When the team at ArenaNet announced the next Guild Wars 2 expansion, Visions of Eternity, they announced that one focus of the expansion would be an overhaul of the game's raid systems. The team planned to improve new player onboarding and combine the raid and strike mission gamemodes to be more intuitive. Today, we received our first real look at these changes in an official blog post.
Whether you're a veteran raider or someone just considering trying raids or strike missions for the first time, these changes have a lot of interesting implications on how you'll interact with endgame content. Let's go over it all, starting with a bit of context.
The Problems With Raids
If you've been in the endgame community for a while, you likely already know what I'm going to discuss here. Feel free to jump to the next heading to get into the meat of what's actually changing.
The main problem with raids in GW2 has always been player engagement. A very small percentage of players actually participated in raids, and while that number has improved in recent years, it's still but a small fraction of the total playerbase. Raids were also very expensive to make, since they featured unique maps used only for the raids, unique models for the bosses, and all of the expenses that come with designing and testing and implementing the most complex and interesting encounters in the game. The primary reason for the large gap between the releases of wing 7 and wing 8 was that raids were simply too expensive to continue making when only a tiny portion of the playerbase ever actually experienced them.
There are a variety of reasons why players weren't engaging with raids, but one of the main linchpins was that GW2 had fostered a very casual playerbase. As a result, many players fell into one of the following categories:
- Casual players who are simply uninterested in playing difficult endgame content like raids.
- Casual players who believed they weren't good enough to try raids, or who otherwise felt too intimidated to try them.
- Players who didn't know the game had raids, or who felt the process of gearing for them or finding a full group was inaccessible.
ArenaNet's first proper attempt at fixing these issues came in the form of strike missions in The Icebrood Saga. Strikes are instances similar to raids, but usually containing only a single boss. The bosses are shorter, simpler, and easier than raids, with the first three strikes in particular—commonly known as the "easy three"—being easy enough that any group of ten random players could complete them without issue. Some of them even came with a new feature that allowed you to load into a public version of the strike instance in order to easily find a group without having to post in the LFG or take command of a squad.
The team's goal with strikes was for them to serve as a "stepping stone". They were easier and more accessible than raids, and could thus act as a way to grant intimidated players the confidence they needed to try harder content. Unfortunately, as today's blog post describes, strikes didn't fulfill that purpose as well as hoped. A small handful of players, such as myself, did get into raiding through them, but those were exceptions.
The next innovation in raid technology came with wing 8, Mount Balrior. This raid, released as part of Janthir Wilds, solved the issue of raids being too expensive to produce through the intelligent reuse of assets. The map itself is used not only in the raid, but also in the Janthir Wilds Convergence and some story instances.The bosses also appear in the convergence and story, and two of them are world bosses, as well. None of the actual fights against these foes are identical, but they use twists on the same core ideas, making them drastically cheaper and easier to produce than the same number of unique encounters. Even so, wing 8 didn't address the main issue—most players still weren't raiding.
Merging Raids & Strikes
Now we can get into the real meat of this topic—what's actually changing in VoE? The most notable change is that raids and strike missions are being combined into one large system, which will be collectively called "raids". What used to be raids can be distinguished as "raid wings", while what used to be strikes can be distinguished as "raid encounters".
One motivation for this change is a more psychological angle. Strikes were intended to be a stepping stone into raids, but many players who participated in strikes still never moved on to raids; now that both types of content are one system, players who clear an easy strike can call themselves "raiders", and that may grant the confidence necessary to attempt more difficult content.
The other main change to come from merging these two gamemodes is that their rewards systems will also be combined. We don't have any details yet on what exactly this entails, just that the systems will, in fact, be merged; the rest of this section will detail my speculation on how this will work.
Currently, there are five main raid & strike currencies:
- Legendary Insights, one of which is gained per each clear of a raid boss or strike CM. They are used in legendary crafting and serve primarily as a timegate to keep you doing the content each week.
- Magnetite Shards, which serve as the main raid currency, used to purchase unique skins, mystic clovers, and other rewards.
- Gaeting Crystals, which serve as rotating raid currency. They're used the same way as magnetite shards for the current expansion's raids (wing 8, as of writing this). Any crystals a player has will likely be converted to magnetite shards upon the next expansion's release, similar to ancient coins.
- Blue Prophet Shards, which serve as the main strike currency, used to purchase various rewards. Can also be combined into blue prophet crystals, which can be used at the Vigil Emissary chest weekly to gain additional strike rewards.
- Green Prophet Shards, which serve as rotating strike currency. They would be granted by the current expansion's strikes, and be converted to blue prophet shards upon the release of a new expansion. Since Janthir Wilds had no strikes, it's currently impossible to obtain any green shards.
Given some of these currencies serve equivalent roles, just in different gamemodes, the logical conclusion is that the rewards systems merging will entail some of them being replaced entirely by the others, thus reducing the total number of currencies and allowing currency rewarded by either strikes or raids to be used to purchase rewards in both areas.
Legendary Insights serve a unique and important role, and can already be obtained from both gamemodes, so I do not expect it to change whatsoever. We could potentially see a change where all strikes now grant an LI on completion, same as the encounters in raid wings, but that would largely trivialize the process of farming LI for Envoy and Coalescence. Not only would it nearly double the amount you could get per week, it would all but completely eliminate the need to consistently participate in harder content—which would be completely antithetical when the main goal of these changes is to get more players into raiding. If there is to be any change to LI, I'd love to see the addition of some sort of sink for the currency; it currently becomes practically worthless once you've made Coalescence and all three weights of Envoy.
Let's address the elephant giant sloth in the room—magnetite/gaeting crystals and blue/green prophet shards serve the exact same purpose as each other, just in raids/strikes respectively. The main focus of the rewards systems merging is that two of these four currencies are going to be removed and replaced with the remaining two. The question is, which two are going, and which two are staying?
An important thing to take note of is that some of the currencies have unique mechanics attached to them. Magnetite shards and gaeting crystals are earned on failed attempts at raid bosses; prophet shards aren't. Blue prophet shards can be combined into blue prophet crystals; it wouldn't make sense for magnetite shards to combine into prophet crystals, and it'd be a bit odd to make a new "magnetite crystal" currency to replace the current blue prophet crystals. There's also Crystallographer Smoxxi, who has unique voicelines and a personality based entirely around the prophet shards and crystals. Overall, I think prophet shards remaining and gaining the "earn currency on a failed attempt" mechanic of magnetite is the most likely outcome, but there's no way to know for sure.
One final thing I'd like to address in this section is the potential issues that may arise from the merging of currencies. I already mentioned how I believe awarding LI from normal mode strikes would be a problem—and yes, I know you can get one LI from doing four EoD strikes; if someone gets Envoy by doing that 150 times they've earned it—but I don't believe the same problem extends to the other currencies. Purchasing the unique rewards from raids or strike CMs already requires beating the content at least once; whereas LI is specifically designed as a timegate to encourage replaying difficult content, I don't see any issue with making it easier to gather currency for unique skins and such. I just hope the team remember to adjust the currency caps, now that there'll be twice as many encounters to do each week; it'd be a catastrophic mistake if a full clear actually passed the currency cap.
New Raid UI
This is by far the most exciting addition for me, and the one that presents the most interesting things to talk about. I showed it off at the start of the article, but here it is again for reference:
The new UI contains a list of all raid wings and raid encounters (formerly strikes), ordered and categorized based on the story they're attached to. Its unknown whether it'll be a dedicated button (such as alongside the trading post, PvP, WvW, etc) or a part of the Hero menu. There are quite a few interesting aspects of this UI and some oddities in its design, so let's go over them.
Raid Selection
Along the left side of the new menu is a scrollable list of raids sorted into collapsible categories. Raid wings are given the same weight as individual strike missions, and the entry for each raid features icons indicating how many encounters it contains. There are two separate icons, a skull for bosses and a star for "event" encounters like Spirit Run or wing 3's escort. To the left of two of the raids' names are icons that seem to indicate the 'Emboldened' and 'Call of the Mists' raid wings for the current week, as well.
Interestingly, despite raids and strikes being merged in this new UI, the term "Strike Mission" is still used in the titles of the IBS strikes in the mockup. I believe this is a good call, actually, and I hope it's maintained to some degree in the final version of this UI. Players who have been actively playing for the past several years, especially those who actively do endgame content, know and refer to this content as "strikes", and there's simply no way we're going to swap to calling them "raid encounters" at this point. Completely removing the strike mission terminology from the game would only make things confusing for new players, since they'd see veterans talking about "strikes" when no such content exists.
Overall, the UI is sleek and simple, and it includes all the info it needs to. I think the team did good work here, and it's really exciting to actually see new UI in the game after all this time. Next up,
Difficulty Rating
The top right portion of the window contains the name, description, and an image of the currently selected raid—in the mockup, that happens to be wing 6, Mythwright Gambit. There's an additional, interesting piece of information listed here, and one that the blog specifically pointed out: a difficulty rating.
The presence of a difficulty rating helps provide players with more context, and if implemented well it could encourage players to seek out more difficult content. If they easily beat something that's difficulty level 1, that may encourage them to try out something ranked at difficulty level 2. If they manage to beat one thing at difficulty level 2, that will provide them with confidence that they can beat every other encounter at that level.
The term used here is "base difficulty", describing the difficulty of the normal mode versions of the fights. To quell ill-founded speculation I've already seen around, it is 100% definitely absolutely not a selector for four separate difficulty modes for each encounter. As of the mockup's creation, it doesn't seem like the team have decided which raids are which difficulty yet; we can safely assume the easy 3 will be the lowest difficulty options, and it's utterly inconceivable that wing 6 would be on the same level as them. It also seems that the rating is for the entire wing as a whole rather than individual encounters; I would personally love to have separate ratings for both the whole raid and all of its individual encounters, as that would be especially useful when comparing them to the strikes, which, by their nature, will have a rating for the individual encounters.
One can easily assume that the IBS easy 3 will be of the lowest difficulty level, and later raid wings, particularly wings 5 and 8, will be of the highest. The biggest question to me is how broad the lowest difficulty level will be, as there is a bigger difference between the easy 3 and the next easiest encounters than between any others. Will base difficulty 1 be reserved almost exclusively for the easy 3, or will they share it with the bulk of the strikes, such as AH or XJJ?
Raid Encounter Details
Beneath the description of the selected raid, the first thing the viewer is presented with is an informational button, one that presumably opens a submenu. The description of the raid and its story are already shown on the main page, so it can't be for that; interestingly, the button is also labelled as "raid encounter" even on a raid wing, which the blog post clearly defined as two separate things.
My current theory is that this window will contain mechanical information about the encounters within a wing, or about the singular encounter of each of the strikes. This information might include descriptions of the boss(es) such as you might see in WoW's adventure guide, perhaps even including descriptions of the boss's mechanics.
Something I definitely expect to be included in this information is a list of utility effects required for certain encounters. For example, the details window for Spirit Vale would mention that the raid requires a boonstrip for Vale Guardian, and the window for Salvation Pass would do the same for the reflect that Matthias requires. The window could potentially do the same for certain special roles, such as handkites or pylon kites, though I find that less certain than utility requirements since special roles are player-made strategies and not necessarily the "intended" methods of dealing with certain mechanics, even if they may be the most effective.
Encounter Selection
Beneath the raid encounter details button in the new raid UI is a set of buttons representing each of the encounters in the selected raid. Similar to the scrollbar to the left, a skull icon is used to represent bosses and a star is used to represent "events", in this case the 'Sorting & Appraisal' encounter. Some of the icons also have an additional, tiny banner-like icon that seems to represent whether or not the encounter has a challenge mode. Though we don't see any example of one in this mockup screenshot, there is presumably an icon for legendary challenge modes, as well.
The blog post mentioned that the new UI would allow players to select an individual encounter within a raid wing and skip straight to it. We can see this in action somewhat in the mockup, as the fourth and final button is highlighted. Strangely, the "Enter" prompt below is still greyed out, but there are multiple explanations for this. The devs may simply have not coded in the ability for the UI to actually load you into raids yet; alternatively, the button may not have actually been selected yet, but is instead highlighted because the dev's mouse is hovering over it and was rendered invisible in the screenshot.
This section of the UI can be used to track which encounters a player has cleared in a given week, represented with a green checkmark and the icon being greyed out. CM completion is also tracked here, with a checkmark also being placed over the small banner icon; in the mockup, we can see that the dev cleared the Conjured Amalgamate encounter on challenge mode.
Recommended Players
The last bit of information included in the new UI is a bit of text which states "Recommended Players: 10". This text seems innocuous at first, until you put some thought into it. This UI was designed for raids and strikes—every single encounter contained within should have a recommended player count of ten. Why dedicate space to pointless information like that?
One possibility is that this info's inclusion was simply an oversight; the team added it without putting further thought into whether or not it would actually be needed. This is just a mockup, after all; everything about it is subject to change drastically. Another possibility is that the info is included for the benefit of new players looking at raids for the very first time, informing them how large their group will be, or how many friends they must gather if they don't want to play with strangers.
The more interesting, though perhaps less likely, explanation is that this UI will actually include content with other player counts. For example, it might include private meta-events like Dragonstorm and Twisted Marionette, or it could include 5-man content like dungeons or DRMs.
Raid Quickplay
In addition to showing off the new raid UI, the blog confirmed that the quickplay feature showed off in the fractal event will be implemented in raids as well, presumably incorporated directly into its LFG window just as fractals were.
The blog specifies that quickplay will be for the "easiest raid encounters", and there's no mention of any intentions to make significant changes to the version of the system seen in fractals, such as the addition of a role selection option. Such a significant change likely would've been mentioned alongside the raid UI, meaning we're likely getting a system very similar to the fractal quickplay. These two factors lead me to believe the raid quickplay selection will consist solely of the easy 3 strikes.
Fractal quickplay works well because tier 1 fractals are easy enough to be cleared without a proper group comp, especially when scaled down to scale 1 and with some mechanics simplified. The same could be said for the easy 3—the fights have very low HP and very low heal pressure, meaning just about any random group could get through them. The same can't really be said for any other fight, even the other IBS strikes. I cannot see a role-selection-less quickplay queue containing any other encounters without resulting in either a very frustrating experience for new players or a bunch of people instantly quitting out if they see they got Boneskinner.
Another interesting quandary of raid quickplay is rewards. Fractal quickplay worked effortlessly, since fractals were already designed with the intention of being played repeatedly in the same day. In contrast, IBS strikes have daily rewards. The quickplay feature will need to work around this to avoid frustrating situations, such as players repeatedly getting duplicate encounters that won't offer full rewards—or delaying other players' runs by leaving the squad when this happens.
One possible solution is to simply provide the full reward of the strikes on every clear. This would result in a different problem, however—it would likely make raid quickplay the most profitable activity in the game by far, flooding a tool meant for new players with veterans trying to speedrun for gold. An alternative solution would be for the quickplay rewards to be detached from the individual encounters, instead just being a standardized reward for clearing any quickplay raid; then you could implement diminishing returns the more clears you did within a day/week.
Summary
Let's recap what we know and the speculations I've made. ANet are aware of the lack of player onboarding for raids and of how strikes failed to serve as the springboard they were initially conceptualized as, and they're merging raids & strikes and adding a new raid UI and raid quickplay to account for those issues and generally improve the quality-of-life and accessibility of endgame content.
Strikes are going to be renamed "raid encounters" and merged into the larger system of raids, though it seems the term "strike mission" will still exist in their titles, which is probably for the best. Their reward systems will also be merged, and while I don't expect significant changes to how LI are awarded, two out of magnetite shards, gaeting crystals, and the blue-green prophet shards are likely going to be axed and replaced by the other two.
The team are going to add a new raid UI, though its unknown how it'll be accessed. The UI will include a list of all raids and strikes and can be used to enter any of them from anywhere, including skipping to any encounter within a raid wing. It also tracks which encounters a player has already cleared in a given week, including distinguishing between CM and normal mode clears.
The new UI will also include a "difficulty rating" for each wing and strike mission as a QoL feature. The menu also features a button that will likely open a window with additional information on each raid, which might include descriptions of mechanics or of utilities necessary to clear certain encounters. The UI also features the strange "recommended players" number which may or may not actually mean anything.
Finally, we'll also be receiving a raid quickplay function along with the new UI, which will most likely only include the IBS easy 3 strikes in its list of possible encounters. There are currently no stated plans for a more complex quickplay system, such as a role queue, and we don't yet know how raid quickplay will handle rewards, either.
I hope my analysis and summary throughout this article was enlightening and/or interesting. I'd love to hear what the community at large makes of these changes, and what alternative theories you may have as to what some of these details mean. If you didn't read the original blog post yourself, I also highly recommend doing so. It stated that we should receive "more details" with these changes in the coming months, so there's lots to look forward to.
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