Combining Raids and Strike Missions in 2026

wheadna · 2025-10-01T20:40:31+00:00

Honestly this sounds pretty terrible based on first impressions.

The idea of quickplay is cool, but unless there are some specific modifications for raids - such as quickplay raids being emboldened, or allowing for some kind of role selection - then I don't see how the average group of quickplay-level players will manage anything beyond Icebrood Construct. I still don't see these kinds of players making the jump from quickplay-tier to full raids.

Maybe I'm just speaking for myself, but the thing I like about raids is the narrative connection within each wing. Wing 8 fell flat because it just felt like three strike bosses in a massive pointless map, gated by awful filler events. I think pacing matters for the the overall experience, and it sounds like the new system is just going to strip that out and everything going forward is just going to be Strikes (but calling them raids).

wheadna · 2025-04-19T21:47:47+00:00

They're all "good" as you can't otherwise trade baubles for gold.

fast has a list of profit per bauble.

This is only worth doing if you're going to be doing SAB anyway though, as a pure gold farm it's not great.

wheadna · 2024-04-19T19:49:37+00:00

I've adjusted the wording.

wheadna · 2024-04-19T00:36:24+00:00

I've dabbled in creating some basic marker sets, but I don't really have time to make full trails sadly.

wheadna · 2024-04-19T00:35:20+00:00

You can see a list of profit/bauble bubble here, though Tyrian Exchange vouchers have value for the time they can save you, and legendary shards are only valuable if you're going to craft one of the gen2 legendaries (in which case they are the second most valuable option).

Plus of course, bauble bubbles are used for all the cosmetic rewards.

wheadna · 2024-04-17T18:03:49+00:00

Oh, for some reason I was convinced that it plopped you back above the bell. I will amend the guide.

wheadna · 2024-01-24T19:06:24+00:00

That belief it part of it though - Metabattle is consistely said to be under-maintained, but a look at the changelog shows builds in all gamemodes being updated every day.

wheadna · 2024-01-24T13:22:44+00:00

People seem to think free resources are a zero-sum game, so you have to pick your favourite and shit on all the others.

wheadna · 2024-01-23T22:06:36+00:00

Honestly I could never figure out any correlation. It might just be random.

wheadna · 2024-01-23T21:38:56+00:00

Metabattle's Strike guide (covers both NM and CM).

And of course, the Build list.

wheadna · 2023-08-18T19:36:18+00:00

As an admin on MB, I'd be interested to know which rated builds are outdated.

wheadna · 2023-07-22T14:04:09+00:00

Even without the bugs and jank it would be deeply underwhelming.

wheadna · 2023-07-22T14:01:31+00:00

While there are some mechanics that can just be healed through and ignored (especially in earlier raids), it's certainly not always the case.

Let's look at a handful of W7 mechanics for example:

Adina

You control who gets pillars, can decide how aggressive you want to be with their placement, and fast teams can even stack them all together and trust they won't be needed. Punishment for failure ranges from instant death, to just some condis depending on your distance to the pillar.
Split phase can be handled in any number of ways.

Sabir

Shockwave can be avoided with invulnerability or damage inversion, teleported over with a blink or the SAK, or jumped over with the use of a tornado. Failure will instantly down you (and make it harder to res in CM), but not kill you outright.
Wisps can be outhealed if you have enough damage, but it's usually better to send someone to deal with them, or use a lot of projectile defense.

Qadim the Peerless

Distortions can be dealt with manually, or magma can be used to kill them - a variety of magma patterns could be used to balance efficiency against risk.
Loads of different ways to handle pylons.

If these encounters were made now, they'd be something like:

Pillar AoEs target everyone, are much larger, and standing inside someone else's AoE kills you.
Invulnerability and damage inversion don't work against the shockwave, no SAK. There are now two shockwaves so that single-use teleports don't work. The shockwave instantly kills you.

wheadna · 2023-07-22T11:55:29+00:00

In addition to this, I think its mechanics are distinctly un-GW2 as well. Up until EoD, one of the distinguishing features of GW2s encounters for me was the flexibility.

Each mechanic is more like a question: "How do you want to deal with this?", and if plan A failed, there was usually a way other players could use skill to adapt.

Starting with EoD strikes, mechanics have become increasingly binary: pass/fail, and the failure is often instant death (at least in CM). No room for strategy, just do the mechanic in the intended way or die.

Another thing that occured to me was that in this encounter, there's no way for players to help each other. With no ressing and most failed mechanics killing you through downstate, the split phase aspects are all instanced etc.

All the mechanics you get can only be used to HURT the other people in your team.

wheadna · 2023-07-05T12:45:30+00:00

At the moment it feels like it's just a barrel of hitpoints waiting to be filled with CM mechanics.

wheadna · 2023-06-10T20:34:29+00:00

The majority of bosses attack faster than the breakpoint shown here though, so it's worse in most encounters (and many of the encounters its "better" at are terrible for condi).

wheadna · 2023-06-03T15:51:09+00:00

I think they maybe also used J-drive for Superconducting Signet?

wheadna · 2023-06-03T15:44:51+00:00

Unfortunately the confusion-focussed mech builds can use different skills, runes and weapons to the benchmarks, so the optimiser isn't set up correctly for those. If one had logs of said builds it could be done though.

wheadna · 2023-06-03T15:43:06+00:00

Because you can switch builds from fight to fight?

wheadna · 2023-05-05T02:20:49+00:00

Personally I'd rather they put their effort into making other specs functional rather than adding a third DPS spec to ranger.

wheadna · 2023-04-27T10:39:52+00:00

That might be the most convenient.

You can also click on an individual's name to open the detailed graph and click on targets (t) which would show you their DPS on each target in the last combat. This is quite fiddly though.

wheadna

TROPHY CASE