GW2: A Really Long Treatise on Gorseval

It’s serendipitous that the topic of the holy trinity has come up in the blogosphere again.

I’ve been pondering over how to blog about GW2 raids without sounding like I’m a jilted grouch (because you’ve read too much of my cognitive dissonance between competing values already) or bragging elitist (by writing completion/accomplishment posts that interest no one – those that have already done it go “what took you so long, noob?” and those that haven’t get grouchier.)

Nor did I want to write raid guides (because there’s already coverage by others far more proficient than me, and who actually feel passionate about this type of content) or sound like I love this content so much that the devs are encouraged to spend more resources on creating more raids at the expense of everything else.

That would be a personal nightmare. I’m actually quite relieved to hear thirdhand from someone with a vested interests in raids (via presumably interactions with raid devs) that the management of Anet is terrified of having raids become the be-all and end-all of the game.

Kindly stay terrified. I suspect the game’s been hemorrhaging players post-expansion, between anecdotal responses via quitting GW2 blog posts and Reddit posts about how many guild members haven’t been logging in lately. WvW fix, then Living Story 3 soon, please.

Hell, revive dungeons, I think you’ve lost a lot of easy fun group content players with that, even if I don’t run in those circles much and don’t really give a damn either way, I’ve observed a number of my friendslist not logging on lately after interest in regular dungeoneering died.

Discussing the raids from a commentary standpoint though, and explaining in greater depth and nuance to a general audience how GW2’s combat system can deviate from a pure tank/heals/dps trinity and be equally or more compelling, I think I can do.

First things first, a disclaimer that I’m just telling things as it is, from my personal perspective and observation of my raid groups (mostly oceanic timezone, with one or two super-casual NA forays.)

Values, priorities and perspectives may differ from raid group to raid group, especially in different timezones or cross cultures, and at different skill levels.

More importantly, my telling it how it is does NOT imply that I personally agree with or like the design or the rules/boundaries/limitations set or any of the implicit behavior that it encourages. When in Rome, you do as the Romans do, especially when you want the Romans to succeed and reap the rewards with as little pain and inconvenience to oneself as possible.

Facts are facts. The boss died when we did this. The boss did not die (and we wiped) when we did that. Therefore we should do more of this, and less of that.

If “this” is not a desirable state of affairs, then developers have to act and adjust “this,” groups bitch a bit and then adapt to the current state of affairs and move on to the next best thing. That’s generally how it goes.

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Since this is not a guide post, I’m going to start out of order and discuss my personal favorite mob of the trio.

Gorseval.

Mind you, this is post-glider fix. I have never dared to attempt it before that, and I’m positive that consistent unpredictable glider failure (since my entire raid group is on the other side of the world) would have greatly colored my feelings about this fight.

As it happens, my only experience with Gorse is a fight where 9 out of 10 gliders work most of the time, with at most one or two unlucky people catching a spot of bad lag or not being skilful at glider control and thus falling out of the sky.

It turns out that I am the least grumpy when I feel a sense of autonomy about the fight, that it is within my/our skill and power and control to influence success.

A fight where -someone else- keeps dying or screwing up, forcing the whole group to voluntarily wipe because we know we can’t get past the enrage timer without said person, is a fight where I silently get grumpier and grumpier. (Keep this in mind when we get to my Sabetha post later on.)

I don’t blame, I know everyone’s human and makes mistakes. It’s just supremely frustrating emotionally to be doing everything right and then have to reset and restart because an oops happened by someone else. Success relying on ten people acting like machines of consistency doesn’t quite make sense or appeal to me. #justmethings

Anyway, fortunately, without the vagaries of glider inconsistencies, Gorseval is a fight that to me, feels the most like a traditional raid boss.

For starters, he’s pretty big.

You get a small group of little people hacking away at a giant mountain of a monster feeling.

He also has a frontal cleave, so you get the traditional strategy where damage-dealers should be staying to his back or sides, while a tank faces him away and moves him about as needed.

This is where proponents of the holy trinity caper about and go “lol, see, you have tank/dps/heals, you now have a trinity in GW2, lololol.”

No one’s arguing that these functions – holding mob aggro, controling mob positioning, damage, damage mitigation, etc. – don’t exist in a non-holy trinity game. Non-holy trinity games offer considerably more flexibility and variation in roles though.

The GW2 tank is not necessarily a heavy armor wearer spamming taunt skills to gather sufficient threat to offset that generated by healers or dps.

Pretty much every class is capable of tanking, with the right build, and as long as they’re wearing gear that gives them a higher toughness than anyone else in the party. Control of mob aggro (specific to Spirit Vale’s Vale Guardian and Gorseval anyway) is a preset affair, where the whole raid group must play a part, opting to wear gear that has zero toughness, so as not to steal aggro from the agreed-upon tank.

Sneaking in with higher toughness is not possible as the boss will home in unerringly on said player, making it obvious to all that something is not right, and questions regarding the offending player’s toughness will be asked.

Fixing this becomes a joint give-and-take affair, either the player must remove or swap the gear with toughness, or the tank has to pile on more toughness to offset that. This ends up a minor social conundrum, due to possible difficulties in obtaining appropriate statted gear, depending on how casual either player is – different groups may opt to allow the offender to stay (if friends or known quantities) or replace them, some tanks may have more flexibility of gear swaps than others, and so on.

Once all the other players meet the established toughness baseline, the tank then puts on enough toughness gear he or she needs to survive (dependent on player skill, heals received, confidence, trial and error, etc.) and devotes the rest of their attention to surviving, proper mob positioning -and- damage, the more the merrier. Spamming taunt is non-essential (for this raid wing anyway.)

Of course, there can easily be a future set encounter where spamming controls like taunts and pulls are expected mechanics of the fight. The GW2 combat system allows for replication of the holy trinity, as well as breaking away from it, in other words. It’s that powerful. (So stop dissing it. Sheesh.)

The boss is dragged to the side by a sacrificial volunteer, who then leaps off and respawns, so that the group can gather at one side to get ready before beginning.

Gorseval begins as you might expect, the tank approaches to aggro the mob.

Gorseval will do an arm swipe (his frontal cleave attack), and then raise his arm for a stomp/smash attack that knocks back if it hits.

This attack is avoidable using the GW2 mechanic of dodging and evading with an invulnerability frame. No tank can save a poor dps player from this, and heals are not strictly necessary as it does not do an extreme amount of damage.

What it does do, is affect dps, as the player cannot attack for the seconds he or she is knocked down and recovering. Over time, a poorer player’s dps will drop in comparison to someone who can dodge consistently. As Gorseval utilizes some rather strict dps checks / has a tight enrage timer, this can affect group success if too many members’ dps is interrupted.

It can take a while to learn and get accustomed to the pattern, but over time, this attack is fairly predictable. Subconsciously or otherwise, you figure out that he will swipe, then smash at the beginning… then there’s a lull as he goes into his breakbar attack, and just as the tank begins pulling to the first updraft, Gorse will do his swipe, smash again.

But since his attacks can cycle a little non-consistently now and again, mostly, the cue you watch for is the one arm raise, then dodge.

This is in contrast to when he sort of half-raises both his arms, which heralds the start of his ground pounding breakbar attack.

In this attack, Gorseval teleports to the center of the arena and starts pounding around with both his arms. Black damaging goo will start spreading in a pattern.

For the first times he does this, the center stays clear for several heartbeats before it fills up and begins covering the entire arena.  It is desirable to break it as fast as possible, or your raid takes damage from the goo, plus Gorseval heavily reflects damage during this phase (like a buffed retaliation), and it can add up to a wipe if left uncontrolled.

Here we enter the province of (arguably) control: the specifically “unique” breakbar management of GW2.

Depleting this second bar requires repeated hard cc in quick succession. The wiki lists a bunch of examples of such cc.

Revenant staff 5 and warrior headbutt is favored fairly often in my particular raid group for break bars. Gorseval, in particular, is vulnerable to engineer slick shoes, which apparently takes advantage of his larger hitbox to spread a larger oil slick effect, which in turn demolishes his break bar.

I suppose one could file this trick in the questionably grey spectrum between “skill” and “exploit.”

Like it or not, raid groups forever chasing the optimal will do it. Some to eke out the last bit of dps they need because they’re struggling. Some because they’re the natural spade explorer-of-systems types and will break these things by their very nature, or in their optimizing search for better, faster, harder.

Personally, I confess that it bothers me very little.

Across the lifespan of the game, we’ve seen little tricks like fiery greatsword rush into walls, pre-nerf ice bow on large hitboxes, linecasting, purposeful positioning to cleave double hitboxes on dragon “objects” and the triple trouble wurm, “faceblocking” husks at wurm (aka standing at a special spot while using an invulnerability skill, which prevents the creation of husks altogether, ie. a sort of extreme egg-reflecting), pre-using potent potions of elemental slaying so that they continue to last while inside the raid instance, burnzerker stacking of their Scorched Earth fire-field to overlap onto a boss’s hitbox so that burns ticked twice or thrice (RIP), swimming underwater to kill the mossman, standing on conveniently/badly placed tree branches to kill mossman, and the recent hilarity of the creative use of conveniently/badly placed adrenal mushrooms to recreate the GW1 minion master to bleedingly devastating effect… (hell, I want one before it’s fixed…)

Some tricks take a certain amount of skill to perform, some don’t; most involve a lot of out of the box / fourth wall breaking understanding of game mechanics to figure out such a thing is possible, and most produce rather OP results, which is why they’re used.

Generally, my thinking is, if what happens is not intended by the devs, and determined to be undesirable, they should and will get around to patching it out. If it’s deemed fine or too unimportant to fix, it’s left in and people keep using it, whatever it is.

Once fixed, people adapt and move on to the next best thing. On and on the cycle goes.

Anyhow, once Gorseval’s break bar is broken, by whichever means, a coordinated cc spike or one really good engineer player (mind you, not everyone can do it. It takes know how and practice,) he crashes to the ground and the group gets a few valuable seconds of dps in.

It is also possible, in a no breakbar chak gerent fashion, to try a delayed breakbar strategy in order for more dps time. This does requires some strong healing to outheal the goop and retaliation damage though.

Healing in GW2 is currently the area where most groups have opted to stick closest to the holy trinity.

It’s not the combat system per se, there have been groups that have managed the Vale Guardian with tempest (elementalist) healers, a revenant healer in Ventari spec, a ten-man all-guardian kill where presumably at least one of the guardians was on heal coverage duty. Theorycrafting has suggested even thieves and necromancers with the right builds can output decent amounts of heals.

However, for a multitude of reasons, for now druid (ranger) healers seem the most popular.

Popular opinion holds that it’s the class most capable of producing a really high consistent output of directed (aka controllable and predictable) healing.

I also suspect that many ranger players, who probably went for the class because it offered the convenience of sitting back and plinking away at range at first glance, are closet healer players. They -like- the trinity healer playstyle. So given the option of fulfilling such a specialist role, many leapt at the chance. Contrast this to, say, thief classes whose players likely gravitated to the concept to do big damage and lots of it, and a willing specialist thief “healer” is much harder to come by, beyond bored already-on-farm groups open to experimentation.

The trinity healer concept is also easiest to grasp from an outsider standpoint, so the natural tendency for simplification becomes “We need a healer! Ok, who has a druid? Grab one from LFG if not.”

Strictly speaking, the pigeon-holing is not necessitated by the combat system. But players being players, they do gravitate to the option of least resistance and perceived most optimum.

I’m not 100% certain, but it seems that both the Vale Guardian and Gorseval produce auras that damage everybody for around 1000-1400 per pulse now and then. This steady trickle of damage encourages the use of at least one healer to offset it. They also help the tank stay upright, and top off the big damaging hits that players who are bad at dodging are likely to take (especially on squishy classes like elementalists or thieves.)

In a really pro group though, I’m not sure there’s a dedicated healer per se. I haven’t spent that much time analyzing this no updraft kill of Gorseval by the Snow Crows group, I just glanced through it for a couple minutes while constructing this post. From the druid’s POV, he’s dps’ing with a sword most of the time, and most of the members are making do with their self-heals and good positioning and dodging. Some members catch a protection boon now and then, and there seems to be a near constant source of regeneration being pulsed from someone, which I am not sure who exactly.

But you know why they take a druid? The druid also has one big advantage. It has buffs. Desirable boons. Frost spirit. Spotter. Grace of the land.

An example of a buff bar that still leaves a little something to be desired.

(To be frank, I don’t yet know half of the icons on the second bar by heart. I know what warrior banners look like because I play warriors very often but the rest is fuzzy. We had some less experienced players as the mightbots on this particular run and somehow, through build, gear or playstyle, party members weren’t catching 25 stacks of might consistently.)

Here we leave the realm of pure holy trinity, and veer more toward the realm of City of Heroes, where proactive buffs were just as important as, and could even replace pure healers.

Where GW2 is concerned, offensive buffs are a must-have always-maintain affair. This stems from the raid designers balancing the raid based on supergroups that do care about maximizing all this support at all times. Without them, other raid groups tend to struggle to output sufficient dps to overcome the enrage timer.

So, 25 might stacks. Given to the primary dps’ers at a minimum. Fury to up critical chance. Quickness and alacrity to speed up attacks and reduce skill cooldowns. Specific class traits like Empower Allies from warriors and Spotter from rangers.

Defensive buffs like regeneration and protection are nice to haves. Protection, especially, preemptively cuts down the amount of group damage taken, relieving stress on the primary healer.

One thing I’ve noticed in my runs, anecdotally, groups who pay attention to appropriate group composition and distribution of boons end up heaps more successful than groups who do not.

A GW2 raid composition has a tendency to saves about 4-6 slots for buffers, 1 for healing. (Optimal raid compositions are still in experimental flux, but mostly for the purposes of min-maxing to fit in more dps, and hybridizing for even more dps, rather than making room for more pure tanks or healers.)

In my book, that makes buffing as important a function and probably -more- important than pure healing.

Might is the province of PS warriors-berserkers and revenant-heralds. Strictly speaking, these are not the only might generators out there. But again, there is a tendency toward cookie cutter simplicity, due to the ease of might generation with these two builds, and the relative simplicity of operating both of these classes.

Fury can be covered by a revenant, but lately, has been moving towards the province of the druid (since it is coming along anyway as a healer, so it may as well provide more buffs too.)

Quickness/Alacrity has mostly been the province of chronomancers. Since the patch that nerfed them somewhat, there have been hints that guardians may also have a slight inroad along this front, but the meta hasn’t really changed in that direction yet.

Guardians though have a place when protection is desired. Hammer guardian-dragonhunter dps has lately been talked up, and hammer guardians are one of the best at laying down a constant field of protection. Revenants too have the flexibility to output protection in lieu of guardians.

The raid group I’m in tends to utilize two PS warriors, one or two revenants, a druid and a chronomancer at a bare mininum before filling the rest of the slots with a tank, and extra classes as needed by the encounter (eg. condi classes for VG, good ranged dps for Gorseval, etc.)

All this can and is likely to change when the next raid wing launches. If, for example, an encounter regularly flips boons into conditions, the need for high condition cleanse and avoidance of boon production is likely to create demand for a whole different set of builds/classes. Necros might then be in really high demand for taking conditions from their allies and sending it back to the appropriate party, fer instance.

Back to Gorseval. Once the break bar sequence is done, and he gets up and mobile again, the intended mechanic (if your group is not pro deeps) works like this.

The tank leads him over to one of the updrafts in the arena. There are four of them in the NW, NE, SW, SE cardinal directions (visible as the swirly things on the minimap.)

Simultaneously, a number of things have to happen. A wall needs to be broken to allow the raid to escape once Gorseval starts his World Eater attack. Loose spirits have to be killed or else Gorseval will consume them after his World Eater and be correspondingly buffed in power, increasing the damage he outputs.

Oh, and Gorseval still needs to be attacked constantly, or you’ll fail the upcoming dps check.

The overall strategy generally relies on some party members to pull (aka crowd control) souls toward Gorseval and the raid group, clumping them up, so that they can be aoe’d down or melee cleaved down at the same time while maintaining damage on Gorseval.

Melee cleaving should also be taking place on the wall, so that it comes down as well. In a pinch, if, say something goes wrong, folks get delayed by rezzing a downed person or whatever, it’s possible to focus everyone on the wall to get that down first too. On the fly target prioritization balance has to take place.

Condi necros have a decent niche here, as epidemic can spread conditions around to all the souls and be hitting Gorseval too. Their viper horror build which produces many itty bitty minions of bleeding goodness is currently making its rounds, courtesy of Reddit.

Generally, ranged AoE damage dealers are the popular pick. Staff elementalists are the current reigning champion, after burnzerkers fell off their perch of OPness.

Sometime around here, Gorseval does his swipe, then arm smash again, and then he starts his World Eater attack. A speading orange circle of doom indicates the time left until staying in the arena = instant death.

As the updraft only lasts so long a time, a party member cannot panic and jump off first. He or she will drain the time on the updraft, leaving the rest of the raid to fall to their doom. Also, that’s lost dps time.

So the whole raid stays and dps methodically until the circles almost touch… whereupon everyone jumps off, takes flight with glider wings, gets uplifted by the updraft and then glides back down to Gorseval when his World Eater is done.

Pray no glider malfunctions occur.

If they do, that person insta-splats to the ground and the raid leader will often call for a voluntary wipe, because that one missing person is often crucial lost dps.

Ideally, the tank lands first, to one side of Gorseval, and everyone else lands on the other side. In practice, well, our group isn’t pro pro, so it’s more of a random cluster.

Around this time again, Gorse will do his swipe and arm smash yet again. One raid group I joined suggested it was best to stay aloft until he finishes this smash then land. Another raid group I joined was fine with just landing and starting the attack asap and dodging as appropriate. Each group’s mileage will differ. It’s mostly a tension between as much dps as possible and safety in not having people downed (dps loss when someone else – probably many someones – stop attacking to rez) or permanently dead (may as well wipe now.)

Then he segues back into his break bar ground-pounding sequence. Repeat previous solution.

Now comes the dps check. ~33% of his health bar must have fallen off throughout the entire sequence above, before he completes his next World Eater attack.

Basically, there are only so many updrafts to use, so you cannot use an updraft at this stage. He must be brought down to ~66% of his health bar and forcibly shoved into his next Charged Souls phase.

If sufficient damage is dealt, the message “Gorseval Beckons For Souls” appears, he goes invulnerable, and four Charged Souls appear at each NW, NE, SW and SE direction. These souls proceed to walk with a one-track mind, ignoring anything aggro or tank-related, towards Gorseval.

If one of them reaches Gorseval, he eats it, then does a World Eater attack that wipes the raid. The end.

So. The other missing member from a tank-dps-heals trinity comes right back into play. Control. Specifically SOFT control. These guys ignore the hard cc that everyone is now used to throwing onto a break bar. They do not get knocked back, launched, pushed, pulled, stunned, dazed, the works.

You need cripples, chills, and most of all, immobilizes.

No neat tank, dps, healer lines here. It’s what your class and build has and can bring to the table. Depending on the raid group, strategies can range from splitting up the raid group equally to both slow and burn them down before they reach Gorseval, or assigning three individuals who know what they’re doing and have the required control to immobilize and slow the souls long enough while the rest of the raid zergs down one soul and then proceeds to deal with the rest in systematic fashion.

This is a point which can trip up newbies to the raid fairly often. As mentioned in a prior post, the first time I did Gorseval, I had some spectacular screwups of the “what am I supposed to do again?!” variety. Just today, I watched new members repeat the lil incident I had, in even more spectacular fail fashion (couldn’t even find the soul in the correct cardinal direction, then of course, spectacularly fail to slow it down, let alone hold it sufficiently.)

Importance of control? Very.

Once the four Charged Souls are dead, Gorseval becomes vulnerable again and the entire sequence repeats.

Arm swipe, arm smash, break bar. Drag to wall, arm swipe, arm smash, break wall, clear spirits. World Eater, jump and glide. Land, arm swipe, arm smash, break bar. DPS to the next magic health number.

Oh, but now you get the added complication of orbs of darkity-dark. (Okay, “Orbs of Spectral Darkness.”)

These things pop up randomly all over like bad mushrooms and spread a growing aura of debuffing badness. If you wander into them, you catch stacks of this debuff. The more stacks on you, the more damage you take, the less damage you do. It’s all hits on overall dps.

To get rid of the debuff, an orb has to be killed, and then you walk over the yellow glowy mini-orb it leaves behind.

Usually, the ranged attacking elementalist(s) are given the additional role of cleaning up the area in the vicinity of the raid of said orbs. I dunno what you’d call this – there’s damage involved, and it’s also both a form of support and crowd control? It’s not tanking or healing, anyway.

So we rinse and repeat (with orbs) until that magic number we were talking about, which happens to be ~33% of the health bar.

Enter Charged Souls phase 2 (now with orbs.)

Once that’s done, the whole sequence repeats one more time (with orbs) and now, with an additional Ghostly Traps/Egg attack.

Gorseval arm swipes, arm smashes, and then he spits ghostly traps at every player. Orange circles appear under each player’s feet. Moving out of it / dodging out is critical.

Here we’re back to utilizing GW2’s unique movement/dodge mechanic again. No tank can save you. No healer can save you. Each player has to learn how to avoid it.

Fail to do so, and you’re entrapped in a ghostly egg which pulses damage on you. Similar to certain spider-egg attacks in open world GW2, others have to break you out by dealing damage to the egg (dps loss on Gorseval, remember!) and/or you should be spamming the new special action key in order to break free.

But really, try not to get caught in the first place…

(Our group isn’t 100% pro, as mentioned, so every so often, there are 1-4 eggs popping up while our raid leader grouses that everyone should really know better. Damned human frailty.)

Now if your raid’s composition and dps is really good, Gorseval should be dead by the end of this third sequence/updraft.

Maybe our group sucks, or because it’s mostly Oceanic and on the other side of the world, if Gorseval ain’t dead yet, there is a tiny amount of leeway to use the fourth updraft to buy a little more dps time.

It depends. Let us not forget that there is a hard enrage timer on Gorseval as well and it’s been ticking down too. Depending on the total amount of time left, the raid leader might decide to use the fourth updraft or just say, fuck it, dps the crap out of it and hope it dies (because there’s not enough time left to do the whole gliding shebang) or whatever.

Personal success rates have been iffy, but possible. As mentioned, when burnzerkers were a thing, there was apparently a great deal of cheesing the hell out of Gorseval. I only got in rather late on that, but did at least do one successful kill with some 3+ burnzerkers of mass destruction.

Post burnzerker readjustment, I did score at least one other successful kill PS warrior-ing (I fail to recall if it’s one or two kills, there was one extremely memorable clutch kill of Gorseval with one quarter of the raid dead and the remaining were downed as he went into enrage, and that has wiped out any memory of a “normal” kill.)

Why do I like Gorseval the most? (Insofar as I could be said to “like” a raid.)

Well, first of all, even though the phases sound really convoluted and elaborate on first reading, and I thought it would be really hard to absorb or learn in practice, Gorseval’s phases are very predictable and build on each other in an understandable, ramping up slightly pattern.

He’s big, thus his animations are easier to read, the encounter has more of that epic ‘raid’ feeling.

Group wipes are generally at predictable points and phases, so it feels easier to learn, you get a longer time to see full cycles of the same repeating pattern and absorb it, rather than randomly wipe and die because someone just screwed up right then. If you wipe at Gorseval, it’s usually a group failure to pass whatever checkpoint or milestone that was (or glider malfunction, but we won’t talk about that.)

If you manage phase 1, you can usually keep going past phase 1 until the group manages phase 2, and the same for phase 3. There’s very little backward progress because an individual just randomly screwed up in phase 1. The phases ramp up gradually, allowing for gradual learning, and never hit a point of insanity.

The dps check comes early – if your group can get past to the Charged Souls, the group theoretically has enough damage to kill him in time, as long as people don’t make too many mistakes. Success feels possible.

Second of all, the whole thing takes place pretty quickly in real time. He has a 7 minute timer. Full stop. (Do I personally think it’s a little too tight? Yeah. But it shows how compressed in time the phases are.)

It adds up to a very quick and actiony sequence that flows seamlessly from one into another, while not being super-complicated to the point of brain overload. Folks who like more strategically-paced combat might shudder at this, but I do personally like the quicker pace of action combat.

Lastly, I think the Gorseval fight showcases pretty much most of the aspects of the GW2 combat system. Yes, aggro exists. Yes, there is a tank, insofar as someone wearing a +4 infusion of toughness (not my group, a pro group) could be said to be tanking. The mob positioning is there. Sturdiness, not so much. Taunting and threat fighting over doing damage? Nope.

Yes, there can be a healer, again insofar as a druid in berserker gear and not doing that much healing per se (not my group again) could be said to be healing. Or if the group needs it to stay upright enough to deal sufficient group dps, there can be a greater focus towards healing power and a more specialist role.

Hell yes, you’re still going to have to read animations and dodge.

You’re still going to need buffs out the wazoo.

Oh, and you’d better understand all aspects of control, or you’ll be sorry.

And yeah, you need to do damage, but you’re probably already really really good at that, right?

Gee, I almost forgot, you need to be able to glide and have those masteries and what not. (By now, most HoT owners have them though.)

There’s a group split, there’s a group reforming, hell, there’s even zerging (that’s GW2 players for you. Circle strat for the win.)

It’s quite the showcase, really.

Is it maybe a bit too tightly tuned and unforgiving of groups who don’t max out every buff in existence, don’t have picture-perfect skill rotations and the ping to execute them and overly focused on maximizing dps, to the extent that it encourages dps meter-ing? Maaaybe.

But he is pretty fun to fight, -if- your raid composition was good to begin with, and man, a mini of him would look great underfoot.

Why Are We Even Arguing About The Holy Trinity?

I really didn’t want to jump on this bandwagon again, but I mostly felt the need to defend the often maligned GW2 combat system, often perceived as “zerg all the things, press 1” or “everyone is dps, stack and cleave.” This argument is often used by holy trinity proponents as an example of non-holy trinity failure and mostly demonstrates their lack of understanding of said system.

Folks, the above is a result of keeping difficulty levels easy and simple, because casuals don’t like it to be more complex than that, and pissing off the casual playerbase is a good way to have loads of unhappy customers.

Hell, -I- personally like to have many parts of my game simple, relaxing, easy fun where I can turn off my brain after a hard day’s work and go farm stuff by myself, or get rewards for hitting a loot pinata with a bunch of other people. Champion trains, Edge of the Mists player vs door trains, Silverwaste chest farms are popular for that very reason!

The GW2 combat system has always been foundationally capable of a lot more, and if people haven’t figured that out by now, they’re voluntarily playing at easier difficulty levels, or they just haven’t bothered to learn.

This will be a multi-part post. The first is a more general rant against the holy trinity (and I can get very acerbic in places, so don’t say I didn’t warn you if you do happen to be pro-holy trinity) and I’ll get to more specific GW2 “how raids work sans holy trinity” posts over the next few days/weekend.

Now on to the fun rant:

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Seriously, why are we even talking about this any longer, in this day and age?

The holy trinity is dead. It never really existed to begin with, beyond a brief blip of fame with the super-simplified World of Warcraft.

Everquest players will tell you that crowd control was a vaunted and valuable function and role where certain classes were desired and sought after.

An old MUD player like myself will point out that many different MUDs experimented with a variety of combat roles/systems beyond the pure tank/dps/heals trinity. 

Some used standing in the frontline position as a way to ‘tank’ or dictate who got hit preferentially. The MUD I played mainly used who entered the room first and engaged with fighting the mob as the set tank, with one class able to ‘rescue’ in order to swap tanking positions.

Heals might be self-heals, besides being cast by another player. The MUD I played used a sort of Diablo-esque precursor system. Heal spells were pre-brewed into potions by the cleric class. The cleric couldn’t cast heal spells as fast as you could quaff said potions. So the cleric stayed at home and crafted, and you brought a more damage-focused character to kill things, armed with some 200-500 heal potions, depending on how much you could carry.

ARPGs today still use a variation of that, you can always self-heal with potions, even if they make room for specialist classes to also heal you up, while playing in a group.

See, there have always been a couple of functions that exist in most typical combat systems.

Damage, of course, is one. You can’t “kill” things without doing damage. 

Variations include melee or ranged damage (aka coupling damage with positioning); or instant direct damage vs damage over time (DoTs, aka coupling damage over time. GW1 added the concept of degeneration, basically a really -fast- damage over time status effect or condition or debuff); or how many things you hit at one time (single target or area of effect, often with many fun shapes beyond circles now, courtesy of Wildstar and GW2.)

Survivability or damage mitigation is another. Basically how high your health pool is, how much armor you have, if you can dodge or evade or otherwise negate hits in some fashion, etc. 

City of Heroes broke this down nicely for us into two major types – resistance, where you took only a percentage of damage dealt each time, or defence, where you had a percentage chance to completely not get hit at all. The first led to more predictably sturdy characters whose health bar whittled down slowly, the latter to characters that felt invulnerable, until they failed a roll invisibly and then got an almighty punch to the face that slapped down a large portion of health, surprising everybody.

Controling of mob aggro is yet another function, ie. who the mob chooses to hit. Your typical MMO does this with a threat generation system which takes into account damage dealt, healing output, and then tends to ruin it all by giving certain classes skills that merely add huge globs of threat to this invisible counter (well, invisible until someone runs an add-on.)

It’s a convention that doesn’t necessarily have to be this way though. The Guild Wars series is the best example of spinning this concept on its head. 

The first game used a PvP-like priority system, the mobs liked to pick on casters and healers and light armor wearers and lowest health players. Makes more sense than picking on the heavily armored tank calling its mother names, no?

In PvE, there was the added concept of proximity aggro, as marked by the danger zone circle on one’s minimap. I’ll frankly confess that prior to playing City of Heroes and absorbing more of these aggro concepts subconsciously, I’d get into serious serious trouble playing Guild Wars 1, unable to conceive of backing away and pulling mobs, and thus causing my aggro circle to overlap multiple groups of patroling mobs, which led to chaos and carnage among my party. 

Post-CoH, when I went back to playing GW1, everything felt surprisingly easier, because I was methodically pulling and clearing single groups at a time without even realising I was doing so.

GW2’s aggro system has always existed, but has been frankly, invisible to many many players and not general knowledge until raids came about and made it a necessity. From the start, the wiki spelled it out. Toughness, proximity, damage dealt are the biggest factors, and each mob is capable of varying behaviors based on these factors, even at different phases of their hp. 

Many mobs respect highest toughness as the primary factor, unless they’ve been set to prioritize lowest toughness instead (very rarely occurs, eg. might be what’s happening during Lupicus phase 2 when he chooses a shadowstep target.)

When toughness is equal, aka everyone is in berserker gear or 0 toughness gear, with no other traits that give toughness, they default to proximity and damage dealt. We blend the two because it’s hard to tell what takes precedence, melee damage tends to do a considerable amount of damage, backing off to drop aggro lowers both proximity and damage dealt over time, so yeah…

…except when the mob is again set to consider something different as a target, such as Mai Trin’s favorite attack that often fucks up the most scaredy cat ranged attacker of the group (aka the furthest away from her.)

Then there’s player positioning and mob positioning. Typically, the first is the onus of every player to be where they’re supposed to, in or out of harm’s way, able to hurt or aid as appropriate. The second is often the purview of the tank and off-tanks, to move mobs where they need to be.

Again, it doesn’t have to be so. Most crowd control roles would do well to understand appropriate mob positioning, be it through pulls, knockbacks, roots/immobilizes, or just via body-blocking (in games that support that) or line of sight pulls or kiting. GW2 ups the ante by asking that most/all players learn this in harder group content.

Plenty of games these days have brought control back to the forefront as a fourth comer to shatter the trinity. City of Heroes, Wildstar, GW2 have all experimented with variations on this count.

CoH used controllers as a tank substitute, negating the alpha strike from a pack of mobs and holding them in place to be beat on. No more waiting for that one special self-important egomaniac “tank” before the group can proceed to play.

Wildstar used the Interupt Armor concept as a mitigating defence against CoH’s binary controls. (When on, they were all powerful. When off, they did absolutely nothing, much to frustration of the classes that relied on it and had to fight mobs made invulnerable to controls. Control magnitude and purple triangles on mobs turning up or down to indicate periods of vulnerability were a half-baked way to address this, but never to much satisfaction, it was too random most of the time, the very antithesis of control.)

So Wildstar brought in Interrupt Armor stacks. Each control strips off one status effect buff that protected the mob from CC. The next CC takes effect. Now there was group contribution and the possibility of group coordinating a CC spike. I don’t play Wildstar, so I have no idea which part of the trinity took on the CC role as well, but if we’re lucky, maybe -all- of them.

GW2 decided that even this was too binary and random. Given the fast pace of the game, it would be quite frustrating to strip off stacks and then have a short control take effect over a long one, just because that short one happened to land when all the invulnerability was off.

So they went for a controlled pre-set effect to take place, when a “break bar” was sufficiently depleted by coordinated CC. Different controls could also be given more weight using this system, rather than all controls being equivalent with a more binary on/off system.

Bhagpuss argues that this then becomes just another health bar to take down.

In a way, yes, there is a resemblance, but I don’t think that resemblance is unhealthy. It’ an easier concept for most people to grasp, the idea of a second health bar that can only be damaged by a different set of skills. There is added complexity in having to balance both – take more skills to do damage to real health, or take more skills to damage the other bar, in order to prevent a wipe or to help add more overall combined group damage when said mob is controlled successfully.

There is one major difference though, that has this second “health bar” echo something out of GW1. It can and often regenerates very quickly. As quickly as GW1 health bars do, under the effect of heals and regeneration. The coordinated spike of burst damage is again brought into play, a very PvPish concept, as opposed to the more PvE-like whittling down of a very large health reservoir.

Interrupts, as a concept, are really about the optimal timing of controls, often within a short interval, while the other party is in the middle of a skill cast.

Enough about control variations, what about support?

There’s reactive support, heals being the prime example. Something happens, the player does something else in response to mitigate this.

Healing, like damage, also sports all of its variations. Funny AoE shapes, instant or DoTs, affects others, affects self, the works. (Self-healing, though, should be pointed out as a critical decision point that affects how reliant on others an individual player has to be. More on that later.)

There’s proactive support, the player does something before the bad stuff happens. (Or at least while it’s happening, which would overlap in the proactive to reactive spectrum.) This is the realm of offensive (damage boosting) and defensive buffs (shielding/protection), of damage reflecting / retaliation, and so on.

Support can be always-on, or short-lived. The first are usually of the fire and forget buff variety, mostly pre-cast and made long as a convenience so that the poor buffers don’t get RSI. The second is more challenging, and either requires good skill rotation to maintain permanence if possible, or appropriate timing for best effect (such as the guardian aegis in GW2, which can completely block and negate one big hit for the group.)

The last trick is that of summoning or pets or minions. The player gets to create mobs from nothing, that can then take on some or all of the above functions, from damage, sturdiness, taking mob aggro, controls, support or heals.

Truth is, across the huge spectrum of games these days, from MOBAs and FPSes, ARPGs to yes, MMOs, you’ll see this variation of functions and combat concepts, which range from 4-7 in number, very rarely the pure holy trinity.

The uniqueness comes when the different games start assigning different classes roles and functions that pick and choose from these 4-6 general concepts.

One class could have the sturdiness of a typical tank, but lack means of aggro control, and be more focused on damage, a superhero style bruiser/brute archetype.

MOBAs, especially, have gone down one extreme, where each special character played has its own unique schtick to keep in mind, along with a vague general role function. This makes game mastery an exercise in specific game knowledge, after one memorizes/learns 48, 72, 112, 123, characters…

(I presume that Marvel Heroes follows a similar-ish route, though probably with less depth than most MOBAs.)

Pro-holy trinity-ians have long lost this battle.

No, really, we should leave this poor dead horse where it is, and take up arms around the real crux of the matter.

It’s not about tank/heals/dps, it’s about how group-reliant they want other players to be. 

Dare I say it, it’s about how dependent on others they want for everyone in their game to be, about how self-important they can feel having a special unique snowflake of a role that is irreplaceable (at least until another identical class shows up. /duh.)

Sorry, folks, I can’t keep the scorn out of my writing for such a mindset.

It’s an argument in similar vein to, “I want other people to play with me, so please force them to, by offering them no choice whatsoever,” regardless of how introverted or disinterested the other person is with regards to playing in a group, or how their schedules look like.

It also makes no sense whatsoever.

As mentioned, even in a game with utterly pure unique roles, that healer is still replaceable by another healer, that tank for another tank.

There is no harm in allowing two (or more) classes to cover the same roles, to overlap in role function. If we don’t have X class, ok, someone can bring Y class (that they do have) and that part of the fight can be covered. 

Added flexibility reduces stand around and wait to play time.

There can still be group interdependence and synergy in a holy-trinityless game. 

City of Heroes generally needed an alpha strike taker in their groups (tank, controller types, plus the villainous brutes, dominators, masterminds, or even buffer/debuffers with enough cojones to self-survive through it), plus enough buff/debuffs made everyone a god of war. Plenty of room for damage-dealers, mob-positioners, supporters, the works. 

The whole was generally larger than the sum of its parts (at least, until Incarnate powers and loot came along.)

There’s even room for special roles for that special snowflake feeling. They just take on more game-specific, build-specific names. GW1 had the imbagon, aka the imbalanced crazy buffer paragon that armored everyone into invincibility, among plenty of other ‘required’ components of a specialized group.

GW2 will always require might-stackers, most often covered by the PS warrior, but now with added flexibility by having a revenant in Herald elite spec also able to perform a similar function. The chronomancer is a must-have in many raid parties for quickness and alacrity generation (guardian quickness is not yet part of the meta but there seem to be some suggestions that the wind might be blowing a little in that direction…)

There’s plenty of encounter-specific roles as well, and a shit load of group interdependence in raids that I can only address in another post.

The only real defence for the holy trinity, that I -might- acquiesce to, is this: Simplicity.

The “it’s too hard for me to understand anything more complex” “casuals want to just drop in and have mindless fun, and feel comforted and familiar with a system they’ve already learned” argument. 

Maybe even the “I want to get carried as a no-responsibility dps because I’m not good at / have no time to learn anything more about this game” argument.

Because, as I said earlier, I have nothing against mindless fun. I like it a lot. I like being lazy and relaxing most of the time, taking the easiest route and the path of least resistance. 

I also don’t like turning away those that aren’t good at the game. If there’s a way for stronger players to support or carry weaker players to success, then all the merrier. That’s a true social game, helping others, being helped in return, because we’re all good at some things and not good at all at other things. (But let’s face it, neither mindless fun, an easy to grasp system or being able to cover for others -requires- the holy trinity.)

Catering to the lowest common denominator is the road to popularity and $$$, contrary to what most of the self-proclaimed “hardcore” will say. An easy to grasp, approachable game that doesn’t frustrate or turn away the bulk of its players at first contact will have a larger population to support it. It so happens that WoW has trained this said bulk of players to be familiar with only one combat system playstyle, so well, if you’re copycatting,  or cloning WoW, holy trinity is probably your best bet.

The instant a defender of the holy trinity brings up the complexity of tanking or healing or getting skill rotations just right as a dps though, I start to scoff. “Then why not broaden your horizons further and learn more of the other specialist functions and of other games that let you play a hybrid class that can be equally good at two things at once? Isn’t that more hardcore, special snowflake heroic, complex and laudable? Why content yourself with doing one thing well, when you can do two, three, four things well?”

Bottom line, it goes back to “I don’t like or want to learn or play any other roles or combinations thereof. I just like this one and am not flexible or adaptable.”

So let’s just say it how it is. Holy trinity defenders are sticks-in-the-mud that want to feel special and want to force other people to roll around in the mud with them.

And there’s nothing wrong with that. A preference is a preference.

It’s just not going to be a game that suits -me.-

And you won’t catch me playing a game designed in such a way for long.

One Step Forward, Two Steps Backward

I thought I was getting better.

Two days ago, I took this screenshot feeling relatively good about everything in general, wanting to share a burgeoning optimism that maybe quarterly class balance updates would be decent for overall game functioning.

After all, I had around three months to giggle about getting into Viper’s gear before the crowd demand sent Black Diamond prices soaring sky-high, and then play a Burnzerker – a build that I would probably not have ever gotten around to on my own, but really tickled the pyromaniac-loving part of me that loves any class that throws around fire, fire and MORE FIRE.

The Burnzerker nerf was expected, and I was pleasantly mollified to see that it wasn’t knee-jerk cut down into absolute uselessness, but more or less on par with most other normal condition classes/builds. (Minus the present bug where two burnzerker fields are ineffective, thus don’t bring more than one, until it gets fixed, eventually.)

Of course, we still have two annoying player subsets to contend with – those who won’t accept anything but the current most OP builds – that crown has gone to a certain specific necromancer/reaper build using minions and epidemic apparently (not sure, I haven’t looked into it yet); and those who are blatantly ignorant and jump to conclusions based on hearsay without any actual attempts at measurement or objectivity.

The latter are a pet peeve, as arguing with an idiot tends to wind up with descending to their level and them beating you with experience at being a stubborn ignoramus.

So I usually don’t try, beyond a calm factual statement or two, and then let the facts speak for themselves. (Brought a burnzerker to VG, red either still died before blue and green, or exactly on time – so either blue/green group is incompetent and/or the condi output is acceptable. Not OP anymore, but acceptable.)

Another funny side story about those who think they know everything: I was on my way to my last Lunar New Year firecracker for the daily.

As my charr bullrushed past one or two people standing around, random bystander guy spoke up and said, “You have to glide to this firecracker. FYI.”

I have no idea if he was addressing me (since I did bump the pillar/pedestal on my way to said firecracker) or if he was talking to the other player standing nearby, but eh, what if that player didn’t own Heart of Thorns? Was he SOL?

Without missing a beat (since I was really truly on my usual route to the firecracker anyway), I ran right past, jumped up the side of the glass dome, ran along the roof and then promptly fell down through a gap in the roof onto the pedestal where the firecracker was.

Sans glider.

Random bystander quickly shut up and decided that now would be a good time to walk/run away.

I might be revealing my deeply flawed human nature here, but I couldn’t stop chortling to myself for some time after that.

But I digress.

The screenshot above is my new *cough*dervish*cough*

Okay, it’s really just the thief Elite spec Daredevil with a staff skin.

But it captures the scythe wielding part of the GW1 dervish decently well, even if the avatar changing utility skills have more or less wound up with the revenant.

Again, without the meta in dramatic upheaval every three months, I find that it would be quite unlikely that I would have gotten around to this build.

Mostly, I was looking for a secondary replacement class for the burnzerker, so that if a particular raid already had way too many might stacking PS warriors or revenants, I could at least offer a current ‘common knowledge’ ‘OP’ class/build. (When in Rome and all that, you know, why fight it?)

It also took out what was probably a month’s worth of materials hoarding and savings by the time I finished decking him out with the appropriate runes/sigils, Ascended weapons, trinkets, and about three pieces of Ascended armor.

As personally painful as it was to dip into the treasure hoard, I have to admit that a certain amount of forced spending and need for materials is good for stimulating the economy. Also, it acts like another kind of hardcore tax beyond expensive food/wrench consumables.

I was excited enough by the feel of playing and learning a new build/playstyle to go out and kill a bunch of core Tyria stuff, adding up toward core Tyria mastery, as well as start formulating specific HoT plans for improvement/progress.

One goal was the Ascended Bo, which I found cheapest to just go ahead with the collection. That made me partake in one round of Auric Basin and one round of Dragon Stand in order to get the last bits of stuff I needed.

I idly also laid in plans to score some HoT mastery points, since way too many repeated raid failures had already capped me in xp for the HoT mastery tracks. I just need about 12 more mastery points I haven’t gotten around to earning.

—

Unfortunately, the last two days have put me into a bit of a foul mood yet again.

I idly made a reply comment in a Reddit thread rant that described how many problems the player was facing while trying to enjoy/play through a HoT meta event.

At the time, it was just a bit of a speculative thought I had, an idle remark on the many levels of abstraction that the guy’s story had become about, that his narrative had become more “struggling with the game, as game” rather than an immersed narrative about the world as obstacle.

I was sort of thinking of the same issue that Warhammer had, with their all encompassing Tome of Knowledge, and PvE leveling that wound up staring at the quest UI going “OK, I need X more organs from Y mobs” and mostly out-of-world game-meta related thinking that made the obvious focus manipulating game mechanics and rules, rather than actually enjoying the world as presented.

It blew up on me rather surprisingly, garnering some 200+ upvotes.

It made me think about how many people are out there, feeling a bit like me, feeling a bit like some of the old guard like that_shaman and other familiar Reddit names expressing a certain malaise or discontent.

And then I read new guard comments in the GW2 reddit, who LOVE raids and think they’re awesome, except that they’re also constantly whining that dungeons have been gutted, fractals have devolved into Swamp of the Mists (apparently, I haven’t bothered to set foot in there for some time) and that they’ve already cleared the raid wing on reset day and have nothing else to do and are now bored and going off to play another game, while waiting for more stuff to do.

And here I am, -struggling- to find enough groups every goddamn week to even get a guaranteed vale guardian kill, having to push aside my dinner time so that I might even get into a raid group that might or might not kill VG…

… and I just get angry. And bitter.

(To add salt to the wound, apparently TTS training raids are now off the calendar, diminishing yet another avenue for raid groups, and it’s back to waiting for an invite into the next experiment, a specific TTS raid guild, to see if that works any better. Strung along, yet again.)

And then I read a post like Azuriel’s, wherein he Gets/Doesn’t Get GW2.

All I want to do is bang my forehead against a flat surface really really hard.

No offense taken from Azuriel’s honest reactions, by the way, I think he’s a great representative of the subset who give GW2 a shot, just can’t find any impetus to level up further and then start posting on Reddit asking, “is that all there is? how do I level fast? map completion is boring, how do I like this game? unosweiter.”

But I can’t help but scream, in a rather enraged fashion, that Heart of Thorns threw in all the fucking endgame for people like this – who need a reason to keep leveling (masteries), who want a PvE endgame to look forward to (raids / collection grind)…

… and apparently they’re not even making it to level 80!

They can’t get past the open exploration aspect of leveling, so they quit before hitting 80.

Meanwhile, those that liked the open exploration aspect, now face the bait-and-switch achievement endgame, just like -every other fucking MMO- out there.

WHO THE FUCK IS ANET CATERING TO ANY MORE?

They try to reach the hardcore raiders, and the hardcore raiders are throwing it back in their faces by locusting the content and diminishing it to triviality.

In the process, they’re infuriating the casuals and those in the middle.

The PvPers are twitching ever since the PvP league ended and they’re forced to mix with the hoi polloi in unranked.

Meanwhile, they’re scrambling to apply CPR to the most neglected portion, WvW, because that’s a post-expansion priority now.

Everyone else is just going to have to wait their turn.

#grumpy

—

Furthermore, I hear news from Trion’s end that they’re revamping payment models and my second-favorite “MMO-like” Trove is going to start charging real money for classes, no two ways around this.

This makes me grumpier.

Mind you, since I started early, I’ve already reaped most of the benefits and unlocked every class but the Gunslinger (which still reputedly needs help to be brought back up to par) so it’s not exactly going to impact me considerably except moving forward, if I ever desire a new class introduced.

But I just don’t know if I can bring myself to play games that don’t feel fair, payment model or level playing field-wise.

So Trove may be a write off too.

Maybe it’s time to relook at Path of Exile or Minecraft again…

GW2: Earning Money From Me Even When Burnt Out

I’m still comparatively burnt out on GW2, but the glider latency fix just got me to pay ArenaNet the first sum of money since Heart of Thorns. Going from 250ms to instantaneous deployment is worlds apart in responsiveness feel.

It’s a princely sum too, more than a typical two months MMO subscription, $35 USD for five shared inventory slots.

I can only hope that I’ll feel inclined to play more this year rediscover a sense of enjoyment while playing GW2 for a balanced amount of time, later this year, after my break.

GW2: Fractals of Silence and Skill (Or Lack Thereof)

I’m hoping to mark the end of my fractal journey for the time being by this week or the next.

At the start of September, I was fractal level 25ish with 26 AR (after goodness knows how many years) and not terribly motivated to go any further.

Eh, some gold, some fractal relics, lots of blues and greens, the odd yellow or orange, pretty much everything to be salvaged since most of the stats that turn up in fractals – Magi, Cavalier, Soldier – are odd, to say the least. Plus Ascended rings that take up slot space (I am constitutionally incapable of throwing -anything- away in an MMO) and the rare rare chance that something pretty might drop.

Oh, and the same content ad nauseam, alongside questionable PUGs – since I lack that mythical beast known as a stable, organized group within my timezone who can deal with my schedule (or lack of it.)

For the hell of it, in a similar vein to my self-imposed “collect all the Scientific skins” challenge, I decided to try to get to fractals 50 before the expansion hit, with its vaunted fractals revamp that would both make the leveling curve easier and slope it upward ever higher to 100.

After all, it is both satisfying to be able to say “been there, done that” as well as be among that rare opposite breed of player who can play the so-called ‘most difficult’ content in GW2 and yet not be an eager raid fanatic.

We’re a few days away from the end of September now, and I’m officially at fractal level 45 tonight.

It’s a little bit trickier to rise further in levels via LFG PUG, given the number of highly aggravating mistlock instabilities that make it daunting to open an instance at one’s current level.

Essentially, I’m sitting around waiting on the largesse of someone else who has already reached fractal level 50 to start their group and jump in… assuming they haven’t already hit their quota of PS warriors and are busily demanding eles and guardians, or conversely, in a more haphazardly not-at-all meta compliant group, hoping that the party won’t give up and fragment from one or two players just up and quitting the group one fractal in, because they didn’t like the chaos/inexperience on display or took umbrage at the ranger or necro in the party or something.

In any case, it’s been an eye-opening experience.

If there’s two things I’ve learned from my fractal journey, it’s these:

1. Other people are not super-skillful gods of competency. There’s no need to be deathly afraid of them, or conversely, looking like a right idiot in front of them.
2. I am not a super-skillful god of competency. There is always more I can be learning and improving on incrementally, as long as I keep an open mind, stay observant as to what’s still lacking, and am patient with myself.

Where 1) is concerned, I’ve feel like I’ve seen it all at this point.

I’ve seen people fall off the Uncategorized fractal simply from mistimed jumps, not a harpy knockback; fail miserably at running wisps in the Swamp (guilty); get smashed by Jade Maw tentacles or fall over consistently from failing to pick up crystals; completely fail at either kiting Mai Trin or managing the cannon phase without panicking like a headless chicken; mess up on really idealistic plans to output sufficient dps to take down Molten Berserker, Grawl Shaman or Subject Six in one go; splatter all over the Thaumanova fractal trying to manage the heat room or shield room; totally screw up the dredge fractal buttons or kiting the last boss from lack of communication, unsoweiter.

What might rather surprise those who haven’t been there is the capacity of practically all of these groups to pick themselves up (even if they have to peel themselves off the floor multiple times after a total party wipe or log out to repair and return) and -eventually- complete the fractal.

The only kind of fractal group I’ve seen fail is the kind where one person gives up and leaves in silence, followed by one or two more… at which point I’m left staring at one or two more people left in my party and think “fuck it, I don’t want to organize this” and leave wordlessly as well.

That’s generally a failure to communicate, pretty much.

It seems to be the oddly damning sin of most PUGs – silence.

Everybody barely says anything and just kinda hopes that everyone knows what they’re doing. If carnage results, then a slightly better group will start to produce one sentence communication, and a bad group just ups and disappears right there.

On this front, the higher level fractal produces better odds that more people generally know what they’re doing, more or less, though there are a few difficult encounters that can start to reveal flaws in that assumption – most memorably in the Snowblind fractal, where certain groups end up throwing one’s bodies over and over at the elemental source while total party wiping the instant someone accidentally aggros one too many ice elementals while 40-60% of the group either doesn’t know what to do about them or decides they will keep pewpewing the elemental source instead.

Granted, the way that encounter is set up, it becomes almost quite impossible to have a lengthy discussion because you’re either getting chill debuffed, chased by really nasty Svanir, constantly knocked down by the elemental source once you run out of stability, struggling to light the fire before the debuff kills everybody, desperately trying to roll out of one-hit KO ice elemental shards, and so on.

(Yes, there are a few safe zones where one can stand in the fire’s warmth and not aggro anything and swap skills, but really, if your team lacks teamwork and communication to begin with, d’ya really think they can manage that?)

Compare and contrast this with the fractal level 10 I attempted one day, mostly in the hopes of getting a quick daily speedily done, where it became rather obvious that the somewhat cute and somewhat pathetic guardian in our party, who only had 740+ AP, was an inexperienced newbie with no AR worth speaking of.

Not merely because he kept falling off every last Cliffside obstacle – entirely likely that he’d never seen the wind blowing statues or the little exploding knockback thingmajigs before – but also due to his tendency to instantly melt in 4-5 ticks when an agony pulse hit while the other four people remained upright and untouched.

He said nothing about being new, or indeed, anything at all, possibly due to the fear of being kicked for his inexperience or noobness.

It did, however, leave me feeling somewhat uncomfortable and uncertain how best to help.

The group kind of just “selfishly” ran to each stage of the fractal and sat there waiting for the straggler(s) to catch up, though the two who seemed to have the most clue (ie. me and another person, probably the one who started the party) took care/charge of the hammer and we did, more or less, wait for the guy to finally catch up before progressing on to the next stage.

Everything in silence.

Granted, it is hard to know just -how- to help. It’s not like I could portal him past anything, he has to press keys in the proper sequence and timing in order to get past the obstacle, the only thing I could do is either give him swiftness or cure his conditions (not useful in this situation) and/or advise him to take his time getting the timing down and/or suggest swapping in a skill with stability.

As for the AR problem, well, it’s blatantly an artificial stat barrier meant to produce vertical progression grind (one reason why I never bothered much with fractals before this either.)

With something as ‘meta’ as this, it’s really hard to know just what to say or do. It ultimately boils down on each player to have done their research beforehand, figured out just exactly how much AR they need before stepping into the ‘correct’ level fractal, which is, objectively a -weird- expectation that a player would have scrutinized the wiki and/or stepped into the fractal portal to have this all explained to them via NPC beforehand… especially when you think the first way a player is likely to encounter the fractals is via a LFG party, especially when a daily tells them to do a level 1-10 fractal. (Granted, the guy was optimistic jumping straight away into level 10.)

Anyhow, the discomfort was mostly mitigated by the fact that fractals 10 is really quite easy, so we just brute forced our way through most of it and ‘carried’ the slightly more clueless individuals through. Only way they’ll learn in the end, via experiencing it, right?

Which segues me to point 2), in that as the fractal levels rise, the failure of others to ‘carry’ me, or cover for my own lack of mastery, has essentially forced me into getting better.

(Mostly through encountering a really disastrous situation, and post-fractal, asking myself what I could have done to not contribute to that.)

After sneaking by many many fractals without really learning the jumps in the Swamp by either not running the wisp. or helping only with the closest ones and brute-forcing most of them, somewhere in the 30s, I decided it was time to solo roll a Swamp fractal and practice some of the wisp runs under the tutelage of ample referencing of gw2dungeons.net.

I’m happy to report that I can actually take on the spider one now without triggering a million baby spiders (by virtue of *duh* jumping on the rocks without eggs nearby) and can deal with all the near ones with full confidence, having memorized a reliable jump path that will work even if the nearest gates are closed.

(Previously, one just used to run and pray that one got lucky.)

The far ones are still tricky, mostly due to my continual inability to distinguish traps from ground (bulky charr is bulky and clumsy) and tendency to run right into the mossman or fail the jumps, but well, there’s always room for more practice later.

I’ve at least memorized the far northwestern one, whose path seems somewhat easy and clear cut, even if my practical implementation leaves something to be desired in between trying to dodge one-hit-kill skelk, traps and getting tangled in-combat and failing jumps as a result.

The one real take-home from actually attempting some of these runs is that I’ve realized it behooves me – if not actually running – to amble on by to support the person running far with swiftness and condition clears and so on, rather than sit like a lump of lard at the logs and hope for others to magically reach the stumps with the wisps without my help.

Ditto the heat room in the Thaumanova fractal. Most of the time, someone much better practiced at it volunteers to take it on and I see neither sight nor sound of the encounter.

In one particularly memorable fractal group, it turned out that -none- of us knew how to do the heat room very well at all. Since it was an over-40s group, doing it was compulsory.

Rather fortunately, I had previously scanned through that fractal on gw2dungeons.net to learn a few tips for just how it might be possible for my class to manage it (not to mention, what the hell it was all about and how the mechanisms worked) and suggested to the group that we may as well collect and use all the cooling rods first, before attempting it as the final thing.

This was done, and all of us had ample time and opportunity to actually -practice- the room (for once) since the whole group decided to throw themselves at it in the hopes that -somebody- would make it.

After my share of failed theory and implementation, I eventually hit on a personal working combination of stacking swiftness through warhorn and banner, Bull’s Rush (thank you, gw2dungeons.net), Rampage’s number 3 rush, falling over and hitting 4 to regain a bit of health while waiting for vengeance 3, hitting that and powering through the rest of the way, amidst double dodging, spamming 1 and generally cursing Asian latency when it comes to needing to physically spam a button.

While I’m still not going to be the first to volunteer to solo that darned room, I no longer feel completely helpless regarding it. If no one else can do it better, I can at least give it a shot and probably get by.

If anything, I think my fractals journey has suggested that it’s unrealistic to get uptight about ‘the perfect run.’

Is it nice if it happens? Yes. I’ve had super-smooth runs where everyone knows how to use ice bows and strips defiance for near absolutely frozen statues, the dps is phenomenal, and the whole fractals sequence is over in 40 minutes or thereabouts. Countable on one hand though.

I’ve had just as many runs or more where mistakes happen, people screw up somewhere, and no one says anything, just picks people up or peels themselves off the floor, and the team completes regardless.

And I’ve had the odd completely baffling run when there are 3 elementalists and myself in the party and we can only reach about 15 might stacks maximum because not a single elementalist even lays out a fire field for me to blast or use a banner in, let alone appears to know how to stack blasts for might… or conjures an ice bow, and I’m *cough* guiltily not strictly 100% meta compliant either because *cough* have you SEEN the price of those runes of Strength, and was using the then-cheap Pack runes as a not-great substitute… except now they’re not exactly cheap either, leaving me at an impasse where runes are concerned. To leave in or replace? (WHEN OH WHEN CAN WE SWAP RUNES LIKE IN PVP, SHEESH.)

Still completed, despite me being disturbed to the point of re-scrutinizing my runes to figure out what was going on, and having a serious rethink re: whether I really should put in Strength runes some day and/or reviewing my food choices to see if something else can make up for that. The thought of using up food worth 40-100+ silver per PUG run is somewhat cringe-worthy though. (I think, where I’m concerned, there are practical limits beyond the holy grail of theoretical optimisation some folks say we should be seeking.)

I think I’ve learned that the unpredictability of a fractals run can be fairly interesting and enjoyable, if looked upon with an open mindset, and preferably more staggered out to every few days or once a week after this mad rush to 50 ends.

I’ve come to the realization that many many people running fractals are absolutely where I am – still in the process of learning to get better – and so there is very little reason to feel inferior or afraid – what’s the worst that can happen, really? The party disintegrates or you get kicked by some strangers whom you’ll never see again. A bit of time wasted. Group up with the next band of strangers that comes along and have a fresh start. Try not to repeat the same mistakes of the past.

Eventually, progress gets made.

I don’t know, I find it quite hard to wrap my mind around this associated concept of “prestige” and “showing off one’s skill in an arrogant manner” that some people relate to ‘difficult content.’

My interpretation of most skillful performances tends to be that heaps of patience and lots of practice went on behind the scenes, and what we see on display is persistence finally paying off.

If anything, I should think going through the difficult learning and mastery process would make one more humble.

Imo, the loudest braggarts, quick to find fault with others, are often not the most skilled.