Tyrian Chronicle: Are We Really Ready for Raids? .

The release date for Heart of Thorns is rapidly approaching, and with the expansion comes what is arguably the most significant change to the game in years, if not ever: the addition of raids. Players across the internet seem torn on whether this is a welcome avenue for challenging content, or a sign of the game being taken in an undesirable direction.
Part of the concern naturally comes from a lack of detail and hands-on experience with the new feature. Until Heart of Thorns is actually here, every new piece of information that ArenaNet provides is dissected and debated. The most recent example of that is this September 30th tweet by Crystal Reid, one of GW2’s raid designers:

It appears as though players will need full Ascended gear to complete raids, and it would probably be ideal even on the early bosses too. ANet has stated previously that raids will not require agony resistance, so it seems a safe if somewhat strange assumption that raids will require the very small stat difference that Ascended armor provides.

It’s an interesting idea that makes you wonder just what these boss encounters will look like. I have a hardcore raiding background, although I’m a happily retired casual player now, and I’m naturally biased towards being pro-raid, but based on the information I’ve seen so far I have to wonder if is Guild Wars 2 is really mechanically ready for raids.

 

Raiding by Profession

One of the most common boss encounter types found in MMOs is the “DPS race”. In this style of fight there are few (if any) fancy mechanics or positioning requirements – you just have to burn down the monster as quickly as possible before it kills you. If indeed, as Reid implies in her tweet, a 10% difference in stats can be the difference between winning and losing a battle then it seems fair to assume that there will be plenty of DPS races for new raiders.

DPS races are a reasonable concept in a game with very tightly balanced DPS classes. When all damage dealers can expect to have a similar output in similar situations, you don’t have to worry about what exact class people are playing.

Guild Wars 2, however has never really worried about balancing the DPS output of all professions. It’s part of the game’s charm, honestly! You can be an efficient damage dealer, or play a support role, or just make portals and leap around the playing field while giggling to yourself. One of the selling points of the game at its launch was that there is no such thing as a “DPS profession”.

Now imagine that you’re a raid leader in Guild Wars 2, and you’re trying to put together a team that can burn down a very tightly tuned boss. Are you going to bring a Necromancer, or another Elementalist? (Hint: it’s the Elementalist.) We’ve already seen this problem come up to some degree with Fractals, but profession exclusion has the potential to be so much worse in raids.

 

Tools of the Trade

Although based on the current state of professions the Elementalist is the clear choice in our earlier scenario, anyone with some raid experience knows that it’s entirely possible for a good player on a sub-optimal profession to outperform a bad player on an optimal profession. Unfortunately, in Guild Wars 2 you’ll never know if this is the case, because at the moment there are no tools to monitor DPS.

Let me be clear here: I dislike DPS meters in the vast, vast majority of situations and I don’t think they have any place in a casual or PvP-focused game. I would prefer they weren’t used at all, ever. But if you’ve been given a boss encounter that has very strict DPS requirements for success it makes beating that encounter a lot more challenging if you have no idea how you’re doing or even how close you are to hitting the magic numbers.

If ArenaNet wants to add challenging raid content to their game that will satisfy the top tier of PvE players, they need to also include the tools that enables those players to do their job.

 

Turning on the Gear Treadmill

Another unique selling feature of Guild Wars 2 is that it lacks a gear treadmill. This philosophy was put slightly to the test with the addition of Ascended armor, but ArenaNet has stuck to their vision and no additional tier of gear has been introduced since 2012. That’s a pretty good track record!

That fact makes you wonder what treasure the final boss encounter will yield. Will players be asked to don all Ascended armor to kill the final boss and.. get more Ascended armor? If additional future raids increase the difficulty, what gear requirements will those have?

We can’t answer those questions yet, of course, but there’s a reason why raiding and gear treadmills have gone hand-in-hand in other MMOs. ArenaNet doesn’t necessarily have to head down this same path, but it will require some careful planning to avoid it.

As with everything relating to Heart of Thorns, we players won’t know exactly how things will work out until after we get our hands on the expansion on October 23rd. Even Reid’s implication that the final raid bosses will be encounters that only the best can beat should be taken with a grain of salt: every raid designer in the history of MMOs has claimed that their content will be the biggest and baddest yet.

However, most MMOs are designed to support raids from the beginning, whereas Guild Wars 2 was arguably initially positioned as the “anti-raid” game. In ArenaNet’s defense the addition of Fractals and Ascended armor – at the time hailed by many to be a fundamentally game-destroying move — has in practice become a fun and functional part of the game.

Will raids be the same way? We’ll have to see, but my old school raiding instinct isn’t sure that Tyria or its players are entirely prepared for what’s to come.