though, I hope they learned never to lock their rewards behind the masteries while still giving access like they did with the Icebrood fast 5. Personally lead to such a salty situation running then and not being able to get shit back for it.
Eh. Everyone should know this stuff. If Grouch wanted to be real with us, he'd give us his thoughts on Cal turning WvW into his personal playground. Truly repulsive behavior from a developer.
@@synapse913you might be a more venerable player in which case I’ll call your critique fair. I been only playing for about 6 months and landed my light legend armor plus 2 weapons and getting ready for about 6 more pieces of legends myself. Have loved most of it and honestly I understand a lot from dev view so I like what I’m hearing. I haven’t had a bad experience gameplay wise but in terms of balance I can’t disagree with any of this
@@clawdane2611 Sorry to come off as doom and gloom, and I'm truly glad you're enjoying GW2, but give it time. Eventually, you'll be dreading balance patch notes, you'll begin noticing how the same classes are always getting buffed/nerfed, the same old glitch/exploits aren't being fixed, the same playstyle always being catered to. Eventually you'll find out that whomever the balance lead is at the given moment is benefitting from those changes/non changes because they play that way, and screw everyone else.
@@synapse913 once again fair critique from a venerable player. I have played enough games to see how that pattern goes. At same time I am one who will look at those glitches, exploits, and bugs and will find ways to either use and get them noticed more, and better avoid them to not let them break my game. I like encouraging proper balance in a game. Even if im a minmaxer who will break it without a moments hesitation if allow.
Why would anyone still play raids when it's 5 year old content (at best), that has been completetly trivialized by powercreep?
The honesty is actually fairly reassuring, shows they do try to be sensible and in touch with reality.
I'm absolutely fine with it at broader scope and looking forward to gw3. I hope after T&L slowdown ncsoft allows them to scale up the team for GW3 again and deliver a big product, similar as with GW2 launch.
You do know that GW3 is not confirmed right? At max it's in some sort of shareholder review stage, which means not a single line of code has been written, i.e. if it gets to be a thing it won't probably even be in this decade.
If all encounters are now designed with permanent uptime in mind why not just make them mostly rolled into everyone's baseline stats and greatly reduce the uptime for situational use.
A lot less rebalancing needed but removes the boom spam meta we are in
Doing raids in gw2 was one of the most fun times i had in an mmo. Never understood people who say its hard to join raids, while you could easily find a guild that does training runs etc to get experience, same goes for fractals or strikes. But idk maybe that has changed in the last 2 years?
They should add a story mode to the raids with lesser or none reward.
Raids have a lot of additional lore which most players won’t see
GW2's harder encounters suffer from way too many confusing, stupid and colorful indicators/target rings. On top of super repetitive keyboard mashing for max dps, the frigging game feels like dance dance revolution rather than raiding.
speaking from a joe average perspective, I'd argue raids are not popular in GW2 because raids are not necessary...
I raided in FF14, tried raiding in WoW (hated it honestly that was back in the days of 40 mans) and I'll be honest I didn't *SUPER* like raiding in FF14, liked it a crapton more than WoW... but honestly it was the only path to XYZ gear... so I did it for a while not cause I loved it, but cause there was no other option for XYZ gear, and ultimately I just decided I didn't care about XYZ gear in FF14 and quit raiding.
I've done a few raids in GW2 and they're fun enough, no more or less so than FF14 but...
I had ascended gear at the time and even tolerated WvW long enough to get a few gifts of battle to make a few weapons, so I don't *NEED* to raid in GW2, I'm an open world / story player and dabble into fractals a little and... that's it. I'm good.
With Soto I have legendary armor now so I'm doubly good. SO, I don't raid, it's fun enough but I don't have the time or inclination for that particular flavor of grind... tolerate WvW long enough to get a gift of battle as fast as possible... and I don't even know what the sPVP lobby looks like and I've been playing GW2 since the 3 day headstart.
I don't know why but GW2 raiding is just.. not fun compared to other MMORPG raiding. I love the casual open world and WvW, and I think strikes are really cool. But full raids WITH trash is awful. Note, I haven't actually done a strike but I love the concept of 1 or 2 boss encounters WITH NO TRASH since they're much easier to get into and learn. But PvE rotations just feel so janky, and there aren't enough cosmetics or other rewards to make me want to do them.. it's a shame that WoW is still my favorite endgame PvE game since I hate it but still play it to raid. WoW raiding should not be miles easier than GW2 but well it is
Bad LFG.
Bad rewards.
Bad difficulty modes.
Inability to change GW2 to a PvE main focus game from its PvP core system design.
Raids bad. Yeah.
Make fights with mobs that instantly (and without pause) corrupt or punish having certain boons, so boonless combat becomes meta in those instances
food for thought, what would happen if quick, alac and other broken boons get a "revealed" debuf where it can't be applied anymore after a threshold of like 10 seconds of boon time per cap and you have like a cooldown for idk 20-30 seconds before those boons can be applied again.
I would love to try raiding. I did a lot of raiding in ESO. It's pretty hard to find groups for endgame raiding in that game but it seems even harder in GW2.
I don't raid because of how rude others are. I hate the dps meters because that's all people care about and if you rez anyone your dps obviously drops a lot
With the raid player toxicity I experienced, it should already be shut down.
Is it toxic if I tell you that your dps is dogshit and you should practice more? If yes, you should quit games where you play with others.
Hello youtube, it is I, the unpaid arenanet game design consultant. They should have mega versions of boons you get by capping the duration or the intensity. For example, at 25 stacks of Might, you consume all that might and gain Mega Might 300% increased damage for x seconds. And then it prevents you from gaining might for x seconds after.
They can’t remove alac and quickness without causing all kinds of problems, but they could give themselves a framework for moving forward by giving EVERYONE the equivalent of those boons as a base stat bump. It would make most encounters just a little easier for casuals and pugs, but probably wouldn’t effect the better players.
The central design choices this game has made are not conducive to compelling organized group PvE content. Teapot mentions the boon system and how it compares to games like WoW, but that's not even the worst of it. The lack of tanking removes that entire dynamic from raid design and replaces it with nothing. As raiders our only option to control enemy positioning is to stack up in a group. In other games enemy movement and positioning is a key component of encounter design where in GW2 it's entirely missing.
We have "healers" in this game, but they're a pale shadow of what comprises the role in other games. As healers we have no ability to target a specific ally at range and support them. The UI doesn't even support it! We just spam PBAoE effects to all players equally. And why not? It's not like this is WoW, where we have healers with very different skill sets serving a variety of functions. There is no tank, so there's no need for heavy single-target healing or damage mitigation support. You don't have healers who specialize in healing over time, burst healing, single-target, multi-target, cleansing, buffing, etc. We all just sort of spam everything on everyone all at once and everyone gets all the boons and all the healing they need. And if they don't, there's nothing you could have done about it because the basic concept here was never to have healers in the first place so that everyone could take care of themselves with their own dodges, heals, and defensive cooldowns, right?
This is not something they can fix. So even if they fix other major issues like LFG and consistently release rewarding content to draw players back in (let's face it, 5 years of no raids has something to do with the state of raids in 2024!), they can't fix the issues that make GW2 raiding just not as fun or interesting as its competitors. Here's hoping if there is a GW3 they learn from that mistake first and foremost.
Simple solution to lack of specialized classes would be role attunement. you get big bonus to skills/stats for your raid role with mayby disadvantage to other (so you won't be able to min max into an omni role).
I wonder if holding a raid tournament where boon DPS and providing alacrity/quick as a healer are banned and some other large sources (like the alacrity relic) are banned is something worth giving a go if there is enough interest? It would give a really good look into how raids would be if quickness and alacrity were not 100% uptime boons (outside of whatever a build can give itself like necro's). Possibly opening up solo heal comps for some wings (like druid being able to choose its higher healing trait instead of the boon trait) and if having 9 DPS instead of 6 DPS with 2 boon DPS would compensate for the loss of the boons.