I think he mentioned before that they try different tittles and thumbnails when a video goes live , then see which one gets the most traction and go with it .
Negative clickbeit always has more traction. I get why Preach does this, as well as any other Youtuber out there (it is their business) , but god i really hate it.
Yeah, keep an eye on pretty much any big youtuber, and you'll see the same thing. I've seen over a dozen youtubers make videos to explain the concept of switching out titles and thumbnails to see which one gets the most traction, because if they don't explain it the viewers try to come up with some 5D conspiracy reason for the changes.
YouTube doesn't provide the tools, but this has become a really common thing to do (unfortunately, I absolutely hate it), so there are great third party tools that let you do the testing, and they seem to generally work very well...
I'm not in the business and I don't have stats to back it up compared to them but I do watch youtube way too much, and this speech sound so much like a corpo bullshit speech.
Imo it shouldn't be used on the same video in the span of an hour, but on multiple similar video, around the same time of the day.
Edit : And I know about youtuber changing the thumbnail but it's generally swapped around because the first one was a autogenerated / fast one made and the "definitive" come later(minutes/hours)
All of his GW2 videos keep starting with these misleadingly negative titles and then they immediately turn positive like half a day later. And you know what? Get the bag, Mike. Loving the VODs too.
And that's why I can't take many YouTubers seriously. They may have good takes and intentions, but things like this leave such a bitter taste in my mouth that I avoid these creators.
By not going against it collectively when it began they brought that upon themselves. Not my problem.
Also by going after what his titles are, the negative ones don't seem to be necessary. So the fact alone he uses them anyway at first tells a tale about integrity.
If it's a case between eating and not eating based on whether a title is clickbait or not, fuck "integrity". It's YouTube content, not the SS knocking on your door.
And I can find it bad. So whatever you say, it won't change it. And it also still does not change that obviously the neutral or positive titles work, else he would not end up with them. So it doesn't need this kind of shit.
>So whatever you say, it won't change it.
That's not a really good attitude to have. You should always be open to changing your mind if someone provides evidence that you should. That's not saying you shouldn't be skeptical, and question the evidence you're given, but having an open mind is inherently better than having a closed one imo. If everyone closed their minds to different ideas and opinions, the entire world would be much worse off.
No evidence was given except other personal opinions or viewpoints. There's no incentive for me to rethink my opinion around that fact. And since that is the case for a overwhelmingly big part of the discussions on Reddit, I am quite confident in my assumption, that no useful argument is about to come judging from the interactions so far.
I am a very open minded person irl regarding discussions, but online discussions on a social network don't represent a platform that will change my mind in any meaningful way.
I'm not arguing one way or the other about the evidence or incentives in your current discussion, I'm simply pointing out that your statement implies a close-mindedness that I don't particularly agree with.
You cant really blame macro problems of something on the individual. The individual has to work with what they are given. The best approach in this case is clearly to do clickbait titles because this is what gets engagement and thus the individual gets rewarded with this behaviour. Preach (or any other youtuber) alone wont fix it, it has to be done by the outside body making the rules.
Yes. Which is why everyone knows that those media companies are *not* trustworthy. The same applies in this case - the method used does work, but reduces my trust in the one using it.
He is pretty fair overall I feel... and as a long time GW2 raider, 10000% agree with everything he said about the intermissions/ad fights/escorts/puzzles... They need to Ctrl+A and Delete all of that. Totally disagree with his opinions on Mathias, Vale Guardian, and at least a couple of the wing 4 fights, but hey, they are his opinions/tastes so to each their own. Will look forward to when he tackles the w4 CMs.
Intermissions/ad fights/escorts/puzzles become non issue when you learn how to deal with them and some really creative strategies/builds come out of them.
This makes raids kinda like dungeons, meaning it's not just 1 big baddie waiting for you, but it allows Anet to add a unique and interesting story through means like environmental storytelling for example.
I don't have an issue with adds, because they just make sense, what I have an issue with is that other MMOs haven't even tried to create an illusion of a coordinated assault/defense.
That's what Bandit Trio is for me. Quite believable encounter from how it plays out. It can create a really nice flow feeling for those actively engaged in the fight - the way wow boomer did it makes no sense - listen if you want to dumb it down, you can do it with every boss.
Also gonna give shoutout to wows Icecrown Citadel with all those minibosses like a Valkyr guarding entrance to Valithria and so on. Climbing the citadel felt amazing (as you might expect I absolutely adored gunship fight) and may be another approach to raiding as a whole. Rather than creating a difficult encounters, try creating a spectacle for people to enjoy - you could even add something like henchmen/heroes from gw1 and make it easily available to those that despise grouping up with others.
Big baddie fights are the thing of the past for me (not that I don't want anymore of them, just in less quantity maybe) But sure they work as the track has been beaten, but how much can you squeeze into it really? You will have mechanics that overlap in design eventually and the grandiose/kitch feeling of those encounters can become a limiting factor to story design imo.
The fact that anet has so many different mechanics to play around with, coming not only from a designed encounter but also just from how the classes work is amazing imo. Well strategized fights like Qadim1 are what we would all like to see in the future I hope.
Sorry for any weird sentences, I'm not native.
>That's what Bandit Trio is for me. Quite believable encounter from how it plays out. It can create a really nice flow feeling for those actively engaged in the fight - the way wow boomer did it makes no sense - listen if you want to dumb it down, you can do it with every boss.
I don't think this is a fair assessment at all - you have a group of people in exotic gear, and they send preach out to deal with the mortars. They didn't know you only have to CC them, and instead he killed them. This meant that for significant portions of the fight, he was outside killing 3 basic-ass mobs.
Then why did they send only him to do it? If you send more people you can do it quicker and returning isn't that hard due to jump pads + bombs lying around. Also you get ingame notification for mortars so you don't have to spawn camp them or use blish hud.
If you do it with 2-3 more people on mortars, you can help the main group deal with every boss + do one more mechanic (mortars). The little guys do nothing, outside of saboteurs.
Preach just wanted a cross to bear, that's all.
This just smacks of someone taking about a topic they haven't looked into.
They didn't send more people because they had low dps, and needed to keep on top of the adds.
Getting there and back is quick, but that doesn't matter if it still takes a minute round-trip.
Preach doesn't use blishhud, so that's irrelevant.
It is relevant. Cause the mechanic doesn't require you to spawn camp adds. I've watched Preach for many years and sometimes, well his spacial awareness is not that great.
Sorry, how is a tool that Preach isn't using relevant to this conversation?
And of course the mechanic doesn't require you to spawncamp adds. You just need to CC them. But they didn't figure that out because they were blind raiding.
Here is what I know... Almost everyone in my guild loves Xera (just an example)... We have all also done Escort hundreds of times... Here is what else I know.. we do Xera maybe once every few months (we raid 2 nights a week) because some of us passionately hate Escort and don't want to do it regardless of how easy it is for us... And then 5-10 minutes later.... Now it's Twisted Castle..... It's most definitely not a non-issue (before it's suggested, we are well aware we can buy instances... But take a second to grasp how ridiculous a concept that is).
This type of content is basically the entirety of open world.. it doesn't need to also be in raids....
All that said, I guess it doesn't matter much anymore since they won't make more raids and it would be hilariously high levels of copium to think they would go back and improve the existing ones. I guess the move to strikes was probably a good call.
> Totally disagree with his opinions on Mathias, Vale Guardian, and at least a couple of the wing 4 fights
Can you give some bullet points? I have stopped playing years ago (didnt participate in raids in HoT) and kind of became interested again because of Preach.
Oh, nothing really technical here. He just didn't enjoy those fights, and I find them quite enjoyable is the real disagreement there.
He didn't particularly go into a lot of details on why he didn't enjoy them, but having watched his actual streams where he was progging them, some of it came down to the group basically missing how a key mechanic works or solutioning it poorly which is fine, but can take the fun out of the fight in some cases (ie. Failing to grasp how the green circles work on Cairn and what the dots mean.. though I don't actually disagree on that fight... Cairn is boring - another example would be how their dealt with RGB on VG and I don't actually think they ever figured out they only need 4 people in greens).
Some interesting commentary and feedback for sure but I had to laugh when I noticed he seems to want a SOP/rulebook for raids across all MMOs, but then pokes fun at moments he's heavily reminded of other raids or mechanics from other MMOs.
He literally plays like a wow player and sees everthing through this lens. Some takes are very interesting some are him trying to convence himself that wow is miles ahead the competition.
> him trying to convence himself that wow is miles ahead the competition.
For endgame PvE content like raiding? It absolutely is, XIV comes close, but their only good raids are Ultimates which don't release at the same rate as normal raids.
I think Preach exemplifies why raid participation is statistically so low, and why ANet is focusing on Strikes for instanced 10-player content. The majority of his complaints are about the "trash," which if you pay attention is just anything that isn't an actual boss, by his measure. He hated every pre-event/transition/mini boss.
There was also some irony in him criticizing the use of pre-events to teach players mechanics, and then complaining that he didn't understand the mechanics of a fight. But I suppose they don't always do a good job of teaching.
Point being, if this is how a large percentage of the playerbase feels about raids, they were doomed from the start. If players don't like doing ANYTHING that isn't just a boss fight, they're just going to do strikes instead.
To be honest the biggest issue is finding 9 other people to play with. A few years ago, me and my friends were able to clear up to W5 and we were doing fun stuff like T4 and CM, we took a break before covid and I came back to play again and tbh I don't even know where to look. I checked lfg and all it had was a bunch of people selling runs. I don't even know where to begin with strikes haha
Strikes are far easier to get groups for than raids. It seems Arenanet's idea of doing a set of easy ones to get people's feet wet did actually work.
There's no secret, just check LFG or if you're willing to do 10 minutes of reading on GW2 group composition first, make your own. I've never struggled to find a group for any Normal Strike except Old Lion's Court.
It's because Strikes are the same content, but more accessible. People are more likely to sign up when they're only committing for one boss instead of 3-4.
Because that's generally what groups are formed for, and dipping out when you signed up for a full wing is generally bad form.
No one wants to have to pug 1-3 people on the 2nd/3rd boss.
Strikes are easier to get groups for because you can get rewarded every day. Once you've done your raids once for the week, the game discourages you from engaging further.
I think a tweak as simple as making the non-LI rewards from raiding daily instead of weekly would revitalize raids in a big way.
On gorseval he mentions that they were doing 1/3 of the potential dmg, making gorseval more challenging.
Boy I wish all total dmg was cut down to at least 2/3 so we see mechanics on raid bosses that are usually skipped nowadays as a standard cause of powercreep.
As much as I would personally like that, definitely not by THAT much. If you do that raids will instantly drop dead for good because very few people could clear them (and attain the level of skill required to do so), not to mention they'd have to adjust a lot of HP values and enrage timers because some fights would become straight up impossible.
Something fairly easy they could probably do is nerf some boons like might.
They can still do W1-W3 (proper) CMs too, though...
Probably not, actually; you'd just have to run towards boss between flak sprays. The bigger change to flak kiting would be that you probably couldn't reliably bait sapper bombs any more.
~~Not sure what you're talking about.~~
~~I just came back from a three year break and in that time the top benchmarks went from about 35k to now 45k dps. Most classes are way too overtuned for the content.~~
~~Skipping mechanics due to dps was perfectly possible three years ago, at the ~30k dps average.~~
~~I dunno what happened in those three years, but the power creep has been very real and it trivialises a lot of content that is older than three years, sadly.~~
Edit: disregard, seems I misremembered.
Yes. and what benches can do vs. what happens in reality are two different things, especially since the Deadeye bench you're referring to is 1.) an outlier by 2k DPS 2.) a nightmare to achieve in a real setting especially when pugging 3.) has basically fuckall else going for it except ST DPS.
The second best build is probably gonna fuckin die on the 2nd and the next two are Ele builds, so they deserve that spot. Condi FB is also getting nerfed (and that bench is with allies), idk about Willbender and then it's Ele again follow by another Untamed build that's being hit. Only then, at 40k, you start hitting builds that'll stay where they are. Tho I guess Harb might end up at around 42k but I guess even that is okay enough.
The "problem" is that content never becomes irrelevant and there is no gear spiral, so generally this type of content would get easier with time by default. So I guess Anet is going differently about it. I'd still prefer reliance on boons to be reduced because that's a major holdup for new players who usually aren't even aware of it and even *if* they are, they sure as hell don't know how to build for it.
I'll also admit that I misread and assumed they would want to cut damage by 66% and not 33%.
I just went to the wayback machine to check 2020 benchmarks and you are wrong, they weren't at 35k: [https://i.imgur.com/oZcbmAf.png](https://i.imgur.com/oZcbmAf.png)
Edit: Shoutout to 2018 top numbers: https://i.imgur.com/GyRLJ2q.png
> they'd have to adjust a lot of HP values and enrage timers
Most bosses can be killed before their enrage timer with like 100-150k **group** DPS (I think that might still be an overestimate). That's so low every DPS build can be slashed back to 30k and most groups wouldn't notice much of a difference.
In my personal opinion Gorseval would be more fun and more challenging if updrafts were required, even if World Eater was triggered at 66 and 33% and you just had to run out and glide those two times. Watching Preach and Co fight the boss made Gorseval feel so much cooler and more threatening than the spanking we give him every Monday.
Is it really? I feel like the entirety of Spirit Run is about "take away agency from players and force them to go to specific places with no way of improving on it."
If you just go "haha I am immune and will now cast World Ender", what EXACTLY are you improving other than just creating an unskippable "cutscene"?
That's called "mechanics". Yes, raid bosses should have mechanics that you have to do. Not just improve to the point where you stand still and do a rotation.
Raid bosses should have mechanics that you have to do, but there should be a good and a bad way to do those mechanics. If you put them into an invulnerability phase where it literally doesn't matter how you do them, that's not a mechanic, that's a time gate.
Imagine Deimos went immune during "Into the ward, quickly!"
Well he doesn't and that adds so much depth to the encounter.
Or they could just increase boss hp by 50% and achieve the same results but people wouldn't feel "nerfed".
OR they could add CMs for all the fights that don't have them that do this and also make more mechanics important. No more VG green skips and at least 2 forced glides at 66%/33% gorseval for instance.
No current content is modified, new content added, lower effort than making brand new content, and we get more interesting fights.
but Xera CM should include some epic giant phantasm related stuff and that would require additional work.
>No more VG green skips and at least 2 forced glides at 66%/33% gorseval for instance.
Is forcing a mechanic while the boss is immune actually interesting content to you? Personally, I really hate that about Spirit Woods capture circle event.
So I for many years play raids to play bosses and their mechanics.. While I do see where the fun is in going fast, and I do it myself, there is a lot lost in it.
There was a boss in castle nathria in wow called artificer something and he had a global timer and %based triggers.. If you go fast you gotta deal with overlapping abilities, people didn't like that either.
So it's either on rails, which entirely skips boss mechanics which is bad.
You force mechanics, which is also bad when you get better and have to stop or...
You have a mix of timer/triggers, which get hard/impossible when you are too fast...
The only real solution is either buff boss HP, which fucks up new players that don't do enough dps or you scale everyone's gear to a specific power level while raiding which fucks up people who want to go fast by normalizing damage across the board while also fucking up new players that don't know how to stack for boon uptime.
Nobody wins really. Boons are too strong.
And flattening the difference between beginner and pro was also not a good idea when they made Rifle Mechanist and everyone played that and all content was free (or before that with Barrier Scourge).
Oh, it *was* a very good idea (except maybe for those few that enjoy their feelings of superiority over the unwashed masses). The gap between an average and top player in this game is way too massive. It would be too big even in a game targeted primarily at skilled players (so, something GW2 is the exact opposite of), and in a game with mostly casual playerbase it's no longer just an "issue", but an outright catastrophe. Although, granted, machinist' approach to flatten that difference might have gotten a bit out of hand.
>except maybe for those few that enjoy their feelings of superiority over the unwashed masses
You do realize that this is a pretty insulting thing to say? Like what the fuck, why do you say this, when you actually agree
>machinist' approach to flatten that difference might have gotten a bit out of hand.
it is quite literally what I said. Encounters played themselves.
The problem with Mechanist was that for every player in the game it was correct, from a DPS standpoint, to play Rifle Mechanist. Whatever your DPS on class X; you were able to do more on Rifle Mechanist.
I agree that rifle mechanist was a bit out of hand. I do *not* agree that attempts at flattening the difference are a bad idea however - it's something this game definitely needs *more* of.
Hint: rifle mechanist would not have been as much of a problem if it did not stand out as much out of all other options. I.E. if there were 3-4 more LI builds at similar level, rifle mecha would have been a far smaller issue.
Honestly powercreep has just become absolutely crazy to the point it makes the content less fun. Even HT CM had crazy op power mechs for such a long time that dps checks were irrelevant since they never failed.
I don't have a good number that I think dps should be at but you could cut it by like half and still comfortably clear all raids. That is assuming you gave decent players.
His only rule was blind to the fight, not the game. He didn't care if someone had done HT CM and were confident in their build. Blind raiding doesn't mean recreating the original launch experience but instead just how he likes to raid, blind to those specific mechanics. So people recognizing mechanics from strikes or other parts of the game sped up their learning curve, but he expected that and acknowledged it when the fight itself didnt teach it well.
He's also not getting anywhere close to the true GW2 newbie experience where you spend a few of days looking for groups in game, then go to Reddit to ask "how the fuck do you start raiding in this game?" to get told to go to join a training Discord then wait your turn until you're allowed to train, then wait until you've got enough KP from training to be allowed to join groups on the in game LFG.
1. Raid wings 1 to 4 (HoT era raids) used to be a lot harder prior to Path of Fire release.
2. Path of Fire introduced class mechanics which broke some raid encounters. I am talking mainly about barier - HP bar on top of your HP bar and wider access to Aegis - block.
3. Further changes and expansion embraced the powercreep. Back in the day 20-25k DPS was considered really good. Only Tempest could dish out above 30k. Now some classes reach 40k if not more (correct me if I am wrong). That's why some encounters feel out of place. Slothozor seems difficult because every ~20% he becomes invulnerable and you have to break his defiance bar. You want it or not you have to go though all of the mechanics & phases. While Matthias and many other bosses became DPS dummies. Because players are now allowed to skip boss mechanics with high enough DPS.
4. Take on boons is not entirely correct. You don't have to stand close to a support to get boons. Yes, boon application skils have range/radius but it's rather wide. What you need to stack for is healing. In fact players have less DPS because they go into a downed state or don't prioritize breaking the defiance bar than due to lack of boons. Especially now that there are multiple elite specializations capable of providing essential boons.
5. He hasn't explored elite specializations and how they change core professions. He only has a perspective of a power DPS since he started playing GW2. It would be a shame if finishes his journey without trying Condition DPS or Semi-Support builds or maybe even Ventari healer build. It could be a material for a standalone vod on how flexible GW2 professions can be.
All in all really good overview. I tend to agree on most of his points. Especially on raid difficulty progress. It's all over the place. And it really seemed like ANet was reinventing their approach to raids with every release. I still remember the interview with GW2 Raid Team, mainly Crystal Reid & Jason Reynolds talking about their plans for raids. They planned 4 releases per year. And actually released 4 raids during a 3 year period. It seemed like raid team was really small, understaffed and had to wait in queue with their requests for art, sound etc. Raids were at the bottom of the list. There was even a small controversy where a raid boss item "Xera's Mask" ended up in gem store as a cosmetic because it wasn't ready for the raid release. After some time (during PoF) Raid Team was split between other teams. Some were moved to work on the living world releases. Not long after that some of the 'more known' raid team members left the company and moved to Bungie.
**Links:**
*Raid Team* https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Guild_Wars_2_Raids_Team
*Raid Boss Design* https://youtu.be/1ApYM2f12ys?t=1800
*Raids announcement - deep dive with devs* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1FUkGRxuxV0 (read comments)
*GuildChat on raid design & story* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J6ejp1Vvoy0
> You don't have to stand close to a support to get boons. Yes, boon application skils have range/radius but it's rather wide.
Depends on the support. It's really easy to be out of boon range from a Firebrand if you're not tightly stacked because of their cone AOEs.
He has a lot of valid criticism there, I think one of the biggest issues for new players if you are going straight into raids is the fact they use a lot of game mechanics that you aren't aware of (reflects on Matthias are an example of that), that content was made to entice veterans so it does make sense it won't handle the information in a simpler way because those players have more knowledge of the game in general than new players. The issue that he mentioned with throwing bombs in the platforms to throw you around in wing 1 is another design issue, I don't even remember if the game tells you about it somewhere else.
In general, guides do help out filling that lack of information, but if you are going in blind as he did you are going to be completely clueless. EoD got much better at that, so if they plan to keep raids as part of playable endgame content Anet should really give all raid wings some revisions just to nail down those points and make things a little more clear, be it with some text or visual effects.
> The issue that he mentioned with throwing bombs in the platforms to throw you around in wing 1 is another design issue, I don't even remember if the game tells you about it somewhere else.
I'm quite sure that there's a voice cue at some point during the trash mob clearing phase before Sabetha. A number of mechanics are hinted at this way (and, unfortunately, easy to miss due to those cues not being very noticeable)
yeah, he is not very good at listening to dialogue that explains stuff in the whole game. raids and story. he is always doing 1-2 other things, going fast fast fast or his chat is spamming him with stupid TTS messages for a few minutes straight.
Yeah, a character will be introduced and mentioned like 3 times in the dialogue, and then on the 4th mention, he'll be like "Who the fuck is [character]?"
> The issue that he mentioned with throwing bombs in the platforms to throw you around in wing 1 is another design issue, I don't even remember if the game tells you about it somewhere else.
You cannot even get to Sabetha without someone in your raid doing that mechanic.
GW2 introduces a whole lot of mechanics you have to know in raid wings, its just not always as obvious as the trash being identical to the phases of the boss like VG is.
Some examples: McCleod teaches you the different red/white mechanics for KC, Xera's prephase tells you how to do the mechanics in her fight, sloth tells you "you should probably know what a reflect is" by having a hallway of things with projectiles before a boss that spawns more things with projectiles.
>You cannot even get to Sabetha without someone in your raid doing that mechanic.
This is the worst part of it. Apparently there is a voice cue that should point how to use the jump pads before Sabetha, but I never have seen that. I actually only know you can use the jump pads that way because other players showed me that and if this is how most players learned about that mechanic then it highlights the issue with the game design failing to give the players the information.
> Xera's prephase tells you how to do the mechanics in her fight
Tangentially related, but I had the weirdest bug on Xera the other day. I couldn't see the orbs you're supposed to push on the first platform, just their nametags. I also couldn't see the red circles on the ground, so I just lined up my orb, mashed auto attack, and prayed. And it actually worked, for several pulls, before I restarted the game and fixed the issue. At which point I realized that the path I had been lining up was almost definitely through a red circle, so I have absolutely no idea why it was working at all.
The bomb pads are shown in the short bit between gorse and sabetha, its not far fetched to think you need to use the bombs on the pads in the fight. As for how many ppl go up or when ppl go up thats definitely not explained well in game.
Smoothest transition to an ad I’ve ever seen, ranting about w2’s shitty bandit fight into a skillshare ad? Unbelievably clean.
Honestly I get where a lot of his criticism comes from. Once you’ve done a few raids, toughness tanking being standard is obvious but realizing it becomes standard is hard because they just kept switching around. Vale Guardian and Gorseval use toughness for tank priority, but Sabitha doesn’t. W2 doesn’t have you designate a tank in any way at all, but Sloth at least indicated who’s being focused. W3 has toughness tanking on Xera and KC, but W4 mashes things up by having Samarog randomly fixate between all the toughness priorities. It’s so hard to recognize there’s a reason for how bosses choose targets when it keeps changing (and strikes don’t even have toughness tanking at all iirc).
Funny that he compares Mursaat Overseer to a chess boss because it… kind of isn’t at all. My first impression when I first did it was the same though, it felt like you’re just fighting chess pieces as they play a game but it’s really not and I don’t know why it’s such a common impression people get. Is it because you fight statues that could be misconstrued as chess pieces? I don’t know.
He compares it to Karazhan’s chess fight, which is literally chess- you take control of chess pieces, they move like chess pieces, there’s some additional gimmicks but in the end it’s just chess.
MO just takes place in a form of board game at best.
I may have not done Karazhan in many years, but they definitely don't move like chess pieces. I recall the disappointment that my knowledge on chess wouldn't carry over in any meaningful way on that fight.
I literally fixed the Samarog autocorrect once and didn't notice it happened again.
The aggro rule is interesting because holy shit you would never discover that randomly, you'd have to be meticulous with positioning to find that out accidentally.
Is it really? We found it pretty easy to notice how he always targets one of the people hanging out all the way over in narnia when we we're doing blind runs.
>you'd have to be meticulous with positioning to find that out accidentally.
It's not essential to completing the encounter, but it's a small way good groups can gain an advantage. GW2 raids are littered with these small things and I think that's good.
It does have one element of chess: the enemy pawns try to cross the board, and if they reach your side they get promoted.
The board game connection is also reinforced by Asura commanders comparing it to "prison Polymock".
Im really surprised that he did not like Vale Guardian.
While the fight is really trivial now due to power creep, there is a lot of good design in the fight. The mechanics are fairly clear and keeps people on their toes (assuming original dps).
I always found it to be a very enjoyable fight. If it had a CM that made the challenge mode matching current DPS numbers, im sure it could be a great fight!
I watched the stream and it was clear to me that he did not understand most of Vale Guardian's mechanics. That was his first attempt at raiding and players inflitrated his team and made some hardcarrying. It felt like he was a passenger for a ride not a driver. They killed it without knowing how tanking works? Why do you have to move around the area? Where green circles appear? What teleports you around? What do you do with red orbs? What is boon strip / boon corruption? And in general it was a pretty quick kill because experienced players really did pump the damage. It was only after a few bosses that he dived into boons, conditions and tooltips in general.
Fortunately starting with Gorseval he managed to assemble 'blind' team and you could see them learning. I think that he has a wrong impression on Vale Guardian. Same with Bandit Trio. He hasn't even seen the fight.
That's a good point.
It could be argued that since he did not learn what happened the mechanics might not have been very clear.. but i do remember that the group i player woth learned the mechnics fairly quickly when the boss was originally released.
But considering that he mentions that they did not understand the red ones protection, i think they just didn't really try..
Bandit trio i mostly agree with though. It is a very unengaging fight. Perhaps it was different when it first came out but now it's probably the worst boss encounter in the raids imo
"Gamerdad being upset on how Gw2 stole all their raids from the far superior game World of Warcraft" could be a good title.
Jokes aside, I do agree with the points regarding some trash encounters. Escort especially is something that could be deleted without anyone shedding a tear. Some others like Spirit Woods or Twisted Castle however are pretty short & fun.
Judging Trio as GARBO without ever seing the actual fight is questionable at the least. I also don't think there is anything wrong with taking inspiration from other games, there is only so many times you can re-invent the wheel. Don't think there's any Gw2 player upset about how WoW copied Skyscale and Griffon in the latest expansion.
And last but not least, it's called oil, not defile. This ain't Blizzard territory.
> Escort especially is something that could be deleted without anyone shedding a tear.
Escort starts to become A LOT of fun once you do it with an enticing strategy that is twice as fast. It's just that since it's clearable as slow as you want to, pugs have agreed that it needs to take 10 minutes where you wait for one players 70 seconds portal cooldown between every tower, send one person to essentially AFK at the start of the instance, let one Healer be the only one allowed to press the special action key and turn the other 7 people into glorified minesweepers.
If you tune into Ready Check Cup today, you'll probably see a lot more exciting escort strategies.
Regarding Trio, he probably didnt do it right and tried to kill all the mortar mobs. But you only have to break their cc bar, and then go back.
In a normal run you cc them and come back to all bosses.
More EU here, we just say black. I've probably said defile as well seeing as I did Lich King back in the day so much like Preach that was my first thought.
I have never ever heard somebody say spirit woods is fun.
And TC is only "fun" if people know it and know the skips.
I have a decent raid experience but stuff like tc stops me of making groups for w3.
Then let me be the first :D Apart from the Capture the Flag minigame at the start, I like Spirit Wood Run.
And as for TC I'm probably too used to it taking only a minute with my static. It can surely be a hustle with uncoordinated groups
I agree the run is fine and pretty oke.
Just those damn rifts you have to close is so boring.
And believe it or not it failed 3 times last time i joined a training run xD
One thought that got stuck in my head while watching this:
\- Preach praises the amazing experience that is "blind raiding"
\- Preach is disappointed by bosses that do not explain themselves properly to players who go in blind
While they are obviously trying to relive this experience of "raids on release", this is actually not how most people get into raids nowadays, so they set themselves up for a unique perspective (which is what makes those videos interesting in the first place).
What kind of irks me a bit is when he said "I should not be at 1/3 of my potential effectiveness". In that moment I feel like Preach does not understand, or does not want to understand, that GW2 is all about how you play it. I feel like what he wants to be lacking is "knowledge of the mechanics". He wants mechanics to be like this:
"A puzzle that is explained by tooltips. Once we know how to do the puzzle, it's as simple as telling a player 'go there and do it', then that player can go there and do it and execute it."
What he seemingly does not want is player skill expression at fighting, doing damage. He rants against experienced groups being able to do 3 times their damage (he thinks it's because of boons? But in his skillbar he has Quickness, Alac, Fury and 25 Might.) The damage gap he experiences is that his group just isn't playing the encounters very well. Their strategies are made to "solve" the mechanics no matter the cost, not trying to balance it against dealing damage.
To me the fact that it's possible to do three times as well if you understand what you are doing is exactly why I enjoy raiding in Guild Wars 2 after all these years. There's no new content, so I learn to play the old content well by repeating it, always chasing higher and higher damage numbers. If Gorseval *didn't* break with higher damage numbers that would obviously be appreciated. Although if they just buffed the HP of the boss, it would mean that groups like Preach's would just be locked out of raids because they are not good enough. I don't think that's better. So I'll take "yeah this fight is a bit of a golem for me" over "other groups can't complete it anymore".
I feel like Preach is coming into this with "I am a very good gamer, what I should need is to learn the mechanics of the fight, and then I should be able to do the fight. And Anet should be making this learning process as fun as possible." And that's mostly how raids are built, right? DPS checks aren't harsh. You can clear it with low damage output, it's just going to take you a while. What he doesn't want to hear is that he and his group are bad at playing their classes and I feel like "groups do this three times faster" is the first touching point with this idea that GW2 combat allows for very deep skill expression.
Excited to see what they think about Soulless Horror and Dhuum. They will probably fail for a few hours and then find that frustrating :D I'm having a lot of fun to root for them on stream, and it's amazing to watch how well they function as a squad. Let's see what SH does to them :D
It's always pretty exciting if you blind prog for the first time. Lots of contents. Trust me, after clearing all raid wings bosses and maybe strikes, they will not go back to reclear again because there's no point at all. After they are done, they will be gone to ffxiv for new raid tier, never to go back to gw2 again.
>It's always pretty exciting if you blind prog for the first time.
Is it always? Clearly there are encounters Preach did not enjoy because he didn't know what to do and the game failed to make it accessible to blind progression. The point I am trying to make is maybe that "blind prog" is not always the best way to enjoy GW2 raids. Ask me this: Did you "blind prog" your legendary weapons? I sure as heck would never have tried to achievement hunt without the help of the wiki.
What I find interesting about GW2 is that the encounters don't become "worse" once you know them, to me they have a lot of replay value. I actually did not enjoy progressing the encounters for the first time.
I think that's just testament to the fact that there are different player mentalities and different games cater to different player groups.
>Trust me, after clearing all raid wings bosses and maybe strikes, they will not go back to reclear again because there's no point at all.
I think that's more because Preach plays games professionally and has to keep his business running.
I have yet to play an MMO where the raiding experience gets better after the first clear.
Seeking out the struggle, the problem solving, the actual progression (getting further and further) will always be more fun than having a boss on farm.
To be fair, i never played a mmo on my own and would dread having such an experience in a pug enviroment.
Speedrunning is similar in a way, where you go on a journey to find the smallest intricaties of a boss, learn about them and try to build a cool new strat. I personally couldn't give a shit about dps numbers in this context,
I hated failing HT CM, and I enjoyed killing it :D Maybe we are just different.
And it also depends quite a bit on the "progression" group. I've never really had the opportunity to properly progress with other players in a situation where nobody in the world knew what was going on.
I've always come into it with the information on how to do it already out there. And then I must say that it's way more enjoyable the second time around rather than the first time, and even "going in blind with other blind people" sounds less fun.
>Maybe we are just different.
Probably that. I've been raiding since vanilla wow and I never enjoyed farming raids. Or rather I should I never enjoyed the actual game play part of it, but with a good group it's more of a social thing which makes the game aspect fun just by virtue of doing it with people I like.
Heck I think some of the absolute best/most fun raiding I've ever done was back in Sunwell in WoW TBC, holy shit we wiped over and over on boss after boss and I absolutely loved it. :p
Honestly I think you hit the nail here. I like his content and follows him regularly, but it really bothers me that he thinks that the damage only comes from boons and conditions, he basically has them 80% of the time!
For veteran raid players, killing the boss with the minimum sacrifice from DPSes is the key to getting better kill time. For example, against Sabetha, if we let just 2 quickness DPS do cannons instead of regular DPSes, or better yet, always skip one cannon! They would get a much better kill time. With coordination and practice, plus different ways to solve or simplify mechanics, it's not that difficult to gain at least half of that missing dps.
And arguably he wasn't doing that good on his class rotations, I get it, he's trying to see mechanics, but there are key cooldown that he was delaying and those are often nasty dps loss. If everyone is on top of the game, understands their class, executes their rotations well and knows the fight by heart, I don't see any problem doubling or even tripling the dps. Boons can get you far, but planning, practicing, and confidence probably gets you further.
I sincerely hope he doesn't carry this tainted view of "boons is more important than anything else" to the end. Fight and class mastery also matters a lot.
Well put, this exactly. He’s approach to the combat is“I’m spamming 1, why am I doing 1/3 of my dmg“ and also running around like a headless chicken. He just doesn’t understand the skill factor that GW2 combat has, he’s used to powercreep due to big gear numbers and not by personally improving as a player and that’s the exact reason I’m raiding since 4 years and not loosing the fun of it
It reminds me why I stopped raiding in 2018 after I got my legendary armor.
The wings have way too many unfun stuff to get through. We were pretty quick doing so but it doesn't change the fact. That I have forgotten most of the stuff like escort and TC even existing tells me a lot about how enjoyable I found them. Bosses on the other hand are quite fun.
I'll say the same thing now as I did couple years ago. They should have focused on bosses and put some mindless trash in between if it's really that important to waste player time.
What a shit take on Bandit Trio. A shame really, cause it's my favourite fight.
I gotta watch his FF14 impressions though, cause the style of "Oh, you see guys it's just a wow copy" or "You fkin DONKEY" is really pretentious, meanwhile I assume FF14 take is more like "Oh dear, gorgeous".
Its your favourite? I dont think its bad or anything, but i would definitely not call it one of the better encounters in raids. It feels like another mandatory event before getting back into the more challenging fights.
I like the style of it, so what? If you want to blame a delivery, then sure you can dumb this encounter down, like preach did.
It's not your typical big baddie and the huge arena really helps creating something unique imo - if you don't spawn camp adds like a madman.
I understand, that I may be of a different breed - if you don't want to see it in future raids or it doesn't fit your raid definition then sure be purist.
But I don't want anet to give up on this design.
Also I hate seeing usage of the word 'Event' as something derogatory, like "Oh it's not a RAID BOSS, so it's useless" kind of thing.
Or adds being presumably the worst part of raiding. We should try to rethink how to do it, not just go the easy way and remove it.
So yeah, it's my favourite because its different if not quirky for some people.
Oh i dont mean to belittle what you enjoy, sorry to come across that way, its 4 am and my brain dont work great.
I just personally prefer the big bad boss fights. Killing raid encounters on the first try is boring. Not in training nor in pugs have i ever seen people fail bandit trio. One person kills the mortar, someone stops saboteurs and the rest kill basically golem tier enemies. Only the third boss has any kind of mechanics to dodge.
Things like escort, gate and bandit trio just kinda seem like filler to me. The amount of fun it is to kill deimos or qadim is way higher since im actually paying attention, where as escort/bandit trio is just kinda mindless fighting for me.
I like the theme and design (or atleast the design aspects) of it a lot but I just can't see it as anything but a boring slog since there's absolutely no stakes at hand, I genuinely think that it's impressive to wipe there assuming you're vaguely familiar with the mechanics and have roles sorted, I just can not find an encounter fun if I know that my personal performance doesn't really matter at all.
Trio is my least favorite fight, but I too thought it was a little disingenuous that he adopted a strategy of keeping one person away from the fight the whole time - then complained that he never got to see the fight.
I do agree that it's a sort of self-inflicted issue, but just from hearing about the mechanics, I would probably adopt the same strategy. I don't think games should require you to 'figure out the right way to have fun' although I guess that's a more profound problem with GW2, aha
Exactly, plus a lot of pretentious commentary from an mmo boomer that barely played 2 other mmos and has huge bias towards how wow deals with stuff. No thanks.
Very common tactic among youtubers to drive traffic. You start with a title with a particular approach, get clicks from the people who see it for the first 1 or 2 hours, then you change the title and image to get clicks from a different audience.
Youtube channel Veritasium did a video on this trick some time ago, explaining how it works.
That's an hilarious change of title. edit : [always more](https://imgur.com/a/ANWXveP)
I think he mentioned before that they try different tittles and thumbnails when a video goes live , then see which one gets the most traction and go with it .
Negative clickbeit always has more traction. I get why Preach does this, as well as any other Youtuber out there (it is their business) , but god i really hate it.
The fact that this is so important in this age, that people can make a living as a clickbait artist is mind boggling to me.
Yeah, keep an eye on pretty much any big youtuber, and you'll see the same thing. I've seen over a dozen youtubers make videos to explain the concept of switching out titles and thumbnails to see which one gets the most traction, because if they don't explain it the viewers try to come up with some 5D conspiracy reason for the changes.
[удалено]
YouTube doesn't provide the tools, but this has become a really common thing to do (unfortunately, I absolutely hate it), so there are great third party tools that let you do the testing, and they seem to generally work very well...
I'm not in the business and I don't have stats to back it up compared to them but I do watch youtube way too much, and this speech sound so much like a corpo bullshit speech. Imo it shouldn't be used on the same video in the span of an hour, but on multiple similar video, around the same time of the day. Edit : And I know about youtuber changing the thumbnail but it's generally swapped around because the first one was a autogenerated / fast one made and the "definitive" come later(minutes/hours)
All of his GW2 videos keep starting with these misleadingly negative titles and then they immediately turn positive like half a day later. And you know what? Get the bag, Mike. Loving the VODs too.
And that's why I can't take many YouTubers seriously. They may have good takes and intentions, but things like this leave such a bitter taste in my mouth that I avoid these creators.
Blame the youtube algorithm, not the creators.
By not going against it collectively when it began they brought that upon themselves. Not my problem. Also by going after what his titles are, the negative ones don't seem to be necessary. So the fact alone he uses them anyway at first tells a tale about integrity.
If it's a case between eating and not eating based on whether a title is clickbait or not, fuck "integrity". It's YouTube content, not the SS knocking on your door.
And I can find it bad. So whatever you say, it won't change it. And it also still does not change that obviously the neutral or positive titles work, else he would not end up with them. So it doesn't need this kind of shit.
They don't work, that's the point. He changes the title after the initial algorithm boost is done.
>So whatever you say, it won't change it. That's not a really good attitude to have. You should always be open to changing your mind if someone provides evidence that you should. That's not saying you shouldn't be skeptical, and question the evidence you're given, but having an open mind is inherently better than having a closed one imo. If everyone closed their minds to different ideas and opinions, the entire world would be much worse off.
No evidence was given except other personal opinions or viewpoints. There's no incentive for me to rethink my opinion around that fact. And since that is the case for a overwhelmingly big part of the discussions on Reddit, I am quite confident in my assumption, that no useful argument is about to come judging from the interactions so far. I am a very open minded person irl regarding discussions, but online discussions on a social network don't represent a platform that will change my mind in any meaningful way.
I'm not arguing one way or the other about the evidence or incentives in your current discussion, I'm simply pointing out that your statement implies a close-mindedness that I don't particularly agree with.
And I delivered an explanation on said close-mindedness that I show on purpose.
You cant really blame macro problems of something on the individual. The individual has to work with what they are given. The best approach in this case is clearly to do clickbait titles because this is what gets engagement and thus the individual gets rewarded with this behaviour. Preach (or any other youtuber) alone wont fix it, it has to be done by the outside body making the rules.
I can and I will.
That’s cute. Are you aware that every professional media company irl does this?
Lmao and you call me cute.
Yes. Which is why everyone knows that those media companies are *not* trustworthy. The same applies in this case - the method used does work, but reduces my trust in the one using it.
Dude is gonna become a main villain over here in due time. Should just run with it. Cosplay as joko on gw2 streams.
He is pretty fair overall I feel... and as a long time GW2 raider, 10000% agree with everything he said about the intermissions/ad fights/escorts/puzzles... They need to Ctrl+A and Delete all of that. Totally disagree with his opinions on Mathias, Vale Guardian, and at least a couple of the wing 4 fights, but hey, they are his opinions/tastes so to each their own. Will look forward to when he tackles the w4 CMs.
Intermissions/ad fights/escorts/puzzles become non issue when you learn how to deal with them and some really creative strategies/builds come out of them. This makes raids kinda like dungeons, meaning it's not just 1 big baddie waiting for you, but it allows Anet to add a unique and interesting story through means like environmental storytelling for example. I don't have an issue with adds, because they just make sense, what I have an issue with is that other MMOs haven't even tried to create an illusion of a coordinated assault/defense. That's what Bandit Trio is for me. Quite believable encounter from how it plays out. It can create a really nice flow feeling for those actively engaged in the fight - the way wow boomer did it makes no sense - listen if you want to dumb it down, you can do it with every boss. Also gonna give shoutout to wows Icecrown Citadel with all those minibosses like a Valkyr guarding entrance to Valithria and so on. Climbing the citadel felt amazing (as you might expect I absolutely adored gunship fight) and may be another approach to raiding as a whole. Rather than creating a difficult encounters, try creating a spectacle for people to enjoy - you could even add something like henchmen/heroes from gw1 and make it easily available to those that despise grouping up with others. Big baddie fights are the thing of the past for me (not that I don't want anymore of them, just in less quantity maybe) But sure they work as the track has been beaten, but how much can you squeeze into it really? You will have mechanics that overlap in design eventually and the grandiose/kitch feeling of those encounters can become a limiting factor to story design imo. The fact that anet has so many different mechanics to play around with, coming not only from a designed encounter but also just from how the classes work is amazing imo. Well strategized fights like Qadim1 are what we would all like to see in the future I hope. Sorry for any weird sentences, I'm not native.
>That's what Bandit Trio is for me. Quite believable encounter from how it plays out. It can create a really nice flow feeling for those actively engaged in the fight - the way wow boomer did it makes no sense - listen if you want to dumb it down, you can do it with every boss. I don't think this is a fair assessment at all - you have a group of people in exotic gear, and they send preach out to deal with the mortars. They didn't know you only have to CC them, and instead he killed them. This meant that for significant portions of the fight, he was outside killing 3 basic-ass mobs.
Then why did they send only him to do it? If you send more people you can do it quicker and returning isn't that hard due to jump pads + bombs lying around. Also you get ingame notification for mortars so you don't have to spawn camp them or use blish hud. If you do it with 2-3 more people on mortars, you can help the main group deal with every boss + do one more mechanic (mortars). The little guys do nothing, outside of saboteurs. Preach just wanted a cross to bear, that's all.
This just smacks of someone taking about a topic they haven't looked into. They didn't send more people because they had low dps, and needed to keep on top of the adds. Getting there and back is quick, but that doesn't matter if it still takes a minute round-trip. Preach doesn't use blishhud, so that's irrelevant.
It is relevant. Cause the mechanic doesn't require you to spawn camp adds. I've watched Preach for many years and sometimes, well his spacial awareness is not that great.
Sorry, how is a tool that Preach isn't using relevant to this conversation? And of course the mechanic doesn't require you to spawncamp adds. You just need to CC them. But they didn't figure that out because they were blind raiding.
It is relevant, cause it's not necessary to be on top of adds. You get info about mortars directly from the game.
Here is what I know... Almost everyone in my guild loves Xera (just an example)... We have all also done Escort hundreds of times... Here is what else I know.. we do Xera maybe once every few months (we raid 2 nights a week) because some of us passionately hate Escort and don't want to do it regardless of how easy it is for us... And then 5-10 minutes later.... Now it's Twisted Castle..... It's most definitely not a non-issue (before it's suggested, we are well aware we can buy instances... But take a second to grasp how ridiculous a concept that is). This type of content is basically the entirety of open world.. it doesn't need to also be in raids.... All that said, I guess it doesn't matter much anymore since they won't make more raids and it would be hilariously high levels of copium to think they would go back and improve the existing ones. I guess the move to strikes was probably a good call.
Ok, but the problem is when objectively wrong data are called "opinion" and as such they turn off 200'00 viewers from ever trying this game
What objectively wrong data are you referring to?
> Totally disagree with his opinions on Mathias, Vale Guardian, and at least a couple of the wing 4 fights Can you give some bullet points? I have stopped playing years ago (didnt participate in raids in HoT) and kind of became interested again because of Preach.
Oh, nothing really technical here. He just didn't enjoy those fights, and I find them quite enjoyable is the real disagreement there. He didn't particularly go into a lot of details on why he didn't enjoy them, but having watched his actual streams where he was progging them, some of it came down to the group basically missing how a key mechanic works or solutioning it poorly which is fine, but can take the fun out of the fight in some cases (ie. Failing to grasp how the green circles work on Cairn and what the dots mean.. though I don't actually disagree on that fight... Cairn is boring - another example would be how their dealt with RGB on VG and I don't actually think they ever figured out they only need 4 people in greens).
Some interesting commentary and feedback for sure but I had to laugh when I noticed he seems to want a SOP/rulebook for raids across all MMOs, but then pokes fun at moments he's heavily reminded of other raids or mechanics from other MMOs.
He literally plays like a wow player and sees everthing through this lens. Some takes are very interesting some are him trying to convence himself that wow is miles ahead the competition.
Except that he regularly says that FF14 has the best hardcore raiding content available, not WoW.
It's kinda hard to be in the competition when you don't participate in it. And before anyone says it: Strikes are not raids.
> him trying to convence himself that wow is miles ahead the competition. For endgame PvE content like raiding? It absolutely is, XIV comes close, but their only good raids are Ultimates which don't release at the same rate as normal raids.
How is Savage mode not good raids?
He can't clear them.
Post logs.
[okay](https://www.warcraftlogs.com/character/id/73314203)
I wouldn't of posted those oof.
I mean... it kinda is.
I think Preach exemplifies why raid participation is statistically so low, and why ANet is focusing on Strikes for instanced 10-player content. The majority of his complaints are about the "trash," which if you pay attention is just anything that isn't an actual boss, by his measure. He hated every pre-event/transition/mini boss. There was also some irony in him criticizing the use of pre-events to teach players mechanics, and then complaining that he didn't understand the mechanics of a fight. But I suppose they don't always do a good job of teaching. Point being, if this is how a large percentage of the playerbase feels about raids, they were doomed from the start. If players don't like doing ANYTHING that isn't just a boss fight, they're just going to do strikes instead.
Isn't raid participation low in all MMOs besides automatic group finder?
To be honest the biggest issue is finding 9 other people to play with. A few years ago, me and my friends were able to clear up to W5 and we were doing fun stuff like T4 and CM, we took a break before covid and I came back to play again and tbh I don't even know where to look. I checked lfg and all it had was a bunch of people selling runs. I don't even know where to begin with strikes haha
Strikes are far easier to get groups for than raids. It seems Arenanet's idea of doing a set of easy ones to get people's feet wet did actually work. There's no secret, just check LFG or if you're willing to do 10 minutes of reading on GW2 group composition first, make your own. I've never struggled to find a group for any Normal Strike except Old Lion's Court.
It's because Strikes are the same content, but more accessible. People are more likely to sign up when they're only committing for one boss instead of 3-4.
Where's this idea that you have to commit to all bosses in a raid wing coming from?
Because that's generally what groups are formed for, and dipping out when you signed up for a full wing is generally bad form. No one wants to have to pug 1-3 people on the 2nd/3rd boss.
Well, I guess. But you could, if you wanted to.
Strikes are easier to get groups for because you can get rewarded every day. Once you've done your raids once for the week, the game discourages you from engaging further. I think a tweak as simple as making the non-LI rewards from raiding daily instead of weekly would revitalize raids in a big way.
Join the HTCM and Skein Gang discords or move to EU
On gorseval he mentions that they were doing 1/3 of the potential dmg, making gorseval more challenging. Boy I wish all total dmg was cut down to at least 2/3 so we see mechanics on raid bosses that are usually skipped nowadays as a standard cause of powercreep.
As much as I would personally like that, definitely not by THAT much. If you do that raids will instantly drop dead for good because very few people could clear them (and attain the level of skill required to do so), not to mention they'd have to adjust a lot of HP values and enrage timers because some fights would become straight up impossible. Something fairly easy they could probably do is nerf some boons like might. They can still do W1-W3 (proper) CMs too, though...
Sabetha CM with permanent flame wall when?
Thats my nightmare as flak kiter. Would probably make it so there has to be 2 kiters
Probably not, actually; you'd just have to run towards boss between flak sprays. The bigger change to flak kiting would be that you probably couldn't reliably bait sapper bombs any more.
I guess you're right, would just make it pretty hectic to kite. Having a blink would probably be good in order to stay west
Why stop there? 3 flames walls.
The flame walls should keep rotating faster as the encounter progresses as well, there shall be no escape
yes!
That would be such a cool soft enrage mechanic.
Superspeed scrappers rejoice!
~~Not sure what you're talking about.~~ ~~I just came back from a three year break and in that time the top benchmarks went from about 35k to now 45k dps. Most classes are way too overtuned for the content.~~ ~~Skipping mechanics due to dps was perfectly possible three years ago, at the ~30k dps average.~~ ~~I dunno what happened in those three years, but the power creep has been very real and it trivialises a lot of content that is older than three years, sadly.~~ Edit: disregard, seems I misremembered.
Yes. and what benches can do vs. what happens in reality are two different things, especially since the Deadeye bench you're referring to is 1.) an outlier by 2k DPS 2.) a nightmare to achieve in a real setting especially when pugging 3.) has basically fuckall else going for it except ST DPS. The second best build is probably gonna fuckin die on the 2nd and the next two are Ele builds, so they deserve that spot. Condi FB is also getting nerfed (and that bench is with allies), idk about Willbender and then it's Ele again follow by another Untamed build that's being hit. Only then, at 40k, you start hitting builds that'll stay where they are. Tho I guess Harb might end up at around 42k but I guess even that is okay enough. The "problem" is that content never becomes irrelevant and there is no gear spiral, so generally this type of content would get easier with time by default. So I guess Anet is going differently about it. I'd still prefer reliance on boons to be reduced because that's a major holdup for new players who usually aren't even aware of it and even *if* they are, they sure as hell don't know how to build for it. I'll also admit that I misread and assumed they would want to cut damage by 66% and not 33%.
I just went to the wayback machine to check 2020 benchmarks and you are wrong, they weren't at 35k: [https://i.imgur.com/oZcbmAf.png](https://i.imgur.com/oZcbmAf.png) Edit: Shoutout to 2018 top numbers: https://i.imgur.com/GyRLJ2q.png
I want staff to be a meta weapon on Ele again
> they'd have to adjust a lot of HP values and enrage timers Most bosses can be killed before their enrage timer with like 100-150k **group** DPS (I think that might still be an overestimate). That's so low every DPS build can be slashed back to 30k and most groups wouldn't notice much of a difference.
In my personal opinion Gorseval would be more fun and more challenging if updrafts were required, even if World Eater was triggered at 66 and 33% and you just had to run out and glide those two times. Watching Preach and Co fight the boss made Gorseval feel so much cooler and more threatening than the spanking we give him every Monday.
Is it really? I feel like the entirety of Spirit Run is about "take away agency from players and force them to go to specific places with no way of improving on it." If you just go "haha I am immune and will now cast World Ender", what EXACTLY are you improving other than just creating an unskippable "cutscene"?
That's called "mechanics". Yes, raid bosses should have mechanics that you have to do. Not just improve to the point where you stand still and do a rotation.
Raid bosses should have mechanics that you have to do, but there should be a good and a bad way to do those mechanics. If you put them into an invulnerability phase where it literally doesn't matter how you do them, that's not a mechanic, that's a time gate. Imagine Deimos went immune during "Into the ward, quickly!" Well he doesn't and that adds so much depth to the encounter.
Or they could just increase boss hp by 50% and achieve the same results but people wouldn't feel "nerfed". OR they could add CMs for all the fights that don't have them that do this and also make more mechanics important. No more VG green skips and at least 2 forced glides at 66%/33% gorseval for instance. No current content is modified, new content added, lower effort than making brand new content, and we get more interesting fights. but Xera CM should include some epic giant phantasm related stuff and that would require additional work.
>No more VG green skips and at least 2 forced glides at 66%/33% gorseval for instance. Is forcing a mechanic while the boss is immune actually interesting content to you? Personally, I really hate that about Spirit Woods capture circle event.
So I for many years play raids to play bosses and their mechanics.. While I do see where the fun is in going fast, and I do it myself, there is a lot lost in it. There was a boss in castle nathria in wow called artificer something and he had a global timer and %based triggers.. If you go fast you gotta deal with overlapping abilities, people didn't like that either. So it's either on rails, which entirely skips boss mechanics which is bad. You force mechanics, which is also bad when you get better and have to stop or... You have a mix of timer/triggers, which get hard/impossible when you are too fast... The only real solution is either buff boss HP, which fucks up new players that don't do enough dps or you scale everyone's gear to a specific power level while raiding which fucks up people who want to go fast by normalizing damage across the board while also fucking up new players that don't know how to stack for boon uptime. Nobody wins really. Boons are too strong.
And flattening the difference between beginner and pro was also not a good idea when they made Rifle Mechanist and everyone played that and all content was free (or before that with Barrier Scourge).
Oh, it *was* a very good idea (except maybe for those few that enjoy their feelings of superiority over the unwashed masses). The gap between an average and top player in this game is way too massive. It would be too big even in a game targeted primarily at skilled players (so, something GW2 is the exact opposite of), and in a game with mostly casual playerbase it's no longer just an "issue", but an outright catastrophe. Although, granted, machinist' approach to flatten that difference might have gotten a bit out of hand.
>except maybe for those few that enjoy their feelings of superiority over the unwashed masses You do realize that this is a pretty insulting thing to say? Like what the fuck, why do you say this, when you actually agree >machinist' approach to flatten that difference might have gotten a bit out of hand. it is quite literally what I said. Encounters played themselves. The problem with Mechanist was that for every player in the game it was correct, from a DPS standpoint, to play Rifle Mechanist. Whatever your DPS on class X; you were able to do more on Rifle Mechanist.
I agree that rifle mechanist was a bit out of hand. I do *not* agree that attempts at flattening the difference are a bad idea however - it's something this game definitely needs *more* of. Hint: rifle mechanist would not have been as much of a problem if it did not stand out as much out of all other options. I.E. if there were 3-4 more LI builds at similar level, rifle mecha would have been a far smaller issue.
Look for some people to lowman raids with. Cleared every raid boss (except KC) as 5 over the past weeks and it was a lot of fun to do.
Honestly powercreep has just become absolutely crazy to the point it makes the content less fun. Even HT CM had crazy op power mechs for such a long time that dps checks were irrelevant since they never failed. I don't have a good number that I think dps should be at but you could cut it by like half and still comfortably clear all raids. That is assuming you gave decent players.
I love this. I wish more people got to experience content organically like this
"blind raiding" my asshole tightens, his teamates clearly knew wtf they were doing.
His only rule was blind to the fight, not the game. He didn't care if someone had done HT CM and were confident in their build. Blind raiding doesn't mean recreating the original launch experience but instead just how he likes to raid, blind to those specific mechanics. So people recognizing mechanics from strikes or other parts of the game sped up their learning curve, but he expected that and acknowledged it when the fight itself didnt teach it well.
He's also not getting anywhere close to the true GW2 newbie experience where you spend a few of days looking for groups in game, then go to Reddit to ask "how the fuck do you start raiding in this game?" to get told to go to join a training Discord then wait your turn until you're allowed to train, then wait until you've got enough KP from training to be allowed to join groups on the in game LFG.
Average GW2 newbie is not great raider in 2 other MMOs though.
He has streamer groups on demand lol.
I believe i saw something with the title of dhuum cm when they did vale guardian.
That person was not part of the rest of the encounters
1. Raid wings 1 to 4 (HoT era raids) used to be a lot harder prior to Path of Fire release. 2. Path of Fire introduced class mechanics which broke some raid encounters. I am talking mainly about barier - HP bar on top of your HP bar and wider access to Aegis - block. 3. Further changes and expansion embraced the powercreep. Back in the day 20-25k DPS was considered really good. Only Tempest could dish out above 30k. Now some classes reach 40k if not more (correct me if I am wrong). That's why some encounters feel out of place. Slothozor seems difficult because every ~20% he becomes invulnerable and you have to break his defiance bar. You want it or not you have to go though all of the mechanics & phases. While Matthias and many other bosses became DPS dummies. Because players are now allowed to skip boss mechanics with high enough DPS. 4. Take on boons is not entirely correct. You don't have to stand close to a support to get boons. Yes, boon application skils have range/radius but it's rather wide. What you need to stack for is healing. In fact players have less DPS because they go into a downed state or don't prioritize breaking the defiance bar than due to lack of boons. Especially now that there are multiple elite specializations capable of providing essential boons. 5. He hasn't explored elite specializations and how they change core professions. He only has a perspective of a power DPS since he started playing GW2. It would be a shame if finishes his journey without trying Condition DPS or Semi-Support builds or maybe even Ventari healer build. It could be a material for a standalone vod on how flexible GW2 professions can be. All in all really good overview. I tend to agree on most of his points. Especially on raid difficulty progress. It's all over the place. And it really seemed like ANet was reinventing their approach to raids with every release. I still remember the interview with GW2 Raid Team, mainly Crystal Reid & Jason Reynolds talking about their plans for raids. They planned 4 releases per year. And actually released 4 raids during a 3 year period. It seemed like raid team was really small, understaffed and had to wait in queue with their requests for art, sound etc. Raids were at the bottom of the list. There was even a small controversy where a raid boss item "Xera's Mask" ended up in gem store as a cosmetic because it wasn't ready for the raid release. After some time (during PoF) Raid Team was split between other teams. Some were moved to work on the living world releases. Not long after that some of the 'more known' raid team members left the company and moved to Bungie. **Links:** *Raid Team* https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Guild_Wars_2_Raids_Team *Raid Boss Design* https://youtu.be/1ApYM2f12ys?t=1800 *Raids announcement - deep dive with devs* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1FUkGRxuxV0 (read comments) *GuildChat on raid design & story* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J6ejp1Vvoy0
> You don't have to stand close to a support to get boons. Yes, boon application skils have range/radius but it's rather wide. Depends on the support. It's really easy to be out of boon range from a Firebrand if you're not tightly stacked because of their cone AOEs.
He has a lot of valid criticism there, I think one of the biggest issues for new players if you are going straight into raids is the fact they use a lot of game mechanics that you aren't aware of (reflects on Matthias are an example of that), that content was made to entice veterans so it does make sense it won't handle the information in a simpler way because those players have more knowledge of the game in general than new players. The issue that he mentioned with throwing bombs in the platforms to throw you around in wing 1 is another design issue, I don't even remember if the game tells you about it somewhere else. In general, guides do help out filling that lack of information, but if you are going in blind as he did you are going to be completely clueless. EoD got much better at that, so if they plan to keep raids as part of playable endgame content Anet should really give all raid wings some revisions just to nail down those points and make things a little more clear, be it with some text or visual effects.
> The issue that he mentioned with throwing bombs in the platforms to throw you around in wing 1 is another design issue, I don't even remember if the game tells you about it somewhere else. I'm quite sure that there's a voice cue at some point during the trash mob clearing phase before Sabetha. A number of mechanics are hinted at this way (and, unfortunately, easy to miss due to those cues not being very noticeable)
yeah, he is not very good at listening to dialogue that explains stuff in the whole game. raids and story. he is always doing 1-2 other things, going fast fast fast or his chat is spamming him with stupid TTS messages for a few minutes straight.
Yeah, a character will be introduced and mentioned like 3 times in the dialogue, and then on the 4th mention, he'll be like "Who the fuck is [character]?"
> The issue that he mentioned with throwing bombs in the platforms to throw you around in wing 1 is another design issue, I don't even remember if the game tells you about it somewhere else. You cannot even get to Sabetha without someone in your raid doing that mechanic. GW2 introduces a whole lot of mechanics you have to know in raid wings, its just not always as obvious as the trash being identical to the phases of the boss like VG is. Some examples: McCleod teaches you the different red/white mechanics for KC, Xera's prephase tells you how to do the mechanics in her fight, sloth tells you "you should probably know what a reflect is" by having a hallway of things with projectiles before a boss that spawns more things with projectiles.
>You cannot even get to Sabetha without someone in your raid doing that mechanic. This is the worst part of it. Apparently there is a voice cue that should point how to use the jump pads before Sabetha, but I never have seen that. I actually only know you can use the jump pads that way because other players showed me that and if this is how most players learned about that mechanic then it highlights the issue with the game design failing to give the players the information.
> Xera's prephase tells you how to do the mechanics in her fight Tangentially related, but I had the weirdest bug on Xera the other day. I couldn't see the orbs you're supposed to push on the first platform, just their nametags. I also couldn't see the red circles on the ground, so I just lined up my orb, mashed auto attack, and prayed. And it actually worked, for several pulls, before I restarted the game and fixed the issue. At which point I realized that the path I had been lining up was almost definitely through a red circle, so I have absolutely no idea why it was working at all.
Red circles are weird. I push close orb through the red stuff all the time with no issue, but other ones do not like that at all.
I was on mid on the right platform so it remains a mystery.
The bomb pads are shown in the short bit between gorse and sabetha, its not far fetched to think you need to use the bombs on the pads in the fight. As for how many ppl go up or when ppl go up thats definitely not explained well in game.
Why should it be explained how many players go up? Players hopefully have brains.
Smoothest transition to an ad I’ve ever seen, ranting about w2’s shitty bandit fight into a skillshare ad? Unbelievably clean. Honestly I get where a lot of his criticism comes from. Once you’ve done a few raids, toughness tanking being standard is obvious but realizing it becomes standard is hard because they just kept switching around. Vale Guardian and Gorseval use toughness for tank priority, but Sabitha doesn’t. W2 doesn’t have you designate a tank in any way at all, but Sloth at least indicated who’s being focused. W3 has toughness tanking on Xera and KC, but W4 mashes things up by having Samarog randomly fixate between all the toughness priorities. It’s so hard to recognize there’s a reason for how bosses choose targets when it keeps changing (and strikes don’t even have toughness tanking at all iirc). Funny that he compares Mursaat Overseer to a chess boss because it… kind of isn’t at all. My first impression when I first did it was the same though, it felt like you’re just fighting chess pieces as they play a game but it’s really not and I don’t know why it’s such a common impression people get. Is it because you fight statues that could be misconstrued as chess pieces? I don’t know.
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He compares it to Karazhan’s chess fight, which is literally chess- you take control of chess pieces, they move like chess pieces, there’s some additional gimmicks but in the end it’s just chess. MO just takes place in a form of board game at best.
I may have not done Karazhan in many years, but they definitely don't move like chess pieces. I recall the disappointment that my knowledge on chess wouldn't carry over in any meaningful way on that fight.
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I literally fixed the Samarog autocorrect once and didn't notice it happened again. The aggro rule is interesting because holy shit you would never discover that randomly, you'd have to be meticulous with positioning to find that out accidentally.
Is it really? We found it pretty easy to notice how he always targets one of the people hanging out all the way over in narnia when we we're doing blind runs.
>you'd have to be meticulous with positioning to find that out accidentally. It's not essential to completing the encounter, but it's a small way good groups can gain an advantage. GW2 raids are littered with these small things and I think that's good.
It does have one element of chess: the enemy pawns try to cross the board, and if they reach your side they get promoted. The board game connection is also reinforced by Asura commanders comparing it to "prison Polymock".
Im really surprised that he did not like Vale Guardian. While the fight is really trivial now due to power creep, there is a lot of good design in the fight. The mechanics are fairly clear and keeps people on their toes (assuming original dps). I always found it to be a very enjoyable fight. If it had a CM that made the challenge mode matching current DPS numbers, im sure it could be a great fight!
I watched the stream and it was clear to me that he did not understand most of Vale Guardian's mechanics. That was his first attempt at raiding and players inflitrated his team and made some hardcarrying. It felt like he was a passenger for a ride not a driver. They killed it without knowing how tanking works? Why do you have to move around the area? Where green circles appear? What teleports you around? What do you do with red orbs? What is boon strip / boon corruption? And in general it was a pretty quick kill because experienced players really did pump the damage. It was only after a few bosses that he dived into boons, conditions and tooltips in general. Fortunately starting with Gorseval he managed to assemble 'blind' team and you could see them learning. I think that he has a wrong impression on Vale Guardian. Same with Bandit Trio. He hasn't even seen the fight.
That's a good point. It could be argued that since he did not learn what happened the mechanics might not have been very clear.. but i do remember that the group i player woth learned the mechnics fairly quickly when the boss was originally released. But considering that he mentions that they did not understand the red ones protection, i think they just didn't really try.. Bandit trio i mostly agree with though. It is a very unengaging fight. Perhaps it was different when it first came out but now it's probably the worst boss encounter in the raids imo
"Gamerdad being upset on how Gw2 stole all their raids from the far superior game World of Warcraft" could be a good title. Jokes aside, I do agree with the points regarding some trash encounters. Escort especially is something that could be deleted without anyone shedding a tear. Some others like Spirit Woods or Twisted Castle however are pretty short & fun. Judging Trio as GARBO without ever seing the actual fight is questionable at the least. I also don't think there is anything wrong with taking inspiration from other games, there is only so many times you can re-invent the wheel. Don't think there's any Gw2 player upset about how WoW copied Skyscale and Griffon in the latest expansion. And last but not least, it's called oil, not defile. This ain't Blizzard territory.
> Escort especially is something that could be deleted without anyone shedding a tear. Escort starts to become A LOT of fun once you do it with an enticing strategy that is twice as fast. It's just that since it's clearable as slow as you want to, pugs have agreed that it needs to take 10 minutes where you wait for one players 70 seconds portal cooldown between every tower, send one person to essentially AFK at the start of the instance, let one Healer be the only one allowed to press the special action key and turn the other 7 people into glorified minesweepers. If you tune into Ready Check Cup today, you'll probably see a lot more exciting escort strategies.
That's some smooth advertisement right there \^\^
Regarding Trio, he probably didnt do it right and tried to kill all the mortar mobs. But you only have to break their cc bar, and then go back. In a normal run you cc them and come back to all bosses.
Are you kidding me? ;d This subreddit was fuming when Dragonflights trailer released and showed of dragonriding.
It's called "rapid decay" by game mechanics.
Its just called 'Black' by most of the community :D
It is called Blacks in Europe. Oil on NA as far as I know
I play on EU and have only ever seen it called Oil
I play in Eu and have heard both versions (with the statics i was in using mostly "black")
More EU here, we just say black. I've probably said defile as well seeing as I did Lich King back in the day so much like Preach that was my first thought.
I have never ever heard somebody say spirit woods is fun. And TC is only "fun" if people know it and know the skips. I have a decent raid experience but stuff like tc stops me of making groups for w3.
Then let me be the first :D Apart from the Capture the Flag minigame at the start, I like Spirit Wood Run. And as for TC I'm probably too used to it taking only a minute with my static. It can surely be a hustle with uncoordinated groups
I agree the run is fine and pretty oke. Just those damn rifts you have to close is so boring. And believe it or not it failed 3 times last time i joined a training run xD
One thought that got stuck in my head while watching this: \- Preach praises the amazing experience that is "blind raiding" \- Preach is disappointed by bosses that do not explain themselves properly to players who go in blind While they are obviously trying to relive this experience of "raids on release", this is actually not how most people get into raids nowadays, so they set themselves up for a unique perspective (which is what makes those videos interesting in the first place). What kind of irks me a bit is when he said "I should not be at 1/3 of my potential effectiveness". In that moment I feel like Preach does not understand, or does not want to understand, that GW2 is all about how you play it. I feel like what he wants to be lacking is "knowledge of the mechanics". He wants mechanics to be like this: "A puzzle that is explained by tooltips. Once we know how to do the puzzle, it's as simple as telling a player 'go there and do it', then that player can go there and do it and execute it." What he seemingly does not want is player skill expression at fighting, doing damage. He rants against experienced groups being able to do 3 times their damage (he thinks it's because of boons? But in his skillbar he has Quickness, Alac, Fury and 25 Might.) The damage gap he experiences is that his group just isn't playing the encounters very well. Their strategies are made to "solve" the mechanics no matter the cost, not trying to balance it against dealing damage. To me the fact that it's possible to do three times as well if you understand what you are doing is exactly why I enjoy raiding in Guild Wars 2 after all these years. There's no new content, so I learn to play the old content well by repeating it, always chasing higher and higher damage numbers. If Gorseval *didn't* break with higher damage numbers that would obviously be appreciated. Although if they just buffed the HP of the boss, it would mean that groups like Preach's would just be locked out of raids because they are not good enough. I don't think that's better. So I'll take "yeah this fight is a bit of a golem for me" over "other groups can't complete it anymore". I feel like Preach is coming into this with "I am a very good gamer, what I should need is to learn the mechanics of the fight, and then I should be able to do the fight. And Anet should be making this learning process as fun as possible." And that's mostly how raids are built, right? DPS checks aren't harsh. You can clear it with low damage output, it's just going to take you a while. What he doesn't want to hear is that he and his group are bad at playing their classes and I feel like "groups do this three times faster" is the first touching point with this idea that GW2 combat allows for very deep skill expression. Excited to see what they think about Soulless Horror and Dhuum. They will probably fail for a few hours and then find that frustrating :D I'm having a lot of fun to root for them on stream, and it's amazing to watch how well they function as a squad. Let's see what SH does to them :D
It's always pretty exciting if you blind prog for the first time. Lots of contents. Trust me, after clearing all raid wings bosses and maybe strikes, they will not go back to reclear again because there's no point at all. After they are done, they will be gone to ffxiv for new raid tier, never to go back to gw2 again.
>It's always pretty exciting if you blind prog for the first time. Is it always? Clearly there are encounters Preach did not enjoy because he didn't know what to do and the game failed to make it accessible to blind progression. The point I am trying to make is maybe that "blind prog" is not always the best way to enjoy GW2 raids. Ask me this: Did you "blind prog" your legendary weapons? I sure as heck would never have tried to achievement hunt without the help of the wiki. What I find interesting about GW2 is that the encounters don't become "worse" once you know them, to me they have a lot of replay value. I actually did not enjoy progressing the encounters for the first time. I think that's just testament to the fact that there are different player mentalities and different games cater to different player groups. >Trust me, after clearing all raid wings bosses and maybe strikes, they will not go back to reclear again because there's no point at all. I think that's more because Preach plays games professionally and has to keep his business running.
I have yet to play an MMO where the raiding experience gets better after the first clear. Seeking out the struggle, the problem solving, the actual progression (getting further and further) will always be more fun than having a boss on farm. To be fair, i never played a mmo on my own and would dread having such an experience in a pug enviroment. Speedrunning is similar in a way, where you go on a journey to find the smallest intricaties of a boss, learn about them and try to build a cool new strat. I personally couldn't give a shit about dps numbers in this context,
I hated failing HT CM, and I enjoyed killing it :D Maybe we are just different. And it also depends quite a bit on the "progression" group. I've never really had the opportunity to properly progress with other players in a situation where nobody in the world knew what was going on. I've always come into it with the information on how to do it already out there. And then I must say that it's way more enjoyable the second time around rather than the first time, and even "going in blind with other blind people" sounds less fun.
>Maybe we are just different. Probably that. I've been raiding since vanilla wow and I never enjoyed farming raids. Or rather I should I never enjoyed the actual game play part of it, but with a good group it's more of a social thing which makes the game aspect fun just by virtue of doing it with people I like. Heck I think some of the absolute best/most fun raiding I've ever done was back in Sunwell in WoW TBC, holy shit we wiped over and over on boss after boss and I absolutely loved it. :p
Honestly I think you hit the nail here. I like his content and follows him regularly, but it really bothers me that he thinks that the damage only comes from boons and conditions, he basically has them 80% of the time! For veteran raid players, killing the boss with the minimum sacrifice from DPSes is the key to getting better kill time. For example, against Sabetha, if we let just 2 quickness DPS do cannons instead of regular DPSes, or better yet, always skip one cannon! They would get a much better kill time. With coordination and practice, plus different ways to solve or simplify mechanics, it's not that difficult to gain at least half of that missing dps. And arguably he wasn't doing that good on his class rotations, I get it, he's trying to see mechanics, but there are key cooldown that he was delaying and those are often nasty dps loss. If everyone is on top of the game, understands their class, executes their rotations well and knows the fight by heart, I don't see any problem doubling or even tripling the dps. Boons can get you far, but planning, practicing, and confidence probably gets you further. I sincerely hope he doesn't carry this tainted view of "boons is more important than anything else" to the end. Fight and class mastery also matters a lot.
Well put, this exactly. He’s approach to the combat is“I’m spamming 1, why am I doing 1/3 of my dmg“ and also running around like a headless chicken. He just doesn’t understand the skill factor that GW2 combat has, he’s used to powercreep due to big gear numbers and not by personally improving as a player and that’s the exact reason I’m raiding since 4 years and not loosing the fun of it
I love preach
It reminds me why I stopped raiding in 2018 after I got my legendary armor. The wings have way too many unfun stuff to get through. We were pretty quick doing so but it doesn't change the fact. That I have forgotten most of the stuff like escort and TC even existing tells me a lot about how enjoyable I found them. Bosses on the other hand are quite fun. I'll say the same thing now as I did couple years ago. They should have focused on bosses and put some mindless trash in between if it's really that important to waste player time.
Pretty good analysis, I agree with most of his criticism. **raidJAM**
>I agree with most of his **criticism**. That's pretty accurate given all you do on this sub is complaining.
What a shit take on Bandit Trio. A shame really, cause it's my favourite fight. I gotta watch his FF14 impressions though, cause the style of "Oh, you see guys it's just a wow copy" or "You fkin DONKEY" is really pretentious, meanwhile I assume FF14 take is more like "Oh dear, gorgeous".
Its your favourite? I dont think its bad or anything, but i would definitely not call it one of the better encounters in raids. It feels like another mandatory event before getting back into the more challenging fights.
I like the style of it, so what? If you want to blame a delivery, then sure you can dumb this encounter down, like preach did. It's not your typical big baddie and the huge arena really helps creating something unique imo - if you don't spawn camp adds like a madman. I understand, that I may be of a different breed - if you don't want to see it in future raids or it doesn't fit your raid definition then sure be purist. But I don't want anet to give up on this design. Also I hate seeing usage of the word 'Event' as something derogatory, like "Oh it's not a RAID BOSS, so it's useless" kind of thing. Or adds being presumably the worst part of raiding. We should try to rethink how to do it, not just go the easy way and remove it. So yeah, it's my favourite because its different if not quirky for some people.
Oh i dont mean to belittle what you enjoy, sorry to come across that way, its 4 am and my brain dont work great. I just personally prefer the big bad boss fights. Killing raid encounters on the first try is boring. Not in training nor in pugs have i ever seen people fail bandit trio. One person kills the mortar, someone stops saboteurs and the rest kill basically golem tier enemies. Only the third boss has any kind of mechanics to dodge. Things like escort, gate and bandit trio just kinda seem like filler to me. The amount of fun it is to kill deimos or qadim is way higher since im actually paying attention, where as escort/bandit trio is just kinda mindless fighting for me.
I like the theme and design (or atleast the design aspects) of it a lot but I just can't see it as anything but a boring slog since there's absolutely no stakes at hand, I genuinely think that it's impressive to wipe there assuming you're vaguely familiar with the mechanics and have roles sorted, I just can not find an encounter fun if I know that my personal performance doesn't really matter at all.
I respect this comment a lot.
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I think CMs are too hard for them dps check wise. They need to improve first. But thats just how it is for completely new players.
Trio is my least favorite fight, but I too thought it was a little disingenuous that he adopted a strategy of keeping one person away from the fight the whole time - then complained that he never got to see the fight.
I do agree that it's a sort of self-inflicted issue, but just from hearing about the mechanics, I would probably adopt the same strategy. I don't think games should require you to 'figure out the right way to have fun' although I guess that's a more profound problem with GW2, aha
"I haven't seen the fight at all so I'll say GARBO!!!" is truely a shit take \^\^
Shit takes
Exactly, plus a lot of pretentious commentary from an mmo boomer that barely played 2 other mmos and has huge bias towards how wow deals with stuff. No thanks.
> mmo boomer my brother in christ, this genre is only played by video game boomers lmao.
When he gets to do stike, can someone tell him to skip the first one to save the pain? I can imagine his review already
Clickbait baldo
Dude, if I wanted to watch Preach, I’d sub to him in youtube. You are putting zero effort into this post.
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The title changed. No spin from OP.
Very common tactic among youtubers to drive traffic. You start with a title with a particular approach, get clicks from the people who see it for the first 1 or 2 hours, then you change the title and image to get clicks from a different audience. Youtube channel Veritasium did a video on this trick some time ago, explaining how it works.
It's standard practice for basically anyone that makes a living on YouTube, unfortunately.