1:23:10 "play power tempest without stab good luck". Just trade 10% damage and take Harmonious Conduit for stab on overload. Once you learn to not get hit, you take the training wheels off. For real though any Tempest build is fun with the utility you can bring, totally agree.

"It's a tale as old as time", truly. I would also sum it up with another quote: "Knowing is half the battle" Interesting topics though, I appreciate the discussion. I still am pretty optimistic about the future. As you said the combat in GW2 is fun, and so I will keep playing (on NA 🎶). 0:55 Discord via LFG: this is spot on. My small guild does a raid training once a week in the LFG, and we encourage people to join discord mostly to help explain the fights. We have gotten a fair amount of people to stick around once they find us in LFG. 44:00 People doing 5k dps: I think this can only fully be solved by Arenanet (and they probably won't). New players just don't realize that a game can have builds and rotations that have a difference of a factor of 10 for how effective they can be lol 1:18:00 One-button "rotation" and learning one thing at a time: totally agree, it's easier for someone to learn raid mechanics if that's the main focus, not trying to learn a more involved rotation at the same time. My favorites are Hammer Willbender, Quick Axe Berserker and spam decapitate, or Dual Pistol deadeye (set dual attack to auto).

About PvP: 7:15 Reward incentives: I do agree with you here - regardless of reward if it's not fun, I'm not likely to do it often. However, I would challenge you a little bit on PvP. I have played the game for a long time but never did much PvP. I got one leggy armor set from raids, and recently after starting the open world armor decided to try out PvP to work on the last armor weight. I found that 1) pvp is much more engaging gameplay for leggy armor than rifts (lol), and 2) the rewards in general seem to be really good, what with competitive pips + reward tracks + easy wizard vault. For me PvP is fun, maybe that will fade over time though. I guess I don't know anything else than the current experience so maybe I am baised here. I have little experience with past good/bad metas or super high-end play with coordinated teams. I researched as much as I could on conquest, and just go in and blast and get to play different builds than I play in other game modes. I do feel the pain of the matchmaker for sure (I know sometime I am the problem in a game, I am still a bit of a peepo), but I had the same experience back when I played Overwatch. Random team-based competitive games are just frustrating sometimes; not only can there be a big skill discrepancy but also differences in intent. Except here I still feel like even if a game is uneven I still am making progress on reward track, etc. Bonus meme, I was one of many that got sucked into WvW for my "one gift of battle to make a legendary weapon" and ended up playing a couple hundred hours so far. Rewards were the catalyst that got me out of PvE. I do agree about Dragonhunter though, it's gotta go xD 12:08 Being forced to do the wrong things: this was exactly my experience in Overwatch. The "correct" strategy and behaviors of a Diamond or Masters player may not work when playing in a mixed or lower-level game.

In short the answer is yes. Overall as time goes on i get tired of the combat - Spammy hellscape. Ill be getting the expac but def not for the raid. Gg

When I do lfg raid training 1. Do only 1 boss per training not FC 2. Give everyone 5+ min watch boss mechanic guide on youtube 3. Play the most important role myself 4. If you have exp friend who willing to help take them with you , 2-3 exp players will help a lot Not much time consuming per run, feel good for everyone 😊

Regarding that the game doesn't teach people how badly they perform there is one fun short story I have, of myself. I always played the game a lot and never thought of myself as a "bad player" in performance in the past. That changed when I was watching Teapot doing raids back in the days or doing any other group content and I was like "wait a minute... his numbers are like 4-5 times bigger than mine wth" that was when I realized that just having "berserker's" stats is not really enough, the runes, traits, consumables etc are just as important and that was my moment of "I need to learn and get better dangit." :D Also was sort of the inspiration for my "how to deal damage" video I had recently, I see too many people just say "oh bro just get berserker's gear" on reddit etc without explaining anything else. I have met and seen players (including streamers new to the game) who only had the 6 armor piece as berserker's armor, no runes, no trinkets, weapons being random stats and they just said "people told me to get berserker's gear". Too many people take it granted and simple that newbies will understand how gearing works by just saying "get berserker's gear." I wish Anet would rework the leveling process that every new people go through, even if just a bit. I had seen people say how easy the game is and they literally just leveled thru core Tyria, where you could just go afk and still easily kill anything, it gives them this illusion that they are "so good." at the game and they are properly geared and what not. For me it's a bit sad, but what can we do, our guides and videos will not save much, the game should provide that, not the community.

Everybody asks "where are the commanders?" but nobody asks "how are the commanders?".

51:16 yeah, LOL. I was building precision on my Healer build because l thought my heal could crit. My friends corrected me pretty quickly

18:10 then they can copy stuff from ff14. Like high concept from p8s, The Boss is untargetable during the whole mechanic. You just solve the mechanic during it

100% agree with not adding things to characters or classes. Refine what you have for an expansion or two. Rework or rebalance skills and traits instead of adding new ones. Give us an amazing story to play. Give us dynamic encounters.

Personally I found Gw2 raiding not too bad to get into via the LFG and people are super nice with guidance, I'm on EU though

I actually had a raid commander today leading a wing 1 training through lfg and with no vc and it went super smoothely. Granted 2-4 people knew what they were doing but still, we made it happen 😁 I do agree that a better lfg tool definitely needs to be given the development time

Sneb, did you cancel the Project that you wanted to try and speedclear raids? Or is it private now?

So, I am one of the people who left at SOTO and am not likely to come back. I don't pay much attention to GW2 content, but I'm still friends with some people from the community so I'm pretty up to date (I hang out in emi's discord still and play genshin with her). I'm unlikely to come back for the next xpac for wing 8 and there's one additional reason I didn't hear. To me, SOTO content didn't look exciting. Now if I wanted to come back and raid for wing 8 I feel like I would have to buy SOTO too, even though there's only weapon mastery, required relics, and one strike that looks interesting. Maybe I'll be wrong and wing 8 will be amazing and I'll be interested in going back, but the value proposition just keeps going down with each xpac that looks boring. I'm at the point where I anticipate the only thing I'll be interested in will be GW3 in the future.

Gixx, you do not look like you sound at all lol!

This whole game is dead and so niche lol. Y'all be happy if more than 20k players are still logging in weekly. The few hundreds of whales are carrying this contentless 12 years old relic.

As a rev enjoyer/main @ 41:25 this is so true and it triggers me so bad when I see it!

You are on the money for me personally.. now that I have all sets of legendary armor & trinkets there is not much else for me to do in Raids. I only bother to do them once in a while with friends when they need a fill, but even then I'm not always interested. The RAID journey was great, at first they were super hard and challenging and it felt great to overcome the challenge they presented. I do think there needs to be some sort of carrot at the end of the stick otherwise doing the same content after a while (challenging or otherwise) will simply get old. Strikes were ok.. but super cumbersome to engage with.. you have to all zone out and click the thing for the next one rather than just be able to go from one to the next. This inevitability causes you to loose people with this.. people get confused on navigating the NPC menu, or you have to all go to a new zone to do these others.. people crash on loading screens. The whole interface for strikes is an issue. PvP? Amazing and if you are dipping your toes in you can die in .5 seconds to someone with experience... no real in-game guides on PvP with actual useful information and how the game mode is played covering rotation how to make points etc etc. The combat in GW2 is some of the best I've ever played and I love it. If it wasn't for WvW friends I would no longer bother to login much at all. I love gw2, we need more people to discover it and join the fun and find reasons for people to keep logging in. My interest in the upcoming raid will be curiosity factor only and after playing it a handful of times and beating it I'll be back to reserve list. Completing raids unlocks nothing fun nor does it help you bypass other annoying content. Here's one.. if I could complete all raid wings X amount of times to help skip something like MAP COMPLETION. Dude, I'm back on board in LFG.

ArenaNet only designs compelling endgame content when they have someone to champion it. I couldn't stay interested in raids in GW2. I eventually found (and left) a really comfortable, friendly static, but a lot of that was just me growing weary and tired. Path of Exile is a better match for me these days; regular, consistent high quality content several times a year, extreme build variety, high variation in map mods, game-drops, interesting boss loot, compelling chase items, fantastic boss fights for a solo player. I'm just tired of the GW2 community's obsession w/ DPS > all.

Interesting point @Snebzor, related to not find people that wants to improve, do you have any ideas on how to improve that?

I'm a guildless training raid commander in EU lfg for years now. I suck with regular times, so I'm not doing statics, and I dislike the split in attention between voice and text chat, so I usually stick to text chat to train people. I regularly run w1-4 runs with 1 or 2 experienced freinds, now and then w5, 6 or 7. Always without any requirements. The only thing I absolutely require is them telling their role at the beginning. And, bear in mind, many new people do not initially understand how chat works. Sometimes it takes a kick, and then a whisper and an explanation before new people get how squadchat works. Once this initial hurdle is overcome, and everyone had at least a glance at chat and get reminded that there is a chat, I ask if there is anyone completely new to the boss. Most of the time, someone is. If someone speaks up, its a good sign for the run. I explain the boss with minimal time loss in chat and we go for the first attempt. It only takes a minute per boss if at all. If noone speaks up I do not explain, but experience shows that we're then struggling with stuff more often. Vale Guardian and Gorseval are first try kills 90% of the time. Sabetha is usually a second or third try. Sloth is similar, often 2 or 3 tries, sometimes more tries when people do not understand the poison placements or if we have multiple first time shroom players (If its 1, they can do shroom 1 and its easy to quickly restart). Matthias is often easier, the more the group struggled at Sloth, because sloth mechanics apply to matthias. We do split escort without portal and with bunny (usually). We do kc cm, which sometimes takes 1 or 2 extra tries. We usually have 2 or 3 gliding deaths on xera (or just straight up 9 or 8 man it because 1 or 2 people miss the mastery). They learn they need the mastery, and the next week they usually have it. Depending on how it went until then, we might give some cms in w4 two tries. I've had training runs starting in w1 without requirements that cleared the complete w4 with cms. Sometimes its not meant to be, but thats fine too. We do not gg for individual fails. We assign backups for cannons in sabetha, and if our first time cannon dies, then so be it, we try to still kill. If there is a second try, the first timer gets another chance. If there are any questions, we always answer them. People get the idea relatively quickly. Groups with a livelier chat learn better and people from these tend to show up again. Raids are easy these days. One or 2 experienced people make a very very big difference. There is 0 reason to be afraid of raiding. As you said, there are builds out there that do 30k by autoattacking, and thats 20k more than you need to clear the easier raidwings. Oh and, regarding the 'what would make raids interesting again'... The wardrobe unlock was a cool idea, i like that one. Sad that it will never happen. Other than that, some very very simple quality of life and balance changes in the raids would go a very very long way. Reduce the cap the flag event time (amount of circles needed) in w1 by 33 or 50%. Give Gorse 20% more health so its more common that people gotta do updraft (which is a fun mechanic!). Make gorse retaliation meaningful. Make the trio bosses spawn slightly faster for less downtime. You get the idea. if you really want to get old timers invested into raids again, at least for a moment, make interesting cms for w1-3 (do not just increase health bars, dear god, please). I'm not hyped for w8. As you said, just look at the recent content. Raids used to be the spearhead of gw2. There were unique mechanics there, they had their own story lines. Even if some of the maps were clearly not polished in some places, they were still great, as they were their own areas, supporting the story. Anet just doesn't do this anymore. I'm not against asset reuse, but they are clearly overdoing it right now. Maybe i'll be positively surprised. But I doubt it.

I'm a guildless training raid commander in EU lfg for years now. I suck with regular times, so I'm not doing statics, and I dislike the split in attention between voice and text chat, so I usually stick to text chat to train people. I regularly run w1-4 runs with 1 or 2 experienced freinds, now and then w5, 6 or 7. Always without any requirements. The only thing I absolutely require is them telling their role at the beginning. And, bear in mind, many new people do not initially understand how chat works. Sometimes it takes a kick, and then a whisper and an explanation before new people get how squadchat works. Once this initial hurdle is overcome, and everyone had at least a glance at chat and get reminded that there is a chat, I ask if there is anyone completely new to the boss. Most of the time, someone is. If someone speaks up, its a good sign for the run. I explain the boss with minimal time loss in chat and we go for the first attempt. It only takes a minute per boss if at all. If noone speaks up I do not explain, but experience shows that we're then struggling with stuff more often. Vale Guardian and Gorseval are first try kills 90% of the time. Sabetha is usually a second or third try. Sloth is similar, often 2 or 3 tries, sometimes more tries when people do not understand the poison placements or if we have multiple first time shroom players (If its 1, they can do shroom 1 and its easy to quickly restart). Matthias is often easier, the more the group struggled at Sloth, because sloth mechanics apply to matthias. We do split escort without portal and with bunny (usually). We do kc cm, which sometimes takes 1 or 2 extra tries. We usually have 2 or 3 gliding deaths on xera (or just straight up 9 or 8 man it because 1 or 2 people miss the mastery). They learn they need the mastery, and the next week they usually have it. Depending on how it went until then, we might give some cms in w4 two tries. I've had training runs starting in w1 without requirements that cleared the complete w4 with cms. Sometimes its not meant to be, but thats fine too. We do not gg for individual fails. We assign backups for cannons in sabetha, and if our first time cannon dies, then so be it, we try to still kill. If there is a second try, the first timer gets another chance. If there are any questions, we always answer them. People get the idea relatively quickly. Groups with a livelier chat learn better and people from these tend to show up again. Raids are easy these days. One or 2 experienced people make a very very big difference. There is 0 reason to be afraid of raiding. There are builds out there that do 30k by autoattacking, and thats 20k more than you need to clear the easier raidwings. Oh and, regarding the 'what would make raids interesting again'... The wardrobe unlock was a cool idea, i like that one. Sad that it will never happen. Other than that, some very very simple quality of life and balance changes in the raids would go a very very long way. Reduce the cap the flag event time (amount of circles needed) in w1 by 33 or 50%. Give Gorse 20% more health so its more common that people gotta do updraft (which is a fun mechanic!). Make gorse retaliation meaningful. Make the trio bosses spawn slightly faster for less downtime. You get the idea. if you really want to get old timers invested into raids again, at least for a moment, make interesting cms for w1-3 (do not just increase health bars, dear god, please). I'm not hyped for w8. As you said, just look at the recent content. Raids used to be the spearhead of gw2. There were unique mechanics there, they had their own story lines. Even if some of the maps were clearly not polished in some places, they were still great, as they were their own areas, supporting the story. Anet just doesn't do this anymore. Maybe i'll be positively surprised. But I doubt it.

I finished my core world completion and was so impressed by how many new people are running around leveling up their characters in the level 1-15 zones.

It's weird i can't relate to almost any of the stuff you guys are saying... I play on EU servers and i barely encountered any of the issues you guys are talking about! The lfg on raids is pretty active here, the only problem is the lack of training groups. But concerning any other content, i always see squads all over the lfg.

screw gw2 raid...keep asking kp

It’s been 5-6 months now since the open-world legendary armor was released, and we can see the effect. Far fewer new players want to commit to raiding because they already have the legendary armor, or they spend over an hour each day farming essence.

I disagree on Convergences needing leadership and someone to set up everything. In fact, i feel like that's partly what keeps players from learning and realizing they fail. You just need a few people who know the mechanics to explain to others what they are seeing on screen and what to do. I'm doing weekly convergences by pure pugging with a quickdps scrapper with heal on blast relic, sometimes i'm a minute late to join the public because i make myself tea and i haven't failed a convergence in weeks. Even Umbriel is no problem if i tell people to slot condicleanses, get out of numbered fields and remind them to heal zojja. Usually 2-3 other people tell the map that kind of stuff anyways. Personally i haven't dropped any ascended foods but there's usually some anyways. You don't need to tag up, sometimes being a random voice in mapchat is all the leadership needed. But yes, i agree on the open world and instanced story content needing to be more challenging, actually interesting and FUN gameplay wise. I believe in players to rise to the challenge if they get to do it without pressure or scrutiny from others, and the open world or convergences are perfect for that.

I am very new to raiding, done wing 1-4 a couple times Raids were incredibly scary to me: Why? - Reputation; people being very likely to have elitist mindset - Socializing; having to spend several hours with 9 other strangers i just met and don't know anything about is scary, stressful and draining - Time; You have to do the encounter to learn it, which takes time, probably too much time.. training raids taking up to 3h per wing!! is an insane time investment to me, considering you have to pay attention the entire time, else you may fail a mechanic that may get the 9 other people killed which is stressful I have no desire to do any more raids after the few i did, for the simple reason that i think most of the encounters are not fun to me. I have done fractal cm's, even gotten dwd title and i love doing those, because mechanics aren't super vague and sort of explain themselfes. Going from the regular version to cm's i don't ask "what am i supposed to do?" but rather "what changes?", which is much easier to adjust then "here's these 5 new things you have to pay attention to at all times! I love encounters that are clear with their mechanics, Deimos being my favourite. Sunqua cm, Nightmare cm, OLC and Kaineng Overlook for non-raid encounters.

Rant mode engaged. The thing I was most hyped for with strike missions was to have old story bosses made into instance. With instances being made to instanced content, it the same, I'm hyped for the old content. Yeah we did we great strike missions, yeah we will get atleast 1 good raid. But will this build hype, would this draw me back if I had quit, probably not.

Soto was a cleansing nuke for a lot of casual communities as well, i can only put this down to not enough exploration and boring metas just achievements you almost have to wiki, you get it half done forget what it's called and it's lost in. the achievement log forever

"Everyone is hiding in private discords" -except Silhouette the stand alone king of LFG like the last samurai in a squad with no kp requirements. I will ride this trash heap until its reworked.

I wonder if its just them all being NA. I am EU and do full clear 1½-2 times a week. Always either joining LFG or leading and having several pugs with us. LFG fill fast (even late at night) and sometimes you get 100% new people and sometimes you get an old vet all depending on time of day and and what you are looking for.

I think the hardest part about making new fractals and more importantly metas clear easier is the big dps gamers have a lot of legendary gear, and with each passing day another vet player gets full legendary. With that they have absolutely 0 insensitive to play anything they dont want to ever again, that drives them towards fun content or quit the game. They all end up in wvw, cm clears for the fun of it. Or a small percentage (Gixx) try and get more people the rewards. Guild wars is a game you make your own fun, and the problem is that new players think soto is the newest content, so surely that's where everyone is. I got my skyscale masteries and left, i didn't enjoy much soto content at all. So players get frustrated that events fail, and as you said, they dont know they're doing bad. The game has no "its your fault" so they blame others since they're pressing buttons so surely they're doing big dps. The game has tried to teach combos and dodging and other mechanics through ganeplay (the training heart in eod) but they dont teach boons very well if at all.

No links in the description for your guests.

Sneb’s expectations for the other players is just setting himself up for constant disappointment. He should know by now how most players are and adjust his actions in the game accordingly. He can hope that some players will exceed his expectations but lowering expectations will make it easier to enjoy the result. Of course, if I were in Sneb’s situation I would probably feel just like him.

I cant stand forced group content,so .. yeah

It's dead and buried except for 10k people

I used to play a lot of gw2 and was passionate about raiding. In total I have around 9k hours in the game, cleared every single raid on all roles and raid CMs multiple times. Issue is, if you are interested in raiding specifically, there is simply nothing to do. Even if they improve the rewards, it is very difficult to keep being motivated to play with the current release schedule of any instanced content. Why would I raid in gw2 and get two-three bosses a year if I can go raid in ff14 and get 12 raid bosses (with possible 1-3 hidden ones) and 6 extreme bosses (basically strikes) in around 2.5 years time span, and that is not counting ultimates and other instanced exploration things like in Eureka or Bozja, and that is not even counting dungeons, criterion, maps etc. There is not enough content to keep people interested if they specifically want to raid longterm in gw2.

I love how friendly the raiding community is in the Discord groups I've joined (Raid Academy, Skein Gang, etc) but I'm sad to see that people don't use the LFG as often. I love the FFXIV way of encouraging older players to help newer players which is increase the rewards for everyone if there are new players present. I also think LFG itself is the issue since it's not well designed. When I start training runs or just start clear runs in general I always use LFG to try to help it look more active.

"some people in raids only wanna chase logs" YES THAT'S SELF-IMPROVEMENT. PEOPLE LIKE FEELING LIKE THEIR PERFORMANCE IS PROGRESSING AND IMPROVING. when you clear the same content week after week after week, you're going to get bored if you don't actively try to do it just a little bit better, faster, etc. you are looking at the same instinct that encourages people to speedrun games. disparaging people for pursuing that goal is failing to understand a huge motivator some people have for playing games of any kind.

Are these still going to Spotify? Please update it soon if you can!

Idk who did more damage to raids. The player community or the neglect from anet. But these are both factors. If you never made sg the raid scene would be as unpopular as spvp. I personally dont want to look at spreadsheets or sit at the golem like its my job especially when the content doesnt require the level of skill 99% of you at the 'top' deem it to require.

It would be great if we could buy Mount skins with Raid currency, or at least have a drop chance, put 1 skin from each mount there, in raids, put gliders skins, put outfit skins...

As someone who is an instanced end game enjoyer, the Raid community (speaking from NA) is my favorite. I've been in 8 statics total throughout the past ~3 years, 3 raid statics, 3 strike CM statics, and 2 fractal CM statics, and the raid statics were the best BY FAR. All three came from different facets of the game too, first was SG, second was an LFG, and a third was literally one I pugged into that was part of a guild. While it's not a humongous sample size, the raid players were so much more relaxed, chill, and played efficiently and effectively while not stressing about pick choices. I think a lot of that has to do with 1. Weekly raids 2. Powercreep making any pick usable but because there was so much time between meetings, everyone was so friendly and just caught up with eachother while doing all raids, and even CMs. Meanwhile, Fractal groups are super focused on efficiency in mechanics, and Strike CMs (probably because they're more difficult) were much stricter and tight on group setup. That is to say that if you want the hardest content in the game (hopefully this isn't true once JW comes out) you should go Strike CMs, if you want challenging content that has GREAT people making up the population, go Raids. These are the communities I had the best success with: Raid Academy Void Lounge Temple of Febe Discord Skein Gang LFG Static applications

Who wanna play raids? : Who wanna lead? :

What have you personally observed within the raiding community? Let us know if you're NA/EU!

Which wing do you think will be hardest to complete with 10 thieves?

My mans saw that cold corndog and couldnt resist. Its okay i took my sons chicken tenders to work yesterday for lunch on accident. 😂😂

1:53:47 My ego perked up at this statement as I'm the top dps Weaver most times and sometimes top dps quickness Catalyst in pugs.

1:33:26 This is 100% the truth. New games are not made because someone or some people with a vision and passion for gaming came up with an idea and put it to practice, but rather every new game is under some mega corporation that only look at games as a way of making money. You have to look at indie games to find games that actually feel like they respect you as a human rather than a walking moneybag.