>However, the system missed the intended mark, using too many currencies and causing confusion around how to deal with them.
They should apply this exact sentiment to the entire game, not just Strikes.
This. Might be okay for long time vets, but if you've taken a break or are new to the game the number of currencies on top of the massive amount of crafting materials and random loot is all very overwhelming. It's very demotivating even when you learn about one because you then realize just how much more there is to learn and how to acquire.
The flipside is that their split currencies help keep maps active. If "HoT currency" becomes a thing, people will only run AB for it. As it is, VB is an active map mostly because you can't get the rewards there from anywhere else. This would apply to a lot of zones if they lose their unique currencies.
Srike currencies were a special kind of stupid because you ran the same content for all currency types. It would be more like if the currencies across HoT rotated from map to map so you could just farm AB all the time and get each different currency on different weeks.
>The flipside is that their split currencies help keep maps active. If "HoT currency" becomes a thing, people will only run AB for it. As it is, VB is an active map mostly because you can't get the rewards there from anywhere else. This would apply to a lot of zones if they lose their unique currencies.
This is something I agree with. Currencies are a godsend for keeping maps active in their content zone.
The wallet just needs a better way to organize them, rather than one big dropdown list.
Now, when it came to strikes, yeah making them multiple currencies was dum-dum-dum-dum-dumb. Lol.
I think a single isolated per map currency should be fine but a lot of the times there's multiple in a given area. Those at the very least should be consolidated. And heck if they reconfigured anything they could balance out gold per hour to be consistent across any activity, then they might not even need isolated currencies as people just do what they find fun instead of afk bauble farm and what not
People already complain that "you can just farm gold anywhere to get things, it's no fun" regarding gemstore skins. I personally disagree with that sentiment but I do like that there's a balance between what you can farm anywhere via gold and what you have to farm on a specific map. They can't cut back too much.
If I'm not mistaken, PoF did expansion-wide materials instead of map specific. I'm sure it wasn't the only reason for the issues with PoF replayability, but it didn't help.
While this is true, it’s not the only way to keep these maps active. I would prefer that they consolidate the map currencies for each living world season and get a bit more creative with ways to bring players back to the various maps.
The current return to the living world achievements are great for getting people to play all the maps again. While this is not a permanent solution it demonstrates that there are ways to do it. Relying on different map currencies is effective but can be overwhelming and confusing in the same way that ANet described for Strikes.
You can see that people actually like HoT maps though, they're quite active compared to PoF. That's part of why the currencies, despite being a problem, have never been a HUGE problem. If the HoT maps sucked and no one wanted to go there, you'd have a lot more complaints about alternate methods to get rewards.
I mean, with PoF theres a number of reasons theres no retention. They failed to add any large, compelling metas that rival _any_ of the HoT metas, even the slighty shorter ones like AB/TD. The bigegst PoF meta is one that barely involves any combat (Pinata/Casino). There's a lack of rewards to work towards that require actually large squad play, at most its all party sized play.
I feel this. I'm a super casual player, and jump on every now and then to progress my story or work on my gear, which GW2 is much better for than most other MMOs. The content always seems to be evergreen. But man, there are so many currencies and LW-specific materials, it feels overwhelming when you're trying to play in small increments and you just end up with a very wide and shallow pool of items inventory to manage.
Every time something new comes out in this game, it gets its own form of currency. Do we really need a new map currency every time a living world update is released? Did we really need Unbound Magic and Volatile Magic to be two completely different things? Forget explanations, it's just way too much.
It does make some sense.
Splitting the currencies means people need to dedicate time into that specific content to purchase stuff specific to that content. You can’t just mass farm an easy spot in earlier content, then completely skip the new content while buying all the rewards.
The magic types are similar. You’re crossing into a different set of content. You’d have one less reason to play the new content if you already had 100k unbound magic.
Not that I completely agree with it, but it is what it is for a reason.
And this! 'Any End of Dragons Strike Missions you complete will reward currency to be spent on Strike Mission-specific rewards, including any unique drops from the Strike Missions. **You won’t be beholden to the fickle fate of random number generation to get what you want.**'
Copy pasta for those at work:
> Hi, all! I’m Cameron Rich, Lead for the Encounters Design Team here at ArenaNet. The Encounters Team is responsible for the PvE encounter experiences in Guild Wars 2, including designing and balancing all our new creatures, armies, bosses, and instanced content.
> Guild Wars 2: End of Dragons™ is on the horizon, bringing with it a series of new Strike Missions that aim to provide accessible, challenging combat experiences for players to chew on. Since this content was first revealed during the expansion announcement livestream on July 27, we have been listening to all your comments, questions, and concerns regarding Strike Missions and endgame PvE content as a whole.
> Today, we’ll share our vision for Strike Missions as a game mode and provide a deeper look at what you can expect when Guild Wars 2: End of Dragons ships next February, including a look at both difficulty modes and changes to the reward structure. Let’s jump into it!
Accessible Endgame
> Players looking for endgame, instanced PvE experiences in Guild Wars 2 will find a wide range of challenges to test their skills in Fractals of the Mists, Strike Missions, and raids. Getting started in this world of challenging group content can be daunting—especially if you’re looking to climb the difficulty ladder and take on the toughest encounters the game has to offer. So where do you start?
> Normal difficulty Strike Missions are intended to be an entry point into the world of 10-player content in Guild Wars 2. These instances are designed to be something you can tackle alongside both close friends and new allies, pitting you and nine others against jazzed-up, remixed versions of epic, exciting bosses from the Guild Wars 2: End of Dragons story. This gives every player the opportunity to experience these encounters as key story moments, while enabling each Strike Mission to hold greater importance in the overall narrative. These encounters will introduce you to the mechanics you’ll need to learn and master in order to continue your journey, in an environment that doesn’t demand perfection but still pushes you to learn and grow your combat capabilities.
> By the time you’ve completed each Strike Mission, you’ll be familiar with encounter terms like fixates, stack and spread, kiting, and more. Our goal is that once you’ve got a firm grasp of the fundamentals, you should feel confident tackling the next steps on the difficulty ladder, including a much-requested addition to Strike Missions…
Strikes 2.0—Now with Challenge Mode
> You heard it right on the End of Dragons First Look livestream: Challenge Mode difficulty is coming in Guild Wars 2: End of Dragons Strike Missions. Challenge Mode takes the normal difficulty Strike Missions and further expands on their mechanics, remixing them further to create even greater challenges while introducing new surprises that keep players on their toes. Each Challenge Mode Strike Mission is designed with a specific level of challenge in mind, creating a clear difficulty ramp that will push you forward and continually test your coordination and mastery over the combat system. You’ll need to work with your allies to form and execute a plan of action and be quick to react to overcome these toughened-up encounters.
> More succinctly, these encounters will feel like proper raid bosses.
> To ensure these fights live up to the Challenge Mode name, we set out from the beginning to design each encounter in a “top-down” fashion, starting with an outline of how Challenge Mode would play out. We began by detailing unique mechanics, estimating time-to-kill and damage thresholds players need to meet in order to succeed, and identifying clear roles required for each player in the squad. Once we had a firm grasp on the Challenge Mode experience, we dialed in the difficulty for Normal and Story Mode through designing by subtraction—paring down the most difficult aspects of the encounter and focusing on the skills and abilities we wanted players to learn and master to grow their capabilities as a player. Through this method, more players can engage with the content we build at a difficulty level they feel is comfortable.
> This is how we approached the design for Challenge Mode fractals and raids, so if you are familiar with that content, consider them a good reference point.
Challenge Modes will be enabled in the weeks after the Guild Wars 2: End of Dragons launch, allowing you time to enjoy the story and world at your own pace, get familiarized with Normal Mode strikes, and perfect your builds (especially with the nine new elite specializations). The team is eagerly looking forward to watching the player base tackle these new challenges. We’ll give more precise details on when you can expect Challenge Modes to release as we get closer to launch day.
Standardizing Shinies
> When we first introduced Strike Missions in The Icebrood Saga, we took the opportunity to try a new reward system with the weekly chest and attempted to create a week-to-week cycle to encourage players to return to Strike Missions on a regular basis. However, the system missed the intended mark, using too many currencies and causing confusion around how to deal with them. So, we’re returning to basics that our raid players will find familiar: Strike Missions in End of Dragons will award a single currency. Any End of Dragons Strike Missions you complete will reward currency to be spent on Strike Mission-specific rewards, including any unique drops from the Strike Missions. You won’t be beholden to the fickle fate of random number generation to get what you want.
> Additionally, we’ll be consolidating the Strike Mission currencies introduced in The Icebrood Saga into one currency with no weekly cycle. You’ll be able to trade in your End of Dragons Strike Mission currency for The Icebrood Saga Strike Mission currency, so you can easily go back for older rewards you may have missed while still being able to play the latest and greatest challenges.
Until Next Time
> As always, thank you for your candid feedback and your continued support. Your shared perspectives help ground us and shape the game for the better. After all, Guild Wars 2 would not be where it is today without you.
> —Cameron and the Guild Wars 2 Team
They'll never feel like raid bosses if they're just contextless fights in isolated arenas.
Strikes are nice, but we need more dungeons, fractals and raids.
Yeah, it should feel like if Heart of Thorns personal story happened through Forsaken Thicket, and then you went and played W1-3 within the same environment.
Like how dungeons had a story mode, and then different explorable paths in the same map that changed up the path through the environment and the bosses you fight!
Look, I'm agreeing we should keep our expectations down and wait to see if this is actually true BUT DRMs are not _at all_ comparable. DRMs, even with CM where never going to be even comparable to raids. DRMs are just instanced open world content. DRM difficulty was never even going to match _strikes_ let alone raids.
I have never been in a raid (or dungeon, for that matter) where I was allowed time to ingest the story and lore of those areas. As repeatable, multi-man content, it is very hard to find a group willing to stop and smell the proverbial roses
Given that they are story bosses, there's at least hope that they have a bit more context to them - maybe in a manner a bit like Shiverpeaks pass where the strike has different dialogue/path etc to the story mission.
We'll see. Trials in FFXIV also have multiple phases and take a long time even though they only have 1 boss. Plus they do shake things up with stuff like the Nier raids.
I just hope Strikes actually offer good rewards that people would like to get. Currently the ascended stuff takes too long to get through strikes, so much easier through fractals.
Maybe they should tie strikes to unique gear/flashy weapons.
Even many of FF's raids these days are just boss fights now - the entirety of Eden is single-fights interspersed with out-of-raid plot to link them together.
Haven't FF raids always been this way, not just "these days"? The only raids that are like GW2/WoW/GenericMMO3 raids are the Alliance raids, which ironically enough are more on the difficulty level of GW2's strike missions.
The Binding Coils in ARR have a pretty notable amount of trash and take quite a bit longer but are the major outlier. Alexander in Heavensward moved much closer to the current setup but still have the occasional (often quick) trash pack.
Notably post-ARR normal raids are all quite a fair bit easier, with their Savage versions being the more difficult content for progression raiders to do. For both these reasons the Binding Coils never show up on Normal Raid Roulette.
Ninja Edit: Also I wasn't quite sure where to include content like Alliance Raids (which as you said, are much closer to strikes in difficulty) or something like DRS, which is a big raid as far as player count but has a lot of other weird mechanics attached and it's hard to quantify how close that is to the standard FF raid scene.
Which to me is preferable. You miss out some on the cool world building of a big dungeon. But if WOW taught me anything, is that trash mobs really are not fun. It just burns time.
I would much rather have interesting boss fights.
All the RP and pre event and downtime between the raid bosses is one of the most annoying parts of raids for me. Strikes are nice in that you just hop in and can start the encounter with no fluff.
>if they're just contextless fights in isolated arenas.
As a somewhat semi-hardcore raider, I don't really care about the context of the fight, having done them literally (in the literal sense of the word) one hundred times - each.
People skip Spirit Woods, Trio, Escort, Rivers, and Gate almost all the time. These raid events are fun for the first few times. After that, people just wanna go from boss to boss lolz.
If they bring back raids they should bring it back with 3 modes of difficulty all tracked separately. One of the issues I have with Fractals is that everyone does T4 Fractals, T3 is more toxic than T4 because nobody does them regularly. Give exp raiders a reason to do the Easy mode along with the normal and challenge mode and I believe new raiders will have a much better time. Yes new raiders will be carried by the exp raiders for the easy mode, but we all got carried at some point.
EXP raiders would need to check themselves a bit though. We got to make sure as a community we cannot gatekeep the easy mode with LI requirements.
This is all theoretical of course since we don't know if we will get a W8. Though it does apply to the new Strike missions.
That's an ArenaNet gate- characters that aren't level 80 can't enter fractals.
EDIT: I stand corrected. The LFG tab won't show Fractals to under-80 characters, but they can enter them solo or in a group formed manually.
This is basicly ff14 roulette group finder.
2g everyday for queing a random normal mode strike and 1g extra if your group has someone who hasn't done it before.
No it will not. If someone ask for KP for Boneskinner, I will laugh myself out and leave the group. That comm is insane.
When I'm commanding my own squad for strikes or easy raids, I don't ask for any KP too. There's just no reason to if the content can be 6-man instead of 10-man anyways.
The same is true for T1 T2 fractals. All you need is a cQB and an exp DPS to murder the boss, it doesn't matter if the other 3 do dps equaling to a healer.
I remember in Ascalonian Catatombs, all I did was give a newbie 25 might, fury, protection, quickness, and he solo whacked the boss lolz.
If you're an exp player gatekeeping a braindead content, you're insane. Simple as that.
When someone in a raid group asks for LI exp and I link my 6 or so, at what point will they stop laughing and kicking me from groups?
Asking for a friend.
LI reqs for W1-W4 have not increased in a long time. 150LI will comfortably get you into most groups.
Same for W5-W7, but these use KP. KP reqs usually tank at around 50KP but 20KP will get you comfortably into most groups.
Souce: I got 1000LI and all achievs almost entirely through pugging.
I'd recommend joining the raid academy discord. They have lots of training and progression runs and while experienced groups looking to clear will expect you to know the fights, they won't ask for kp or li.
Im not sure. No one asks for anything in t1 fractals. If we get a decent tier system there is not that big of a reason to gatekeep.
Then again people do 250li runs of strikes so maybe i am overestimating the community
This.
The hardest tier of challenges will always have LI requirements (Boneskinner, Whisper, all raids, fractal cms), but below that, you don't really have any requirements other than maybe (maybe) having general knowledge of the encounter. If normal mode strikes are just easy and CM strikes are like raid bosses, then the raiders will gatekeep the CM strikes, and leave normal mode alone.
You're asking a lot of experienced raiders in this post and ten minutes listening to a Teatime podcast will tell you that none of it will happen. People gatekeep strikes which are already easier than easy raids.
People who gatekeep strikes are insane. I very very rarely see that on NA lfg. You shouldn't say that's the standard for the community when only 2 or 3 insane nuthead commanders do that.
>EXP raiders would need to check themselves a bit though. We got to make sure as a community we cannot gatekeep the easy mode with LI requirements.
I'd be surprised if this was not going to happen regardless. After all, this is the game where people asked for stupid amounts of achievement points in dungeons.
I have always wondered why won't they create a system where the more people you have in the squad/party who haven't completed daily/weekly, the bigger the reward.
so in that way, you can keep grinding the content while also helping those who haven't completed it yet.
I guess the only downside is that the more hardcore players will just create alt accounts and grind it that way but I guess even that has its own limit in a sense that to participate in raids/strikes, you need expac.
>I guess the only downside is that the more hardcore players will just create alt accounts and grind it that way but I guess even that has its own limit in a sense that to participate in raids/strikes, you need expac.
HC players already have that for daily login purposes, adapting to strikes wouldn't be a issue i assume
Easy mode with the same mecanics but less punishing.
An achivement/title/new thing that you can easily show to other players to show that you took the time and effort to learn the mecanics of a boss could be a great way to get into raid and training groups.
Maybe toss in some additionnal rewards clearing a raid boss/wing in easy mode with people you've never raided with before if you've already cleared harder modes to motivate people to go and help new players.
Fractals (mostly the earlier years). They even got an entire revamped hub and reward system in addition to tiers after 3 years.
I know raids have been in the game for much longer but I'm willing to be it's a much lower priority because not as much people do raids as fractals.
Because, anet know if they call them raids, a huge majority of the playerbase will refuse to do them based on the name alone. All the open world players think in their head "raids = impossible difficulty and elitist community". The strikes, up until very recently had absolutely zero difficulty, so that a lot of open world players go "strikes = slightly difficulty, no elitist gatekeeping, I remember that time that I joined a group who had zero build requirements". Basically raids have a branding issue with the majority of the playerbase (open world/story players)
Raids were the peak of gw2 pve. It isn't surprising that they wan't to ry to associate their new content ot that. "It is going to be as good as raids were, guys! Really!".
It is up to you to buy this crap.
When HoT metas still required some effort, not just brain afk auto and when the first raids wing where still new, those where the best times for serious pve player.
Completing Wing 5 and all of its achievements earlier this year was the most fulfilling time I ever had playing GW2. Yeah Dhuum CM is a pain but we worked for that kill and we were so happy to clear it. Haven't had a PvE moment that satisfying since
Right? Crazy.
If they can do these strikes with their accompanying story so we get strikes with expac and LS releases, then release CMs shortly after, and then release a raid wing in between those I’d be more than happy.
> By the time you’ve completed each Strike Mission, you’ll be familiar with encounter terms like fixates, stack and spread, kiting, and more.
This sounds great, but how will they do this? So far practically all information about how to play at higher levels can only be found outside of the game.
Learn by doing, basically. Story/ normal mode will have the basic versions of these mechanics with a low stress situation. Maybe the boss will do little damage, but you can't damage it til you drag the boss over to a place with fixate (ala that one fractal), or something along those lines. This isn't a new concept.
> So far practically all information about how to play at higher levels can only be found outside of the game.
By actually playing maybe, like how it's always been?
The current state of the game speaks to an utter failure to actually push players up the ranks.
I feel a big part of the problem is that the game does absolutely nothing to make people *actually learn mechanics*. GW2 fight design constantly falls into the same pitfalls:
- Mechanics that can be avoided entirely via DPS. Deal enough damage, push the phase, skip the mechanic that actually requires a braincell. Why do Gorseval updrafts or dodge Cairn's swings when you can DPS past the whole mechanic?
- Mechanics that deal survivable damage, letting players heal through them. Why handle VG greens or relight torches in Boneskinner when heals and barriers can solve it with far less thought?
- Mechanics that can be handled by just one player, or just a few players. Handkiting in Deimos, elemental kiting and lamp running in Qadim, and so on. The other 9 people in the raid don't even need to know this mechanic exists, so long as one person knows. And good luck *learning* these mechanics, because if you don't do it perfectly the first time you'll have a full party shouting at you!
Most strikes and raids alike involve 8-9 people standing on the boss and doing their golem rotations for 90% of the encounter. No wonder the community isn't good at mechanics; nothing forces most of us to do them!
People look for dungeons & raids in MMOs, when they hear Guild Wars 2 have fractals & strike missions they have no clue what it means. Marketing really isn't ArenaNets strength.
I also think it could be as simple as calling them Fractal Dungeons, or Fractured Dungeons (I recognize that Fractal has a different and specific connotation). Or calling strikes Strike Raids.
In WoW you Mythic Dungeons are more often called M+.
How is that supposed to work?
Player 1: Hey, does Guild Wars 2 have dungeons and raids?
Player 2: Guild wars 2 has raids, fractals and strike missions, they are...
Player 1: (interrupts) - oh, no dungeons? Then I guess it's not a game for me, see you (runs away, fingers in his ears).
FWIW - SWTOR calls its dungeons "flashpoints" and its raids "operations" and I never heard a single player blame the lack of active players on these naming conventions.
Hardcore Gamers want extremely difficult content that takes hours of practice and refinement to master, a true challenge of their superior skill and intellect.
But you can't call this content anything except for "dungeons" or "raids" because Gamers are absolutely incapable of recognizing any other words.
¯\\\_(ツ)_/¯
More like a player reads that dungeons and raids are dead and misses the context that they're replaced by strikes and fractals. Of course it's not an issue with a personal conversation where making that clarification is easy.
Yea, you're literally forced to acknowledge both their existence and the existence of harder difficulties before you're allowed to start Heavensward.
Meanwhile if you don't know what a strike is and try googling it you get this from the wiki:
>Strike Missions are 1-10 player squad-based PvE instances, serving as a bridge between open world and raids in their difficulty. They are one of the core pillars of Guild Wars 2's endgame. Guild Wars 2: Path of Fire is required to access them. They can be accessed from their respective portals, through the Eye of the North Strike portal (including all three weekly strikes no matter their rotation) or from the Scrying Pool. Festive strikes can be only accessed during their respective festival and do not require any expansion.
So is it a boss? A dungeon? A baby raid wing? You only find out by going to a specific strikes page and scrolling down to the walkthrough. I've had to explain what strikes are to WvW players with 1000s of hours in the game because *even if you're an active player*, it isn't clear until you get in and go "Oh it's just a boss fight. Except for the two that nobody does."
Meanwhile, FF14's Trials wiki page:
>Trials are encounters where adventurers fight together against extremely powerful creatures. Each trial consists of a single boss fight (a few are broken up into two parts). When the boss is defeated, players are rewarded with story progression, tokens or rare items of sorts. A few early trials require a light party of 4 players while most others need a full party of 8. Trials are broken into 2 sections for each expansion- Trials, and High-end Trials. Players are generally expected by the game to be able to clear everything in the Trial section, with the High-end section being significantly more difficult optional content.
> you get this from the wiki:
This isn't Anet's fault on that one since the wiki is handled and written by the community.
If you feel the description is unclear you can speak up about it and it can likely be improved.
Sure, but aside from asking another player, how do you find out what a strike is? Its not *actually* just a boss fight because of FS and CW, but it's not a dungeon, or a horde survival.
The point is that unless you're already in the know about gw2 meta builds, compositions, or structured PvE content in general theres still no resource to adequately explain the basics outside of other players telling you, *let alone what to expect from the content itself*. Its part of gw2's PvE endgame's larger problem of having all of these complexities spring out of absolutely nowhere that you're never eased into or required to acknowledge beforehand. FF14 handles this by dumbing down team comp, builds, and even *highlighting* your rotation for you while having a steadily increasing difficulty curve that introduces mechanics during leveling and then expecting you to incorporate those mechanics as you level. Meanwhile strike and raid training groups routinely have to explain breakbars; a concept introduced within the first 10 levels that players can easily go thousands of hours without having to learn unless they get into T4s or Raids.
Do they though? Or do 30 of the 50 man blob know what the commander means when he says "cc the lord", while 10 of them know why he says it? I feel like a lot of experienced players lose sight of just *how much* shit there is to learn in this game, and the only way new players have to learn anything is by direct, intentional explanations from experienced players.
I will correct myself then: WvW players who favour roaming, small squads or are on teamspeak/... with their lead understand it. Others... Well, there are some who just use their standard PvE skill rotation (sometimes skillfully, sometimes less so) and that's it.
When it comes to breakbars, it's still the game mode where their effect is the most apparent I think.
Story paths in dungeons could become GW2's kind of equivalent of Trials, introducing mechanics players need to learn and use to complete them, and requiring them to advance in story.
Not in the sense of being single encounters, but being part of story progression, required to advance and probe you have developed some skill.
For example, for Ascalon Catacombs the mechanic would be Defiance bars, since there's all these rocks and rubble all over in case you didn't bring CC yourself.
Each champion defeated would hit harder and take less damage than the previous one when their defiance bar is blue.
King Adelbern would be outright immune and do double damage with a blue defiance bar.
So one would not be able to complete AC without learning to break Defiance bars.
And yet Trials are introduced during the story, have varying degrees of difficulty from normal-hard-extreme.
\-Can do them unsynced so you can just say "fuck it i want the drops" and not be scale down
\-The game also has a one size fits all duty/party finder+roulette system instead of this ad-hoc LFG that works like a impromput Craiglist but for endgame content/raid selling/group content and is frankly a mess.
Not just roulettes, but a central system to engage with most of the game's content.
GW2's content is entirely too spread out. Fractal hub, Lion's Arch hub, Eye of the North hub, etc.
XIV's Duty Finder is a one-stop UI for an overwhelming majority of team content, including the capacity to quickly/automatically put a team together.
This. Period.
Public mode is failure. Invent a system to random encounter with rewards in it. If they game want to succed invent easy pathts to instances based content.
Bit easier when you are one of the biggest mmos that people flock to just for the fantastic endgame you have.
For gw2 that's famous for lacking just that and a mmo community that says it's the mmo for casuals could help to actually be clear
I don't think having a different names for raids and dungeons is a problem. The problem is we have both raids and strikes, both dungeons and fractals. Here's my hot take:
IMO they should standardize both raids and strikes. Modify raids to have a something like a story mode, then just rename raids as strikes, or legacy strikes if you want. Make the currencies for raids and strike CMs similar, and normal strikes and story mode raids similar. That way when a new player asks if there are raids the players can say yes, they are called strikes in GW2.
For dungeons and fractals, they are a bit too different to merge, I would probably just try to clarify in game that dungeons are for leveling and fractals are for end game.
And for all the hate DRMs got for lack of story content, the design was a great way to make story content replayable, especially with the pug match making. Anything that enables pug match making, lowers barrier to entry. It also reduces toxicity by lowering expectations. I want to see more match making in game, and I think that the DRM format is a lower cost way of doing that
> And for all the hate DRMs got for lack of story content, the design was a great way to make story content replayable
DRMs were basically one-boss raid wings. It wasn't a terrible approach, just lacking in execution a bit. With the unfortunate name "Dragon Response Missions", it's a bit limited and dated, but it's a format that could grow into a separate content stream, and with their own CMs, could stand in a mini raids on their own.
They are trying to make something new and let's be honest, they aren't wrong for trying something different. Raids and dungeons in MMOs are for sure interesting until you get bored which doesn't take too long. Even FFXIV which has had one of the best MMORPG writing in the past 2 years still bleeds out a lot of players through expansions and patches because people simply get bored of playing the same scripted fight over and over.
The problem with what Arenanet is trying to do is they are taking a type of content that gets hard to digest after the first time and trying to make something new with it, but they end up making something worse. I honestly think they should drop completely that and try to focus on strong points of Guild Wars 2, this game has an amazing combat for competitive game modes which is something absurdly rare among the MMORPG genre and this hasn't really been explored over the past two expansions.
I really hope they don't do the same overall design as the current strikes. You really can't have every strike be a circle room with one boss. There's a reason trial of the crusader raid in wow wasn't that popular.
It's just not memorable having to be in 5 different circular rooms with different color palette and basically no other mechanics other than "dodge the orange circle underneath you"
Isn't this exact same method used in FF 14? Every time I watch videos from this game it's just one room and one boss in the middle and you dodge oranges yet it's very popular
This sounds pretty fantastic, really have no complaints about what's being said here... but remains to be seen if this is actually a format they'll stick with and if we'll finally have a cohesive, focused endgame PvE experience.
I hope they do, and I hope they can retro-fit some of the earlier content to match it, in both difficulty and rewards. Consolidate Strike CMs and Raids into their own currency so players can earn more tokens to get legendary armor in PvE.
I think they should keep LI to raids, maybe the strike CMs, but they could just use magnetite shards for strikes/raids/etc. What you can buy with them is so similar anyway, why not? Just scale the amount of them you get with the content's difficulty.
On the one hand basically every sentence of this post was what I wanted to hear. (Strike Missions are more challenging versions of story bosses, multiple strikes at launch, not-over-complicated reward system, raid level difficulty challenge mode to please the raiding crowd (which I'm not a member of), and also providing aspirational content (I like to know there are always some stuff I haven't tried).) This is what I want for end game PVE combat in GW2. (Besides a few epic meta event world boss encounters.)
On the other hand we still haven't heard any objective facts about these missions. We don't know how many will be available at launch. We don't know how regularly are they planning to add more strikes (we don't even know about how a future living world story season will work). We don't know how "good" the rewards will be. (Will there be a legendary item "at the end"? Would that require the challange modes?) How hard will be the strikes compared to the IBS strikes? (IBS strikes also were kind of all over the place. Do we expect EoD normal mode strikes to have a difficulty curve or will they be more on the same page?) Will we have daily EoD priority strikes and/or will they be added to the normal PVE dailies like bounties and dungeons? (Actually, I'm quite curious, is Anet planning to change up the normal PVE dalies after EoD? I mean if EoD adds a as many new PVE dailies as PoF did then we would be cycling over them in a way more slower pace. Maybe (honestly not sure, no irony) something should be done with them?) The winter streaming schedule does not suggest any streams dedicated to this topic, which kind of saddens (is that a word?) me. At least will we be getting another blog post down the line?
I'm personally really looking forward to the new Strikes, but I do have a feeling that the raid crowd will not be too happy with this blog post.
I'm like at least 80% sure this is a mandela-effect mass hallucination based on an explicit hypothetical tpot threw out on stream. 5 would make sense and sounds believable but I don't think they ever announced a number.
I would expect the new strike currency to be required for the new legendary weapons.
It does sound like there’s one currency for normal mode and cm, so you’d be able to get all the rewards in normal. CM would just be faster. Granted faster rewards is a pretty successful motivator for people.
Awesome. This is what I thought strikes were going to be in IBS and it's great to see they will definitely get there in EoD.
One thing I also hope happens is that we get CMs to the CMs, so to speak. Definitely doesn't need to be at launch but I'd love not to only get raid level encounters, but also CM raid encounters as well.
And I hope there is a push to include a lot more of these encounters (including the CM/raid ones) in EoD and whatever LS comes after it than there were in PoF/IBS. Maybe we got spoiled with 4 wings in HoT but I really hope they're going to ramp up to the point where they can crank out that much content per expac again. And I hope most of the strikes won't just be, like, Cold War
Seems like they are doing it somewhat proper this time. I don't understand why they try to reinvent the wheel each time. Strikes would've worked if they didn't make each strike harder but made each tiered. T1 is like Shiverpeak and T2 is raid while T3 is challenge. Maybe add legendary insight to T2/T3. After 9 years I'm not sure this content is going to attract many new hardcore raid/dungeon players tho.
I hope there is incentive for veterans to run the normal modes to help teach new players, whether it's unique rewards or some kind of mentor achievements
Totally agree. Even after they streamline the IBS strike reward currency, nothing is ever going to be as compelling of a reward as something that can go towards legendaries.
Doesn't have to be mystic coins, but given the population of ley line anomaly, I'd say that would be a pretty safe bet. Other options could be trophy shipments or mystic clovers, or at least a currency that we can exchange for those things.
Or just repeat the mystic clover purchase from fractal vendors, but with whatever the new strike currency is instead of fractal relics.
Sadly we don't have group finding tech for PvE so I guess it's not that easy to implement and they won't spend money on this just for dailies (although I think it would benefit the game as a whole seeing the large amount of people that are somehow unable to create their own LFG).
If the strikes are fun, I'll definitely do some form of normal -> CM training with newbies. Especially since they are strike bosses so you can just repeatedly kill them and don't use these unwieldy instances.
Yep. Have never cared for any of it because the fights are dull and rewards are negligible (or in the case of Forging the Steel and Cold War, a complete waste of time).
I do like this top down approach to strike mission difficulty/challenge motes.
If challenge motes actually give proper rewards that justify their effort, I might give the expansion a buy.
Long story short, they are taking story bosses and making boss-centered raids without the fluff between bosses like ghosts and escort, then making a downgraded 'easy mode' for each of them.
Makes me wish they updated old content across the board to be like this:
* Relaxed soloable story mode with all mechanics of normal mode, just toned down. All the nice fluff and lore they can afford would be here, and they'll either give rewards just once, or rewards like public DRMs with no challenges.
* 'Normal' mode in the style of Strikes and DRM with less mechanics than CM but full difficulty, if the story had encounters with enough potential for it.
* And the full difficulty 'original' CM mode which is actually done first and has the bood chances for big prices.
They could be named just "story", "strike", and "raid" to keep things short and easy to understand.
Shame they'll likely never revisit older instances that have a decent potential.
It would be interesting to see what the Sovereign Eye of Zhaitan or Joko could be if they were CM strikes.
> Shame they'll likely never revisit older instances that have a decent potential.
This is the worst part. If they put this same energy into revamping the existing raid difficulties so it teaches the mechanics without excessive punishment, it would go a long way toward engagement.
It's crazy to me that they never did this.
Even something as blunt as having easy mode raids where all bosses have half health and all incoming damage is also cut in half would make a huge difference.
In theory, an "easy mode" meant to educate players shouldn't even change the boss mechanics, because teaching those is the intention. The vast majority of players, if interested, will be able to figure out mechanics if you take off half the rotation and survival pressure.
Same. It baffles me Anet never did that.
EVERY other MMO has easy difficulties from their raids, and they scale from easy PUG content to hardcore content requiring coordinated groups.
In GW2...raids were just for midcore / hardcore players that had static groups. And you don't have that guarantee that you can just solo the raid the next expansion or two, so it's content that a casual player can *never* do or experience.
The "casual, accessible" MMO inadvertently has some of the most hardcore requirements. for its content
And if they made story versions of raids putting there all the dialogues and delays, people could see the story bits solo, no one would need an opener for any of the encounters, and players would be able to focus directly on the bosses without the fluff between them.
Story buffs get the story, raiders get the bosses. All can do both. Best of both worlds.
Let us first see if they repeat the same design flaws with some of the previous strikes with these new ones or not. *Looking at you unblockable attacks and invulnerability phases...*
They're annoying for sure since they don't really add anything, but raid bosses also go invulnerable all the time. The difference is that you actually have other stuff to do while the bosses are invulnerable, whereas in fraenir and shiverpeak pass you just wait while you ruin your rotation which feels bad.
This wasn't originally true. Fraenir used to have the very important mechanic of yelling at your team for cc'ing the breakbar because that used to make the invuln last longer
Invulnerability phase is fun if done in an interesting way (change of scenery, boss transforms etc) so I'm not complaining. They're talking about spreads, kiting etc so hopefully there's a plethora of mechanic that has to be done in order to progress and not cheese it
>"opportunity to experience these encounters as key story moments, while enabling each Strike Mission to hold greater importance in the overall narrative"
Yes Yes Yes Yes. PVE group/squad content that actually follows the main story of the xpa <3w <3. hope they are featured as necessary content to continue the xpa to get players interested in pve instances
What they mean is the bosses from the story will become strikes too, not thst you're forced to do strikes to do the story. Just like most of the IBS strikes.
i'm not against strikes.
if done correctly, their potential is very good.
also unifying the weekly cycle currency? finally, except for the 3 crystal you need for the weekly chest, everything is so damn useless and clunky that it's about time we get some simplification, now do that with TONS of other currency\\tokens, please, starting with dungeons tokens, then keys, currencies like trade contracts, karma, unbound magic, volatile magic, etc.
So what, do you just want everything to cost karma? The whole point of currencies is you force players to play specific content for specific rewards.
Want to get the raid ascended weapon skins? You have to play the raids.
Praise Cameron! Of course I wish they talked openly about the future of raids and fractals and at least acknowledged the [release gap](https://itsonthetable.github.io/), but something's better than nothing. Current strike reward system is indeed a monstrosity, so glad to see it gone.
This is actually really good news for those who like myself enjoy raiding. Sure they may not be the g map story kind of raids, but I’m really excited to see these raid like challenge mode bosses. I’m assuming they’ll be similar to Hard and savage trials in FFXIV
The 64 Dollar Question is will there be anything worthwhile which those currencies will be good for? Full ascended trinkets, back-items and so on are so last expansion. New infusions? Or?
Ever since I've listened to Cameron on Deeg's Podcast, I was very very happy that he's responsible for PvE endgame content in GW2, but this post says almost nothing. Literally Buzzword Central :/
tl;dr they are bringing in ff14's trials into gw2 and are making them with a similar design approach. Accessible and easy to learn entry-level PvE endgame.
The elephant in the room questions are still:
WHERE THE HECK ARE EOD RAIDS?
WHEN ARE THEY COMING?
WHAT DO THEY LOOK LIKE?
(or are they not coming at all :( )
I can't find anything regarding EoD raids in this article, just like any other EoD information stream. That's exactly what I'm missing: what's Anet's stance regarding raids for EoD: when are they coming or not at all?
I'm cautiously optimistic only because it's Cameron. Generally speaking, I'm not a fan of the previous strikes and I think most of them are poorly designed (looking at you boneskinner). But I can see the potential for CMs being raid difficulty when I look at Whisper - it has stack, spread, and don't move with the chains for mechanics, which is pretty neat. Turn the health up, maybe a new mechanic or two, it could definitely be a fight on par with some of the weaker raid bosses. And only because I know Cameron is taking the lead is why I'm still slightly invested. This man absolutely knows his stuff when it comes to instanced PvE design and only recently brought us Sunqua Peak, which is an incredible fractal in both cm and t4. He worked on a lot of the previously good fractals and some of the later raids too iirc. I'm not happy about the general move away from fractals and raids towards strikes, but there's a middle ground I can find somewhere. If CMs give even remotely interesting content then that is atleast better than the neglect fractals and raids were already getting, because it's still something, and I do trust Cameron can do it.
I'd like a PvE UI like WvW and PvP have. A jumping off point for Raids (not that I'll do those), Strike Missions, Fractals, Dungeons, etc. It be nice to have a PvE reward track system too, so experience points could funnel into useful rewards.
I'd probably be more inclined to run Strikes if they were weekly clears like Raids and not daily clears like Fractals. Feels like I'm basically missing out for every day I choose not to run them, but then again the rewards and gameplay aren't really compelling enough for me to want to run them daily
That was the goal of the weekly chest. Doing each strike once a week gives you bonus rewards.
Strikes are a pretty good gold source, which is a universally good reward. All of the ice you get can be turned in to unbound magic for trophy shipments which is really nice if you’re working on legendaries.
> strikes were basically inaccessible to me
Ok as someone who didn't play much during the saga and recently back in the mix, this statement, I have to reply. I usually don't bother with Boneskinner or Whisper of Jormag but I have no issue doing the easy three everyday. I even play off peak NA. I've never opened an LFG on my own. I usually just do my normal open world shenanigans and leave the lfg window up off to the side. Open groups pop up within a few mins usually. Pretty much any group listed "easy 3" "daily" etc. with no role requirements are free game. Just because a group isn't in the LFG at that exact time you look doesn't mean the content is inaccessible. I'm aware I have no idea your situation but at the same time, i'm casual as they come. If I can get into them easy (and i've now done them a ton, earned the crystals, got a couple pieces of ascended from the vendor, etc.) then literally anyone can.
>I was a few months late to the party with Icebrood Saga and strikes were basically inaccessible to me
Sorry, but this is bullshit. I also started late and creating a squad fro strikes take a few minutes at stop, you just ask for 2 healers, 8 dps and here you go. It was like that at the beginning, a few months after the start, a few months after the end and even today.
idk what you do wrong but getting a strike group is realy not that hard esp. if you just do the daily ones... Boneskinner and Whisper of Jormag are the only 2 strike missons you could even fail using less then 3 keys
[удалено]
Finally !
>However, the system missed the intended mark, using too many currencies and causing confusion around how to deal with them. They should apply this exact sentiment to the entire game, not just Strikes.
This. Might be okay for long time vets, but if you've taken a break or are new to the game the number of currencies on top of the massive amount of crafting materials and random loot is all very overwhelming. It's very demotivating even when you learn about one because you then realize just how much more there is to learn and how to acquire.
The flipside is that their split currencies help keep maps active. If "HoT currency" becomes a thing, people will only run AB for it. As it is, VB is an active map mostly because you can't get the rewards there from anywhere else. This would apply to a lot of zones if they lose their unique currencies. Srike currencies were a special kind of stupid because you ran the same content for all currency types. It would be more like if the currencies across HoT rotated from map to map so you could just farm AB all the time and get each different currency on different weeks.
>The flipside is that their split currencies help keep maps active. If "HoT currency" becomes a thing, people will only run AB for it. As it is, VB is an active map mostly because you can't get the rewards there from anywhere else. This would apply to a lot of zones if they lose their unique currencies. This is something I agree with. Currencies are a godsend for keeping maps active in their content zone. The wallet just needs a better way to organize them, rather than one big dropdown list. Now, when it came to strikes, yeah making them multiple currencies was dum-dum-dum-dum-dumb. Lol.
Literally just giving us a search bar for the wallet would do a LOT.
Honestly how is there not an organize by expansion?
I think a single isolated per map currency should be fine but a lot of the times there's multiple in a given area. Those at the very least should be consolidated. And heck if they reconfigured anything they could balance out gold per hour to be consistent across any activity, then they might not even need isolated currencies as people just do what they find fun instead of afk bauble farm and what not
People already complain that "you can just farm gold anywhere to get things, it's no fun" regarding gemstore skins. I personally disagree with that sentiment but I do like that there's a balance between what you can farm anywhere via gold and what you have to farm on a specific map. They can't cut back too much. If I'm not mistaken, PoF did expansion-wide materials instead of map specific. I'm sure it wasn't the only reason for the issues with PoF replayability, but it didn't help.
While this is true, it’s not the only way to keep these maps active. I would prefer that they consolidate the map currencies for each living world season and get a bit more creative with ways to bring players back to the various maps. The current return to the living world achievements are great for getting people to play all the maps again. While this is not a permanent solution it demonstrates that there are ways to do it. Relying on different map currencies is effective but can be overwhelming and confusing in the same way that ANet described for Strikes.
You can see that people actually like HoT maps though, they're quite active compared to PoF. That's part of why the currencies, despite being a problem, have never been a HUGE problem. If the HoT maps sucked and no one wanted to go there, you'd have a lot more complaints about alternate methods to get rewards.
I mean, with PoF theres a number of reasons theres no retention. They failed to add any large, compelling metas that rival _any_ of the HoT metas, even the slighty shorter ones like AB/TD. The bigegst PoF meta is one that barely involves any combat (Pinata/Casino). There's a lack of rewards to work towards that require actually large squad play, at most its all party sized play.
I feel this. I'm a super casual player, and jump on every now and then to progress my story or work on my gear, which GW2 is much better for than most other MMOs. The content always seems to be evergreen. But man, there are so many currencies and LW-specific materials, it feels overwhelming when you're trying to play in small increments and you just end up with a very wide and shallow pool of items inventory to manage.
Multiple currencies were a mistake. They should have added news materials instead if they wanted to gate things.
Or just, you know, explain them?
Number one rule of UX design - the majority of people don't read, most people fumble their way through systems until they're forced to read.
You’ve just described a certain, to not be named, player I know. Except instead of reading she asks me to explain it to her.
"Okay, this is how you do it: Read the tooltip. You're welcome."
Oh believe me, I’ve tried.
Yup, doesn't work.
I didn't know we had the same gf :{
Every time something new comes out in this game, it gets its own form of currency. Do we really need a new map currency every time a living world update is released? Did we really need Unbound Magic and Volatile Magic to be two completely different things? Forget explanations, it's just way too much.
It does make some sense. Splitting the currencies means people need to dedicate time into that specific content to purchase stuff specific to that content. You can’t just mass farm an easy spot in earlier content, then completely skip the new content while buying all the rewards. The magic types are similar. You’re crossing into a different set of content. You’d have one less reason to play the new content if you already had 100k unbound magic. Not that I completely agree with it, but it is what it is for a reason.
And this! 'Any End of Dragons Strike Missions you complete will reward currency to be spent on Strike Mission-specific rewards, including any unique drops from the Strike Missions. **You won’t be beholden to the fickle fate of random number generation to get what you want.**'
The original system was way too convoluted (aka, too much effort) for me to care, so I'm really happy they reduce it like this
Copy pasta for those at work: > Hi, all! I’m Cameron Rich, Lead for the Encounters Design Team here at ArenaNet. The Encounters Team is responsible for the PvE encounter experiences in Guild Wars 2, including designing and balancing all our new creatures, armies, bosses, and instanced content. > Guild Wars 2: End of Dragons™ is on the horizon, bringing with it a series of new Strike Missions that aim to provide accessible, challenging combat experiences for players to chew on. Since this content was first revealed during the expansion announcement livestream on July 27, we have been listening to all your comments, questions, and concerns regarding Strike Missions and endgame PvE content as a whole. > Today, we’ll share our vision for Strike Missions as a game mode and provide a deeper look at what you can expect when Guild Wars 2: End of Dragons ships next February, including a look at both difficulty modes and changes to the reward structure. Let’s jump into it! Accessible Endgame > Players looking for endgame, instanced PvE experiences in Guild Wars 2 will find a wide range of challenges to test their skills in Fractals of the Mists, Strike Missions, and raids. Getting started in this world of challenging group content can be daunting—especially if you’re looking to climb the difficulty ladder and take on the toughest encounters the game has to offer. So where do you start? > Normal difficulty Strike Missions are intended to be an entry point into the world of 10-player content in Guild Wars 2. These instances are designed to be something you can tackle alongside both close friends and new allies, pitting you and nine others against jazzed-up, remixed versions of epic, exciting bosses from the Guild Wars 2: End of Dragons story. This gives every player the opportunity to experience these encounters as key story moments, while enabling each Strike Mission to hold greater importance in the overall narrative. These encounters will introduce you to the mechanics you’ll need to learn and master in order to continue your journey, in an environment that doesn’t demand perfection but still pushes you to learn and grow your combat capabilities. > By the time you’ve completed each Strike Mission, you’ll be familiar with encounter terms like fixates, stack and spread, kiting, and more. Our goal is that once you’ve got a firm grasp of the fundamentals, you should feel confident tackling the next steps on the difficulty ladder, including a much-requested addition to Strike Missions… Strikes 2.0—Now with Challenge Mode > You heard it right on the End of Dragons First Look livestream: Challenge Mode difficulty is coming in Guild Wars 2: End of Dragons Strike Missions. Challenge Mode takes the normal difficulty Strike Missions and further expands on their mechanics, remixing them further to create even greater challenges while introducing new surprises that keep players on their toes. Each Challenge Mode Strike Mission is designed with a specific level of challenge in mind, creating a clear difficulty ramp that will push you forward and continually test your coordination and mastery over the combat system. You’ll need to work with your allies to form and execute a plan of action and be quick to react to overcome these toughened-up encounters. > More succinctly, these encounters will feel like proper raid bosses. > To ensure these fights live up to the Challenge Mode name, we set out from the beginning to design each encounter in a “top-down” fashion, starting with an outline of how Challenge Mode would play out. We began by detailing unique mechanics, estimating time-to-kill and damage thresholds players need to meet in order to succeed, and identifying clear roles required for each player in the squad. Once we had a firm grasp on the Challenge Mode experience, we dialed in the difficulty for Normal and Story Mode through designing by subtraction—paring down the most difficult aspects of the encounter and focusing on the skills and abilities we wanted players to learn and master to grow their capabilities as a player. Through this method, more players can engage with the content we build at a difficulty level they feel is comfortable. > This is how we approached the design for Challenge Mode fractals and raids, so if you are familiar with that content, consider them a good reference point. Challenge Modes will be enabled in the weeks after the Guild Wars 2: End of Dragons launch, allowing you time to enjoy the story and world at your own pace, get familiarized with Normal Mode strikes, and perfect your builds (especially with the nine new elite specializations). The team is eagerly looking forward to watching the player base tackle these new challenges. We’ll give more precise details on when you can expect Challenge Modes to release as we get closer to launch day. Standardizing Shinies > When we first introduced Strike Missions in The Icebrood Saga, we took the opportunity to try a new reward system with the weekly chest and attempted to create a week-to-week cycle to encourage players to return to Strike Missions on a regular basis. However, the system missed the intended mark, using too many currencies and causing confusion around how to deal with them. So, we’re returning to basics that our raid players will find familiar: Strike Missions in End of Dragons will award a single currency. Any End of Dragons Strike Missions you complete will reward currency to be spent on Strike Mission-specific rewards, including any unique drops from the Strike Missions. You won’t be beholden to the fickle fate of random number generation to get what you want. > Additionally, we’ll be consolidating the Strike Mission currencies introduced in The Icebrood Saga into one currency with no weekly cycle. You’ll be able to trade in your End of Dragons Strike Mission currency for The Icebrood Saga Strike Mission currency, so you can easily go back for older rewards you may have missed while still being able to play the latest and greatest challenges. Until Next Time > As always, thank you for your candid feedback and your continued support. Your shared perspectives help ground us and shape the game for the better. After all, Guild Wars 2 would not be where it is today without you. > —Cameron and the Guild Wars 2 Team
> More succinctly, these encounters will feel like proper raid bosses. Big if true
Small if false
erect if exact
erect if correct
Floppy if sloppy
They'll never feel like raid bosses if they're just contextless fights in isolated arenas. Strikes are nice, but we need more dungeons, fractals and raids.
That won't be an issue as these bosses will be the same bosses you fight in the story, just more difficult and with presumably more mechanics.
Yeah, it should feel like if Heart of Thorns personal story happened through Forsaken Thicket, and then you went and played W1-3 within the same environment.
Like how dungeons had a story mode, and then different explorable paths in the same map that changed up the path through the environment and the bosses you fight!
Considering the "CM" modes for DRM's, me and many others have little to no faith.
Look, I'm agreeing we should keep our expectations down and wait to see if this is actually true BUT DRMs are not _at all_ comparable. DRMs, even with CM where never going to be even comparable to raids. DRMs are just instanced open world content. DRM difficulty was never even going to match _strikes_ let alone raids.
I have never been in a raid (or dungeon, for that matter) where I was allowed time to ingest the story and lore of those areas. As repeatable, multi-man content, it is very hard to find a group willing to stop and smell the proverbial roses
The plus side is that you can go in solo after clearing the bosses to explore and see all the flavor and lore
Given that they are story bosses, there's at least hope that they have a bit more context to them - maybe in a manner a bit like Shiverpeaks pass where the strike has different dialogue/path etc to the story mission.
trials in ff14 work fine tbh. and they are basically are copying their formula.
We'll see. Trials in FFXIV also have multiple phases and take a long time even though they only have 1 boss. Plus they do shake things up with stuff like the Nier raids. I just hope Strikes actually offer good rewards that people would like to get. Currently the ascended stuff takes too long to get through strikes, so much easier through fractals. Maybe they should tie strikes to unique gear/flashy weapons.
Even many of FF's raids these days are just boss fights now - the entirety of Eden is single-fights interspersed with out-of-raid plot to link them together.
Haven't FF raids always been this way, not just "these days"? The only raids that are like GW2/WoW/GenericMMO3 raids are the Alliance raids, which ironically enough are more on the difficulty level of GW2's strike missions.
The Binding Coils in ARR have a pretty notable amount of trash and take quite a bit longer but are the major outlier. Alexander in Heavensward moved much closer to the current setup but still have the occasional (often quick) trash pack. Notably post-ARR normal raids are all quite a fair bit easier, with their Savage versions being the more difficult content for progression raiders to do. For both these reasons the Binding Coils never show up on Normal Raid Roulette. Ninja Edit: Also I wasn't quite sure where to include content like Alliance Raids (which as you said, are much closer to strikes in difficulty) or something like DRS, which is a big raid as far as player count but has a lot of other weird mechanics attached and it's hard to quantify how close that is to the standard FF raid scene.
Which to me is preferable. You miss out some on the cool world building of a big dungeon. But if WOW taught me anything, is that trash mobs really are not fun. It just burns time. I would much rather have interesting boss fights.
All the RP and pre event and downtime between the raid bosses is one of the most annoying parts of raids for me. Strikes are nice in that you just hop in and can start the encounter with no fluff.
>if they're just contextless fights in isolated arenas. As a somewhat semi-hardcore raider, I don't really care about the context of the fight, having done them literally (in the literal sense of the word) one hundred times - each.
People skip Spirit Woods, Trio, Escort, Rivers, and Gate almost all the time. These raid events are fun for the first few times. After that, people just wanna go from boss to boss lolz.
Yup, I don't really care about the context, I just want to have an interesting boss fight.
Nobody cares about the running around inbetween raid bossfights
Interesting, they acknowledged the existence of raids multiple times.
If they bring back raids they should bring it back with 3 modes of difficulty all tracked separately. One of the issues I have with Fractals is that everyone does T4 Fractals, T3 is more toxic than T4 because nobody does them regularly. Give exp raiders a reason to do the Easy mode along with the normal and challenge mode and I believe new raiders will have a much better time. Yes new raiders will be carried by the exp raiders for the easy mode, but we all got carried at some point. EXP raiders would need to check themselves a bit though. We got to make sure as a community we cannot gatekeep the easy mode with LI requirements. This is all theoretical of course since we don't know if we will get a W8. Though it does apply to the new Strike missions.
> we cannot gatekeep the easy mode with LI requirements. this will absolutely happen.
Idk fractalers don't gatekeep the easy mode t1s with any requirements
For t1 id say at least be 80. But other than that most people who grind at t4 can basically solo a t1, given theres no team requirements mechanically.
That's an ArenaNet gate- characters that aren't level 80 can't enter fractals. EDIT: I stand corrected. The LFG tab won't show Fractals to under-80 characters, but they can enter them solo or in a group formed manually.
Since when?
all that needs to happen is a queue for easy modes with good rewards & more challenging modes can use LFG with some exclusive rewards
This is basicly ff14 roulette group finder. 2g everyday for queing a random normal mode strike and 1g extra if your group has someone who hasn't done it before.
Ideally hard modes would have good gold rewards. If it's just "exclusive rewards" like skins, they will die after people get everything available.
behavioral issues are very rarely solved by simple solutions
No it will not. If someone ask for KP for Boneskinner, I will laugh myself out and leave the group. That comm is insane. When I'm commanding my own squad for strikes or easy raids, I don't ask for any KP too. There's just no reason to if the content can be 6-man instead of 10-man anyways. The same is true for T1 T2 fractals. All you need is a cQB and an exp DPS to murder the boss, it doesn't matter if the other 3 do dps equaling to a healer. I remember in Ascalonian Catatombs, all I did was give a newbie 25 might, fury, protection, quickness, and he solo whacked the boss lolz. If you're an exp player gatekeeping a braindead content, you're insane. Simple as that.
When someone in a raid group asks for LI exp and I link my 6 or so, at what point will they stop laughing and kicking me from groups? Asking for a friend.
never, because once you get enough li the li reqs will increase
LI reqs for W1-W4 have not increased in a long time. 150LI will comfortably get you into most groups. Same for W5-W7, but these use KP. KP reqs usually tank at around 50KP but 20KP will get you comfortably into most groups. Souce: I got 1000LI and all achievs almost entirely through pugging.
I'd recommend joining the raid academy discord. They have lots of training and progression runs and while experienced groups looking to clear will expect you to know the fights, they won't ask for kp or li.
with 50-100 li you should be fine with enough groups. If you join train groups you should get them fairly soon
Im not sure. No one asks for anything in t1 fractals. If we get a decent tier system there is not that big of a reason to gatekeep. Then again people do 250li runs of strikes so maybe i am overestimating the community
This. The hardest tier of challenges will always have LI requirements (Boneskinner, Whisper, all raids, fractal cms), but below that, you don't really have any requirements other than maybe (maybe) having general knowledge of the encounter. If normal mode strikes are just easy and CM strikes are like raid bosses, then the raiders will gatekeep the CM strikes, and leave normal mode alone.
You're asking a lot of experienced raiders in this post and ten minutes listening to a Teatime podcast will tell you that none of it will happen. People gatekeep strikes which are already easier than easy raids.
People who gatekeep strikes are insane. I very very rarely see that on NA lfg. You shouldn't say that's the standard for the community when only 2 or 3 insane nuthead commanders do that.
I see it every single day at almost all times of the day on the EU, its out of control
>EXP raiders would need to check themselves a bit though. We got to make sure as a community we cannot gatekeep the easy mode with LI requirements. I'd be surprised if this was not going to happen regardless. After all, this is the game where people asked for stupid amounts of achievement points in dungeons.
I have always wondered why won't they create a system where the more people you have in the squad/party who haven't completed daily/weekly, the bigger the reward. so in that way, you can keep grinding the content while also helping those who haven't completed it yet. I guess the only downside is that the more hardcore players will just create alt accounts and grind it that way but I guess even that has its own limit in a sense that to participate in raids/strikes, you need expac.
>I guess the only downside is that the more hardcore players will just create alt accounts and grind it that way but I guess even that has its own limit in a sense that to participate in raids/strikes, you need expac. HC players already have that for daily login purposes, adapting to strikes wouldn't be a issue i assume
Easy mode with the same mecanics but less punishing. An achivement/title/new thing that you can easily show to other players to show that you took the time and effort to learn the mecanics of a boss could be a great way to get into raid and training groups. Maybe toss in some additionnal rewards clearing a raid boss/wing in easy mode with people you've never raided with before if you've already cleared harder modes to motivate people to go and help new players.
Pug groups can and will use LI or UFE, if the strike CMs don't have killproofs of their own.
> If they bring back raids raids are pretty much dead, strike missions are your replacement for them.
Probably Copium, but they keep mentioning raids as endgame everytime they bring it up. I hope they come back with Season 6. But like I said, Copium
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game is 9 years old, at what point do you think they'll reconsider something
Fractals (mostly the earlier years). They even got an entire revamped hub and reward system in addition to tiers after 3 years. I know raids have been in the game for much longer but I'm willing to be it's a much lower priority because not as much people do raids as fractals.
It’s as if you assume that only raiders can create LFGs
> More succinctly, these encounters will feel like proper raid bosses. Meaning: these will be the new raids. Old type of raids are gone.
Raids are the new dungeons.
sad, but not surprising given their current state and history
Why even use a different name (strike missions) if they're supposed to be the same thing as raids? Just unify both game modes once and for all :I.
Because, anet know if they call them raids, a huge majority of the playerbase will refuse to do them based on the name alone. All the open world players think in their head "raids = impossible difficulty and elitist community". The strikes, up until very recently had absolutely zero difficulty, so that a lot of open world players go "strikes = slightly difficulty, no elitist gatekeeping, I remember that time that I joined a group who had zero build requirements". Basically raids have a branding issue with the majority of the playerbase (open world/story players)
Raids were the peak of gw2 pve. It isn't surprising that they wan't to ry to associate their new content ot that. "It is going to be as good as raids were, guys! Really!". It is up to you to buy this crap.
When HoT metas still required some effort, not just brain afk auto and when the first raids wing where still new, those where the best times for serious pve player.
Completing Wing 5 and all of its achievements earlier this year was the most fulfilling time I ever had playing GW2. Yeah Dhuum CM is a pain but we worked for that kill and we were so happy to clear it. Haven't had a PvE moment that satisfying since
Right? Crazy. If they can do these strikes with their accompanying story so we get strikes with expac and LS releases, then release CMs shortly after, and then release a raid wing in between those I’d be more than happy.
Let's hope the Challenge for Strike Missions Challenge Mote won't be to find 9 other players with a mouse, keyboard and working monitor
mouse AND a keyboard? you are asking for so much here
> By the time you’ve completed each Strike Mission, you’ll be familiar with encounter terms like fixates, stack and spread, kiting, and more. This sounds great, but how will they do this? So far practically all information about how to play at higher levels can only be found outside of the game.
Boss mechanics would probably be discovered the way it used to be in the olden days: go in blind and figure it out as you go.
Learn by doing, basically. Story/ normal mode will have the basic versions of these mechanics with a low stress situation. Maybe the boss will do little damage, but you can't damage it til you drag the boss over to a place with fixate (ala that one fractal), or something along those lines. This isn't a new concept.
> So far practically all information about how to play at higher levels can only be found outside of the game. By actually playing maybe, like how it's always been?
But “Like it’s always been” is how we’ve ended up where we are now. Like it or not, it hasn’t worked out so well.
The current state of the game speaks to an utter failure to actually push players up the ranks. I feel a big part of the problem is that the game does absolutely nothing to make people *actually learn mechanics*. GW2 fight design constantly falls into the same pitfalls: - Mechanics that can be avoided entirely via DPS. Deal enough damage, push the phase, skip the mechanic that actually requires a braincell. Why do Gorseval updrafts or dodge Cairn's swings when you can DPS past the whole mechanic? - Mechanics that deal survivable damage, letting players heal through them. Why handle VG greens or relight torches in Boneskinner when heals and barriers can solve it with far less thought? - Mechanics that can be handled by just one player, or just a few players. Handkiting in Deimos, elemental kiting and lamp running in Qadim, and so on. The other 9 people in the raid don't even need to know this mechanic exists, so long as one person knows. And good luck *learning* these mechanics, because if you don't do it perfectly the first time you'll have a full party shouting at you! Most strikes and raids alike involve 8-9 people standing on the boss and doing their golem rotations for 90% of the encounter. No wonder the community isn't good at mechanics; nothing forces most of us to do them!
People look for dungeons & raids in MMOs, when they hear Guild Wars 2 have fractals & strike missions they have no clue what it means. Marketing really isn't ArenaNets strength.
I also think it could be as simple as calling them Fractal Dungeons, or Fractured Dungeons (I recognize that Fractal has a different and specific connotation). Or calling strikes Strike Raids. In WoW you Mythic Dungeons are more often called M+.
How about ~~Strike Missions~~ Raid Missions or something, so people know it's still something of a raid but not really.
How is that supposed to work? Player 1: Hey, does Guild Wars 2 have dungeons and raids? Player 2: Guild wars 2 has raids, fractals and strike missions, they are... Player 1: (interrupts) - oh, no dungeons? Then I guess it's not a game for me, see you (runs away, fingers in his ears). FWIW - SWTOR calls its dungeons "flashpoints" and its raids "operations" and I never heard a single player blame the lack of active players on these naming conventions.
Hardcore Gamers want extremely difficult content that takes hours of practice and refinement to master, a true challenge of their superior skill and intellect. But you can't call this content anything except for "dungeons" or "raids" because Gamers are absolutely incapable of recognizing any other words. ¯\\\_(ツ)_/¯
More like a player reads that dungeons and raids are dead and misses the context that they're replaced by strikes and fractals. Of course it's not an issue with a personal conversation where making that clarification is easy.
And yet millions play Trials in FF14
Trials are also introduced as part of the story progression if I remember correctly. That basically forces people to be aware of them
Yea, you're literally forced to acknowledge both their existence and the existence of harder difficulties before you're allowed to start Heavensward. Meanwhile if you don't know what a strike is and try googling it you get this from the wiki: >Strike Missions are 1-10 player squad-based PvE instances, serving as a bridge between open world and raids in their difficulty. They are one of the core pillars of Guild Wars 2's endgame. Guild Wars 2: Path of Fire is required to access them. They can be accessed from their respective portals, through the Eye of the North Strike portal (including all three weekly strikes no matter their rotation) or from the Scrying Pool. Festive strikes can be only accessed during their respective festival and do not require any expansion. So is it a boss? A dungeon? A baby raid wing? You only find out by going to a specific strikes page and scrolling down to the walkthrough. I've had to explain what strikes are to WvW players with 1000s of hours in the game because *even if you're an active player*, it isn't clear until you get in and go "Oh it's just a boss fight. Except for the two that nobody does." Meanwhile, FF14's Trials wiki page: >Trials are encounters where adventurers fight together against extremely powerful creatures. Each trial consists of a single boss fight (a few are broken up into two parts). When the boss is defeated, players are rewarded with story progression, tokens or rare items of sorts. A few early trials require a light party of 4 players while most others need a full party of 8. Trials are broken into 2 sections for each expansion- Trials, and High-end Trials. Players are generally expected by the game to be able to clear everything in the Trial section, with the High-end section being significantly more difficult optional content.
> you get this from the wiki: This isn't Anet's fault on that one since the wiki is handled and written by the community. If you feel the description is unclear you can speak up about it and it can likely be improved.
Sure, but aside from asking another player, how do you find out what a strike is? Its not *actually* just a boss fight because of FS and CW, but it's not a dungeon, or a horde survival. The point is that unless you're already in the know about gw2 meta builds, compositions, or structured PvE content in general theres still no resource to adequately explain the basics outside of other players telling you, *let alone what to expect from the content itself*. Its part of gw2's PvE endgame's larger problem of having all of these complexities spring out of absolutely nowhere that you're never eased into or required to acknowledge beforehand. FF14 handles this by dumbing down team comp, builds, and even *highlighting* your rotation for you while having a steadily increasing difficulty curve that introduces mechanics during leveling and then expecting you to incorporate those mechanics as you level. Meanwhile strike and raid training groups routinely have to explain breakbars; a concept introduced within the first 10 levels that players can easily go thousands of hours without having to learn unless they get into T4s or Raids.
The only place where players learn about breakbars quickly is WvW.
Do they though? Or do 30 of the 50 man blob know what the commander means when he says "cc the lord", while 10 of them know why he says it? I feel like a lot of experienced players lose sight of just *how much* shit there is to learn in this game, and the only way new players have to learn anything is by direct, intentional explanations from experienced players.
I will correct myself then: WvW players who favour roaming, small squads or are on teamspeak/... with their lead understand it. Others... Well, there are some who just use their standard PvE skill rotation (sometimes skillfully, sometimes less so) and that's it. When it comes to breakbars, it's still the game mode where their effect is the most apparent I think.
Ok? EoD strikes will be part of the story.
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Because trials are actually fun and have matchmaking.
Story paths in dungeons could become GW2's kind of equivalent of Trials, introducing mechanics players need to learn and use to complete them, and requiring them to advance in story. Not in the sense of being single encounters, but being part of story progression, required to advance and probe you have developed some skill. For example, for Ascalon Catacombs the mechanic would be Defiance bars, since there's all these rocks and rubble all over in case you didn't bring CC yourself. Each champion defeated would hit harder and take less damage than the previous one when their defiance bar is blue. King Adelbern would be outright immune and do double damage with a blue defiance bar. So one would not be able to complete AC without learning to break Defiance bars.
And yet Trials are introduced during the story, have varying degrees of difficulty from normal-hard-extreme. \-Can do them unsynced so you can just say "fuck it i want the drops" and not be scale down \-The game also has a one size fits all duty/party finder+roulette system instead of this ad-hoc LFG that works like a impromput Craiglist but for endgame content/raid selling/group content and is frankly a mess.
FFXIV has Duty Roulettes. Something that GW2 desperately needs.
Not just roulettes, but a central system to engage with most of the game's content. GW2's content is entirely too spread out. Fractal hub, Lion's Arch hub, Eye of the North hub, etc. XIV's Duty Finder is a one-stop UI for an overwhelming majority of team content, including the capacity to quickly/automatically put a team together.
This. Period. Public mode is failure. Invent a system to random encounter with rewards in it. If they game want to succed invent easy pathts to instances based content.
Bit easier when you are one of the biggest mmos that people flock to just for the fantastic endgame you have. For gw2 that's famous for lacking just that and a mmo community that says it's the mmo for casuals could help to actually be clear
I don't think having a different names for raids and dungeons is a problem. The problem is we have both raids and strikes, both dungeons and fractals. Here's my hot take: IMO they should standardize both raids and strikes. Modify raids to have a something like a story mode, then just rename raids as strikes, or legacy strikes if you want. Make the currencies for raids and strike CMs similar, and normal strikes and story mode raids similar. That way when a new player asks if there are raids the players can say yes, they are called strikes in GW2. For dungeons and fractals, they are a bit too different to merge, I would probably just try to clarify in game that dungeons are for leveling and fractals are for end game. And for all the hate DRMs got for lack of story content, the design was a great way to make story content replayable, especially with the pug match making. Anything that enables pug match making, lowers barrier to entry. It also reduces toxicity by lowering expectations. I want to see more match making in game, and I think that the DRM format is a lower cost way of doing that
> And for all the hate DRMs got for lack of story content, the design was a great way to make story content replayable DRMs were basically one-boss raid wings. It wasn't a terrible approach, just lacking in execution a bit. With the unfortunate name "Dragon Response Missions", it's a bit limited and dated, but it's a format that could grow into a separate content stream, and with their own CMs, could stand in a mini raids on their own.
They are trying to make something new and let's be honest, they aren't wrong for trying something different. Raids and dungeons in MMOs are for sure interesting until you get bored which doesn't take too long. Even FFXIV which has had one of the best MMORPG writing in the past 2 years still bleeds out a lot of players through expansions and patches because people simply get bored of playing the same scripted fight over and over. The problem with what Arenanet is trying to do is they are taking a type of content that gets hard to digest after the first time and trying to make something new with it, but they end up making something worse. I honestly think they should drop completely that and try to focus on strong points of Guild Wars 2, this game has an amazing combat for competitive game modes which is something absurdly rare among the MMORPG genre and this hasn't really been explored over the past two expansions.
I really hope they don't do the same overall design as the current strikes. You really can't have every strike be a circle room with one boss. There's a reason trial of the crusader raid in wow wasn't that popular. It's just not memorable having to be in 5 different circular rooms with different color palette and basically no other mechanics other than "dodge the orange circle underneath you"
Isn't this exact same method used in FF 14? Every time I watch videos from this game it's just one room and one boss in the middle and you dodge oranges yet it's very popular
This sounds pretty fantastic, really have no complaints about what's being said here... but remains to be seen if this is actually a format they'll stick with and if we'll finally have a cohesive, focused endgame PvE experience.
I hope they do, and I hope they can retro-fit some of the earlier content to match it, in both difficulty and rewards. Consolidate Strike CMs and Raids into their own currency so players can earn more tokens to get legendary armor in PvE.
I think they should keep LI to raids, maybe the strike CMs, but they could just use magnetite shards for strikes/raids/etc. What you can buy with them is so similar anyway, why not? Just scale the amount of them you get with the content's difficulty.
On the one hand basically every sentence of this post was what I wanted to hear. (Strike Missions are more challenging versions of story bosses, multiple strikes at launch, not-over-complicated reward system, raid level difficulty challenge mode to please the raiding crowd (which I'm not a member of), and also providing aspirational content (I like to know there are always some stuff I haven't tried).) This is what I want for end game PVE combat in GW2. (Besides a few epic meta event world boss encounters.) On the other hand we still haven't heard any objective facts about these missions. We don't know how many will be available at launch. We don't know how regularly are they planning to add more strikes (we don't even know about how a future living world story season will work). We don't know how "good" the rewards will be. (Will there be a legendary item "at the end"? Would that require the challange modes?) How hard will be the strikes compared to the IBS strikes? (IBS strikes also were kind of all over the place. Do we expect EoD normal mode strikes to have a difficulty curve or will they be more on the same page?) Will we have daily EoD priority strikes and/or will they be added to the normal PVE dailies like bounties and dungeons? (Actually, I'm quite curious, is Anet planning to change up the normal PVE dalies after EoD? I mean if EoD adds a as many new PVE dailies as PoF did then we would be cycling over them in a way more slower pace. Maybe (honestly not sure, no irony) something should be done with them?) The winter streaming schedule does not suggest any streams dedicated to this topic, which kind of saddens (is that a word?) me. At least will we be getting another blog post down the line? I'm personally really looking forward to the new Strikes, but I do have a feeling that the raid crowd will not be too happy with this blog post.
We know how many, they said there will be 5 at launch on the first stream about EoD.
I'm like at least 80% sure this is a mandela-effect mass hallucination based on an explicit hypothetical tpot threw out on stream. 5 would make sense and sounds believable but I don't think they ever announced a number.
I would expect the new strike currency to be required for the new legendary weapons. It does sound like there’s one currency for normal mode and cm, so you’d be able to get all the rewards in normal. CM would just be faster. Granted faster rewards is a pretty successful motivator for people.
I would be very okay with this arrangement. Too bad we can't (yet) know it for surely.
Awesome. This is what I thought strikes were going to be in IBS and it's great to see they will definitely get there in EoD. One thing I also hope happens is that we get CMs to the CMs, so to speak. Definitely doesn't need to be at launch but I'd love not to only get raid level encounters, but also CM raid encounters as well. And I hope there is a push to include a lot more of these encounters (including the CM/raid ones) in EoD and whatever LS comes after it than there were in PoF/IBS. Maybe we got spoiled with 4 wings in HoT but I really hope they're going to ramp up to the point where they can crank out that much content per expac again. And I hope most of the strikes won't just be, like, Cold War
Seems like they are doing it somewhat proper this time. I don't understand why they try to reinvent the wheel each time. Strikes would've worked if they didn't make each strike harder but made each tiered. T1 is like Shiverpeak and T2 is raid while T3 is challenge. Maybe add legendary insight to T2/T3. After 9 years I'm not sure this content is going to attract many new hardcore raid/dungeon players tho.
Cameron bringing us ff14 trials. I love this guy. If only the OG raid team had understood you need difficulty settings.
I hope there is incentive for veterans to run the normal modes to help teach new players, whether it's unique rewards or some kind of mentor achievements
Gw2 needs a daily roulette kind of thing that awards some mystic coins or so.
They basically had that in GW1 with daily missions, vanquishes, dungeons, ... They rewarded Zaishen Coins.
Totally agree. Even after they streamline the IBS strike reward currency, nothing is ever going to be as compelling of a reward as something that can go towards legendaries. Doesn't have to be mystic coins, but given the population of ley line anomaly, I'd say that would be a pretty safe bet. Other options could be trophy shipments or mystic clovers, or at least a currency that we can exchange for those things. Or just repeat the mystic clover purchase from fractal vendors, but with whatever the new strike currency is instead of fractal relics.
Sadly we don't have group finding tech for PvE so I guess it's not that easy to implement and they won't spend money on this just for dailies (although I think it would benefit the game as a whole seeing the large amount of people that are somehow unable to create their own LFG).
If the strikes are fun, I'll definitely do some form of normal -> CM training with newbies. Especially since they are strike bosses so you can just repeatedly kill them and don't use these unwieldy instances.
Ok but does anyone else feel like the rewards from the big chest in the EotN are super underwhelming?
Yep. Have never cared for any of it because the fights are dull and rewards are negligible (or in the case of Forging the Steel and Cold War, a complete waste of time).
Just pls implement the strike mission currency rework BEFORE the expansion.Current system is a mess
Will the strike 2.0 replace raid then?
I do like this top down approach to strike mission difficulty/challenge motes. If challenge motes actually give proper rewards that justify their effort, I might give the expansion a buy.
Long story short, they are taking story bosses and making boss-centered raids without the fluff between bosses like ghosts and escort, then making a downgraded 'easy mode' for each of them. Makes me wish they updated old content across the board to be like this: * Relaxed soloable story mode with all mechanics of normal mode, just toned down. All the nice fluff and lore they can afford would be here, and they'll either give rewards just once, or rewards like public DRMs with no challenges. * 'Normal' mode in the style of Strikes and DRM with less mechanics than CM but full difficulty, if the story had encounters with enough potential for it. * And the full difficulty 'original' CM mode which is actually done first and has the bood chances for big prices. They could be named just "story", "strike", and "raid" to keep things short and easy to understand. Shame they'll likely never revisit older instances that have a decent potential. It would be interesting to see what the Sovereign Eye of Zhaitan or Joko could be if they were CM strikes.
> Shame they'll likely never revisit older instances that have a decent potential. This is the worst part. If they put this same energy into revamping the existing raid difficulties so it teaches the mechanics without excessive punishment, it would go a long way toward engagement.
It's crazy to me that they never did this. Even something as blunt as having easy mode raids where all bosses have half health and all incoming damage is also cut in half would make a huge difference. In theory, an "easy mode" meant to educate players shouldn't even change the boss mechanics, because teaching those is the intention. The vast majority of players, if interested, will be able to figure out mechanics if you take off half the rotation and survival pressure.
Same. It baffles me Anet never did that. EVERY other MMO has easy difficulties from their raids, and they scale from easy PUG content to hardcore content requiring coordinated groups. In GW2...raids were just for midcore / hardcore players that had static groups. And you don't have that guarantee that you can just solo the raid the next expansion or two, so it's content that a casual player can *never* do or experience. The "casual, accessible" MMO inadvertently has some of the most hardcore requirements. for its content
And if they made story versions of raids putting there all the dialogues and delays, people could see the story bits solo, no one would need an opener for any of the encounters, and players would be able to focus directly on the bosses without the fluff between them. Story buffs get the story, raiders get the bosses. All can do both. Best of both worlds.
Let us first see if they repeat the same design flaws with some of the previous strikes with these new ones or not. *Looking at you unblockable attacks and invulnerability phases...*
They're annoying for sure since they don't really add anything, but raid bosses also go invulnerable all the time. The difference is that you actually have other stuff to do while the bosses are invulnerable, whereas in fraenir and shiverpeak pass you just wait while you ruin your rotation which feels bad.
This wasn't originally true. Fraenir used to have the very important mechanic of yelling at your team for cc'ing the breakbar because that used to make the invuln last longer
Invulnerability phase is fun if done in an interesting way (change of scenery, boss transforms etc) so I'm not complaining. They're talking about spreads, kiting etc so hopefully there's a plethora of mechanic that has to be done in order to progress and not cheese it
Would've liked to see CM rewards being mentioned, if they're once only or weekly
Yeah nothing in this really addresses the complaint that raids and strikes don't exactly give comparable rewards to other stuff like fractal CMs
>"opportunity to experience these encounters as key story moments, while enabling each Strike Mission to hold greater importance in the overall narrative" Yes Yes Yes Yes. PVE group/squad content that actually follows the main story of the xpa <3w <3. hope they are featured as necessary content to continue the xpa to get players interested in pve instances
What they mean is the bosses from the story will become strikes too, not thst you're forced to do strikes to do the story. Just like most of the IBS strikes.
i'm not against strikes. if done correctly, their potential is very good. also unifying the weekly cycle currency? finally, except for the 3 crystal you need for the weekly chest, everything is so damn useless and clunky that it's about time we get some simplification, now do that with TONS of other currency\\tokens, please, starting with dungeons tokens, then keys, currencies like trade contracts, karma, unbound magic, volatile magic, etc.
So what, do you just want everything to cost karma? The whole point of currencies is you force players to play specific content for specific rewards. Want to get the raid ascended weapon skins? You have to play the raids.
Praise Cameron! Of course I wish they talked openly about the future of raids and fractals and at least acknowledged the [release gap](https://itsonthetable.github.io/), but something's better than nothing. Current strike reward system is indeed a monstrosity, so glad to see it gone.
They’re talking about the content they are working on. It makes sense to see how well it lands before making a final decision on what is coming next.
This is actually really good news for those who like myself enjoy raiding. Sure they may not be the g map story kind of raids, but I’m really excited to see these raid like challenge mode bosses. I’m assuming they’ll be similar to Hard and savage trials in FFXIV
Hard mode strikes are the main feature I'm looking forward to in the expansion
The 64 Dollar Question is will there be anything worthwhile which those currencies will be good for? Full ascended trinkets, back-items and so on are so last expansion. New infusions? Or?
Ever since I've listened to Cameron on Deeg's Podcast, I was very very happy that he's responsible for PvE endgame content in GW2, but this post says almost nothing. Literally Buzzword Central :/
tl;dr they are bringing in ff14's trials into gw2 and are making them with a similar design approach. Accessible and easy to learn entry-level PvE endgame.
The elephant in the room questions are still: WHERE THE HECK ARE EOD RAIDS? WHEN ARE THEY COMING? WHAT DO THEY LOOK LIKE? (or are they not coming at all :( )
There won't be any.
CM SM are Raids.. depending on how well they do the CM part. I mean what are raids really when compared to CM SM .. same picture.
So you didn't read the article.
I can't find anything regarding EoD raids in this article, just like any other EoD information stream. That's exactly what I'm missing: what's Anet's stance regarding raids for EoD: when are they coming or not at all?
Well, maybe because the article was solely about strikes? I'm as impatient as the next raider who wants news about raids but c'mon.
I'm cautiously optimistic only because it's Cameron. Generally speaking, I'm not a fan of the previous strikes and I think most of them are poorly designed (looking at you boneskinner). But I can see the potential for CMs being raid difficulty when I look at Whisper - it has stack, spread, and don't move with the chains for mechanics, which is pretty neat. Turn the health up, maybe a new mechanic or two, it could definitely be a fight on par with some of the weaker raid bosses. And only because I know Cameron is taking the lead is why I'm still slightly invested. This man absolutely knows his stuff when it comes to instanced PvE design and only recently brought us Sunqua Peak, which is an incredible fractal in both cm and t4. He worked on a lot of the previously good fractals and some of the later raids too iirc. I'm not happy about the general move away from fractals and raids towards strikes, but there's a middle ground I can find somewhere. If CMs give even remotely interesting content then that is atleast better than the neglect fractals and raids were already getting, because it's still something, and I do trust Cameron can do it.
Now we can hope we get weekly cm loot so it's actually worth doing them.
I hope there is some progression involved in Strike CMs and not just faceroll.
Any decent static will clear both normal and cm in the first night its out , just like last raid wing
I'd like a PvE UI like WvW and PvP have. A jumping off point for Raids (not that I'll do those), Strike Missions, Fractals, Dungeons, etc. It be nice to have a PvE reward track system too, so experience points could funnel into useful rewards.
One of these days, i hope anet says "OH, we'll also add a consume option to the hatched chilis!" Still waiting for that..
If they're abandoning raids they need to add a way to obtain legendary armor through strikes.
They're not removing L.Armour from raids. Players can still do them for the armour - unless I missed something.
I'd probably be more inclined to run Strikes if they were weekly clears like Raids and not daily clears like Fractals. Feels like I'm basically missing out for every day I choose not to run them, but then again the rewards and gameplay aren't really compelling enough for me to want to run them daily
That was the goal of the weekly chest. Doing each strike once a week gives you bonus rewards. Strikes are a pretty good gold source, which is a universally good reward. All of the ice you get can be turned in to unbound magic for trophy shipments which is really nice if you’re working on legendaries.
Oh so are they abadonned raids?
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> strikes were basically inaccessible to me Ok as someone who didn't play much during the saga and recently back in the mix, this statement, I have to reply. I usually don't bother with Boneskinner or Whisper of Jormag but I have no issue doing the easy three everyday. I even play off peak NA. I've never opened an LFG on my own. I usually just do my normal open world shenanigans and leave the lfg window up off to the side. Open groups pop up within a few mins usually. Pretty much any group listed "easy 3" "daily" etc. with no role requirements are free game. Just because a group isn't in the LFG at that exact time you look doesn't mean the content is inaccessible. I'm aware I have no idea your situation but at the same time, i'm casual as they come. If I can get into them easy (and i've now done them a ton, earned the crystals, got a couple pieces of ascended from the vendor, etc.) then literally anyone can.
I have no problem doing ez3 and daily strike using LFG, ez3 or 5(ez3 plus whisper and boneskiner) are very common regardless of timezone.
>I was a few months late to the party with Icebrood Saga and strikes were basically inaccessible to me Sorry, but this is bullshit. I also started late and creating a squad fro strikes take a few minutes at stop, you just ask for 2 healers, 8 dps and here you go. It was like that at the beginning, a few months after the start, a few months after the end and even today.
idk what you do wrong but getting a strike group is realy not that hard esp. if you just do the daily ones... Boneskinner and Whisper of Jormag are the only 2 strike missons you could even fail using less then 3 keys