Suggestion: Add Raid-level PvE Content in Nightfall

This is a pretty simple suggestion or wish:

Add PvE areas like FoW or UW which don't allow for henchmen and make them into 12 or 24 man events.

Make them an optional seperate level of progression for PvE guilds to participate in. Instead of just having a primary mission line to complete, players could group together and make progression through a series of ever more difficult optional missions for special items and titles. Each area could have different types of enemies and require special strategies and excellent teamwork to beat. The rewards would be greater for each raid mission that is completed and with each area dropping unique items for that mission. Maybe they could even be made into variable missions with different bosses and routes to take. Instead of being forced to beat the same mission every time, different groups could take different objectives to complete.

I guess this is asking for a lot, and I don't really expect to see anything of this WoW/EQ1 calibre type PvE content but I guess a dream is a dream....

If it's optional, and optional ONLY, let me repeat myself, optional, as in NOT REQUIRED, then yeah, I'm fine with it. I just don't want this to become another WoW.

I dont see any need to add content that requires a larger party. It's hard enough getting enough people as it is.

What I would like to see, though, are massive bosses with multiple hit zones.

Say you have a giant golem walking along, and the warriors have to attack its feet to slow it down and make it fall over, whilst rangers have to run up a nearby cliff to fire arrows at its eyes to blind it....

Then it falls over, and everyone runs over to its head and tries to do damage before it gets up again, and so on.


You can think of similar set pieces that apply to multiple monsters... eg, sieging a monster stronghold, where they have patrols, scouts, guards and a boss. They communicate with each other, so aggroing a scout will make it run away and call a powerful patrol etc.

I wouldn't mind seeing things like require PvE teams to work in tandem to achieve a single goal, i.e. one group distracts enemies, while another sneaks in behind to... capture the base or something. However, Rieselle made a good point; 24 people would be too much. Another thing to taake into consideration is that many people can reach level 20 by the time they reach the Desert in Prophecies, and yet you don't really see many high-level enemies until you reach the Shiverpeaks, and even then they are wimps. It's incredibly easy, albeit time-consuming, to kill everything in each zone in the Southern Shiverpeaks, even with henchman.

So I would opt for more high-level areas, missions, and quests. That wouldn't be too difficult for ANET, and it really isn't an unreasonable request. But in order to truly satisfy PvE players' need for end-game content, ANET needs to make high level farming areas (set low drop rates, and just let people farm - a lot of us like to farm every once in a while), as well as replayable missions/quests like the OP described. There's nothing wrong with throwing a bone to the PvE-ers, even if it does smack of a WoW type game style.

i'd actually like to see more variety in group sizes. does everything have to be a group of 8? i'd be interested in tackling high level zones in groups of 6 or 4. or yes, larger numbers.

That's just simply a different game, though would be cool

that sounds alot like LOTR

the deep and urgoz are already similar to what ur describing in the 12-man "raids".

Well, so far Guild Wars doesn't have 'saving system' where you could log off in some huge & time consuming instance and come back later to finish things off. Therefore bringing in big raids that could last whole night & day would be only for the hardcore PvE'rs (which 90% of this community is ).

But that concerns only the size of some raid-mission. For the 8-12 player limit, I bet Anet will continue increasing party size. Level Cap 20 kinda forces it because one way to 'develop' your character then is to experience greater/more epic size challenges. Otherwise we would feel just playing a game with same difficulty over and over again, only with new skins.

No larger groups please. That would be a nightmare to get into. Its already hard to get full groups for some areas, and the amount of people in the party isn't nearly as high. Unless there is someway to get a HUGE number of players to be there and want to get into the large groups, so you can easily join a group at all times, then no, no, and no.

Also, please now raids like WoW. If I wanted stuff like that (which I don't), then I would play WoW. I say smaller groups with harder enemies, like the missions for the dragon festival. Those were fun, but still hard.

And the huge enemies with different parts to hit sounds cool. Maybe in a later mission with 2 teams in one of the chapters to come?

No henchies, no go IMO. I've had my fill with PuGs and refuse to deal with the migraines that seem to follow the common PuG.
Either it's henchies, friends and guildies or nothing.
Would love to see some more end game content though, GW needs it badly - However, it seem Anet enjoys locking up end game content behind favor and faction farming... so I don't see any real end game content coming till Anet removes the worst features in GW... that being favor and faction farming ties to the elite missions.

Sounds more like Shadow of the Collossus, wich pwns.

If stuff like that gave titles and items with different, cool skins, then it'd be OK. If it provided more powerful items (which would then become prerequisite to stay competitive), then not.

As for party size, I think by the time chapter 3 is out we'll be ready for 12-man parties... the number of classes is growing, you see. Bigger than that would become really unmanageable. 4-man teams against strong enemies, the support classes would have a really hard time getting a group, it'd be all tank/nuker/monk, with little to no variation...

I tend to disagree because of two things: 1) Missions that require these larger teams could easily be filled at places such as Kaineng Center and Lions Arch. 2) The Guild Wars universe has expanded to the point where the community is no longer large enough to populate it's epic scale. By providing these grandious missions in areas where traffic is guaranteed it would increase the playability of the game tenfold.

I believe that it really is HARD to get full groups in many areas. I have seen at least one town completely deserted: The Aurios Mine. It stays deserted for great lengths of time and I haven't ever seen enough people there to start a mission, which it does have a mission.

We are all frustrated because of the difficulty that lies within gathering a group in an almost deserted towns. Again, if strategically placed the larger missions could theoretically be easy to get into. To easily solve the other concerns we could be given the option of joining the mission randomly or with an assembled team (both options are in the game already, they'd just have to insert the options as separate buttons).

I believe that this is an awesome idea. I would like to see a variety of these type of monsters, not just end-game or elite bosses but ones that freely roam the countryside in certain areas of the map.

I'm guessing the Elite mission in Nightfall will be 12-man, just like the Elite Missions in Factions.

More than 12? I don't know, even WoW is scaling back it's "Epic" content, because it was simply too hard to get groups of 40+ together.

I could see Elite missions where two 12 person teams work together, though.


If we're going to increase the size of parties, then the "LFG" function must be improved! (I should be improved anyway, but that's another thread...)

As has been stated; there are 12 man pve areas called elite missions.

This belongs in sardelac...

They are exactly what he is describing. And I believe Nightfall will have more but without the need to catch a ferry there.

I want more gods to have there own "planes" though... similar to Grenths UW or Balthazars FOW. What about Dwayna, Lyssa and Melandru?

12-man are nice. I love that they are bigger than the 8-man, and challenging but not so huge that it becomes zerg-fest or hard to get a group. 12 MAYBE 16 person teams are about as far as I'd like to see this game grow.

I too would like to see some new high end areas from the other gods in TOA as well. Been waiting for it since I heard factions was coming out!

Or the smaller multiple team idea sounds like fun as well, sort of similar to what you have to do at the beginning of the Deep. But if an entire area was designed around tight coordination between 3-4 teams of 4 or 5, it would provide an interesting challenge - similar to what AB is now, or something like the squads in the battlefield series.

Ironically I just read the other day in PC mag about the latest upcoming addon for WoW dicontinuing 40 man raids. They're going to focus on smaller groups requiring more coordination skills or something