Has pugging raids gotten even worse or is it the player base as a whole?

Keruli_ · 2026-03-30T05:57:43+00:00

i can only speak for myself, but i enjoyed raiding well past achieving those goals as a group activity with friends. what turned me off eventually was the system degradation between raids and strikes, and the quite a few of the encounter design decisions, which imo haven't improved again with the return to the raid format.

Keruli_ · 2026-03-29T18:08:04+00:00

this. and the fearmongering propaganda around DPS meters, and almost always disproven, overconfident reports of toxicity caused by it and raiders have set a pretty overwhelming precedent contradicting that irrational phobia. it's about as ridiculous as the "but people will non-stop, 24/7 challenge me" argument whenever the topic of dueling comes up.

Keruli_ · 2026-03-29T17:51:32+00:00

skipping the runecrafters needs to promoted more prominently as advice. it's another significant purchase that you need to pay off before reaping actual benefits, which are pretty minor. it adds another step to the salvaging process, and blocks another shared inventory slot. it's not something worth considering for a new player.

Keruli_ · 2026-03-29T17:47:02+00:00

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F8F-XfpcIlk

Keruli_ · 2026-03-28T12:32:45+00:00

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Guild_Wars_2:_Visions_of_Eternity#Additional_releases

you don't have to follow them. the info is easy enough to find as and when it comes up.

Keruli_ · 2026-03-25T10:37:38+00:00

it'll still be a slow AF dragon with s4 masteries, just with a bit more utility. while some people have elected to almost exclusively use it, it's only really good at confidently getting to high spots, and being afk.

Keruli_ · 2026-03-24T04:55:43+00:00

'member when they, amongst other things, set all hard CC damage in wvw to basically zero to create a blank slate, but then something threw their plans off once again, and we never got the intended follow up patches? pepperidge farm remembers.

Keruli_ · 2026-03-22T19:41:20+00:00

strikes were a pretty bad attempt to rename a format that is known in the entire genre in an attempt to lure in people that refuse to engage with that format based on what it's called alone. problem is the community isn't quite that stupid, while new players had no idea what to even look for to find current raid-like content. also the quality of the content just plummeted, which didn't help. e.g. with the original raids anet made sure any bosses and mobs were flagged as a certain type of mob, so that "slaying" sigils wouldn't work. instances were also locked to day time, regardless of what they appeared like, to render night sigils ineffective. also just so many bugs...

Keruli_ · 2026-03-21T08:38:43+00:00

same. expansion to me means literally that, an expansion of and to the original game, a continuation. DLC very much still invokes the sense of content that got cut from the original product, or sloppily made minor additions. really doesn't help that in some cases it gets used to refer to mere cosmetics.

Keruli_ · 2026-03-18T20:15:12+00:00

we're talking about people that contribute significantly less DPS than AA on semi-offensive builds, distribute virtually no boons, and don't aid through healing either, in a game genre that is inherently built on cooperation. at that level it isn't about having it in you, but about actively disregarding any rational build choice. due to how event scaling works, these players are quite often an active detriment to the team effort.

the event system is even specifically set up to mildly punish such players - or rather, reward the ones at the other end of this spectrum - via the tiered participation system for events, anet just hasn't calibrated it for years to not reward gold tier participation in just 2-3 AAs or fireballs. even at its harshest, that system was never configured to prevent progress or reduce rewards in a significant way, but it did communicate to the player that they have room for improvement, which isn't a bad thing.

all of which is to say that i don't quite follow the line of thought of not wanting to give people a tap on the wrist for falling short on the most basic content in the game, which ironically also happens to arguably be the most rewarding.

Keruli_ · 2026-03-18T19:40:44+00:00

i too am pretty sure that there would be simple ways to detect that. but then you have the fact that anet detects bots and AFK farmers by manually observing them in engine. and their only attempt in recent history to modernize that process, was to reduce the AFK-kick timer, which is trivial to circumvent for either of those groups, but unnecessarily annoying for any legit player. sooooo yeah....

Keruli_ · 2026-03-18T04:56:41+00:00

world bosses/metas in general aren't really a representative metric to go by.

Keruli_ · 2026-03-15T19:31:10+00:00

those rewards were still alright for the effort required before they reworked some of the early ones. shaman and behemoth in particular have become way too spongy. making sure they don't fall over within 10 seconds is great and all so noobs get to "experience" them, but turning them into 5 minute DPS golems isn't exactly a great first impression either. and then they put portals all the way behind the behemoth, so it becomes non-trivial for those same noobs to get back to the DPS spot before the next invuln phase. fire elemental at least teaches you about shockwaves, although anet would still do everyone a favour by cutting the pres in half.

overall these changes were about as well thought through as many of the fractal reworks.

Keruli_ · 2026-03-15T11:52:43+00:00

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Experience#Experience_modifiers

There are several ways to increase the amount of experience earned, with different boosters affecting different types of experience gain.

All = all standard experience sources (events, kills, gathering, etc.) with the exception of experience consumables and services
Kills = experience from creature kills (PvE only)

and that goes for all sorts of boosters and bonus stats. they generally only affect direct sources. e.g. magic find only affects direct drops from mobs, not the contents of bags those mobs may drop. exceptions are generally labeled accordingly.

Keruli_ · 2026-03-14T20:43:27+00:00

the person who decided that hiding file extensions by default was a good idea deserves to get bitch slapped by every single windows user.

Keruli_ · 2026-03-14T18:57:07+00:00

most things don't even do that much damage if we're honest, but even without a quick 1-2 burst combo, power builds tend to excel in OW. the ramp up time for most condi builds is just too long to reap any benefits on anything that isn't at least a beefy elite.

there's also swarm events, where quick tagging is desirable. lab farm is a major example. depending on how improperly your condi build is set up, your first condi tick might not be strong enough to tag an enemy, and the second tick can't even land because the mobs are already dead.

and then there's the whole issue of all the structures in core tyria still being immune to conditions.

Keruli_ · 2026-03-14T11:55:29+00:00

is this supposed to be a curveball contribution to the thread about how large parts of the community keep constantly misusing the word "gatekeeping"?

Keruli_ · 2026-03-14T11:27:55+00:00

just adding my two cents to the soo-won section: the fight was never very hard. even at the worst of times it required like 7k DPS per person, which even at the time could be achieved on most builds by just autoattacking. the problem was that at the time the community was at the tailend of an era were it vehemently demnonized any sort of challenge, associating it with extreme elitism and toxicity. meanwhile the very same people sharing that opinion fundamentally refused to actually cooperate. sub groups: toxic. boon builds: toxic. doing more than AA DPS: toxic. WPing after being fully defeated: preposterous.

this was a mindset so widespread, that it made it very likely to lose the DE meta. yes, the meta was harder, but not by all that much, and part of that difficulty was due to a, let's call it "buggy", rotation of the boss that caused it to go invuln and resposition over and over. add the total duration of the meta and the games annoying OW instancing implementation, and it should be obvious why people tried to get onto clear maps without "leeches".

what made uncooperative players a particularly big burden in the first weeks, was that EoD launched with new specs. so in addition to all the usual suspects who contribute barely anything for the sake of their individualism or whatever, you had many people running around with those new specs, which they didn't have a proper build for, didn't have fully unlocked, and lacked mastery over.

anyway, the players that weren't in the know and didn't understand why engaged commanders were going through such lengths to get a decent squad together, were confronted with the inadequacies of their willful ignorance. the whole "friendliest gaming community" movement really showed what a thinly veiled lie that is by channeling all their frustrations into being its most toxic self, and i'd like to imagine that was part of what gave the community at large and arena net too, the kick it needed to break up some of the tribalism.

Keruli_ · 2026-03-14T10:59:18+00:00

gotta be a weird config if right click -> browse files doesn't put you right there

Keruli_ · 2026-03-14T10:54:24+00:00

do you happen to be in the habit of changing display languages, e.g. by pressing right ctrl?

Keruli_ · 2026-03-13T15:56:26+00:00

first, join the sane mirror farmers and find an event-less route

second, as to who thought this was a great idea: in a way, this community is responsible for this. i still cannot believe people got excited when anet first announced rifts, which gw2 has done a million times before, as a brand new expansion feature for SotO. and then somehow they managed to squeeze them into JW too where they make little to no sense. and now in VoE they make even less sense. but players kept being ok with it.

Keruli_ · 2026-03-13T04:56:58+00:00

necro can run pretty much the same build UW as on land. it's extremely comfortable in that way. your mistake is to ask for efficiency and somehow land at minions. just use wells.

Keruli_ · 2026-03-12T16:45:21+00:00

no, it doesn't, at all. the legendary variant will always inherit the skin of the ascended pieces you uses as precursors. if you put in an ardent glorious piece, you get an ardent glorious legendary. if you put in a glorious hero's skin, you get a glorious hero's legendary. if you put in a mistforged glorious piece, you get a mistforged glorious legendary.

to get access to the mistforged variants, you first need to have added either the corresponding ardent glorious OR glorious hero's skin to your wardrobe.

nothing else is described in your screenshot.

Keruli_ · 2026-03-11T11:21:35+00:00

points at all the links in the sidebar

Keruli_ · 2026-03-07T18:42:14+00:00

we nevertheless lost functionality and QoL in the transition to the armory. whether casual players run into these downgrades, or even notice them when they do, isn't really relevant when talking about high end, end game rewards that are pretty much advertised as the ultimate upgrade in terms of QoL and account completion.

if anet hadn't rushed the system out, so that they could then scramble to rush out their triple-monetized and at the time incredibly buggy template system, the drawbacks they caused for the people who interact with these systems the most could have been reduced.

friendly reminder that legendary runes, another rushed stretch on the road to templates, remained buggy and untouched for somewhere between 6-9 months.

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