What about Instanced Dynamic Events?

[Arazen]

Thanks guys, that really cleared things up a bit.

I really, really hope those exploration modes are hard as hell, since that seems to the niche for the hardcore players. Still I honestly don't think, that the big-scale events will be very hard for the individual as long as some good players take care of key mechanics (like ArenaNet did in the demos).

I play WoW and I've never managed to do heroic modes, because you have to grind normal modes and now you even have to grind LFR for at least the 4-set bonus, so people allow you in normals. Redundant grind I despise and that's why I'm really looking forward to GW2.

[Bloodhunter]

Thanks guys, that really cleared things up a bit.

I really, really hope those exploration modes are hard as hell, since that seems to the niche for the hardcore players. Still I honestly don't think, that the big-scale events will be very hard for the individual as long as some good players take care of key mechanics (like ArenaNet did in the demos).

I play WoW and I've never managed to do heroic modes, because you have to grind normal modes and now you even have to grind LFR for at least the 4-set bonus, so people allow you in normals. Redundant grind I despise and that's why I'm really looking forward to GW2.

Dynamic Events will scale harder when more people appear with higher level, when people are focusing on doing what they should do (killing adds, helping out allies i.e. healing/buffs/resurrecting/combo's) but if you are really looking for hard stuff, explorable mode dungeons are seek to be a very hard challenge, which in no way can be compared to 5 man WoW dungeons. Let me just add to this that no one have tested these and ArenaNet have said this is previous blog posts.

[Squirrelbanes]

Dynamic Events will scale harder when more people appear with higher level, when people are focusing on doing what they should do (killing adds, helping out allies i.e. healing/buffs/resurrecting/combo's) but if you are really looking for hard stuff, explorable mode dungeons are seek to be a very hard challenge, which in no way can be compared to 5 man WoW dungeons. Let me just add to this that no one have tested these and ArenaNet have said this is previous blog posts.

On top of this...what Arazen says...about the individual...GW2 will be so much more about the colaborative effort It's so much more dynamic skill based, and the DE events are thought (from what we've seen at convention of the lvl 50s etc) to be a lot about different mechanics working together. They'll still be hard though...particularly the elite ones
It puts the RPG back into MMO and makes MMO rly cooperative again.

[JiaYow]

What the ... I wasn't able to post the last few days, only to see my poor thread spiraling into a discussion about raids.

There is another thread discussing the feasibility of raids in GW2 already. It is not this one.

I'm grateful for all your feedback and comments, and I must admit that there are valid points in here that I haven't thought about initially.
However, let me make one thing clear:

This thread is not about traditional WoW raids.

It's not about bragging. Not about excluding randomers. I'm happy that GW2 shifted the paradigm so that you're always happy to see other players.
However, what I meant is that there is no "playground" for coordinated guild activity. It's not that I want to progress with my guild and guild only. It's that many fun things need to be coordinated, and I don't see a way to do this in GW2 at the moment.

See, in PvP you have the same. You can join WvWvW (equivalent to the open PvE world), but sometimes you want to do 10v10 or 25v25 in a controlled way. ANet knows and acknowledges this, so they've stated multiple times that you can form large groups and do PvP with them without interference. Not because randomers are bad, but because you cannot communicate strategies with them quickly.

In PvE, I'm worried about situations where I would like to, say, down The Shatterer with special tactics (like without the lasers) or with only 9 people. Not that I wouldn't invite randoms to do that with me, but you can't expect every random to happily participate. It's not only frustrating for us, but also for them, because they might want to down him "the normal way", but can't, because my 25-man guild refuses to use or defend the lasers. Of course we're not evil, so we would down him for the sake of the randoms, but it's sour for us.

The next thing is that the skill combination feature of GW2 allows for great creativity and innovative fun. People here say that it's not balanceable so ANet should actively prevent coordinated skill combos in PvE by not offering the necessary environment. I say, this is self censoring. They have an awesome system. Why shouldn't we be able to play with it? People have most fun if they do something their own creative way. Like, down a boss with 25 Guardians, stacking their skills. Since the purpose of those zones wouldn't be progress and competition, one can finally even encourage creative thinking in defeating bosses.

I hope this makes the purpose of the thread clearer. We're not talking raid. We're talking zones in which guild can have fun i.e. while waiting for an Elite Dynamic Event to proc.

Also, please understand that I'm not critizing ANet's decision. However it ends, I'll end up buying and enjoying the game. I'm just curious what you people think about not being able to coordinate anything meaningful in PvE with more than 5 people. If you think that anything like that, even Instanced Dynamic Events would immediately lead to raidlike competitioning, even without extra loot or achievements, that's a valid point. This should definitely be considered. Thank you. Go on, other opinions?

[Herowyn]

So, a guild plans to defeat the shatter on <date> at <time> and everyone logs into the game at that time, only to find, that a lot of other players are already there, having brought the boss to 30%.

Correct me if i am wrong. This cant be possible because you cant guess when a DE will occur. The only thing you can plan is to participate in DE that occurs while you are connected. You cant force a DE to show up.

[Mif]

Correct me if i am wrong. This cant be possible because you cant guess when a DE will occur. The only thing you can plan is to participate in DE that occurs while you are connected. You cant force a DE to show up.

It's kinda possible. You would have to push the event chain along to the point you get to the event you want, and that's only if the chain is in a state that you can push it to where you want.

It's certainly not anything you could do reliably or schedule "raid time" around.

[Merendel]

Don't know about you, but if I raid with 25 people, I do so because I like playing with them. If I don't like playing with them I'd just raid in a 10 man format. And if I like playing with them, playing isolated from the other 20 feels like an "incomplete" guild activity. A proper guild activity would mean involving as many as we can in playing together. If you don't care about the other 20 people you play with, then that's not my problem. Nothing subjective here.

You are still unilaterally declaring that 10 or 25 or whatever number larger than 5 is the only way to go. THAT is your opinion. Other people can have different opinions on the proper size of a guild or a guild activity. You may want to not talk about smaller guilds but they do exist.

Also due to the practical nature of juggling 25 schedules even your 25 mans are inherently "Incomplete" guild activities. You need 25 people to do a 25 man raid, if you go with less you handicap yourself which will doom your attempts if the content is very hard. Real life happens and invariably at some point one of your raiders will be forced to miss a night. to combat this guilds need to maintain a few spares to rotate in as the need arises. Hmm now you have the choice of an incomplete activity because your forced to exclude people when everybody is there or have no activity if you strictly adhere to only 25 members. Open world DE's are inherently more proper and complete than traditional raids by your own stated standards by the fact that you can include EVERY member of the guild that is available. If your short a few that night no problem, you can still run with fewer. if you have more than some arbitrary 25 man limit, still no problem they can join in.

[Blznsmri]

If it's in an instance, it's not really dynamic now is it?

[theredviola]

It's kinda possible. You would have to push the event chain along to the point you get to the event you want, and that's only if the chain is in a state that you can push it to where you want.

It's certainly not anything you could do reliably or schedule "raid time" around.

Man... now THAT would be one hell of a DE night for a guild... Think of how much of that chain you have to get done to get to the Shatterer? Let alone how massive the other parts of the DE are going to be... there are no words for the awesome that would be.

[Grable]

In PvE, I'm worried about situations where I would like to, say, down The Shatterer with special tactics (like without the lasers) or with only 9 people. Not that I wouldn't invite randoms to do that with me, but you can't expect every random to happily participate. It's not only frustrating for us, but also for them, because they might want to down him "the normal way", but can't, because my 25-man guild refuses to use or defend the lasers. Of course we're not evil, so we would down him for the sake of the randoms, but it's sour for us.

Again, in short: 5man content is for that. Open World content like the Shatterer you'll have to cooperate with others on the server. If others are completely inept you will probably fail the boss, unless the majority of DE participants is your guild. Working as intended

If you want to experiment with the tactics and do a boss completely "your way" then you go 5man content.

[JiaYow]

Oh, seems that posting works for me again! Yay, thank you kind Bloodhunter :>

If it's in an instance, it's not really dynamic now is it?

Yes and no. What I find dynamic is that you don't enter the raid, kill 25 trash mobs, then defeat the one boss that is standing around like in raids, but there is a chain that you can participate in, and depending on what you do, the chain will unfold in different ways. Differently to "normal" DEs however, the events require high guild coordination, not necessarily many people (like, say, defending a village under heavy siege, where you have to disable several strategic points simultaneously to strike back).

Again, in short: 5man content is for that. <snip> If you want to experiment with the tactics and do a boss completely "your way" then you go 5man content.

As I said, limiting tactics to 5 people is kind of self censoring, isn't it? It's like "hey we have an awesome system, but it's so awesome that we can only allow up to 5 of you to use it to its fullest extend, oh but only in PvE. In PvP it's fine".

Aside from that, my current guild in WoW consists of like 11 members, all with RL. Yep, small guilds exist, and even people here are part of them. So, in average, there are like 7-8 people online every evening. What we do in WoW is fill the rest with randomers, which is usually fine. Now, we're all excited for GW2, finally meaningful and (hopefully) balanced PvP and no more raid-grinds.
So what can we do in GW2? Say, we want to have a challenge. Easy, just exclude 2 or 3 guys and go with the rest. Nice move. This is the inherent problem I see in "casual" 5man dungeons. Having the real challenge in 5man is fine, but usually there will be more players online in a guild.
Or, we desperately want to do something together. We could either travel the world and pray for a Elite DE to happen (where we would participate together with randomers, so no crazy tactics possible), or ... wait, nothing in PvE. See, and all I figured is that Instanced Dynamic Events would fill this niche, nothing more. I already know from experience that we'll be stranded with 7 people in a great game with nothing challenging in PvE to do. And that makes me sad.

I mean, you guys will be in guilds too, won't you? What will you do if there are more than 5 people online? Hope that <num of players> mod 5 equals 0? Or travel the world in search for a fun Elite Event to happen, which you then would have to down without proper coordination?

[Leben]

I think the main issue here is that despite your insistence that you are not asking for raids, you keep describing raids Large scale, instanced activity is a raid, regardless of whether there are bosses to fight or not. As has been said by many people in this thread, Arenanet is trying to bring themselves away from this kind of content and bring it out into the open world, which is why elite dynamic events exist. When you mention the Shatterer and keep saying how you would want to do "this" with your guild, or "that" with your guild but you're worried that other people will come along and spoil it, you're completely missing the point about the way the game has been designed. You're supposed to want to see other players! Other players make the boss difficulty increase by scaling it up. New mechanics, higher damage, higher health etc, all get introduced to scale up the boss and keep it interesting for everybody there. You don't need raids to provide a challenge to players.

Have you ever played APB? There are no raids, nor instances in that game. You effectively just keep doing the same missions over and over again. It was great to be joined by other players in that game because it made for brilliant gun battles over the objectives, or high speed car chases. I was part of a "guild" when I played APB as well. There were no raid bosses, no dungeons to run, no organised PVP to compete in. So what we did was all dress up in the same style of clothing (Nigerian gangster/rebel fighter!) and go do missions as a team. We organised tactics over mumble and everything was done in meticulous detail. This was a LOT of fun! I'd still be playing now if it hadnt been so infested with cheats Point is, you dont need instances to have organised events with your guild to have fun.

[omlech]

It's amusing to see people who think raiding can only be instanced when raiding existed before instancing was created and there was a SHIT TON of competition involved, it makes the world firsts in WoW look stupid by comparison. By design GW2 takes the entire concept of outdoor raiding and puts an entirely cooperative spin on it rather than a competitive one.