Mike was finally able to try out some of the group content and had an awesome time in Fractals and his first Strike. As well as seeing why dungeons were left by the wayside and exactly how this 'no Holy Trinity' thing really worked... by basically having a Holy Trinity lol. Anyway what did you think about the evolution of Guild Wars' group content? Drop a comment and let us know.
The game didn't have any healers on release. There is definitely a tank/support dps healer trinity in the game now, which overall makes the game easier and allows for the support style players to carry floor dps like Mike was at level 35. Also it seems like Mike might struggle with Revenant compared to a less active class, since it seems he uses pretty bad keybinds and presses everything very slowly. Like, his world vs world gameplay was basically like watching a 4 year old draw holding a crayon like a dagger. Lastly, I don't think there is any raid footage in this video, and I doubt Mike could ever get the voice in the void title but I'd like to see the journey and the attempts
The boss that was shown in this video is actually the newest Strike/raid boss of GW2 (released about 4 months ago). And one of the Fractals was also the newest one (from 2020). You were essentially bouncing between the most recent content and content from 10 years ago. Also Strikes replaced raids in GW2. The Challenge Mode versions of Strikes are pretty much the new raids in GW2 and the only difference is that you no longer have trash and events between bosses.
@@Neox999this is a disingenuous reply. killing one boss is not a "raid". Also don't pretend fractals ever got updated. They really never did other than certain "CM"s. It was years and years of nothing when it comes to arenanet developing this game, and that's aside from the general lack of difficult endgame content, even the quarterly balance patches, since the latest expansion, have been incredibly underwhelming and overall poorly done. There are story missions in ff14 that are arguably harder than 99% of content in gw2, and that's kind of a joke, but it's also what you get when you make a horizontal progression game designed for the lowest common denominator type of player.
@@drewjozz I'm not here to argue, but how are the current FFXIV "raid" bosses any different to trials or (CM) strikes besides being part fo the same story line?
GW2 added the Fractal dungeons years before WoW added M+, clearly inspired by it. So correct statement would be: Mythic+ is WoW's version of Fractals from GW2!
why do ppl compare m+ and fractals? i dont get it the two concepts are completly different. there is no competition in guild wars 2 fractals whatsoever so there is nothing to compare to a competitive game mode like m+ .... cant be just me feeling that way? there are no rating/timings/leaderboards so there is no one trying anything hard or out of progress - its just other dailies based on how long u play the game.
@@Slackw4x Huh... M+ is a timed instance variation of Fracs and always has been.. It is just ANOTHER mechanic that WoW has stolen in its life.. No need to get all mad and white knight WoW.. It has always been this way and it is even a meme BECAUSE, it has happened so often.. Same thing with DFs dragon mount..
@@arthon3753 no i still dont see that at all... fracs are another implementation for normal/heroic/mythic reflected in different tiers(1,2,3,4) introduced after trying to do WoW-inspired dungeons. m+ is the successor or extension to core dungeon difficulty and fracs are simply not. so no m+ cannot be inspired by fracs because fracs are nothing more then base difficulties which WoW had since the early days. btw im a gw2 player just in case you think i try to defend the blizz shit show. but i would love to see something like m+ in gw2 so i cannot agree with everyone saying that we already have that when in reality - we dont!
@@arthon3753 well, based on your input i actually checked out the wiki for details. the lack of information players get ingame about fracs is actually a problem. im a new gw2 player - i hit 80 with my first char like 4 weeks ago and in contrast i have arround 13k hours in WoW - stopped after legion ended. so yeah to make it clear a good friend introduced me to gw2 and gave me fractals as a reason why i would definetly enjoy it. but at least til now it feels like fractals are just one little side hustle in this game where no one really cares about? its hard to find players doing something other than "gogo dailies" and so i was not able to find any challenge in fractals whatsoever - at least til now up to tier 3. im srs and dont want to hate on gw2 at all, i had one of the best leveling and open world experiences EVER.. like i wasnt expecting that ngl it was really awesome. that said - yesterday it was the day where i kinda decided gw2 is maybe not the game for me just because of all i tried to explain. but now i realize its actually other reasons that i dislike it other than fracs are not really m+. i enjoyed the ~70% of fractals i played so far up to tier 3 but as i said it wasnt really a challenge and THATS whats missing for me - so yeah im definetly more of a horizontal progression type of guy with all the benefits it brings for gameplay - others might disagree on that ofc. but yea i realized it was really the struggle with my friends trying to do better times better routes on higher and higher m+ keys with different pulls and so on what made it great for me. i kinda searched the EXACT same experience in gw2 and well - its great - but its not even remotely close. so yeah the game is great and i will enjoy fractals up to max just because the challenges are new mechanics but after that... thats it right? would you agree that a non-capped leaderboard-timing style of fractals would make sense no? just to try and push you and your friends over just some mechanics - i mean... i dont know i play the mechanic what - 5 times? but after 5 times i can kinda close my eyes on playing that no? i guess u get the point i try to make - i think it would be great for gw2 to have something more then just that. but hey it just doesent catch me so yeah - still thanks for ur input and lets see what they do with the game
I feel like the "completely blind only doing what the game holds my hand to do" is a poor approach when you miss things like this. It's a massive RPG with immense amounts of player agency and freedom, it'd probably put more players *off* if there were a bunch more pop-ups and tasks and suggestions of doing this raid and that strike and whatnot. They have big icons on the map, players should feel compelled to actually explore the world they're in.
Yeah I got an aneuvrism trying to understand how he got so wrong. It's fine thinking that on the spot because you've been going a little too fast, but on stream+while editing? Damn that's a huge mistake.
@@emikochan13 This is true. And if you intentionally go about things as if you are an ignorant, half blind child you won't be exposed to the grown up parts of the game. Or you'll go into a five man fractal when you've been told by everyone that it's group content (bUt ThE gAmE dIdNt AuToMaTiCaLlY bRiNg Up LfG) you'll get flattened.
Fractals does drop ascended trinkets, weapons, and armor. The higher the fractal tier the higher the chances for ascended gear drops. you can get rings from robot vendors pretty cheap after like 3 days of daileys. You farm the currency from dailey fractals to buy the gear from robot vendors, ascended gear color is pink in wording. Rings can be upgraded twice via the mystic forge so you can get 3 infusions of agony on each ring. WvW is totally getting reworked i would check in after the rework coming soon.
Tbh I've had better luck getting the asc greatsword from Dragonstorm than getting asc weapons/armor from fracs. All fracs seem to give me is rings, rings and some more rings for good measure.
From memory the 'trinity' became a thing with raids once the Elite specs began to be added which allowed Anet to create more specialised specs that occupy 'trinity' slots without upsetting existing players by making core changes to the basic classes.
It actually existed before that too. I haven't played for years so I don't know if it was changed but back in the vanilla days, guardians could put out a lot of healing with that big book ult (I forgot what it is called) so that was your default "healer" if you needed one and people with more armor were more likely to to aggro and I remember me playing a warrior with soldier's gear and in most boss battles I was the only one who got aggro and on trash I used hammer and CC skills to deny trash the opportunity to harm people and sort of soft-tanked and it worked really well :)
@lamebubblesflysohigh they didn't introduce tanking/healing roles till heart of thorns expansion, which is also the expansion that introduced raids, with that, they integrated the toughness stat to coincide with designating tank roles, the player with highest toughness auto becomes the tank, with the introduction of the druid elite spec for ranger in heart of thorns we had the first major healing role, path of fire expansion then introduced the healing guardian elite spec you're referring to.
@@lamebubblesflysohigh that wasn't really comparable to introduction of druid, that was most likely elite healing cooldown, other then that people had to rely on healing skills with big cd that everyone had.
@@lamebubblesflysohigh yes but no content really called for it, maybe lvl 50 fractals back when they were the max but dungeons (and fractals for the most part) were always just "kill it before it kills you". The closest thing we had to a support was mesmer time warp and phalanx strength warrior lmao
You can make a group for yourself if there’s one available. There can be any number of group’s advertising for the same thing in the lfg. The advertise your group button creates your group.
He done that, he playing most them with viewers who were also blind aside from thr first dungeon. Im guessing wasnt really important to mentionbin the video i guess.
To say you can't create dng groups in lfg is just wrong. The button was right there, he even hovered it. But if the user doesn't click with mouse the error is NOT the PC but instead sitting right in front of it.
@@713Lord is it possible that a veteran gamer such as preach not understanding the system intuitively is more of an evaluation of the system itself than of the player?
He just got confused about it because when he tried making a group a couple times on stream people in the LFG would merge their group with his when he created it so it would look like he auto-joined their group. Chat tried to tell him but he wasn't reading it too much then since he was trying to figure stuff out on his own.
The idea of builds in Guild Wars 2 and the trinity that kind of always existed was and is that any class can fill every role. Some do it better but there are niches for every class and build exploration was a huge part of the game for me. You can look at the best builds online but you can also make it your own.
Back in vanilla dungeon trains were the way you made money, so you would run all paths daily excluding some of the slower or annoying ones. That's why he has them memorized
Or you did money by soloing them and selling the completion. Ascalon was basically famous for exactly this. So people did the same path like 20-30 times a day alone and memorizing the dens isn't really that crazy anymore at that point
Those dungeons were so freaking hard on the first month of the game release, no one knew what to build, elite spec power creep was not there and it was recommended around level 35, great times!
My experience with GW2 is playing it for the first 3 months of its lifespan....I look back on those times and I don't remember having much fun. I want to try it again at some point since the game has matured a lot and I assume is much better now, but the memories of the early days just keeps me away for now.
Mike, I'm going to say this as a player who lovingly adores World VS World: If you want a full experience, you need to be on voice coms and join an organized group from your server. Just like a raid. You can solo WvW, but the intent is team based play of various group sizes. You will see different opinions on meta's, comps, group sizes, and strategy. Reguardless, get in some kind of organized group like you would for a PVE raid. It can and will be a random zerg v zerg, unless you hear the commications taking place between the players and various commanders who are online. The best groups will utilize game mechanics, have structured party comps, utilize terrain, and have a driver calling commands and movement similar to a conductor. Other groups can be as small as 2-4 players built to harass and pick off members of larger groups who get separated or lag behind. While other players really try to focus the match and prioritize defending and upgrading the infrastructure on the map. If you ignore all of that, yes it feels like one giant zerg on zerg
Sadly its like this these days which is why I stopped playing it. Miss the pre HoT days on small realms where it was casual and you could do things solo and still help out. Did basically nothing but WvW from launch to HoT, 5000+ hours of it and barely touched the game since then, sadge.
@@JathraDH I'm in mostly the same boat. I played heavily launch through the HoT, and focused WvW heavily. I still play, but no where near as much. I remember playing before comander tags were in game. And I had the most fun before they merged servers and created the current iterations of the point system. But, that's not the current game. So, may as well try and make sure Mike gets the full experience. As the game will not prompt him to join a group. Much of what makes WvW what it is, was player driven. Voice comms, commanders, the WvW community is all player driven
@@dusk1947 For sure yeah. Current is so serious because of the server merging, and while there is certainly fun in that, it's not really my thing. 100% agree you should be joining the server voice for a good experience these days. I bought GW2 specifically for WvW because of my time with RvR in DAoC and it delivered a similar experience for a time. Alas, all things are destined to change, just as DAoC did. Thanks for the reply.
@@JathraDH The pre HoT patch was probably the best state the game was ever in at least in terms of WvW and sPvP. WvW just was never the same after the stability change from duration to duration with stacks.
WvW was my favorite part of GW2. Once you get the hang of it you can just lose yourself there. I did a lot of roaming on my own or with a couple friends and when running into a Zerg be prepared to die. Lol. When I got better I was able to pick off people in the Zerg on my Thief while calling out in chat for our server to come. It’s great fun.
The section which you call "Meta events" are actually not that. Meta events are map-wide events which you'll become more familiar with in LWS2 onwards. There's a ton of amazing ones. What you played in Tower of Nightmares is something different, there's not too many of those and Tower of Nightmares has to be the most painful one. It's also the oldest one.
As a player since launch, would classify tower of nightmares, battle for LA, twisted marionette, and dragon storm as an instanced public meta or world boss, though tower doesn’t really have an end boss like the other ones.
Can't wait for him to see Auric Basin and Dragonstand (?)last zone anyways in HoT. Didn't realize till recently that that fight is whats happening while you do your own last part of the story. so cool!
@preach gaming, The history on no raids at launch is this. At the time of launch, Arenanet knew you couldn't do raids without a clear holy trinity. So they developed their dungeon system that could work with a multitude of builds and be successful. Also, there was a strong sentiment in the community, that Arenanet was pushing as well, that raids brought toxicity to MMO's because of elitism behavior, and Arenanet was very publicly clear that they're against that. So much so, that it's kind of a meme in the community to a degree now. So yeah, it took them a long time to figure out, hey, if we don't up the difficulty of this game, our veteran players are not going to stick around, and we need to teach people how to play the game, and make easy builds that anyone can be successful with. It took them about 6 years to get there after launch, really. They've abandoned raids now. They only release strikes. Strikes are raid replacements. I'm not saying there won't ever be another raid, be Arenanet has been known to surprise us from time to time, but right now, I don't think it's in the cards, unless serious amounts of people start playing the raids.
I do have one correction for you. There is a gear reason to do dungeons. At least two of the armor rune sets you can get from dungeon currency is used as the meta, one set being the absolute best for healers, the other a set for condition based dps. There are other rune sets that are used for other builds, but there is definitely a reason to do them. Regarding ascended gear, there are several different ways to get it, but the gear will always be bound to your account. Note it will never bind to a character, so you can swap it via the bank to other characters as needed. You can craft it, get it from drops in fractals and even World vs World open world, you can also get it from vendors in fractals, strikes, pvp and WVW for the currencies in those game modes. The stats on ascended gear is (I think) another 10% higher than exotic, and has the same values as legendary armor (once you get to that).
At launch the “trinity” was soft: control, damage, support, but no content really utilized anything resembling roles. Support was boons and buffs not actually pure healing (but heal ele and guardian had decent sustain output though scaling was trash so investing in damage was just better) but the game was built on damage mitigation and avoidance (the game is still like this) Control was…. Useless as there was no real need for cc or area denial in PVE in the early days no encounters where boss placement or tanking mattered The original philosophy hasn’t changed much, was that the roles were supposed to be fluid. players would recognize an attack and play reactively… problem was the developers gave players awesome tools. But nothing that really required them to be used. At launch. It took the devs a while to get over the fear of ally targeted heals and ally targeted skills in general. As they were just added in 2022.
Back in the day, that part of Ascalonian Catacombs with the burrows was by far the hardest part of this dungeon. The idea was that you would be overwhelmed by the huge amounts of mobs that would keep spawning out of the burrows and would have to frantically rush to destroy them to beat the encounter. With player experience and a ton of power creep it's now obviously a boring walk-over, but that wasn't the initial design - and that initial design worked for quite a while.
It depends on your class, for some it's harder because of player nerfs. Back in pre-HoT I could solo it with elementalist if I played it well thanks to the big hitboxes on the burrows allowing Frost Storm, Lightning Storm and Meteor Shower to destroy them before you could get overwhelmed. Nowdays it doesn't really feel feasible to solo anymore due to all of those skills getting hard nerfs vs big hitboxes.
I must say that I've really enjoyed watching you experience gw2 for the first time,😀it is very exciting to watch your reactions to the story and all that stuff! WvW is where I've spent the most time in Gw2 :D such a fun mode! the gameplay changes so much depending on how good the commander/commanders are, when to push/flank/buff and fake, when to sneak around and ninja capture smaller but critical points to drag their attention, or you can make a 2-5+ smaller group and run around capping camps/sentry and smaller towers and get into duel fights with others. I've played so much WvW that I have managed to craft a full WvW Legendary armor set and soon the legendary WvW ring
Yes, zerg is the easiest way play WvW, so probably best way to get accustomed to it, but after getting some confidence and proper build, you can do much more.
You know what's funny: Project MMO is set out to "clear the current raid tier (or equivalent endgame content) in as many games as possible" Ironically the Strike "Old Lion's Court" that you cleared technically already *IS* the "latest"/"current" endgame encounter that was added to the game. (Nov 8 2022) Much like Raids, Strike Missions were not originally part of this content, namely Living World Season 1. In fact the concept of Strikes *in general* came to the game *even later* than Raids did. Because LWS1 was originally removed after its release and only re-implemented over the course of 2022, this Strike Mission was added "retroactively". So it is some of the highest quality content, drawing from over 10 years of experience on the part of the devs as well as new engine technology, while things like the Tower of Nightmares or The Battle for Lion's arch are more on the lackluster side, because their age is showing much more intensely.
Voice in the Void would be the correct equivalent of "current endgame"... Harvest Temple CM preach will never complete. He's just not mechanically skilled enough
this "waiting for spawn" thing in the dungeon was really hard a long time ago , because if you didnt have enough dmg you got overwhelmed by all the mobs and died :) as allways in mmos, things were harder at the beginning xD
Ascended gear comes from crafting it yourself, RNG luck in specific meta and boss events, collections, and you actually CAN buy ascended gear from vendors. It often takes special currency or specific achievements, but it is an option. Crafting the gear can be spendy on your bank and in game currency but after crafting legendries and putting it into perspective, it really isn't that bad LOL (EDIT) Tower of Nightmares is called Tower of Nightmares for a reason 🙃😭
Likely you've already done the research but the generally agreed upon roles are "offensive support/defensive support, and dps" Your healers are going to be defensive support. They'll be healing of course, while also permanently providing most of the boons for the entire subgroup, mostly defensive boons but often offensive as well. These days healers will provide either Alacrity or Quickness too. Your offensive supports are going to be dps that sacrifice some of their dps output to give either Alacrity or Quickness, depending on which one your healer provides, as well as Fury and other incidental boons. Most specs have to specifically gear for it. There are also some niche roles that are specific to encounters (usually raids), as well as off-healer builds like Heal Scourge which is so incredibly broken it can carry an entire 10 man squad to victory.
This is true. Fractals were released 11/2012, just 3 months after GW2 released, as Anet had evidently decided that dungeons weren't going to work the way they wanted it to. Mythic+ was released in 9/2016 and apparently modeled somewhat after the Fractals system. It's nice when game studios can take good systems and create their own versions for their players to enjoy.
"No holy trinity" never meant that people could not heal others, it meant that there is no healer class or "path" dedicated to just healing. Everyone could heal themselves but many could also heal people in group and even outside of their group, and not all were equally good at it. The elementalist which in other MMOs would only be a high damage mage could heal very well with his water attunement for example, but at the click of a button he would revert back to being a DD. Likewise there was no dedicated tank class and the tanking mechanic you encountered neither is, nor was ever "the" tanking mechanic. Different bosses have different mechanics, and sometimes all it would take is to equip an armor set with different stats and you would become the tank ;)
The best meta events are the ones from the Heart of Thorns expansion in my opinion. They act as a second side of the story as you progress through the expansion, along side the story instances in each zone. They're on a schedule based on IRL time, and there are guilds that will run them (i.e. make sure there are enough people in the map, use commander tags to form groups and broadcast instructions).
Some of the metas in the Season 4 maps are _damn_ good too, by the way. Istan, Kourna, Dragonfall. Kourna's an acquired taste but I led that one _so_ many times I've come to love it. It's short and gets easier as it goes on. And don't get me started on the final boss metas of IBS and EoD.
Fractals do provided ascended gear, but it's not reliable even at its maximum difficulty, so your best option here is to simply craft the armor and weapons and buy the accessories from vendors. Sadly, fractals aren't as infinite as M+, they only go up to 100 which in terms of difficulty it would be the equivalent of something between a +15 and a +20 depending on the fractal and instabilities up on them for that day, which is our equivalent of weekly affixes. It's by far the most fun content the game has to offer in my opinion.
I can't wait till you get to Heart of Thorns content. It's so brilliant and unique for an MMO experience. And playing it 'blind' as you are, will make it even better!
Heart of Thorns puts so many other games to shame. That expansion is unreal. Cant wait for him to jump into it aswell. Hopefully chat is gonna let him do it blind as much as possiblr
Strikes are actually new content that was released later in the game than raids, the reason you're encountering strikes before raids now though is because of the re-release of living story season 1 that has not been available until recently because of technical issues and having to rework it to be replayable. It used to be one time thing that was never supposed to be available again, until Anet realised that this wasn't a good idea and made all living story content after that first season be replayable content. Raids were released with Heart of Thorns expansion.
The main DPS gain that you're lacking is a big mix of things. A big part of it is not canceling auto attack chains and keeping up damage uptime on the boss at all times by utilizing dodge rolls, trusting healers and aegis etc. Another part is boon and condition management. There's a massive difference between a group that can output constant 25might, fury, alacrity, quickness, and 25vuln on the target. Another relatively big part is gear. Ascended gear, while not mandatory, is at the very least a 20% increase in damage, and on top you'd have sockets (infusions) etc.
I played at launch and I can totally get why there wasn't a raid. The launch version of Guild Wars 2 was absolutely intended to be at odds with everything that WoW was at the time; there was a real tone of deliberate contrarianism to it. It felt like a risk, calculated, to create novelty and only compete with WoW in areas where Blizzard struggled. I honestly think its a large part of why GW2 is still running; people tend to be very positive towards something that dares to break the mould.
when people claim GW2 has no trinity is behind the times, you can in fact play a trinity role in the game, some of the harder content does in fact require some trinity play to even get through. which goes to show, you still need the trinity in game play, even if you personally think you dont.
Couple remarks: you can specifically list your group (and state the intention& experience level/requirements). The other group probably merched with you, but this isn't normally the case. For your 2nd dungeon run you definitely had 2 experienced players aswell. You can see the mastery level right beside their character portrait. you can expect someone with mastery level 300 to have spend atleast like 750 hr into the game. If you hover over their portrait you can see their total achievement points aswell to give a rough estimation of their game knowledge & skill level. For ascended gear during fractals: you can actually craft ascended gear with materials you get in fractals. The npc can be abit tricky to find, but there definitely is one. For WvW id highly recommend to join a more organized raid group on voice. Although. 20v20 combat system (or upwards to 70v70) is always abit mess, there is still alot of coordination & teamplay involved. Its definitely worth it to check out again if you can find a proper group & running some sort of WvW build.
Fractals are the best beginner friendly way to get endgame gear. It is the classic slow approach to getting endgame gear over time with a stellar gold per hour extra. Love to see the content!
low lvl fractals are terrible for gear. most of the few rings you get wont even have good stats on them. there is no simple way to gear with ascended until the expansions/living world seasons.
@@yvindvego9404 Laurels and Guild Commendations can help with purchasing Ascended Trinkets. However, not all stat combinations are available this way (ie no Viper’s stats).
Sorry if this means spoilers, I tired to keep stuff generalized - PvE Tanking in GW2 usually is either Proximity, Effect based or Toughness based - Some mechanics might be Kite-able as in the tank cannot but either the whole group or some players can deal with them ( most often proximity based - example closest person that doesn't tank or furthest away) - Visualizer for Mechanics are often the Special action Key ( SaK ) standard bound to "ß" or Icons above the players Head or in the Boon/ Buff area - other than that its only about Green AoE (mostly friendly fields where you want to stack as a group) and Red/Orange AoE where you want to avoid them or carry them out of group
During beta there were a lot of people who were going on there needed to be the holy trinity. It screwed up Elementalist, Warrior, Gaurdian (warrior cleric type, or paladin-esque class), and Hunter at launch. I had been playing an Hunter and a Gaurdian. I loved that I could stand face to face with something as a gaurdian and not worry too much about most things as I had a few good shields that were AoE and one had a small AoE heal that also helped downed players in my sphere of influence. Hunter I could command my pet to go revive while I distracted and taunted the enemy off the downed player. My husband loved Elementalist for the damage output and he could use, water for ice slows, electric holds, earth shields, and back me up with distractions, crowd control, and toughness boons from all four elements. Warrior could not be touched for sheer melee damage output, shield or no shield, they just were "tanks" on the battle field. This was the early beta, before we started getting the hackers. The other classes each had their own specialty abilities, but everyone could depend on each other to be able to do something. Everyone could revive, everyone could heal, everyone could be the focus if they used their shields (whether physical or magical) to protect others, and players could work as a team instead of being stuck in a role or outright ignored because of class. There was no worries about who could do the holy trinity until we started seeing people (the hackers) running around with no armor, doing one shot kills, and always complaining out in chat (we didn't have private chat during the beta tests) that there was no holy trinity, that the content was too easy, there was no challenge. So every class had something changed and it made it dangerous for some (Elementalist had damage squish, but water got more healing power, guardian lost heal shielding and protection bubbles, the protection bubbles became lower damage condition for shorter times, the warrior now had to bear the brunt of the damage by themselves, with no boosts in their toughness and damage output squish as well, Hunter became a joke, the pet couldn't revive anymore, distractions became a horror show with all the changes). I at this time tried out Necromancer, who had been before a bit broken, but it had been balanced and played more like a Warlock from WoW. Luckily, so the early beta player thought, it was only tried for one weekend beta test. We had three more betas before launch, but we noticed anyone complaining about the naked killing machines on the field who were telling everyone that there was no challenge and that there needed to be a holy trinity, they were getting banned in the forums between betas. When that was noticed, we stood back, knowing that the one weekend might be what we get at launch. Which was what happened. I ended up not playing my preferred classes, hunter, guardian, warrior, and elementalist. I ended up playing necromancer, later I did make a hunter, but it never was the same. After 7 years of being away, and my husband and I left when Heart of Thorns first came out, where Anet sold it as only core and expansion, there was no separate upgrade for players who already owned the game. It was when a lot of older players left for sojourns to other games. I only recently had contact with old friends to come back and give GW2 a new try. I had been playing other MMOs, I (sorry to say) had become fed up with WoW and EQ(1&2), bored with ESO and a few lesser known name MMOs, and had lost interest in FF14 (might go back, but I got a little tired of story being shoved through dungeons, even with the NPC grouping, every few talk scenes lately, and the difficulty to level up a few of the other classes I wanted to play on the side when not playing my primary class or crafting.) Coming back to GW2, some of the problems post beta had been corrected, but there was still an underlying holy trinity to some of the classes. Though, I have to say, at least I can play my hunter and guardian a little more, the elementalist still has a heavy lean towards being a healer over damage, I have not gone back to playing a warrior, but the necromancer has a good feel and no heavy handed warlock influence. I specialized into Reaper for my necro, using a great sword and plowing through enemies with conditions and solid melee damage, makes me feel pretty good on days where I need to vent frustrations. The hunter, I use the pet as a boon to my fighting, by binding it to me while fighting, pretty cool, and guardian dual wielding....not something I expected to have fun with, I switch easily between sword and board to dual wield and not feel like I lost anything. Heart of Thorns was as annoying as I thought it would be 7 years ago, but it did give me good practice with the glider, I stopped dying every time I got knocked off a path by a champion during the "night" attacks. I just hope that the later expansions, as I get into them, will be just as fun. I do have to say, not playing through the Living World story lines (not exactly rolling in money enough to unlock the chapters I missed) I have lost the story line and had to play catch up with what was going on from clues dealing with new people I apparently met during Living World seasons. I never did dungeons or fractals in GW2, since they were not required for the story or area.
So, dps benchmarks are typically done with most boons (all the DPS ones, in any case), food and utility buffs, full ascended gear, and infusions. If you're doing a benchmark without boons, in exotic gear, no food/util or infusions, 8k isn't really as bad as you might expect. If you were using Snow Crows, they have a post somewhere that explains what setup they are using for the golem benchmarks.
Old Lion's Court is actually in top 3 of the hardest strike normal mode encounters. Totally doable and learnable, less DPS dependant than Harvest Temple, but it requires good cooperation and leadership not to dissolve into a madhouse and merry wipes. Congrats on beating it, Preach, even most well-prepared raid groups had some hours woorth of training it on release and you did amazing while going blind on whole buff system and raid composition!
Isn't it the other way around? HT NM you can do with little to no DPS as there is no form of a timer. Whilst in OLC if your DPS is low the arena will slowly fill with the blue stuff.
@@hanneskarlbom6644 to be frank, I can’t really tell, but having really good Dps on soo-won’s sphere reduces chances of a rag-tag groups of casual raiders wiping due to overaccelerating the heart of dragonvoid into the wall. Add cleaving is also really needed if you don’t just snipe everything in first 10 seconds of the phase
This man is going to love the Dragon's End meta. Hopefully he gets to start at the beginning and goes with a *half*-blind *half*-newbie group who *just barely* makes it. Some of the most fun I've had in GW2 was when the community was progressing the map and we finally started killing it! That first kill was just... *chef's kiss*
Idk if you know this but if you type /wiki (type anything here) it will take you to the wiki and show you anything you need to know. A very very useful ingame feature
Healing exists, usually done by healer supports or tank supports! for example, heal alacrity mechanist provides alacrity, might, and heals. AND is a tank! To tank usually the player with the higher toughness usually attracts the bosses attention. Other encounters care about positioning, like Old Lions Arch. And some are just randomly selected who gets to tank.
Yeah the no holy trinity thing was much more of a thing earlier on and like a lot of concepts arenanet kind of juat abandoned it. So much so that they pushed staff ele into a support role really hard, unless they changed that again.
They instead put the holy trinity to most of the classes in game. I really love i can become a dps, healer, tank, or boon provider in one class. I main revenant, and it's so refreshing to just change my build anytime
If I recall, Old Lion's Court was added with the Living World Season 1 revamp last year. And Strikes as a whole were released in Season 5, past the second expansion.
The zerg thing definetly happens on the WvW, but from my experience from years ago, each server has a number of very organized guilds that lead those zergs on open discords, with strategic calls (like sending a detatchment to go capture a point) and tatical ones (like during a clash, calling out for when and where to charge, focus the damage and use the siege weapons). Those guilds also organize between themselves the timings for when each one will be leading, so there's almost 100% uptime of an active lead group for each server. At the time I've played, raids were not yet a thing, so this was the main form of group content, and the community around it was gigantic and very receptive.
WvW is definitely something you want to try out with some experienced players so you can try fighting large groups in a more coordinated way. It has a very satisfying loop if you can get over the initial hurdles.
So the interesting thing about the trinity in guild wars 2 is that I don't think the intention was ever for those roles not to exist, but rather that they wouldn't be enforced and there would be a bigger focus on personal responsibility. The game absolutely shipped with gear that was designed for players who wanted to be tanky or provide more support for their group, and a lot of classes had ways to heal their party. The issue was that with the ability to avoid most damage and self heals were it wasn't avoidable mixed bosses that didn't really require stacking all of those powerful buffs, that the player meant there wasn't really any reason for players to do anything other than play really selfish dps specs and brute force everything, at least until bigger bosses like raids and strikes and more specialized elite specs started coming in that needed their niches to actually function to be worth using.
All of those "35K DPS is projected" moments on guides assume the entire "raid" buff suite is active. From unique profession buffs to the standard boons. So if you don't have some of those elements it can drastically affect your output. Not to say Elite Specs won't play a part - they absolutely do - but they are just another piece of the encounter puzzle.
Word vs Wolrd is one of those things where you have to be in voice call with the rest of the players. I remember years ago on Desolator running around together with others in a teamspeak call. One of the best pvp experiences I've ever had in mmos. Not streamer friendly, unless you actually lead your server.
You mentioned being surprised that "There is a Strike but there's no raid" and that the game launched with no raids. I don't know if you're aware by now but the Strikes were not in the base game either. They were added with the 5th Living World Season - The Icebrood Saga in 2019 so 7 years after the game released. Raids were introduced in the first expansion - Heart of Thorns in 2015. Some things you might not know were not in base game off the top of my head: mastery, mounts and gliders. I haven't done Tower of Nightmares but there is something I'd call Meta Events. The one I remember most clearly is Dragon's Stand. The way it works is the entire map is basically one giant group event with multiple stages and every player on the map takes part in an assault. The players work their way towards the other side of the map where there's a huge arena with a final boss. I enjoyed experiencing it quite a bit.
The trinity was soft reintroduced with the first expansion. That's when raids were added is why. The trinity isn't needed outside of Raids, Strikes, and high level Fractals. In the open world you can play whatever build you want.
Go to group finder and find under strikes one that says 3 daily easy ones or smth, (under the experienced tab) that should get you into it as long as you hit what the commander hits. That will get you into strikes without having to really worry or learn anything
Hey Mike, I only recently found your content and as a veteran GW2 player it is dope watching new folks embrace the content. To answer your ascended gear question, Fractals does drop Ascended gear. It is super rare. You can also use the Fractal Relic currency to buy ascended gear. The main way to get ascended gear though is crafting.
Mike, you should definitely try WvW again with an experienced group. I’ve been playing almost exclusively WvW off and on since launch, and its best moments come from two large, organized guild groups going head to head. These guild based zerg fights are actually much more organized and coordinated than something like Alterac Valley. There are clearly defined roles for each class (profession) with dedicated supports and dps, a clear frontline supporting its backline, etc. You need to find a guild on your server that you can tag along with at least temporarily and be sure to join their discord and listen along. It is usually easy to join a Commander (called a tag) and just ask in chat for a discord link. Many guilds include randoms in this way. You don’t have to commit to joining a guild. The way this usually works is a Commander (with an icon above his head) will vocally direct the whole zerg and call for specific actions like a “bomb” (coordinated usage of cc and damage spells on a specific area used for the purpose of downing and killing a couple players) or a committed push into the enemy zerg with the intent of wiping them. At higher levels, Commanders will employ mindgames like using Mesmer portals (imagine 20 people teleporting behind your group at the same time) or more commonly group-wide stealth with Engineers or Mesmer veil. If you’re interested in seeing what each class brings to a zerg, check a site like Metabattle for starter builds. Timing matters if you want the highest quality fights. Try to get a sense of when your server’s peak hours are. Also, every week, the WvW servers reset and the standings are updated. What this means is that the WvW servers go down for an hour, but when they come back online, the slate is wiped clean for the week and everyone rushes to get in and that’s when you see massive 50 vs 50 vs 50 three-way fights between all three servers for core objectives on the map. This is “reset night” and you absolutely must experience this with a competent guild at least once or you cannot say you’ve really seen all that WvW has to offer. To anyone else reading this who wants to try WvW, I absolutely recommend just finding a guild/commander tag as mentioned above and asking if you can join for reset night. It will fundamentally change the way you see WvW. Good luck!
6:50 well to be fair: it´s actually the other way around. Fractals were added about 3 months after the initial release (so late 2012), so it´s not gw2's version of mythic+, but rather mythic+ is the WoW-version of Fractals. yeah, that's nitpicking, but for some people it´s very important. 11:00 Fractals DO provide ascended gear, but that is somewhat limited and basically depends on the Tier. You can buy ascended rings from the vendors, which you can then upgrade twice (attuning and/or infusing) to add additional infusion-slots to get more agony resistance. The rest is often acquired via crafting (requiring a maxed out armorsmith/leatherworker/tailor) which can get quite expensive at times. World vs World is kind of a little "special child", because the community has like, a few "factions" of players (not to be confused or related with the "factions"-expansion of the first Guild Wars game), which basically splits in pugs ("randoms" that just gather together basically), more progressive players and highly progressive guilds and commanders. The expectations of these groups are very different, and if you don´t tell them that you are a new player, they expect you to at least know the basics. But generally speaking: in large squads, if you tell them you are a new player, MOST commanders are very kind and helpful, will explain what is going on, which builds are (more or less) required, or rather expected from you, and it can get a very nice expierience (you probably already noticed that this is the MAIN game mode i personally play). 11:55 the actual numbers are around 80 players on Eternal Battlegrounds, and around 100-120ish on the other 3 main borderlands PER SIDE. The lag can get very ridiculous, but that usually happens when all 3 teams collide with full numbers (for example, 2 squads of 50 fight each other, and it can be fine. but once the third party shows up with another 50 players skills don´t go off reliably anymore. But usually moving and autoattacking still works fine, so that´s probably what you expierienced, as the "typical" lag is very rare (rubberbanding and stuff). You pretty much died in the zerg-scenario because you played a build that was not suitable for zerging. You used sword/sword on revenant, which doesnt really work in that case unless you know exactly what you´re doing (melee-damage is not easy to pull off, though not impossible if you know what you´re doing). Dumbing it down you could say, you have supports and ranged DPS, with some exceptions. That´s what i also meant with the builds-stuff earlier. Which actually brings me to another point: you don´t run the same build for every content. The more flexible you are with your build-choice, and the better know your class, the more accessible each type of content becomes. Since we have horizontal progression on gear, the PLAYER is the main deciding factor in this game (2 players with the exact same build and gear can perform completely different based on how well they know their class, build and the content type they play. that difference is MASSIVE). For example (the easiest one to compare): an expierienced player with the same build and gear can deal over 10-15 times more DPS than a player that just slapped that exact same gear and build onto them, not really knowing what they´re doing. 13:07 i already touched that part, but it´s more a mix. We have solo-roaming (usually 1- at max 3 people doing smaller stuff), smallscale (usually about 10-15 players), guilds (that usually act with 20-25 people, that can somewhat be compared to a range of progressive up to hardcore raiding-guilds with extremely skiled players). And then we have zerging/blobbing (the most popular one) with up to over 50 people going against other zergs and big objectives. Again, player skill does really matter, i personally have busted 50+ zergs with my 20ppl guild in the past, just because of the massive difference in skill, tactics and coordination. So that point is kinda wrong on your side, assuming even numbers the better coordination and execution will win, randomly throwing your stuff at the enemy won´t get you anywhere. 14:30 the strike you got in (Old Lion's court) is actually a quite challenging strike-mission. It's not the most difficult, but the mechanics are a bit harder to grasp in the beginning. The difficulty varies a bit though (especially in the End of Dragons-strikes), and all of them also have a challenge-mode (with Harvest Temple Challenge Mode from EoD being the hardest encounter in the game so far). 16:00 yeah, they came back to KIND OF a holy trinity, but NOT in the classical MMO-sense. Yes, tanks, healers and DPS-splitting exists, but it goes beyond that and is way more flexible. Tanks are only a thing in raids and the OLC-strike you did, but they are not "only" tanking. Every class has a variety of tasks, and it mostly revolves around key boons (alacrity and quickness basically). Every "role" (and that includes MOST classes) is capable of fitting a combination of both (for example: a healer can also be a quickness-giver, or a DPS can also be an alacrity giver), and in many cases one of the healers can also be a tank at the same time. that´s called "role compression" (fitting the tasks of alacrity/quickness and healing/tanking into the least players as possible to free up more spots for pure DPS). This is basically limited entirely to raids, high-tier Fractals and the OLC-strike. You don´t need that in dungeons or open world AT ALL. Also, tanking is not based on a single aggro-mechanic (we don´t have a "hate"/"enmity"-system in the game). Every encounter has a different mechanic. that can be: the player with the highest toughness, the player closest to the enemy (which you encountered in the old lions court), sometimes you have a special action key, sometimes the boss picks it at random, and some bosses don´t even need to be tanked (or cannot be tanked) at all. It´s all encounter specific, and limited to instanced content. 17:22 adding onto that: every character grants some boons. but (as i said before), we specifically look at quickness and alacrity. revenant (herald in particular) is able to fit the quickness-slot, and renegade fits the alacrity-slot. so your profession DOES provide boons, but your specialization wasn´t capable of that. So yeah, not entirely true, but not entirely wrong either. But judging by your footage, you figured out pretty good. 20:37 you probably looked at a build from snowcrows. snowcrows is one of the most popular and one of the best (if not THE best) raiding guild in gw2. Their builds are highly optimized and their benchmarks are done in a perfect environment with a very specific setup (all boons, all conditions on the enemy, stationary golem). Important here: it is a BENCHMARK with perfect execution. the maximum dps possible. You will never reach that amount in a real encounter because of mechanics and your execution, but skilled players will get very close to these numbers if the conditions are met. And yes, the elite-spec has a MASSIVE impact on how you play your character, so that was the reason (you were lacking essential traits in the elite-spec traitline). 25:09 Meta-events are not public instances (technically). Every PvE-map is an instance of its own, and these instances are opened and closed based on the amount of players on the specific open world map. They are frequently occuring, with some being on a timer, and some being tied to an event chain, so you cannot compare them to instance content (dungeons/fractals/strikes/raids). Tower of Nightmares IS a fkd up instance tho, but that´s because its VERY old content where ANet didn´t know how they wanna handle it yet (Living world season 1). They abandoned that approach and changed on how they did Living world afterwards. Additional note: Living world initially was a time-limited release of story and events in the world (hence the name, an everchanging world). But players hated that and they abandoned it, changing to a more expansion-like approach. There is a very common quote in the r/guildwars2 subreddit's discord called "the box": "Guild Wars 2 does a lot of things different from other MMOs. This can be anything from character progression, gearing up, races, class/weapons identity (eg: Ranger doesn't mean you're gonna be ranged 100%), whatever. We generally find that people coming from other games in the genre put a lot of focus on "This is how my old game did it, so surely GW2 is the same". Take what you know about other MMOs, put it in a box, kick the box to the basement of your brain. You may need something from it once in a while, but mostly, it's not relevant. Come at GW2 fresh and you'll have a better time getting to grips with things." and this is the best approach you can do in order to understand GW2. I won´t go into much detail about living world (i´ll wait for the other video for that). But basically, living world initially was (as said before) a time-limited release of story and events happening in the world. The initial iteration was related to the strike you did, that events leading up to the battle for lions arch, ending in the destruction of the city that later got rebuilt. But if you missed the time window it was active, you had no chance to ever expierience it again. This upset a lot of players, so ANet changed it into a more "expansion-like" approach. Living world season 1 has just been re-released last year after being unavailable for almost 10 years (and some of the content is still missing, never to come back). The big note: the whole story flows through living world and expansions, and EVERYTHING is relevant to the story (some events in earlier story-parts get referenced or important WAY later into the expansions/later living world).
wvw in coordinated groups is so much fun and so tactical, when 2 guilds hop on there and are versing each other its some of the most fun ive personally had in an mmo
you were allowed to join fractals solo, because they are soloable as long as you have the proper build . Basically a spec that gives itself boons, like open world solo builds. So any build that gives itself 25 stacks of might, fury and quickness or alacrity. Most of the builds run Celestial stat set. Once you know them and you are high enough level/have 150+ agony resist you get concentration for the potions that are usable in fractals ( specific buffs). And in this case you can run more raid like/dps focused build since the concentration is usually enough to maintain a healthy amount of boons/stacks. Plus you will deal more dmg and take less dmg thanks to the potions. Tl'dr, they are soloable and tier 1 is also fast for ppl that do fractal CMs, but i agree that they should at least mention that is 5 man intended content :D
I haven't played strikes, but I did play raids before. It wasn't PROXIMITY, it was the amount of toughness (armor) you have. So chronomancer would equip armor with toughness stats and then the boss would always target him/her and they would tank. Maybe something has changed, I don't know, especially with strikes. There was one boss in raids, Slothosar, if I spelled it correctly, he had that target someone and you have to move, then it changes
There was always a sort of trinity but not in the way most mmos meant Preach ie classes being hard locked to these roles. Like you could be a dps warrior, a tank warrior, a healing shout warrior, a bannerslave support warrior for boons.
Meta events in GW2 are series of events on a map-wide scale that must be completed for the next step of the event to occur , then the next step of bosses, mini bosses or mobs to defeat etc. If the entire map can complete each stage of the event, the final boss appears in a location for the map to fight. If any step in the meta fails, the boss doesn not appear. The entire map comes together with people who are familiar of the event putting tags on themselves for ppl to join their group, in order to try to successsfully complete it. They start at scheduled times depending upon the map and many require teamwork and people to take charge of the squads as each does what they need to do to make the boss spawn. I think the hardest used to be in Dragon's Stand of heart of thorns, until the latest chapter released and now i believe it's soo won in the End of Dragons. Think large scale map wide raid-ish type thing. There is a page on the gw2 wiki for event timers so you can see what zones have what meta events happening when.
GW2 works without a holy Trinity but most people need well defined roles which is what it ultimately comes down to. The way the game works without a holy Trinity relies on synchronization between players. Everyone is a tank, everyone is a healer, everyone is DPS. Everyone is a tank means you stack together and stagger out your defensive abilities to block eflect\mitigate attacks. You CC and stunlock mob packs. Everyone is a healer means that you use your personal heal abilities to heal yourself but also occasionally heal party members. You place down water fields and others blast them for additional healing. It essentially makes PvE into a game where you have to be on the same page as your party members. What the Holy Trinity essentially does is it defines everyone's role so that they don't have to be conscious of what other people are doing and only really need to worry about their own piece of the puzzle and it all connects at the end automatically.
no, it doesn't work like that, raids and later strikes, especially challenge modes were added with holy trinity in game. it looks like you haven't played for a long time.
@@wiziek I haven’t played in about 2 years but I did do a lot of raids before then. A lot of those raids were 1 - 3 manned (before PoF even) and a lot of challenge mode fractals were soloed which shows you that most professions have all the tools they need to complete a good number of the game’s challenges. Healers were added on top of the old system, it wasn’t reworked, which basically makes healers a crutch in a big portion of the game. It is a crutch that a big portion of the player base needs to complete content, but it is a crutch nonetheless. As for tanks, the last time I played, tanks didn’t really exist. You don’t tank bosses so much as you just positioned them and most professions could do that job if needed. It was just left to the ones who could do it most efficiently. In general the holy trinity is only something that’s required in dice-roll games like EverQuest and Classic WoW. It’s not something you absolutely need in heavily action oriented MMOs like GW2 or honestly even FFXIV - many dungeons were possible with a tank and 3 DPS where the tank handled both survivability and positioning. The holy Trinity is basically just around these days because people are comfortable with it and for class Fantasy. Going back to FFXIV, a lot of the encounters put arbitrary tank and healer checks, the necessity for those roles isn’t built into the core puzzle.
Person closest with the highest toughness is who ends up with threat, doesn't just randomly pick who's closest. Some mechanics though will target random players
one thing you missed is PvP , which is different than WvW , its 5v5 Arena with equalized gear and all specs and traits and stats unlocked . Also about the LFG , you can make your own group , its just that other groups can merge with yours which is what i thinked happened to you , its not an automated thing , the players in the other group choose to merge their group . As for fractals , they do drop Ascended gear , and also every time you do a fractal you get a currency that you can use to buy ascended gear , incase the one you wanted did not drop
@Preach Gaming you should definitely try to link up with the World vs World community for that content, the game currently doesn't guide you very well and it's mostly organized and coordinated by the community. For example, very frequently Commanders (Tags) will go invisible during their runs so that randoms can't just find them, but I'm sure they'll be happy to have you if you ask. The zerg vs zerg gameplay is honestly some of the best content in this game!
Not only do I love watching him discover everything, he explains it and it's helping me learn more because I'm a new player at level 60 and need to know stuff for when I hit 80
And yeah - "The Return of the Trinity" stuff wasn't a concept much until the first raid came out with HoT. There are different elements that become prevalent in different modes though, like WvW doesn't have specific "tank" roles even though at smaller scale fights you will find more bruisery builds.
I remember in the early days of GW2 and I built a Shout/Banner Warrior with the ability to heal on shouts. I didn't do a whole lot of damage, but I kept my groups up during difficult mechanics. Or because of my survivability I would be the last man standing and end up solo'ing the boss.
For the challenge some players run dungeons and fractals solo. Even some raid bosses. In wvw there are different types of players. Roamers, zergers, and point chasers. Instead of fighting zergs or duels, some will capture unguarded camps, sentry spots, and towers to disrupt supply lines, keep up activity, and gain points for their world. Apart from the marked target mechanic, toughness also attracts bosses. The idea was GW2 would become an esport, but pve became the dominant game mode over time.
4:35 Actually GW2 has a very helpful community, so when asking on map chat, reddit or some bigger community discords there will be some people to help you for sure. EDIT: 20:30 Predicted DPS is on training golem with all buffs. That fight has a lot of downtime, so your DPS is basically halved.
As a longtime Guild Wars 2 player, this whole series has been really interesting to watch! I think we all cringe when we see you trying the old/outdated areas of the game where we all pretty much collectively know are garbo, but if you like strikes then I think you're going to love the raids too.
Guild Wars 2 started off with no Holy Trinity, but you still had the build flexibility to go "support" or "bulky" if required. No player was hardstuck in a specific role. Avoiding damage was still the optimum style and group healing wasn't massive in comparison to group buffs. Then the first expansion came out and we started to get elite specs focusing on actual support or tanking. Ranger's Druid and Mesmer's Chronomancer (with Chronomancer being a great "clothie" tank because they just avoid or negate a lot of damage). After that, yeah, we started using the Holy Trinity, but technically there's an addition to that structure, so it's maybe the Holy Quaternity? Tank, Healer, Damage Dealer and Boon (Buff) Support.
11:00 haha yes :D You do indeed (mostly) craft ascended gear. Fractals will drop a ton of trinkets, and back when I first got into them I was told by the more experienced fractal-goers that "oh, you'll be drowning in full sets of ascended armour in no time, just keep doing it daily and progress" - a year later I had only seen three pieces of ascended armour and no weapons yet :D I did havea a ton of gold though and that helped me level crafting, but yeah.
Just from watching the first 3 minutes of this video, I can see a couple things that went wrong. 1.) You signed up for Explorable Mode - this isn't a grievous error but you're supposed to run Story Mode first. Story Mode contains an optional part of the Personal Story, following the former guild Destiny's Edge as they try to reconcile their differences after a catastrophic event before GW2 starts. Story Mode also unlocks access to the Explorable Mode versions of that dungeon which gives currency that can be used to buy level 80 exotic gear from a vendor in Lion's Arch. If you don't do Story Mode on that character, you have to find someone else who has done it to access Explorable Mode in the future. Simply getting someone else to open up Explorable Mode for you doesn't work. 2.) In order to use the LFG tool you have to open up the tab that you want to use and select Ascalonian Catacombs (which you did). Then, at the bottom of the page was a button that reads "Advertise Your Group." That will ask you to write a short description so you can let other players know what you intend to run, and/or if you want new or experienced players. Your mistake was in immediately clicking on the first available group and selecting the Join button. 3.) The Graveling Burrows event you said felt slow was 100% because you got carried by the team. A couple of them were probably running non-condition, full DPS gear (specifically, Berserker's). Graveling Burrows are classified as Objects and can't be afflicted by any conditions (debuffs). A truly blind run would have been a lot more hectic as you would have not only lacked the high DPS to kill each burrow before the next one spawned, but some of your gear and build would have included conditions and/or condition damage, which as stated earlier can't be applied to the Burrows and result in lost DPS and crowd control. That specific fight should have seen you frantically trying to destroy burrows and swarms of gravelings at the same time before their numbers overwhelmed your party.
The watch work trio came out relatively recently, and at the time I was a Raid trainer for a very casual RP oriented guild. Learning and teaching that fight to my peers was an absolute blast. It really excelled at what I think guild wars 2 does best. Making challenging fights that force you to think and position well and punish you for not acting accordingly, while still being easy enough for just about anyone to participate.
Yep the game changed massively in the first 3 years and elite specs in HoT changed it again, the original GW2 wanted to be a game without fixed roles unlike anything else but changed that when it found most people didn't like it and wanted more fixed roles for groups. No major changes since just balance tweaks and adding more stuff with each expansion and living world.
Boons are super important in WvW, especially stability. Zerg vs Zerg mostly revolves around keeping Stability up and trying to strip enemys stability so you can CC and kill them, dodge their bombs, cleanse their conditions etc. In every party you need a main + secondary support, damage dealers and utility users (like mesmers who provide stealth, portals etc). There are also sub roles like boonstripping or providing CC, or you can also be a pure damage dealer like berserker too. Also whoever is running meta builds and playstyles win, because that's why they are meta.
For WvW, the tendency is to attack any enemy showing a lower rank than yourself. Since you're new and have the lowest possible rank, they made a beeline towards you and laid out the "Welcome to WvW" mat.
Idk if you read this stuff but strikes came even later than raids, the old lions court strike mission you did is THE newest group instance in the game at this time. Season 1 of living world was re-released during this xpack and anet added this as something new to it.
I really enjoyed this experience. I find it fascinating how MMO's can differ from each other. I sort of feel like WoW is the gold standard of gameplay - level to max - get some gear in dungeons, test ur mettle in a raid and wipe a few times, overcome the challenge and get the big purple boys. It's interesting to see how other MMO's deal with the core gameplay loop and reiterate certain aspects of it. Really cool video mate
I'm mixed in the system in GW2, pros and cons since there is more choice but there also kind of isn't since you need specific boons and some specs are really heavily pushed or held back based on which ones they can give, and just sometimes very odd balancing. Same with horizontal progression, I like that it's different from most other MMOs but it does present it's own issues that are about the same level of problematic for me, just in different areas.
Hm? What class is being pushed back by specific boons? Usually when making group you go for (not counting encounter-specific roles) 2 boon providers and 3 DPS per group, so if anything, only 40% is boon-reliant. The only class that I could think of being pushed back by lack of boons is Heal Scourge, but because it's so good at what it does, putting alac/quick anywhere into his kit would instantly make it best healer in the game. You can still get away with two good boon providers, HSC and 2 DPS in a group and it's probably the safest way you can go with.
Preach's perspective on the old Living Story Season 1 content is very telling about the difference in quality that exists between the "new" LS1 content and the actual old content. Tower of Nightmares and Old Lion's Court are very different experiences, all cobbled together under the same season umbrella. I think it would be good for Anet to look at the many pain points of the early player experience that Preach is revealing and making for a smoother more cohesive experience. The game doesn't push you to go do the raid, and it never will :( you must start that journey without the game advertising it.
Im not a big fan of raiding in gw2 but if i remember correct about tanking part it also depends on your defense rating. If a player has more defense the boss is gonna have a higher aggro rate. That is at least what it used to be. Also about the dps part its not just the Elite specc its about group cordination as well. Does your group keep up with the buffs does your group keep up with Debuffs also take in note the dps guides sometimes are based on a " Dummy" where they get permanent buffs and just go burst throu full rotation which doesnt apply real combat experience.
The end-game, at launch, was pushing Orr events and the world bosses. Eventually, they added Living World Season One and the end-game content was whatever that happened to be that fortnight. After Season Two, it settled on Silverwastes.
WvW is very much zerg vs zerg but engagements have far more to do with how the commander leads rather than the individual player. Ther's skill involved but its not as much individual player based but how effective you are at working as a whole unit.
I'm so glad you're raiding blind. I have wanted to be able to do blind runs with a group for years, I've not ever been able to put one together, but running and experiencing something for the first time is incredibly important.
Mentioning strikes as end game is interesting, the core game didn't have strikes either. It had no raids, nor did it have strikes. One of the strikes takes place in the first Living world but was not a strike at the time form what I understand. Original end game was doing world bosses, meta events, WvW and SPVP
That part at the beginning (3:00), in the dungeon, if you hadn't killed the burrows or actively tracked'em with the veteran's help (the guy with the glittery sword that actually is rather expensive) you WOULD have been overwhelmed by the mobs that those would've caused to spawn.
As someone who as over 5k hours in Guild Wars 2, I love how you went about experiencing the game! Especially with trying to group up with people of a similar knowledge level. It's so much more interesting to try to figure out stuff yourself instead of getting spoonfed :)
Correct me if Im wrong but that lions arch strike was also not in the base game. It sort of existed as a meta event during Season 1 of the living world but it was only around for a very limited and then was removed until only like a year ago. It took until the first expansion for them to create any content even close to a typical raid
The most important thing to getting a real feel for WvW is to try joining in with a commander and a zerg who are on Discord. It completely changes the dynamic when you're working as a team to apply damage spikes to the enemy team or utility to your own at the right time.
Regarding the development resources for Living Worlds I can understand Ian saying that. GW2 has stated that Living World episodes always required nearly the entire development team on it.
Congratulations on your first strike boss kill! Just to touch on a few things, you can for sure get Ascended gear (BIS) from fractals, there are a lot of vendors and currencies so it can be confusing (GW2 is known for too many currencies). The LFG system works that you have to choose "advertise group" to make your own, dont need to be in a party for it. Things like dungeons will likely never have more than one group running since they're considered dead or forgotten content. However raids, fractals and strikes LFG will usually have many more. There for sure is the holy trinity, however tanks are usually also healers, and healers are usually picked based on their ability to provide boons rather than raw healing output. Lastly the tower of nightmare and battle for lions arch 50 man meta's were re-visited content that was originally released in living world season 1 2013, so is about 10 years old and really scuffed. Best of luck in your future adventures!
Preacher, Fractals can reward ascended rings but the drop chance is low on Tier 1 fractasl(1-50). You can upgrade the rings to be attuned which adds a second agony resistance gem slot and then upgraded a second time to "Infused" which adds a 3rd agony resistance gem slot. Besides that armor and trinkets come from crafting, achievements, world boss drops, raids, an a lot of other variety of activities. If you ever have a question you can do the /wiki command in game it will open up the wiki website. For example you can do "/wiki ascended" and itll pull up the wiki article on ascended gear and from there you can go deep and see how to acquire specific pieces. Or the crafting recipes to make them. Ascended gear thats crafted is bound on acquire so no buying them from someone else.
Mike was finally able to try out some of the group content and had an awesome time in Fractals and his first Strike. As well as seeing why dungeons were left by the wayside and exactly how this 'no Holy Trinity' thing really worked... by basically having a Holy Trinity lol.
Anyway what did you think about the evolution of Guild Wars' group content? Drop a comment and let us know.
Why you don't try real raid ??? W1 and w4 is easy about mechanic so try it you will be much enjoy that strike mission
The game didn't have any healers on release. There is definitely a tank/support dps healer trinity in the game now, which overall makes the game easier and allows for the support style players to carry floor dps like Mike was at level 35.
Also it seems like Mike might struggle with Revenant compared to a less active class, since it seems he uses pretty bad keybinds and presses everything very slowly.
Like, his world vs world gameplay was basically like watching a 4 year old draw holding a crayon like a dagger.
Lastly, I don't think there is any raid footage in this video, and I doubt Mike could ever get the voice in the void title but I'd like to see the journey and the attempts
The boss that was shown in this video is actually the newest Strike/raid boss of GW2 (released about 4 months ago). And one of the Fractals was also the newest one (from 2020). You were essentially bouncing between the most recent content and content from 10 years ago.
Also Strikes replaced raids in GW2. The Challenge Mode versions of Strikes are pretty much the new raids in GW2 and the only difference is that you no longer have trash and events between bosses.
@@Neox999this is a disingenuous reply. killing one boss is not a "raid".
Also don't pretend fractals ever got updated. They really never did other than certain "CM"s.
It was years and years of nothing when it comes to arenanet developing this game, and that's aside from the general lack of difficult endgame content, even the quarterly balance patches, since the latest expansion, have been incredibly underwhelming and overall poorly done.
There are story missions in ff14 that are arguably harder than 99% of content in gw2, and that's kind of a joke, but it's also what you get when you make a horizontal progression game designed for the lowest common denominator type of player.
@@drewjozz I'm not here to argue, but how are the current FFXIV "raid" bosses any different to trials or (CM) strikes besides being part fo the same story line?
GW2 added the Fractal dungeons years before WoW added M+, clearly inspired by it. So correct statement would be: Mythic+ is WoW's version of Fractals from GW2!
why do ppl compare m+ and fractals? i dont get it the two concepts are completly different. there is no competition in guild wars 2 fractals whatsoever so there is nothing to compare to a competitive game mode like m+ .... cant be just me feeling that way? there are no rating/timings/leaderboards so there is no one trying anything hard or out of progress - its just other dailies based on how long u play the game.
Just like in how the previous video he says "GW2 does endgame gear like FF14". Like, sure, that system GW2 has had since 2012...
@@Slackw4x Huh... M+ is a timed instance variation of Fracs and always has been.. It is just ANOTHER mechanic that WoW has stolen in its life.. No need to get all mad and white knight WoW.. It has always been this way and it is even a meme BECAUSE, it has happened so often.. Same thing with DFs dragon mount..
@@arthon3753 no i still dont see that at all... fracs are another implementation for normal/heroic/mythic reflected in different tiers(1,2,3,4) introduced after trying to do WoW-inspired dungeons. m+ is the successor or extension to core dungeon difficulty and fracs are simply not. so no m+ cannot be inspired by fracs because fracs are nothing more then base difficulties which WoW had since the early days. btw im a gw2 player just in case you think i try to defend the blizz shit show. but i would love to see something like m+ in gw2 so i cannot agree with everyone saying that we already have that when in reality - we dont!
@@arthon3753 well, based on your input i actually checked out the wiki for details. the lack of information players get ingame about fracs is actually a problem. im a new gw2 player - i hit 80 with my first char like 4 weeks ago and in contrast i have arround 13k hours in WoW - stopped after legion ended. so yeah to make it clear a good friend introduced me to gw2 and gave me fractals as a reason why i would definetly enjoy it. but at least til now it feels like fractals are just one little side hustle in this game where no one really cares about? its hard to find players doing something other than "gogo dailies" and so i was not able to find any challenge in fractals whatsoever - at least til now up to tier 3. im srs and dont want to hate on gw2 at all, i had one of the best leveling and open world experiences EVER.. like i wasnt expecting that ngl it was really awesome. that said - yesterday it was the day where i kinda decided gw2 is maybe not the game for me just because of all i tried to explain. but now i realize its actually other reasons that i dislike it other than fracs are not really m+. i enjoyed the ~70% of fractals i played so far up to tier 3 but as i said it wasnt really a challenge and THATS whats missing for me - so yeah im definetly more of a horizontal progression type of guy with all the benefits it brings for gameplay - others might disagree on that ofc. but yea i realized it was really the struggle with my friends trying to do better times better routes on higher and higher m+ keys with different pulls and so on what made it great for me. i kinda searched the EXACT same experience in gw2 and well - its great - but its not even remotely close. so yeah the game is great and i will enjoy fractals up to max just because the challenges are new mechanics but after that... thats it right? would you agree that a non-capped leaderboard-timing style of fractals would make sense no? just to try and push you and your friends over just some mechanics - i mean... i dont know i play the mechanic what - 5 times? but after 5 times i can kinda close my eyes on playing that no? i guess u get the point i try to make - i think it would be great for gw2 to have something more then just that. but hey it just doesent catch me so yeah - still thanks for ur input and lets see what they do with the game
Preach is wrong about that you cant make a dngn group if one exists. At 1:30 you can see Advertise your group at the bottom.
I feel like the "completely blind only doing what the game holds my hand to do" is a poor approach when you miss things like this. It's a massive RPG with immense amounts of player agency and freedom, it'd probably put more players *off* if there were a bunch more pop-ups and tasks and suggestions of doing this raid and that strike and whatnot. They have big icons on the map, players should feel compelled to actually explore the world they're in.
@@milkbucket5647 that is how most players play, very few even type one time in ingame chat, never mind watching a video.
Yeah I got an aneuvrism trying to understand how he got so wrong. It's fine thinking that on the spot because you've been going a little too fast, but on stream+while editing? Damn that's a huge mistake.
@@emikochan13 This is true. And if you intentionally go about things as if you are an ignorant, half blind child you won't be exposed to the grown up parts of the game. Or you'll go into a five man fractal when you've been told by everyone that it's group content (bUt ThE gAmE dIdNt AuToMaTiCaLlY bRiNg Up LfG) you'll get flattened.
@@emikochan13 That's a pretty big claim with a pretty big lack of any sort of supporting evidence.
Fractals does drop ascended trinkets, weapons, and armor. The higher the fractal tier the higher the chances for ascended gear drops. you can get rings from robot vendors pretty cheap after like 3 days of daileys. You farm the currency from dailey fractals to buy the gear from robot vendors, ascended gear color is pink in wording. Rings can be upgraded twice via the mystic forge so you can get 3 infusions of agony on each ring. WvW is totally getting reworked i would check in after the rework coming soon.
this is very accurate and this is what I say when I first introduce people to fractals
@@absolutefolly2011 100% true
wow i've been playing since launch and i had no idea you could upgrade rings
@@emikochan13
🙄
Tbh I've had better luck getting the asc greatsword from Dragonstorm than getting asc weapons/armor from fracs. All fracs seem to give me is rings, rings and some more rings for good measure.
From memory the 'trinity' became a thing with raids once the Elite specs began to be added which allowed Anet to create more specialised specs that occupy 'trinity' slots without upsetting existing players by making core changes to the basic classes.
It actually existed before that too. I haven't played for years so I don't know if it was changed but back in the vanilla days, guardians could put out a lot of healing with that big book ult (I forgot what it is called) so that was your default "healer" if you needed one and people with more armor were more likely to to aggro and I remember me playing a warrior with soldier's gear and in most boss battles I was the only one who got aggro and on trash I used hammer and CC skills to deny trash the opportunity to harm people and sort of soft-tanked and it worked really well :)
@lamebubblesflysohigh they didn't introduce tanking/healing roles till heart of thorns expansion, which is also the expansion that introduced raids, with that, they integrated the toughness stat to coincide with designating tank roles, the player with highest toughness auto becomes the tank, with the introduction of the druid elite spec for ranger in heart of thorns we had the first major healing role, path of fire expansion then introduced the healing guardian elite spec you're referring to.
@@ramsack I am pretty sure guardian could put out big heals with that big book skill in vanilla too
@@lamebubblesflysohigh that wasn't really comparable to introduction of druid, that was most likely elite healing cooldown, other then that people had to rely on healing skills with big cd that everyone had.
@@lamebubblesflysohigh yes but no content really called for it, maybe lvl 50 fractals back when they were the max but dungeons (and fractals for the most part) were always just "kill it before it kills you". The closest thing we had to a support was mesmer time warp and phalanx strength warrior lmao
You can make a group for yourself if there’s one available. There can be any number of group’s advertising for the same thing in the lfg. The advertise your group button creates your group.
He done that, he playing most them with viewers who were also blind aside from thr first dungeon. Im guessing wasnt really important to mentionbin the video i guess.
To say you can't create dng groups in lfg is just wrong. The button was right there, he even hovered it. But if the user doesn't click with mouse the error is NOT the PC but instead sitting right in front of it.
@@713Lord is it possible that a veteran gamer such as preach not understanding the system intuitively is more of an evaluation of the system itself than of the player?
He just got confused about it because when he tried making a group a couple times on stream people in the LFG would merge their group with his when he created it so it would look like he auto-joined their group. Chat tried to tell him but he wasn't reading it too much then since he was trying to figure stuff out on his own.
Did you watch the rest of the video? He says he found it like 3 minutes later in the video lol
The idea of builds in Guild Wars 2 and the trinity that kind of always existed was and is that any class can fill every role. Some do it better but there are niches for every class and build exploration was a huge part of the game for me. You can look at the best builds online but you can also make it your own.
Back in vanilla dungeon trains were the way you made money, so you would run all paths daily excluding some of the slower or annoying ones. That's why he has them memorized
Or you did money by soloing them and selling the completion. Ascalon was basically famous for exactly this. So people did the same path like 20-30 times a day alone and memorizing the dens isn't really that crazy anymore at that point
Don't forget Arah dungeon runs too!
Those dungeons were so freaking hard on the first month of the game release, no one knew what to build, elite spec power creep was not there and it was recommended around level 35, great times!
Especially with gear damage. ^^
Only some of the routes were worth doing too chances were 2/3 or 3/3 routes in a given dungeon we’re not worth the hassle and coordination required
My experience with GW2 is playing it for the first 3 months of its lifespan....I look back on those times and I don't remember having much fun. I want to try it again at some point since the game has matured a lot and I assume is much better now, but the memories of the early days just keeps me away for now.
@@garethwilkins6744 I totally forgot about that, but true! XD
@@kn0bhe4d Even if you still don't like it, it will be for different reasons. A decade does a lot for an mmo like this.
Mike, I'm going to say this as a player who lovingly adores World VS World:
If you want a full experience, you need to be on voice coms and join an organized group from your server. Just like a raid.
You can solo WvW, but the intent is team based play of various group sizes.
You will see different opinions on meta's, comps, group sizes, and strategy. Reguardless, get in some kind of organized group like you would for a PVE raid.
It can and will be a random zerg v zerg, unless you hear the commications taking place between the players and various commanders who are online.
The best groups will utilize game mechanics, have structured party comps, utilize terrain, and have a driver calling commands and movement similar to a conductor.
Other groups can be as small as 2-4 players built to harass and pick off members of larger groups who get separated or lag behind.
While other players really try to focus the match and prioritize defending and upgrading the infrastructure on the map.
If you ignore all of that, yes it feels like one giant zerg on zerg
Sadly its like this these days which is why I stopped playing it. Miss the pre HoT days on small realms where it was casual and you could do things solo and still help out.
Did basically nothing but WvW from launch to HoT, 5000+ hours of it and barely touched the game since then, sadge.
110% this! You won’t understand the amount of strategy until you join an organized group with VC.
@@JathraDH I'm in mostly the same boat. I played heavily launch through the HoT, and focused WvW heavily. I still play, but no where near as much.
I remember playing before comander tags were in game. And I had the most fun before they merged servers and created the current iterations of the point system.
But, that's not the current game. So, may as well try and make sure Mike gets the full experience. As the game will not prompt him to join a group. Much of what makes WvW what it is, was player driven. Voice comms, commanders, the WvW community is all player driven
@@dusk1947 For sure yeah. Current is so serious because of the server merging, and while there is certainly fun in that, it's not really my thing. 100% agree you should be joining the server voice for a good experience these days.
I bought GW2 specifically for WvW because of my time with RvR in DAoC and it delivered a similar experience for a time. Alas, all things are destined to change, just as DAoC did.
Thanks for the reply.
@@JathraDH The pre HoT patch was probably the best state the game was ever in at least in terms of WvW and sPvP.
WvW just was never the same after the stability change from duration to duration with stacks.
WvW was my favorite part of GW2. Once you get the hang of it you can just lose yourself there. I did a lot of roaming on my own or with a couple friends and when running into a Zerg be prepared to die. Lol. When I got better I was able to pick off people in the Zerg on my Thief while calling out in chat for our server to come. It’s great fun.
The section which you call "Meta events" are actually not that. Meta events are map-wide events which you'll become more familiar with in LWS2 onwards. There's a ton of amazing ones. What you played in Tower of Nightmares is something different, there's not too many of those and Tower of Nightmares has to be the most painful one. It's also the oldest one.
Also the Tower of Nightmares is content from 2013. So it's well before the introduction of content that's better designed like Strike missions.
As a player since launch, would classify tower of nightmares, battle for LA, twisted marionette, and dragon storm as an instanced public meta or world boss, though tower doesn’t really have an end boss like the other ones.
Can't wait for him to see Auric Basin and Dragonstand (?)last zone anyways in HoT. Didn't realize till recently that that fight is whats happening while you do your own last part of the story. so cool!
@preach gaming, The history on no raids at launch is this. At the time of launch, Arenanet knew you couldn't do raids without a clear holy trinity. So they developed their dungeon system that could work with a multitude of builds and be successful. Also, there was a strong sentiment in the community, that Arenanet was pushing as well, that raids brought toxicity to MMO's because of elitism behavior, and Arenanet was very publicly clear that they're against that. So much so, that it's kind of a meme in the community to a degree now. So yeah, it took them a long time to figure out, hey, if we don't up the difficulty of this game, our veteran players are not going to stick around, and we need to teach people how to play the game, and make easy builds that anyone can be successful with. It took them about 6 years to get there after launch, really. They've abandoned raids now. They only release strikes. Strikes are raid replacements. I'm not saying there won't ever be another raid, be Arenanet has been known to surprise us from time to time, but right now, I don't think it's in the cards, unless serious amounts of people start playing the raids.
I do have one correction for you.
There is a gear reason to do dungeons.
At least two of the armor rune sets you can get from dungeon currency is used as the meta, one set being the absolute best for healers, the other a set for condition based dps.
There are other rune sets that are used for other builds, but there is definitely a reason to do them.
Regarding ascended gear, there are several different ways to get it, but the gear will always be bound to your account. Note it will never bind to a character, so you can swap it via the bank to other characters as needed.
You can craft it, get it from drops in fractals and even World vs World open world, you can also get it from vendors in fractals, strikes, pvp and WVW for the currencies in those game modes.
The stats on ascended gear is (I think) another 10% higher than exotic, and has the same values as legendary armor (once you get to that).
The no trinity misconception is due to the fact that when the game was released, there was no holy trinity. That changed in HoT.
At launch the “trinity” was soft: control, damage, support, but no content really utilized anything resembling roles.
Support was boons and buffs not actually pure healing (but heal ele and guardian had decent sustain output though scaling was trash so investing in damage was just better) but the game was built on damage mitigation and avoidance (the game is still like this)
Control was…. Useless as there was no real need for cc or area denial in PVE in the early days no encounters where boss placement or tanking mattered
The original philosophy hasn’t changed much, was that the roles were supposed to be fluid. players would recognize an attack and play reactively… problem was the developers gave players awesome tools. But nothing that really required them to be used. At launch.
It took the devs a while to get over the fear of ally targeted heals and ally targeted skills in general. As they were just added in 2022.
And even then, you have a lot of hybrid builds, so there’s a trinity, but is a soft trinity
Back in the day, that part of Ascalonian Catacombs with the burrows was by far the hardest part of this dungeon. The idea was that you would be overwhelmed by the huge amounts of mobs that would keep spawning out of the burrows and would have to frantically rush to destroy them to beat the encounter. With player experience and a ton of power creep it's now obviously a boring walk-over, but that wasn't the initial design - and that initial design worked for quite a while.
Yep that place was could be very rough.
It depends on your class, for some it's harder because of player nerfs.
Back in pre-HoT I could solo it with elementalist if I played it well thanks to the big hitboxes on the burrows allowing Frost Storm, Lightning Storm and Meteor Shower to destroy them before you could get overwhelmed.
Nowdays it doesn't really feel feasible to solo anymore due to all of those skills getting hard nerfs vs big hitboxes.
nothing stays hard forever, time nerfs all things.
Meh. People just brought an Ele to get around it. Ice bow was so OP.
I'm surprised he didn't compare it to Violet Hold in WoW which had similar design where we all memorized the spawn locations after 3-4 runs ;)
I must say that I've really enjoyed watching you experience gw2 for the first time,😀it is very exciting to watch your reactions to the story and all that stuff!
WvW is where I've spent the most time in Gw2 :D such a fun mode!
the gameplay changes so much depending on how good the commander/commanders are, when to push/flank/buff and fake, when to sneak around and ninja capture smaller but critical points to drag their attention, or you can make a 2-5+ smaller group and run around capping camps/sentry and smaller towers and get into duel fights with others.
I've played so much WvW that I have managed to craft a full WvW Legendary armor set and soon the legendary WvW ring
Yes, zerg is the easiest way play WvW, so probably best way to get accustomed to it, but after getting some confidence and proper build, you can do much more.
You know what's funny: Project MMO is set out to "clear the current raid tier (or equivalent endgame content) in as many games as possible"
Ironically the Strike "Old Lion's Court" that you cleared technically already *IS* the "latest"/"current" endgame encounter that was added to the game. (Nov 8 2022)
Much like Raids, Strike Missions were not originally part of this content, namely Living World Season 1. In fact the concept of Strikes *in general* came to the game *even later* than Raids did. Because LWS1 was originally removed after its release and only re-implemented over the course of 2022, this Strike Mission was added "retroactively". So it is some of the highest quality content, drawing from over 10 years of experience on the part of the devs as well as new engine technology, while things like the Tower of Nightmares or The Battle for Lion's arch are more on the lackluster side, because their age is showing much more intensely.
I was thinking about that too it is the most current strike. And he’s got a long road ahead before the next one!
Voice in the Void would be the correct equivalent of "current endgame"... Harvest Temple CM preach will never complete. He's just not mechanically skilled enough
this "waiting for spawn" thing in the dungeon was really hard a long time ago , because if you didnt have enough dmg you got overwhelmed by all the mobs and died :) as allways in mmos, things were harder at the beginning xD
Ascended gear comes from crafting it yourself, RNG luck in specific meta and boss events, collections, and you actually CAN buy ascended gear from vendors. It often takes special currency or specific achievements, but it is an option. Crafting the gear can be spendy on your bank and in game currency but after crafting legendries and putting it into perspective, it really isn't that bad LOL (EDIT) Tower of Nightmares is called Tower of Nightmares for a reason 🙃😭
I am tremendously happy @Mike your jumping into GW2 with your mmo love and critical eye. Going to be amazing fun seeing you discuss it
1:30 The "Advertise Your Group" button will absolutely allow you to list your group even if another one already exists.
Likely you've already done the research but the generally agreed upon roles are "offensive support/defensive support, and dps"
Your healers are going to be defensive support. They'll be healing of course, while also permanently providing most of the boons for the entire subgroup, mostly defensive boons but often offensive as well. These days healers will provide either Alacrity or Quickness too.
Your offensive supports are going to be dps that sacrifice some of their dps output to give either Alacrity or Quickness, depending on which one your healer provides, as well as Fury and other incidental boons. Most specs have to specifically gear for it.
There are also some niche roles that are specific to encounters (usually raids), as well as off-healer builds like Heal Scourge which is so incredibly broken it can carry an entire 10 man squad to victory.
Interestingly, Fractals came out before mythic plus. So really mythic plus is wow's version of GW2's Fractals.
This is true. Fractals were released 11/2012, just 3 months after GW2 released, as Anet had evidently decided that dungeons weren't going to work the way they wanted it to. Mythic+ was released in 9/2016 and apparently modeled somewhat after the Fractals system. It's nice when game studios can take good systems and create their own versions for their players to enjoy.
WoW players would be amazed at how much of their game is simply copied from other MMORPGs willing to try something different.
@@cattysplat Challenge Modes for dungeons in WOW came out in 2012 with the Mists of Pandaria expansion.
M+ was an evolution of MOP and WOD CMs
"No holy trinity" never meant that people could not heal others, it meant that there is no healer class or "path" dedicated to just healing. Everyone could heal themselves but many could also heal people in group and even outside of their group, and not all were equally good at it. The elementalist which in other MMOs would only be a high damage mage could heal very well with his water attunement for example, but at the click of a button he would revert back to being a DD. Likewise there was no dedicated tank class and the tanking mechanic you encountered neither is, nor was ever "the" tanking mechanic. Different bosses have different mechanics, and sometimes all it would take is to equip an armor set with different stats and you would become the tank ;)
The best meta events are the ones from the Heart of Thorns expansion in my opinion. They act as a second side of the story as you progress through the expansion, along side the story instances in each zone. They're on a schedule based on IRL time, and there are guilds that will run them (i.e. make sure there are enough people in the map, use commander tags to form groups and broadcast instructions).
Some of the metas in the Season 4 maps are _damn_ good too, by the way. Istan, Kourna, Dragonfall. Kourna's an acquired taste but I led that one _so_ many times I've come to love it. It's short and gets easier as it goes on.
And don't get me started on the final boss metas of IBS and EoD.
Your comment about what mmos can(and should ,quite often) learn from other is spot on. Would love to see this concept explored more thoroughly
Fractals do provided ascended gear, but it's not reliable even at its maximum difficulty, so your best option here is to simply craft the armor and weapons and buy the accessories from vendors. Sadly, fractals aren't as infinite as M+, they only go up to 100 which in terms of difficulty it would be the equivalent of something between a +15 and a +20 depending on the fractal and instabilities up on them for that day, which is our equivalent of weekly affixes. It's by far the most fun content the game has to offer in my opinion.
I can't wait till you get to Heart of Thorns content. It's so brilliant and unique for an MMO experience. And playing it 'blind' as you are, will make it even better!
Heart of Thorns puts so many other games to shame. That expansion is unreal. Cant wait for him to jump into it aswell. Hopefully chat is gonna let him do it blind as much as possiblr
I came i to GW2 a yr ago, when I hit Heart of Thorns my 1st time it blew my mind! The verticality of the map is amazing.
Blizzman in a different stream: "I don't know who Mike is. I probably passed by him in thecampus."
Anet: Actively watches him raid.
Strikes are actually new content that was released later in the game than raids, the reason you're encountering strikes before raids now though is because of the re-release of living story season 1 that has not been available until recently because of technical issues and having to rework it to be replayable. It used to be one time thing that was never supposed to be available again, until Anet realised that this wasn't a good idea and made all living story content after that first season be replayable content. Raids were released with Heart of Thorns expansion.
The main DPS gain that you're lacking is a big mix of things.
A big part of it is not canceling auto attack chains and keeping up damage uptime on the boss at all times by utilizing dodge rolls, trusting healers and aegis etc.
Another part is boon and condition management. There's a massive difference between a group that can output constant 25might, fury, alacrity, quickness, and 25vuln on the target.
Another relatively big part is gear. Ascended gear, while not mandatory, is at the very least a 20% increase in damage, and on top you'd have sockets (infusions) etc.
I played at launch and I can totally get why there wasn't a raid. The launch version of Guild Wars 2 was absolutely intended to be at odds with everything that WoW was at the time; there was a real tone of deliberate contrarianism to it. It felt like a risk, calculated, to create novelty and only compete with WoW in areas where Blizzard struggled. I honestly think its a large part of why GW2 is still running; people tend to be very positive towards something that dares to break the mould.
when people claim GW2 has no trinity is behind the times, you can in fact play a trinity role in the game, some of the harder content does in fact require some trinity play to even get through. which goes to show, you still need the trinity in game play, even if you personally think you dont.
Couple remarks: you can specifically list your group (and state the intention& experience level/requirements). The other group probably merched with you, but this isn't normally the case.
For your 2nd dungeon run you definitely had 2 experienced players aswell. You can see the mastery level right beside their character portrait. you can expect someone with mastery level 300 to have spend atleast like 750 hr into the game. If you hover over their portrait you can see their total achievement points aswell to give a rough estimation of their game knowledge & skill level.
For ascended gear during fractals: you can actually craft ascended gear with materials you get in fractals. The npc can be abit tricky to find, but there definitely is one.
For WvW id highly recommend to join a more organized raid group on voice. Although. 20v20 combat system (or upwards to 70v70) is always abit mess, there is still alot of coordination & teamplay involved. Its definitely worth it to check out again if you can find a proper group & running some sort of WvW build.
Fractals are the best beginner friendly way to get endgame gear. It is the classic slow approach to getting endgame gear over time with a stellar gold per hour extra. Love to see the content!
low lvl fractals are terrible for gear. most of the few rings you get wont even have good stats on them. there is no simple way to gear with ascended until the expansions/living world seasons.
@@yvindvego9404 Laurels and Guild Commendations can help with purchasing Ascended Trinkets.
However, not all stat combinations are available this way (ie no Viper’s stats).
Sorry if this means spoilers, I tired to keep stuff generalized
- PvE Tanking in GW2 usually is either Proximity, Effect based or Toughness based
- Some mechanics might be Kite-able as in the tank cannot but either the whole group or some players can deal with them ( most often proximity based - example closest person that doesn't tank or furthest away)
- Visualizer for Mechanics are often the Special action Key ( SaK ) standard bound to "ß" or Icons above the players Head or in the Boon/ Buff area
- other than that its only about Green AoE (mostly friendly fields where you want to stack as a group) and Red/Orange AoE where you want to avoid them or carry them out of group
During beta there were a lot of people who were going on there needed to be the holy trinity. It screwed up Elementalist, Warrior, Gaurdian (warrior cleric type, or paladin-esque class), and Hunter at launch. I had been playing an Hunter and a Gaurdian. I loved that I could stand face to face with something as a gaurdian and not worry too much about most things as I had a few good shields that were AoE and one had a small AoE heal that also helped downed players in my sphere of influence. Hunter I could command my pet to go revive while I distracted and taunted the enemy off the downed player. My husband loved Elementalist for the damage output and he could use, water for ice slows, electric holds, earth shields, and back me up with distractions, crowd control, and toughness boons from all four elements. Warrior could not be touched for sheer melee damage output, shield or no shield, they just were "tanks" on the battle field. This was the early beta, before we started getting the hackers.
The other classes each had their own specialty abilities, but everyone could depend on each other to be able to do something. Everyone could revive, everyone could heal, everyone could be the focus if they used their shields (whether physical or magical) to protect others, and players could work as a team instead of being stuck in a role or outright ignored because of class.
There was no worries about who could do the holy trinity until we started seeing people (the hackers) running around with no armor, doing one shot kills, and always complaining out in chat (we didn't have private chat during the beta tests) that there was no holy trinity, that the content was too easy, there was no challenge. So every class had something changed and it made it dangerous for some (Elementalist had damage squish, but water got more healing power, guardian lost heal shielding and protection bubbles, the protection bubbles became lower damage condition for shorter times, the warrior now had to bear the brunt of the damage by themselves, with no boosts in their toughness and damage output squish as well, Hunter became a joke, the pet couldn't revive anymore, distractions became a horror show with all the changes). I at this time tried out Necromancer, who had been before a bit broken, but it had been balanced and played more like a Warlock from WoW. Luckily, so the early beta player thought, it was only tried for one weekend beta test.
We had three more betas before launch, but we noticed anyone complaining about the naked killing machines on the field who were telling everyone that there was no challenge and that there needed to be a holy trinity, they were getting banned in the forums between betas. When that was noticed, we stood back, knowing that the one weekend might be what we get at launch. Which was what happened. I ended up not playing my preferred classes, hunter, guardian, warrior, and elementalist. I ended up playing necromancer, later I did make a hunter, but it never was the same. After 7 years of being away, and my husband and I left when Heart of Thorns first came out, where Anet sold it as only core and expansion, there was no separate upgrade for players who already owned the game. It was when a lot of older players left for sojourns to other games.
I only recently had contact with old friends to come back and give GW2 a new try. I had been playing other MMOs, I (sorry to say) had become fed up with WoW and EQ(1&2), bored with ESO and a few lesser known name MMOs, and had lost interest in FF14 (might go back, but I got a little tired of story being shoved through dungeons, even with the NPC grouping, every few talk scenes lately, and the difficulty to level up a few of the other classes I wanted to play on the side when not playing my primary class or crafting.) Coming back to GW2, some of the problems post beta had been corrected, but there was still an underlying holy trinity to some of the classes. Though, I have to say, at least I can play my hunter and guardian a little more, the elementalist still has a heavy lean towards being a healer over damage, I have not gone back to playing a warrior, but the necromancer has a good feel and no heavy handed warlock influence. I specialized into Reaper for my necro, using a great sword and plowing through enemies with conditions and solid melee damage, makes me feel pretty good on days where I need to vent frustrations. The hunter, I use the pet as a boon to my fighting, by binding it to me while fighting, pretty cool, and guardian dual wielding....not something I expected to have fun with, I switch easily between sword and board to dual wield and not feel like I lost anything.
Heart of Thorns was as annoying as I thought it would be 7 years ago, but it did give me good practice with the glider, I stopped dying every time I got knocked off a path by a champion during the "night" attacks.
I just hope that the later expansions, as I get into them, will be just as fun. I do have to say, not playing through the Living World story lines (not exactly rolling in money enough to unlock the chapters I missed) I have lost the story line and had to play catch up with what was going on from clues dealing with new people I apparently met during Living World seasons.
I never did dungeons or fractals in GW2, since they were not required for the story or area.
So, dps benchmarks are typically done with most boons (all the DPS ones, in any case), food and utility buffs, full ascended gear, and infusions. If you're doing a benchmark without boons, in exotic gear, no food/util or infusions, 8k isn't really as bad as you might expect. If you were using Snow Crows, they have a post somewhere that explains what setup they are using for the golem benchmarks.
Old Lion's Court is actually in top 3 of the hardest strike normal mode encounters. Totally doable and learnable, less DPS dependant than Harvest Temple, but it requires good cooperation and leadership not to dissolve into a madhouse and merry wipes. Congrats on beating it, Preach, even most well-prepared raid groups had some hours woorth of training it on release and you did amazing while going blind on whole buff system and raid composition!
Isn't it the other way around? HT NM you can do with little to no DPS as there is no form of a timer. Whilst in OLC if your DPS is low the arena will slowly fill with the blue stuff.
@@hanneskarlbom6644 Harvest Temple does have a timer of sorts. The Void AOE in the center keeps expanding over time in each step
@@TheRedGauntlet Yeah, but in normal mode, you have to be VERY slow for it to be relevant.
@@hanneskarlbom6644 to be frank, I can’t really tell, but having really good Dps on soo-won’s sphere reduces chances of a rag-tag groups of casual raiders wiping due to overaccelerating the heart of dragonvoid into the wall. Add cleaving is also really needed if you don’t just snipe everything in first 10 seconds of the phase
It is considered 2/5 in difficulty scale
This man is going to love the Dragon's End meta. Hopefully he gets to start at the beginning and goes with a *half*-blind *half*-newbie group who *just barely* makes it. Some of the most fun I've had in GW2 was when the community was progressing the map and we finally started killing it! That first kill was just... *chef's kiss*
Idk if you know this but if you type /wiki (type anything here) it will take you to the wiki and show you anything you need to know. A very very useful ingame feature
Healing exists, usually done by healer supports or tank supports! for example, heal alacrity mechanist provides alacrity, might, and heals. AND is a tank! To tank usually the player with the higher toughness usually attracts the bosses attention. Other encounters care about positioning, like Old Lions Arch. And some are just randomly selected who gets to tank.
Yeah the no holy trinity thing was much more of a thing earlier on and like a lot of concepts arenanet kind of juat abandoned it. So much so that they pushed staff ele into a support role really hard, unless they changed that again.
They instead put the holy trinity to most of the classes in game. I really love i can become a dps, healer, tank, or boon provider in one class. I main revenant, and it's so refreshing to just change my build anytime
If I recall, Old Lion's Court was added with the Living World Season 1 revamp last year. And Strikes as a whole were released in Season 5, past the second expansion.
The zerg thing definetly happens on the WvW, but from my experience from years ago, each server has a number of very organized guilds that lead those zergs on open discords, with strategic calls (like sending a detatchment to go capture a point) and tatical ones (like during a clash, calling out for when and where to charge, focus the damage and use the siege weapons). Those guilds also organize between themselves the timings for when each one will be leading, so there's almost 100% uptime of an active lead group for each server.
At the time I've played, raids were not yet a thing, so this was the main form of group content, and the community around it was gigantic and very receptive.
WvW is definitely something you want to try out with some experienced players so you can try fighting large groups in a more coordinated way. It has a very satisfying loop if you can get over the initial hurdles.
So the interesting thing about the trinity in guild wars 2 is that I don't think the intention was ever for those roles not to exist, but rather that they wouldn't be enforced and there would be a bigger focus on personal responsibility. The game absolutely shipped with gear that was designed for players who wanted to be tanky or provide more support for their group, and a lot of classes had ways to heal their party. The issue was that with the ability to avoid most damage and self heals were it wasn't avoidable mixed bosses that didn't really require stacking all of those powerful buffs, that the player meant there wasn't really any reason for players to do anything other than play really selfish dps specs and brute force everything, at least until bigger bosses like raids and strikes and more specialized elite specs started coming in that needed their niches to actually function to be worth using.
Really enjoying this series. I've played this game since launch but almost exclusively in WvW. You're inspiring me to try and do my first raid.
All of those "35K DPS is projected" moments on guides assume the entire "raid" buff suite is active. From unique profession buffs to the standard boons. So if you don't have some of those elements it can drastically affect your output. Not to say Elite Specs won't play a part - they absolutely do - but they are just another piece of the encounter puzzle.
yea, you can turn buffs on in training area too by talking to npc about golem settings, even without party.
Word vs Wolrd is one of those things where you have to be in voice call with the rest of the players. I remember years ago on Desolator running around together with others in a teamspeak call. One of the best pvp experiences I've ever had in mmos.
Not streamer friendly, unless you actually lead your server.
You mentioned being surprised that "There is a Strike but there's no raid" and that the game launched with no raids. I don't know if you're aware by now but the Strikes were not in the base game either. They were added with the 5th Living World Season - The Icebrood Saga in 2019 so 7 years after the game released. Raids were introduced in the first expansion - Heart of Thorns in 2015. Some things you might not know were not in base game off the top of my head: mastery, mounts and gliders.
I haven't done Tower of Nightmares but there is something I'd call Meta Events. The one I remember most clearly is Dragon's Stand. The way it works is the entire map is basically one giant group event with multiple stages and every player on the map takes part in an assault. The players work their way towards the other side of the map where there's a huge arena with a final boss. I enjoyed experiencing it quite a bit.
The trinity was soft reintroduced with the first expansion. That's when raids were added is why. The trinity isn't needed outside of Raids, Strikes, and high level Fractals. In the open world you can play whatever build you want.
That Strike encounter progression really looked fun. I don't really raid in GW2 but seeing that made me want to.
Go to group finder and find under strikes one that says 3 daily easy ones or smth, (under the experienced tab) that should get you into it as long as you hit what the commander hits. That will get you into strikes without having to really worry or learn anything
I love to see you doing this… there is some great fun to be had with GW2 you don’t get elsewhere.
Hey Mike, I only recently found your content and as a veteran GW2 player it is dope watching new folks embrace the content. To answer your ascended gear question, Fractals does drop Ascended gear. It is super rare. You can also use the Fractal Relic currency to buy ascended gear. The main way to get ascended gear though is crafting.
If you're testing your dps on a dummy you can set it so you have boons. Those account for most of your dps and are usually taken into consideration
6:50 Correction. Mythic Plus is WoW's version of GW2's FotM.
Mike, you should definitely try WvW again with an experienced group. I’ve been playing almost exclusively WvW off and on since launch, and its best moments come from two large, organized guild groups going head to head.
These guild based zerg fights are actually much more organized and coordinated than something like Alterac Valley. There are clearly defined roles for each class (profession) with dedicated supports and dps, a clear frontline supporting its backline, etc. You need to find a guild on your server that you can tag along with at least temporarily and be sure to join their discord and listen along. It is usually easy to join a Commander (called a tag) and just ask in chat for a discord link. Many guilds include randoms in this way. You don’t have to commit to joining a guild.
The way this usually works is a Commander (with an icon above his head) will vocally direct the whole zerg and call for specific actions like a “bomb” (coordinated usage of cc and damage spells on a specific area used for the purpose of downing and killing a couple players) or a committed push into the enemy zerg with the intent of wiping them. At higher levels, Commanders will employ mindgames like using Mesmer portals (imagine 20 people teleporting behind your group at the same time) or more commonly group-wide stealth with Engineers or Mesmer veil. If you’re interested in seeing what each class brings to a zerg, check a site like Metabattle for starter builds.
Timing matters if you want the highest quality fights. Try to get a sense of when your server’s peak hours are. Also, every week, the WvW servers reset and the standings are updated. What this means is that the WvW servers go down for an hour, but when they come back online, the slate is wiped clean for the week and everyone rushes to get in and that’s when you see massive 50 vs 50 vs 50 three-way fights between all three servers for core objectives on the map. This is “reset night” and you absolutely must experience this with a competent guild at least once or you cannot say you’ve really seen all that WvW has to offer.
To anyone else reading this who wants to try WvW, I absolutely recommend just finding a guild/commander tag as mentioned above and asking if you can join for reset night. It will fundamentally change the way you see WvW. Good luck!
6:50 well to be fair: it´s actually the other way around. Fractals were added about 3 months after the initial release (so late 2012), so it´s not gw2's version of mythic+, but rather mythic+ is the WoW-version of Fractals. yeah, that's nitpicking, but for some people it´s very important.
11:00 Fractals DO provide ascended gear, but that is somewhat limited and basically depends on the Tier. You can buy ascended rings from the vendors, which you can then upgrade twice (attuning and/or infusing) to add additional infusion-slots to get more agony resistance. The rest is often acquired via crafting (requiring a maxed out armorsmith/leatherworker/tailor) which can get quite expensive at times.
World vs World is kind of a little "special child", because the community has like, a few "factions" of players (not to be confused or related with the "factions"-expansion of the first Guild Wars game), which basically splits in pugs ("randoms" that just gather together basically), more progressive players and highly progressive guilds and commanders. The expectations of these groups are very different, and if you don´t tell them that you are a new player, they expect you to at least know the basics. But generally speaking: in large squads, if you tell them you are a new player, MOST commanders are very kind and helpful, will explain what is going on, which builds are (more or less) required, or rather expected from you, and it can get a very nice expierience (you probably already noticed that this is the MAIN game mode i personally play).
11:55 the actual numbers are around 80 players on Eternal Battlegrounds, and around 100-120ish on the other 3 main borderlands PER SIDE. The lag can get very ridiculous, but that usually happens when all 3 teams collide with full numbers (for example, 2 squads of 50 fight each other, and it can be fine. but once the third party shows up with another 50 players skills don´t go off reliably anymore. But usually moving and autoattacking still works fine, so that´s probably what you expierienced, as the "typical" lag is very rare (rubberbanding and stuff).
You pretty much died in the zerg-scenario because you played a build that was not suitable for zerging. You used sword/sword on revenant, which doesnt really work in that case unless you know exactly what you´re doing (melee-damage is not easy to pull off, though not impossible if you know what you´re doing). Dumbing it down you could say, you have supports and ranged DPS, with some exceptions. That´s what i also meant with the builds-stuff earlier.
Which actually brings me to another point: you don´t run the same build for every content. The more flexible you are with your build-choice, and the better know your class, the more accessible each type of content becomes. Since we have horizontal progression on gear, the PLAYER is the main deciding factor in this game (2 players with the exact same build and gear can perform completely different based on how well they know their class, build and the content type they play. that difference is MASSIVE). For example (the easiest one to compare): an expierienced player with the same build and gear can deal over 10-15 times more DPS than a player that just slapped that exact same gear and build onto them, not really knowing what they´re doing.
13:07 i already touched that part, but it´s more a mix. We have solo-roaming (usually 1- at max 3 people doing smaller stuff), smallscale (usually about 10-15 players), guilds (that usually act with 20-25 people, that can somewhat be compared to a range of progressive up to hardcore raiding-guilds with extremely skiled players). And then we have zerging/blobbing (the most popular one) with up to over 50 people going against other zergs and big objectives. Again, player skill does really matter, i personally have busted 50+ zergs with my 20ppl guild in the past, just because of the massive difference in skill, tactics and coordination. So that point is kinda wrong on your side, assuming even numbers the better coordination and execution will win, randomly throwing your stuff at the enemy won´t get you anywhere.
14:30 the strike you got in (Old Lion's court) is actually a quite challenging strike-mission. It's not the most difficult, but the mechanics are a bit harder to grasp in the beginning. The difficulty varies a bit though (especially in the End of Dragons-strikes), and all of them also have a challenge-mode (with Harvest Temple Challenge Mode from EoD being the hardest encounter in the game so far).
16:00 yeah, they came back to KIND OF a holy trinity, but NOT in the classical MMO-sense. Yes, tanks, healers and DPS-splitting exists, but it goes beyond that and is way more flexible.
Tanks are only a thing in raids and the OLC-strike you did, but they are not "only" tanking. Every class has a variety of tasks, and it mostly revolves around key boons (alacrity and quickness basically). Every "role" (and that includes MOST classes) is capable of fitting a combination of both (for example: a healer can also be a quickness-giver, or a DPS can also be an alacrity giver), and in many cases one of the healers can also be a tank at the same time. that´s called "role compression" (fitting the tasks of alacrity/quickness and healing/tanking into the least players as possible to free up more spots for pure DPS). This is basically limited entirely to raids, high-tier Fractals and the OLC-strike. You don´t need that in dungeons or open world AT ALL.
Also, tanking is not based on a single aggro-mechanic (we don´t have a "hate"/"enmity"-system in the game). Every encounter has a different mechanic. that can be: the player with the highest toughness, the player closest to the enemy (which you encountered in the old lions court), sometimes you have a special action key, sometimes the boss picks it at random, and some bosses don´t even need to be tanked (or cannot be tanked) at all. It´s all encounter specific, and limited to instanced content.
17:22 adding onto that: every character grants some boons. but (as i said before), we specifically look at quickness and alacrity. revenant (herald in particular) is able to fit the quickness-slot, and renegade fits the alacrity-slot. so your profession DOES provide boons, but your specialization wasn´t capable of that. So yeah, not entirely true, but not entirely wrong either. But judging by your footage, you figured out pretty good.
20:37 you probably looked at a build from snowcrows. snowcrows is one of the most popular and one of the best (if not THE best) raiding guild in gw2. Their builds are highly optimized and their benchmarks are done in a perfect environment with a very specific setup (all boons, all conditions on the enemy, stationary golem). Important here: it is a BENCHMARK with perfect execution. the maximum dps possible. You will never reach that amount in a real encounter because of mechanics and your execution, but skilled players will get very close to these numbers if the conditions are met. And yes, the elite-spec has a MASSIVE impact on how you play your character, so that was the reason (you were lacking essential traits in the elite-spec traitline).
25:09 Meta-events are not public instances (technically). Every PvE-map is an instance of its own, and these instances are opened and closed based on the amount of players on the specific open world map. They are frequently occuring, with some being on a timer, and some being tied to an event chain, so you cannot compare them to instance content (dungeons/fractals/strikes/raids). Tower of Nightmares IS a fkd up instance tho, but that´s because its VERY old content where ANet didn´t know how they wanna handle it yet (Living world season 1). They abandoned that approach and changed on how they did Living world afterwards.
Additional note: Living world initially was a time-limited release of story and events in the world (hence the name, an everchanging world). But players hated that and they abandoned it, changing to a more expansion-like approach.
There is a very common quote in the r/guildwars2 subreddit's discord called "the box":
"Guild Wars 2 does a lot of things different from other MMOs. This can be anything from character progression, gearing up, races, class/weapons identity (eg: Ranger doesn't mean you're gonna be ranged 100%), whatever. We generally find that people coming from other games in the genre put a lot of focus on "This is how my old game did it, so surely GW2 is the same". Take what you know about other MMOs, put it in a box, kick the box to the basement of your brain. You may need something from it once in a while, but mostly, it's not relevant. Come at GW2 fresh and you'll have a better time getting to grips with things."
and this is the best approach you can do in order to understand GW2.
I won´t go into much detail about living world (i´ll wait for the other video for that). But basically, living world initially was (as said before) a time-limited release of story and events happening in the world. The initial iteration was related to the strike you did, that events leading up to the battle for lions arch, ending in the destruction of the city that later got rebuilt. But if you missed the time window it was active, you had no chance to ever expierience it again. This upset a lot of players, so ANet changed it into a more "expansion-like" approach. Living world season 1 has just been re-released last year after being unavailable for almost 10 years (and some of the content is still missing, never to come back). The big note: the whole story flows through living world and expansions, and EVERYTHING is relevant to the story (some events in earlier story-parts get referenced or important WAY later into the expansions/later living world).
wvw in coordinated groups is so much fun and so tactical, when 2 guilds hop on there and are versing each other its some of the most fun ive personally had in an mmo
you were allowed to join fractals solo, because they are soloable as long as you have the proper build . Basically a spec that gives itself boons, like open world solo builds. So any build that gives itself 25 stacks of might, fury and quickness or alacrity. Most of the builds run Celestial stat set.
Once you know them and you are high enough level/have 150+ agony resist you get concentration for the potions that are usable in fractals ( specific buffs). And in this case you can run more raid like/dps focused build since the concentration is usually enough to maintain a healthy amount of boons/stacks. Plus you will deal more dmg and take less dmg thanks to the potions.
Tl'dr, they are soloable and tier 1 is also fast for ppl that do fractal CMs, but i agree that they should at least mention that is 5 man intended content :D
Mythic plus came from Fractals btw. Not the other way around. They should steal gw2 dye system and legendary effects and weapon looks for mogs
I haven't played strikes, but I did play raids before. It wasn't PROXIMITY, it was the amount of toughness (armor) you have. So chronomancer would equip armor with toughness stats and then the boss would always target him/her and they would tank. Maybe something has changed, I don't know, especially with strikes. There was one boss in raids, Slothosar, if I spelled it correctly, he had that target someone and you have to move, then it changes
Every Raid/Strike Boss has different tanking mechanics. The Old lions court strike has proximity tanking
There was always a sort of trinity but not in the way most mmos meant Preach ie classes being hard locked to these roles. Like you could be a dps warrior, a tank warrior, a healing shout warrior, a bannerslave support warrior for boons.
Meta events in GW2 are series of events on a map-wide scale that must be completed for the next step of the event to occur , then the next step of bosses, mini bosses or mobs to defeat etc. If the entire map can complete each stage of the event, the final boss appears in a location for the map to fight. If any step in the meta fails, the boss doesn not appear. The entire map comes together with people who are familiar of the event putting tags on themselves for ppl to join their group, in order to try to successsfully complete it. They start at scheduled times depending upon the map and many require teamwork and people to take charge of the squads as each does what they need to do to make the boss spawn. I think the hardest used to be in Dragon's Stand of heart of thorns, until the latest chapter released and now i believe it's soo won in the End of Dragons. Think large scale map wide raid-ish type thing. There is a page on the gw2 wiki for event timers so you can see what zones have what meta events happening when.
I haven't heard the no-holy-trinity marketing since initial release? I thought it was pretty well known that changed
GW2 works without a holy Trinity but most people need well defined roles which is what it ultimately comes down to. The way the game works without a holy Trinity relies on synchronization between players. Everyone is a tank, everyone is a healer, everyone is DPS.
Everyone is a tank means you stack together and stagger out your defensive abilities to block
eflect\mitigate attacks. You CC and stunlock mob packs.
Everyone is a healer means that you use your personal heal abilities to heal yourself but also occasionally heal party members. You place down water fields and others blast them for additional healing.
It essentially makes PvE into a game where you have to be on the same page as your party members. What the Holy Trinity essentially does is it defines everyone's role so that they don't have to be conscious of what other people are doing and only really need to worry about their own piece of the puzzle and it all connects at the end automatically.
no, it doesn't work like that, raids and later strikes, especially challenge modes were added with holy trinity in game. it looks like you haven't played for a long time.
@@wiziek I haven’t played in about 2 years but I did do a lot of raids before then. A lot of those raids were 1 - 3 manned (before PoF even) and a lot of challenge mode fractals were soloed which shows you that most professions have all the tools they need to complete a good number of the game’s challenges. Healers were added on top of the old system, it wasn’t reworked, which basically makes healers a crutch in a big portion of the game. It is a crutch that a big portion of the player base needs to complete content, but it is a crutch nonetheless.
As for tanks, the last time I played, tanks didn’t really exist. You don’t tank bosses so much as you just positioned them and most professions could do that job if needed. It was just left to the ones who could do it most efficiently.
In general the holy trinity is only something that’s required in dice-roll games like EverQuest and Classic WoW. It’s not something you absolutely need in heavily action oriented MMOs like GW2 or honestly even FFXIV - many dungeons were possible with a tank and 3 DPS where the tank handled both survivability and positioning. The holy Trinity is basically just around these days because people are comfortable with it and for class Fantasy. Going back to FFXIV, a lot of the encounters put arbitrary tank and healer checks, the necessity for those roles isn’t built into the core puzzle.
Person closest with the highest toughness is who ends up with threat, doesn't just randomly pick who's closest. Some mechanics though will target random players
one thing you missed is PvP , which is different than WvW , its 5v5 Arena with equalized gear and all specs and traits and stats unlocked .
Also about the LFG , you can make your own group , its just that other groups can merge with yours which is what i thinked happened to you , its not an automated thing , the players in the other group choose to merge their group .
As for fractals , they do drop Ascended gear , and also every time you do a fractal you get a currency that you can use to buy ascended gear , incase the one you wanted did not drop
@Preach Gaming you should definitely try to link up with the World vs World community for that content, the game currently doesn't guide you very well and it's mostly organized and coordinated by the community. For example, very frequently Commanders (Tags) will go invisible during their runs so that randoms can't just find them, but I'm sure they'll be happy to have you if you ask. The zerg vs zerg gameplay is honestly some of the best content in this game!
Not only do I love watching him discover everything, he explains it and it's helping me learn more because I'm a new player at level 60 and need to know stuff for when I hit 80
And yeah - "The Return of the Trinity" stuff wasn't a concept much until the first raid came out with HoT. There are different elements that become prevalent in different modes though, like WvW doesn't have specific "tank" roles even though at smaller scale fights you will find more bruisery builds.
I remember in the early days of GW2 and I built a Shout/Banner Warrior with the ability to heal on shouts.
I didn't do a whole lot of damage, but I kept my groups up during difficult mechanics. Or because of my survivability I would be the last man standing and end up solo'ing the boss.
For the challenge some players run dungeons and fractals solo. Even some raid bosses.
In wvw there are different types of players. Roamers, zergers, and point chasers. Instead of fighting zergs or duels, some will capture unguarded camps, sentry spots, and towers to disrupt supply lines, keep up activity, and gain points for their world.
Apart from the marked target mechanic, toughness also attracts bosses.
The idea was GW2 would become an esport, but pve became the dominant game mode over time.
When guild wars 2 lacked actual guild wars, it didn't surprise anyone that the PvP failed.
4:35 Actually GW2 has a very helpful community, so when asking on map chat, reddit or some bigger community discords there will be some people to help you for sure.
EDIT: 20:30 Predicted DPS is on training golem with all buffs. That fight has a lot of downtime, so your DPS is basically halved.
y but he was checking his dps on training dummy as well :)
As a longtime Guild Wars 2 player, this whole series has been really interesting to watch! I think we all cringe when we see you trying the old/outdated areas of the game where we all pretty much collectively know are garbo, but if you like strikes then I think you're going to love the raids too.
Guild Wars 2 started off with no Holy Trinity, but you still had the build flexibility to go "support" or "bulky" if required. No player was hardstuck in a specific role. Avoiding damage was still the optimum style and group healing wasn't massive in comparison to group buffs. Then the first expansion came out and we started to get elite specs focusing on actual support or tanking. Ranger's Druid and Mesmer's Chronomancer (with Chronomancer being a great "clothie" tank because they just avoid or negate a lot of damage).
After that, yeah, we started using the Holy Trinity, but technically there's an addition to that structure, so it's maybe the Holy Quaternity? Tank, Healer, Damage Dealer and Boon (Buff) Support.
11:00 haha yes :D You do indeed (mostly) craft ascended gear. Fractals will drop a ton of trinkets, and back when I first got into them I was told by the more experienced fractal-goers that "oh, you'll be drowning in full sets of ascended armour in no time, just keep doing it daily and progress" - a year later I had only seen three pieces of ascended armour and no weapons yet :D I did havea a ton of gold though and that helped me level crafting, but yeah.
Just from watching the first 3 minutes of this video, I can see a couple things that went wrong.
1.) You signed up for Explorable Mode - this isn't a grievous error but you're supposed to run Story Mode first. Story Mode contains an optional part of the Personal Story, following the former guild Destiny's Edge as they try to reconcile their differences after a catastrophic event before GW2 starts. Story Mode also unlocks access to the Explorable Mode versions of that dungeon which gives currency that can be used to buy level 80 exotic gear from a vendor in Lion's Arch. If you don't do Story Mode on that character, you have to find someone else who has done it to access Explorable Mode in the future. Simply getting someone else to open up Explorable Mode for you doesn't work.
2.) In order to use the LFG tool you have to open up the tab that you want to use and select Ascalonian Catacombs (which you did). Then, at the bottom of the page was a button that reads "Advertise Your Group." That will ask you to write a short description so you can let other players know what you intend to run, and/or if you want new or experienced players. Your mistake was in immediately clicking on the first available group and selecting the Join button.
3.) The Graveling Burrows event you said felt slow was 100% because you got carried by the team. A couple of them were probably running non-condition, full DPS gear (specifically, Berserker's). Graveling Burrows are classified as Objects and can't be afflicted by any conditions (debuffs). A truly blind run would have been a lot more hectic as you would have not only lacked the high DPS to kill each burrow before the next one spawned, but some of your gear and build would have included conditions and/or condition damage, which as stated earlier can't be applied to the Burrows and result in lost DPS and crowd control. That specific fight should have seen you frantically trying to destroy burrows and swarms of gravelings at the same time before their numbers overwhelmed your party.
The watch work trio came out relatively recently, and at the time I was a Raid trainer for a very casual RP oriented guild. Learning and teaching that fight to my peers was an absolute blast. It really excelled at what I think guild wars 2 does best. Making challenging fights that force you to think and position well and punish you for not acting accordingly, while still being easy enough for just about anyone to participate.
Back on launch, you leveled up your skill with weapons, now you get the slots unlocked as you level up. There have been so many changes since then...
Yep the game changed massively in the first 3 years and elite specs in HoT changed it again, the original GW2 wanted to be a game without fixed roles unlike anything else but changed that when it found most people didn't like it and wanted more fixed roles for groups. No major changes since just balance tweaks and adding more stuff with each expansion and living world.
Boons are super important in WvW, especially stability. Zerg vs Zerg mostly revolves around keeping Stability up and trying to strip enemys stability so you can CC and kill them, dodge their bombs, cleanse their conditions etc. In every party you need a main + secondary support, damage dealers and utility users (like mesmers who provide stealth, portals etc). There are also sub roles like boonstripping or providing CC, or you can also be a pure damage dealer like berserker too. Also whoever is running meta builds and playstyles win, because that's why they are meta.
yeah ppl dont really do "dungons" in gw2, there are other Dungons that are played more , but they are called fractals in game
For WvW, the tendency is to attack any enemy showing a lower rank than yourself. Since you're new and have the lowest possible rank, they made a beeline towards you and laid out the "Welcome to WvW" mat.
Idk if you read this stuff but strikes came even later than raids, the old lions court strike mission you did is THE newest group instance in the game at this time. Season 1 of living world was re-released during this xpack and anet added this as something new to it.
I really enjoyed this experience. I find it fascinating how MMO's can differ from each other. I sort of feel like WoW is the gold standard of gameplay - level to max - get some gear in dungeons, test ur mettle in a raid and wipe a few times, overcome the challenge and get the big purple boys. It's interesting to see how other MMO's deal with the core gameplay loop and reiterate certain aspects of it. Really cool video mate
I'm mixed in the system in GW2, pros and cons since there is more choice but there also kind of isn't since you need specific boons and some specs are really heavily pushed or held back based on which ones they can give, and just sometimes very odd balancing. Same with horizontal progression, I like that it's different from most other MMOs but it does present it's own issues that are about the same level of problematic for me, just in different areas.
Hm? What class is being pushed back by specific boons? Usually when making group you go for (not counting encounter-specific roles) 2 boon providers and 3 DPS per group, so if anything, only 40% is boon-reliant. The only class that I could think of being pushed back by lack of boons is Heal Scourge, but because it's so good at what it does, putting alac/quick anywhere into his kit would instantly make it best healer in the game. You can still get away with two good boon providers, HSC and 2 DPS in a group and it's probably the safest way you can go with.
Preach's perspective on the old Living Story Season 1 content is very telling about the difference in quality that exists between the "new" LS1 content and the actual old content. Tower of Nightmares and Old Lion's Court are very different experiences, all cobbled together under the same season umbrella. I think it would be good for Anet to look at the many pain points of the early player experience that Preach is revealing and making for a smoother more cohesive experience.
The game doesn't push you to go do the raid, and it never will :( you must start that journey without the game advertising it.
Im not a big fan of raiding in gw2 but if i remember correct about tanking part it also depends on your defense rating. If a player has more defense the boss is gonna have a higher aggro rate. That is at least what it used to be. Also about the dps part its not just the Elite specc its about group cordination as well. Does your group keep up with the buffs does your group keep up with Debuffs also take in note the dps guides sometimes are based on a " Dummy" where they get permanent buffs and just go burst throu full rotation which doesnt apply real combat experience.
The end-game, at launch, was pushing Orr events and the world bosses. Eventually, they added Living World Season One and the end-game content was whatever that happened to be that fortnight. After Season Two, it settled on Silverwastes.
WvW is very much zerg vs zerg but engagements have far more to do with how the commander leads rather than the individual player. Ther's skill involved but its not as much individual player based but how effective you are at working as a whole unit.
I'm so glad you're raiding blind. I have wanted to be able to do blind runs with a group for years, I've not ever been able to put one together, but running and experiencing something for the first time is incredibly important.
Mentioning strikes as end game is interesting, the core game didn't have strikes either. It had no raids, nor did it have strikes. One of the strikes takes place in the first Living world but was not a strike at the time form what I understand. Original end game was doing world bosses, meta events, WvW and SPVP
GW2 is such a great game
That part at the beginning (3:00), in the dungeon, if you hadn't killed the burrows or actively tracked'em with the veteran's help (the guy with the glittery sword that actually is rather expensive) you WOULD have been overwhelmed by the mobs that those would've caused to spawn.
As someone who as over 5k hours in Guild Wars 2, I love how you went about experiencing the game! Especially with trying to group up with people of a similar knowledge level. It's so much more interesting to try to figure out stuff yourself instead of getting spoonfed :)
Correct me if Im wrong but that lions arch strike was also not in the base game. It sort of existed as a meta event during Season 1 of the living world but it was only around for a very limited and then was removed until only like a year ago. It took until the first expansion for them to create any content even close to a typical raid
yeah that is correct when they recreated living world 1 that strike was added it represents the current form of 10man endgame content
The most important thing to getting a real feel for WvW is to try joining in with a commander and a zerg who are on Discord.
It completely changes the dynamic when you're working as a team to apply damage spikes to the enemy team or utility to your own at the right time.
Regarding the development resources for Living Worlds I can understand Ian saying that.
GW2 has stated that Living World episodes always required nearly the entire development team on it.
Congratulations on your first strike boss kill!
Just to touch on a few things, you can for sure get Ascended gear (BIS) from fractals, there are a lot of vendors and currencies so it can be confusing (GW2 is known for too many currencies).
The LFG system works that you have to choose "advertise group" to make your own, dont need to be in a party for it.
Things like dungeons will likely never have more than one group running since they're considered dead or forgotten content. However raids, fractals and strikes LFG will usually have many more.
There for sure is the holy trinity, however tanks are usually also healers, and healers are usually picked based on their ability to provide boons rather than raw healing output.
Lastly the tower of nightmare and battle for lions arch 50 man meta's were re-visited content that was originally released in living world season 1 2013, so is about 10 years old and really scuffed.
Best of luck in your future adventures!
Preacher, Fractals can reward ascended rings but the drop chance is low on Tier 1 fractasl(1-50). You can upgrade the rings to be attuned which adds a second agony resistance gem slot and then upgraded a second time to "Infused" which adds a 3rd agony resistance gem slot. Besides that armor and trinkets come from crafting, achievements, world boss drops, raids, an a lot of other variety of activities. If you ever have a question you can do the /wiki command in game it will open up the wiki website. For example you can do "/wiki ascended" and itll pull up the wiki article on ascended gear and from there you can go deep and see how to acquire specific pieces. Or the crafting recipes to make them. Ascended gear thats crafted is bound on acquire so no buying them from someone else.