skus.4527

6/10 3/5 ⭐ Rating is largely based on it being a non-sub pay to play. Open world questing is fun, many events are enjoyable, but I find it repetitive at max level. Notably, I'm not a fan of pvp or wvw so those don't add to my score (or detract from it - I'm rating pve only basically.) Story is serviceable, graphics hold up fine generally. I think GW2 holds its own given the payment model, but if it charged a sub I'd quickly go elsewhere and the score would likely suffer more. It's better than most F2P or buy-to-play models I've tried, though. It's a nice game to jump into from time to time without a lot of commitment.

Why not also have daily raid rewards? "W1 Boss Kill" as a daily chest achieve, just like with pvp, wvw, fractals, etc, is a lot more manageable when it's an easier encounter overall. Even if many players got the permeant rewards in raids, they'd re-run the content for a daily chest or similar reward on an ongoing basis, so long as the effort involved isn't completely disproportionate to the rewards as it would be if they tried to implement the daily chest idea on normal.

I'd like to see puggable content with essentially the same mechanics as normal mode, but scaled to be more forgiving and expecting maybe yellow gear on average and no voice coms. I like the no enrage timer and res full dead ideas @Infusion.7149 mentioned. There shouldn't be any party wipes for a single player's mistake, though a mechanic that require at least some of the players to perform it to get past is fair. Similar rewards to normal, though somewhat slower progression, and skinned differently if necessary to keep the differentiation between gear sets. There needs to be something enticing, but it doesn't have to be exactly what is available in normal. Stepping from easy to normal should be an experience of 'everything hits harder, and there's a new mechanic or two, but it's basically the same.'

Only if you run it that way. It's a new raid for players to experience. Or to run as a story if that's preferable. Players will clear it faster than NPCs, and of course it's something to do with your friends / guildies if you want.

I don't know exactly - it's complicated by at least two things different from how it's implemented in FFXIV, and that's even assuming that system would be taken mostly whole. The first major difference is GW2 doesn't exactly do the usual tank-healer-dps trinity. The second is that there are more slots in a raid than in the dungeons of FFXIV. Of those, the first is the more problematic. In FFXIV, it was filled out so the NPCs took the other needed roles. If you were a tank, the NPCs would be DPS and a healer. If you were DPS, there'd be a tank, a healer, and another DPS, etc. Probably bringing the class/spec you want is the easiest way to fix that, but everyone is kind of dps, and everyone is kind of healer, and everyone is kind of tank in GW2. I'm not sure it even makes sense to assign them classes, but maybe to be able to pick their spec and general tendencies. For the same reason, I'm not sure it makes sense to ask if they're 'just additional dps' - if you're not playing as a group healer, probably one of them should be. If you are, sure, they could be more DPS focused. They can make mistakes, but shouldn't make one-shot raid wipe mistakes. I don't know that there's any need for them to be immortal meatshields - part of the fun might be striking a balance between healing and dps. Bring no healers (and you're not playing one) and maybe you wipe. Bring six healers and it's probably too much. It'd probably be somewhat similar to drms in a way, but a player wouldn't exactly be 'soloing' it since other characters are involved. But, more importantly, it'd be in the same raid where players can make player groups - it's not a drm because it's in the raid instance, and is the same (or similar) raid you'd experience if you went with other players instead. Or at least that's a way it could go.

I do. I think it would increase the number of players willing to experience raids. I think it'd solve a lot of the barriers to entry people have expressed with raids currently. I think it has the potential to increase group engagement, if people work their way up to being comfortable with the content solo but want to complete the content more efficiently (because skilled players are going to clear a raid more efficiently than NPCs.) And I don't think there's anything problematic if many players choose to experience the content solo, rather than not at all. Edit: I should be a little more precise. I don't know if it's the 'best way.' Probably not. But it seems like a possible way, or even a good way.

What if GW2 implemented something like FFXIV's Trust system, where a group of NPCs could join a player in the raid? GW2 already has plenty of LS episodes where NPCs join the PC. Having an NPC pact squad (or maybe even the named NPCs) join the player seems like a natural expansion. It would allow a player to experience the raid content (even at the current difficulty) without being concerned about impacting other player's enjoyment if they mess up and wipe the raid while they're learning, it would eliminate group requirements set to fence out "bad' or new players, it'd allow the player to experience the story, and if it's at the same difficulty there's no reason to fence off any particular rewards. There could be an 'easy' mode, either just outright, or as a training mode and then the NPCs could be brought into the normal mode. Such a system could also be integrated if ANet was interested in adding new dungeons, though it seems like they've mostly focused on fractals, DRMs, and strikes instead. If the NPCs can be leveled/customized it could provide a reason to replay the content to get additional levels for the companions. My main concern is that some players would likely still be bashing their heads against the wall and might not be able to progress. That's not a fun experience, even if it's not an even less fun experience for drawing toxicity from other players for failure. I think an easy mode is a good solution to that, but there are other options.

I think this is exactly the point being missed. Even if no one who played easy mode ever moved on to normal raids, if devs were making new easy mode raids because a larger percentage base of the players played them, the devs have already put in 95% of the work of making new normal raids (or even CM raids.) Tweaking the numbers is the easy part. Easy mode players don't have to transition to harder content, or git gud, or even interact with current raiders for the current raiders to benefit.

I'm not sure I agree with either of these points. GW2 is not WoW, of course, but plenty of WoW players run LFR (the easy-mode equivalent) regularly even with three other raid modes available. And people in GW2 run metas and other things past when the story is no longer relevant. My sense is that if there were some rewards, even just random stuff to sell on to TP, people would run the content. You might be right about the cost and the difficulty of crafting legendary armor - it certainly looks daunting to me. The stat swapping feature is attractive to players of all play levels, I think, because it means you can try different specs or swap between them without having so many extra sets of gear. I don't know if it's worth the effort to make, even taking other features of legendary armor like the cosmetics into account. But if it's one of those things that you can just get by playing eventually it remains a good long term goal and a reason to run the content. An easier mode would allow people to 'raid' without having to become 'raiders' and farm the content like a meta. Right now there's a hard difficulty lock - an easy mode would at least make that bit of crafting the armor more accessible, whether or not anyone actually chose to do it. (I view it as something like the whole map completion achieve - it's not hard to complete the map, but it is a lot of work that might only be useful if there's a very specific goal in mind.)

Then what's the problem with an easy mode, or making legendries available in it? This argument applies equally both ways. Legendries aren't needed for raiding any more than they are for open world or any other game mode. Raiders can use ascended, too. And who cares if there's an easy mode or other people have legendries, raiders aren't in it for the armor, or they'd quit as soon as they have it, right? Adding things for others takes nothing from raiders . According to this, raiders should be in it for the content (or the challenge, if the content were the same in an easy mode.) If that's right, then everyone gets what they want and there's no problem.

I quoted you, Ayrilana, but I've seen this sentiment said by lots of others, especially in the easy mode / hard mode thread that I've been perusing. To me, it highlights what a wide skill gap there is between players here. I'm a pretty new player - I have a couple 80s, but have been working through the LWS and I just got through PoF. I've done one strike mission - WOJ - no fractals, no raids. My first 80 was a thief, for no real reason than that I wanted to dual wield pistols. Core GW2 was mostly easy, but got challenging toward the end. HoT got a lot harder, and somewhere midway through HoT (I think) I ran into a boss I just couldn't kill no matter what I tried on my thief. I spent a few days trying to get past it, then did some googling and rolled a necro because it was supposed to be unkillable. I'm happy to report I'm skilled enough that I can kill it :D I got past that boss that was blocking me and made my way through the rest of HoT, then LWS3, then PoF. At this point, my "Commander" should be called Doctor, as in Strange, because most boss battles are rather a lot like the "Nozdormu, I've come to bargain" scene. The bosses are tougher, but I'm immortal, and with enough deaths I can get through them. I see some raiders saying raiding is not hard, but then talking about how OW is dead easy and needs to be more difficult to prepare people for raids. And I'm about out of classes to roll to get past harder OW content. I'd like to see the raids sometime, maybe, but I don't really want to put myself (or anyone else) through the experience of jumping into something significantly harder than what's already difficult for me, even if it's 'easy' for other people. You're right about at least some of the OW metas - I tend to run AB/Chak Gerent / Pinata and sometimes a Teq, but if I die on any of those I'm not wiping everyone else. Raids, Fractals, Strikes ... those seem like different stories. Maybe I'm unique and the only player like that out there, but I kinda doubt it. I like the easy mode raid suggestion I've seen in the other thread (like LFR in WoW), but otherwise I'm not sure what it'd take to get a player like me into raids.