Raids are hard—arguably the hardest content in Guild Wars 2, and they generally tend to be among the hardest content in any game that has raids. That said, many players seem to vastly overestimate exactly how hard raids are. There is a pervasive belief among most GW2 players that raids are an ultra-hardcore, utterly unattainable goal; in reality, they really aren't that bad, and plenty of them are easy enough that any player could jump in and get a clear, so long as they put in an honest, good-faith effort.
This mismatch of perception and reality has fascinated me since I started raiding, and when I was working on a certain article a few months back, it inspired me to run a little test. Specifically, I wanted to gauge the community at large's opinions for how difficult raids are, and how they stack up to each other. While this honestly didn't provide much insight into the mismatch above, I personally found it incredibly interesting to see exactly how the community viewed different encounters in relation to each other, and some of the data even surprised me.
That's right, data. We've got a survey and a spreadsheet today, folks. I know you love your spreadsheets. Let's go over my methodology for collecting this data and all of the patterns I found interesting enough to talk about.
Methodology
First, let's go over the data itself. To describe the difficulty of each boss, I felt that a single point value would be too lacking in nuance, so I instead chose to define "difficulty" as a combination of three separate factors: execution, complexity, and punishment. In short,
- "Execution" is how difficult a fight's mechanics are to actually complete,
- "Complexity" is the number of mechanics and other variables that players must keep track of during the fight, and
- "Punishment" is how harshly the fight punishes you for failing mechanics.
Over the course of the survey, responders assigned a value from 1-10 to each fight in each of these three categories. On the spreadsheet, I show each fight's average scores in each of the categories, as well as a combined average of those three averages to serve as a final measure of the overall difficulty. As for the encounters covered, I included every boss encounter from raids and strikes, as well as every fractal CM boss. For raids with CMs, each Challenge Mode was counted as a separate encounter in addition to its normal mode variety. I excluded some of the event-like raid encounters, such as Spirit Woods and Gate. I also did not include the two LCMs, though in retrospect that decision was arbitrary and I wish I had included them.
The survey itself was shared on r/GuildWars2. It should be noted that this inherently biases the responses towards players that are more dedicated to the game, and thus more likely to follow its subreddit. Since rating the difficulty of raids also requires one to have done the raids, the data is also biased to the opinions of raiders.
It's also worth noting that this was an incredibly long survey. There were a lot of bosses to cover, and three questions for each. I wanted to conduct the entire thing as one single survey for several reasons (responders might forget how they rated previous bosses if I conducted multiple surveys over the course of a few days, for example), but this further biases the data in favor of especially dedicated players who were willing to answer several hundred questions about raids. All-in-all, I received 53 responses, which I feel is a large enough sample size to analyze some patterns. If you disagree, the survey is still open; feel free to take it yourself.
One final thing to note is that this survey was conducted very shortly after the Guardian's Glade strike was released. Due to it being new, the best strategies hadn't been figured out yet and players had very little practice with it relative to any other encounter. Due to this, its difficulty scores can be assumed to be somewhat inflated.
Interesting Patterns
I recommend having the data open in a second tab for this, but I'll do my best to include images as an additional aide.
Difficulty Groups
In the spreadsheet, difficulty scores are color-coded—green for values less than 2.5, yellow for values from 2.5-5, orange for values from 5-7.5, and red for values over 7.5. The first thing we can look at are the groups that are naturally formed by these four categories.
Only seven encounters (~9%) have an average difficulty of green (1-2.5). This includes five of the seven IBS strikes, as well as the Dreg Shark and Cosmic Observatory. None of what's here is particularly surprising, though the placement of one of these is curious to me.
In my opinion, the Ancient Forgeman is the easiest instanced boss encounter in the game. It's literally impossible to fail when playing the strike in normal mode and spawns a waypoint right next to it, in addition to generally being very easy to solo even without a raid build. It does have a handful of mechanics, but they are all optional if you simply bring a ranged weapon. I believe the fact that it's above the other strikes can be attributed in large part to the fact that the vast majority of players have not fought it more than once or twice.
Okay, maybe Dreg Shark is easier, actually. I mostly included it because I thought its inclusion was funny (I was correct).
Thirty-six encounters (~47%) have an average difficulty of yellow (2.5-5), making this the largest category—too large for me to easily fit it all into one screenshot. It includes most of the remaining strikes, almost every HoT encounter, and most of the fractal CMs. Interestingly, a handful of raid CMs are located here as well. Of primary interest to me are Dagda CM and Ankka CM, both of which I feel are drastically underscored at a mere 3.77 and 4.63 average each.
There are a variety of reasons as to why these might be so underestimated. CO has the easiest CM among the strikes, and before it came out that title had belonged to XJJ. It's possible that some responders, who correctly viewed these encounters as "easiest", accidentally conflated that idea with "easy". It's also worth noting that CMs are, as their title implies, difficult content. Many responders didn't provide scores for the CMs, likely because they simply haven't done the content; this means the data for CMs in particular is biased towards the opinions of highly skilled players, who may underestimate those encounters because they are easy—to them, at least.
Another thing I found interesting in this category are the EoD strikes, which all scored significantly higher than I expected. I tried several times to write a section on what sort of biases might have resulted in this, but none of them felt right, and the more I thought about it, the more I realized that the encounters did, for the most part, seem to be in appropriate positions relative to the encounters around them. As it turns out, the one who was actually under the influence bias was me, not the responders.
In the survey, I utilized point scores, which should have encouraged responders to think in detail about the mechanics about each fight—how difficult, complex, and punishing are they? In contrast, we usually think about encounters as a single object rather than a collection of parts, and we don't tend to describe them using rigid terms such as numbers. Personally, the categories I tend to lump encounters into are something along the lines of:
- "This never fails"
- "This never fails if everyone knows what they're doing"
- "This sometimes fails even with a good squad"
- "This frequently fails even with a good squad"
This way of looking at things is intuitive, but it erases a lot of the nuance of how difficult a fight can be, and particularly how difficult it is to learn as a new player. For me, KO fits cleanly into the second category—if I'm with a squad who know the fight, it's incredibly unlikely anyone will even go down (except to sniper shots). This is largely because the fight spreads its dangerous mechanics out quite a bit, giving you lots of time to recover from mistakes, and because many of the mistakes you can make—like allowing the Enforcer and Mindblade to stand together—only slow you down rather than result in wipes. The fight is quite complex and difficult mechanically, but it's designed in a way that makes it very forgiving if your team meets a minimum level of competence and already knows what it's doing.
Twenty-seven encounters (~35%) have an average difficulty of orange (5-7.5), though the majority of these are in the 5-6 range. This category contains a handful of the toughest Hot and PoF raid bosses, the remaining half of the fractal CMs, the last two EoD strikes (HT and OLC), most of the strike CMs, most of the PoF raid CMs, and all of wing 8. That's a lot of stuff.
This category is by far the most varied in terms of what sorts of content ended up here, which I suppose makes sense—every set of encounters has to have a couple real hard ones, but few encounters in the game are hard enough to reach the fourth and final category. The most surprising inclusions here for me are Slothasor and Xera. I believe their high placement is due to how my survey largely failed to take into consideration DPS/powercreep, and how that impacts the difficulty of encounters. These fights both have a lot of stuff going on and can get quite complex, but I can't remember any time in recent memory I've had a clear of either that was any notably more difficult than anything else in HoT. That's largely because, with modern DPS, the fights go by way too fast for the difficulty to keep up—we can tear through Slothasor even with bad poison placement, and Xera dies so fast that two of her main mechanics basically don't even exist anymore.
Last but certainly not least, only seven encounters (~9%) have an average difficulty of red (7.5-10). Funny that the game has the same number of ultra-easy and ultra-hard fights, though this would obviously not be the case if I'd included additional content such as normal mode fractals.
None of what's here is particularly surprising. I personally haven't actually done Dhuum CM, so I can't reach a fair conclusion regarding this, but I have a very hard time believing that it measures up to the W8 CMs, which I have cleared, considering how little it changes compared to normal mode.
Speaking of the W8 CMs, I would personally reverse the order they appear in here if you were to ask me how hard each of them are. The variance here makes sense, though; with how difficult these fights are, the littlest details in their design are going to have big impacts on how they feel depending on your class and playstyle. Of anything in the game, these are the three I'd most expect to see disagreements on when it comes to which is the hardest or easiest.
General Trends
Beyond these naturally-formed categories, another interesting tidbit revealed by my genius decision to color-code the values is that punishment was almost always the highest score for any given fight—often by enough that the punishment score would be in a higher color tier than the rest. While not as visible, complexity was the least likely to be the highest value. This makes sense—very few mechanics in the game are actually difficult to perform correctly, but there are plenty that will punish you harshly by directly downing or killing you, or by creating a situation that causes a wipe.
Let's look at some exact values. Only 2/77 encounters (~3%) had execution as their highest score. This abysmally low performance is in large part because, in the uncommon case a fight's execution score is actually higher than its complexity, both are generally beaten out by punishment. This might imply an inherent relationship between execution and punishment—fights with harder mechanics also tend to punish you harder for failing said mechanics. Sounds a bit obvious when you say it out loud.
The two encounters in question here are the Fraenir of Jormag and the Eyes of Fate & Judgment. I don't particularly think the first means much of anything, given all of its score are below 2 and quite close together, but the eyes are exactly what you'd expect of an execution-heavy fight. There's very little going on, and it doesn't punish you much since the eyes don't really attack you, but it's very easy to fuck up the one main mechanic.
10/77 encounters (~13%) had complexity as their highest score. Some notable examples here are the two Qadim fights (infamously complex), HT and KO (not a lot going on at once, but a lot of phases to remember), and Eater of Souls (I swear most raiders don't know how this one actually works).
63/77 encounters (~82%) had punishment as their highest score. If you notice that the math there doesn't add up, that's because two encounters actually had ties for their highest scores. These are Ensolyss CM (execution & punishment tie) and Ura (complexity and punishment tie).
While not really part of any trend, I also wanted to highlight Boneskinner, which easily takes the trophy for being the single most interest item in this data set. It's the only encounter to have all three of its scores be in different tiers, with each of them ~2 points apart from each other. In contrast, the majority of other encounters have relatively similar values in all three categories, often with less than 1 point of difference between their largest and smallest score.
Overviews
The last thing I'd like to go over here are the general overviews obtained by averaging all the data together. All of these are on the spreadsheet, located to the right of the two big tables containing all of the individual encounters and their data. First up, the average difficulties of each expansion's content.
On the left is a table of only the data from normal mode encounters; on the right is only challenge modes. Most of this is just about what you'd expect, though the part I personally find most interesting is how fractal CMs stacked up against raids. Responders put them about on par with PoF raids and HoT CMs, which I think feels appropriate. EoD strikes ranking above HoT raids feels wrong to me, on the other hand, but we already discussed my potential bias there.
Here's what that data looks like if you combine normal modes and CMs, allowing us to see how difficult, on average, each expansion/content type is. Most of the game's content sits very close together, with the exception of IBS strikes being much easier than the rest and the most recent raids being much harder. VoE is an outlier due to only having one encounter at the moment, and that encounter having been very new when this survey went out.
Looking at all the data, the game actually has a pretty good ramp when it comes to average encounter difficulty. You can follow the order IBS -> SotO -> HoT -> EoD -> PoF -> HoT CM -> JW -> PoF CM -> EoD CM with the only large gap being between your first CMs and wing 8 in JW. I suspect, however, that that position may be where the VoE encounters actually reside. Of course, I wouldn't expect most players to actually follow an order like this, regardless, but it's fun to think about. That's kinda the whole motto of this article.
Finally, here's what the two difficulty levels look like compared to each other. The difference isn't as high as I would've expected, due in large part to the high base difficulty of wing 8 and Kela lifting every other category up. I chose not to include the LCMs when I designed the survey because I expected only a very small number of responders would be able to provide any data, resulting in a smaller pool and a less accurate result. Even so, I wish I'd included them regardless; it would've added only two questions to the survey overall.
Conclusion
This was a bit of a weird article for me, since I didn't go in with a goal, a point I wanted to prove, or a question I wanted to answer like I usually do. I just knew I wanted to make an article sharing some of the neat data I collected. Was this even entertaining to read? Was the data actually as interesting as I think it is? I've got no clue, but I'd certainly like to hear your thoughts on it.
Thanks for reading!
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