Guild Wars 2 Heart of Thorns - The State of Raiding .

This column is the fourth and final part of our on-going Heart of Thorns review. Previously we covered my first impression of the new expansion, a critique of the difficulty level of the new areas, and a closer look at the changes to dungeons and World vs. World battles.

This final review column is about the most recent Heart of Thorns feature release. That’s right, it’s time to talk about raids.

Spirit Vale is the first wing of the first raid in Guild Wars 2, and it opened to players on November 17. Raids are designed for ten-player groups with an expectation that they’ll be decked out almost entirely (if not completely) in Ascended gear. There currently is no LFG tool for raids, as the difficulty level requires a level of coordination and determination that generally comes only with pre-made groups.

The first boss in Spirit Vale is the Vale Guardian, and the encounter features mechanics that will be familiar to any players who have raided in other MMOs, such as add phases, debuffs that require particular movement, and not standing in bad things.

They Like Me.. They Really Like Me

It’s impossible for anyone outside ArenaNet to know exactly how many groups have killed the Vale Guardian in the first 24 hours after the launch of Spirit Vale but a quick look at the Guild Wars 2 forum and subreddit show that it’s still a rare feat but not uncommon.

What is surprising is the almost overwhelmingly positive feedback from the community so far on what was arguably HoT’s most controversial feature. Even players who have spent all of their time in Spirit Vale dying report loving the experience of learning and slowly improving at this challenging encounter. To quote player “warbignime” from the official forum: “Been playing for 10 hours straight and just having so much fun getting wrecked because we know that it’s possible and we keep improving.”

10 hours straight is obviously more of a commitment than most players are willing to make, but the point is that people who wanted challenging, end-game content in Guild Wars 2 seem to be pleased with this first boss.

A Variety of Professions

One frequent comment is that this first encounter has been well tuned to accommodate a variety of professions and builds in each group. Professions that have been seen as sub-optimal in dungeons, such as Engineers, have been showing up in a number of victorious boss attempts.

So far most groups do appear to favor having a Druid, the new healing-oriented elite specialization for Rangers, but the boss has been killed without one. Instead of the standard reliance on the trinity of “tank, healer, and DPS”, players report that the Vale Guardian abides by ArenaNet’s original launch doctrine of “damage, support, and control”, with condition builds in particular being lauded.

That being said, there are already clear favorites for group composition. Reddit user “netjive8” put together a chart tracking the profession and build in every successful kill for the first 24 hours, and Revenants and Engineers are the clear favorites, followed much further behind by Warriors. As of the time of writing, Thieves and Necromancers are the least likely professions to be in a successful raid group. (This is likely due to bias against those classes as much as their ability to contribute to the group.)

Most players report that “the Berserker meta”, or wearing gear with the Berserker set of damage-boosting stats, is still the way to go in these early raid days, though there has been a lot of talk of condition damage being a big deal as well.

Rewards for Everyone!

As mentioned earlier the new raid portal, which is located in the Verdant Brink map, is not currently available through the LFG Tool, and the assumption so far is that this is at least in part because the ArenaNet raid team didn’t expect a pick up group to have the ability to beat the boss.

But not so fast! A random group did manage to down the Vale Guardian on Wednesday night. Player “TehChaza” and their three friends went through a number of random members over 6 hours, but by the end of the night they managed to clear to the first boss, down him, and then clear the trash up to the second boss. (Their group even included a Thief!)

The loot for killing the Vale Guardian was reported as “mostly random Exotics”, with one mini and the new Ascended level dagger also dropping.

At the moment the biggest complaint about the raid actually has nothing to do with the raid itself. The entrance to the raid is in the open world, in Verdant Brink, a zone that absolutely cannot succeed without a population of dedicated players. Unfortunately with so many people lining up to try the raid the zone fills with people who are idle and not helping the zone events. So those people who are trying to complete the zone find themselves too few and scattered across who knows how many instances of the map. There have been many different suggestions from players on how to fix this ranging from better LFG tools to a separate instance for the raid entrance where people can gather without interrupting the flow of the zone. Another option is to start the raid in a city, Rata Sum being the closest makes the most sense. You gather in Rata Sum to start your raid and then are flown to the location of the raid thanks to the magic of cutscenes. Just make sure you don’t have any Sylvari with you.

Too soon?

 

It’s still early days for the new raids, but the first impressions appear to be quite promising. Players who yearned for difficult, end-game level content are calling the Vale Guardian encounter fun and exciting, and at least this first boss seems to support a variety of Professions and builds.

It will be interesting to see what the rest of Spirit Vale holds for players, and whether the difficulty will decrease to be more friendly to time-conscious random groups as time goes on. For now, though, ArenaNet appears to have a surprising success on their hands!

What has the raiding experience been like for you so far?