Hypothetically what's the minimum people needed for Dragon's Stand?

[Danikat.8537]

I was talking about GW2 meta-events on another forum (in response to someone saying no one does 40-man content any more) and then realised that the important difference is presumably other games actually required 40 people to complete that content while in GW2 most meta-events can be completed by less than a full squad. Which got me wondering about the _minimum_ needed for the bigger meta-events.

 

I picked Dragon's Stand because it's one I know reasonably well, and because it's one meta-event where some people will still declare it impossible to complete if there aren't big groups or at least 3 commanders.

 

I think it would need at least 6 people - two for each lane - because during the Blighting Tree phase you need one group clearing the pods and one fighting the boss, one person couldn't do that because the boss would reset whenever they left to attack the pods. But above that it pretty much comes down to how quickly you can clear the bosses and other enemies and that I'm not sure about. I know people do raids with fewer than 10 players and I assume those bosses are at least comparable to the ones in open-world maps so I guess 10 per lane, or 30 in total, would be enough. But I'm not sure.

[Airdive.2613]

Wasn't the requirement to start the meta event to have 5 players around each of the three commanders? That would make it 15.

[Illconceived Was Na.9781]

When it first came out, I know of a guild that set up to try to do it with as few people as possible. I believe they had 20:

* Five people per lane plus

* A boss roaming squad.

* I find that plausible: imagine a fractal static team for each lane and a fourth group that maybe needs to be better for the boss.

 

Like a lot of events, it's usually less about the number of people and more about what they are dishing out in terms of DPS & utility. Events scale in such a way that more people isn't better until the event reaches a 'breakpoint' where the rate of increase in health diminishes relative to the improvement in damage from people who aren't geared up to be "efficient."

 

So a smaller, coordinated group can find it relatively and absolutely easier than larger, random squads.

 

_edit: rephrased/formatted to avoid the ol' "20. 5 isn't twenty point five" confuzzlement._

 

 

[Danikat.8537]

> @"Airdive.2613" said:

> Wasn't the requirement to start the meta event to have 5 players around each of the three commanders? That would make it 15.

 

I'd forgotten all about that. So I guess that means 15 is the absolute minimum.

 

> @"Illconceived Was Na.9781" said:

> When it first came out, I know of a guild that set up to try to do it with as few people as possible. I believe they had 20. 5 people per lane plus a boss roaming squad. I find that plausible: imagine a fractal static team for each lane and a fourth group that maybe needs to be better for the boss.

>

> Like a lot of events, it's usually less about the number of people and more about what they are dishing out in terms of DPS & utility. Events scale in such a way that more people isn't better until the event reaches a 'breakpoint' where the rate of increase in health diminishes relative to the improvement in damage from people who aren't geared up to be "efficient."

>

> So a smaller, coordinated group can find it relatively and absolutely easier than larger, random squads.

 

That sounds really interesting. I imagine it'd be a very different experience playing with such small groups and that level of coordination. I've done the Legendary Corrupted Facet with both very small, highly coordinated groups and with about 50 people and both are interesting in different ways, but a whole map meta is a very different beast to one boss.

[Lord Trejgon.2809]

15 sounds somewhat feasible I remember once doing DS on fairly "late" map that rolled on with "what we had"

 

what I remembered tho caused a stall is on the blighting pod stage - mid didn't simply have enought people to kill the boss, so boss squad I was at from top went down there to help them out, but for some reason weird things happened resulting in top boss respawning (not sure what happened there, but circling group allowed pod to respawn and ress the boss) so we had to then go back to our lane and clear that one (yay for 3 tower bosses kills on one run?)

 

with proper group 20 should be rather easy at least up to the final fight - 5 people to circle aroudn the tower per lane and a boss kill squad of 5 to move along.

 

the fight with mounth of mordy would be more challenging tho, as you need to spread fairly thin to cover all islands for blossom phases...

[Cyninja.2954]

Theoretically as mentioned 15 people (5 per lane) since events on this map are balanced starting from 5 people. Will make the tripple boss part challenging so 8-10 per lane is easier.

 

With PUG groups it'll probabaly be around 15-20 per lane. Allows 10 people to circle while 5 people deal with the boss.

[Pifil.5193]

> @"Illconceived Was Na.9781" said:

> 20. 5 people

 

For a moment that really confused me. Wait? 20.5 people? How do you have half a pers... oh I get it.

[Illconceived Was Na.9781]

> @"Pifil.5193" said:

> > @"Illconceived Was Na.9781" said:

> > 20. 5 people

>

> For a moment that really confused me. Wait? 20.5 people? How do you have half a pers...

Someone disconnected halfway through?

 

> oh I get it.

Good :)

Even so, I reformatted to avoid confusion for others. Thanks for pointing out (tongue-in-cheek or otherwise).

 

[Blocki.4931]

I'd imagine it's not that tough without having 30 people on each lane scaling the events up as hard. The side events might be a bit tricky

[dace.8019]

Reading this prompted me to reflect on the difficulties ANet must constantly be under in balancing PvE. For myself, I'd like to see harder PvE in every mode - and ANet have done a better job at making PvE more engaging since HoT launched - but I meet a lot of people who can barely handle some of the more mundane content. That a huge spectrum of skill and knowledge exists isn't necessarily surprising, but I just forget sometimes.

 

I was catching up on some missed achievements/rewards and going about some of the PoF/LWs4 stuff and some of the events would be partial successes or scrape through (and a couple of failures) but generally be ok. Then for a few items on my list I joined some farming groups in a couple of maps and they absolutely annihilated the metas/events. The difference that profession knowledge, build efficiency and mechanics understanding is huge.

[Danikat.8537]

> @"dace.8019" said:

> Reading this prompted me to reflect on the difficulties ANet must constantly be under in balancing PvE. For myself, I'd like to see harder PvE in every mode - and ANet have done a better job at making PvE more engaging since HoT launched - but I meet a lot of people who can barely handle some of the more mundane content. That a huge spectrum of skill and knowledge exists isn't necessarily surprising, but I just forget sometimes.

>

> I was catching up on some missed achievements/rewards and going about some of the PoF/LWs4 stuff and some of the events would be partial successes or scrape through (and a couple of failures) but generally be ok. Then for a few items on my list I joined some farming groups in a couple of maps and they absolutely annihilated the metas/events. The difference that profession knowledge, build efficiency and mechanics understanding is huge.

 

Agreed. I noticed some of this when I was doing core map completion again a few months ago and got to watch various people doing hero challenges and events. There was a huge contrast - some people would activate a challenge, burn it down in seconds and move on and others really struggled for a variety of reasons - some just stood still and took a lot of damage, others moved well, used all their skills but seemed to do no damage etc.

 

Then I got a taste of it myself when I made my weaver. Used Tomes to get to level 80, equipped the best of the equipment from the level up rewards, picked some skills and traits and headed to PoF maps to do hero challenges. I'd easily done them solo on my ranger and my other elementalist, but on a new 80 with sub-par equipment and unfamiliar skills (I tried out the Weaver skills as I got them) it was a whole different experience.

[Soren.9316]

The lowest I've successfully ran and succeeded was with 30 people. 10 per lane, which left you a bit of wiggle room when you got to the towers so that 5 could be on the boss and 5 could kill pods. Everything went fairly smooth with only a few minor hiccups. I think it would be reasonable to run with only 15 if you had a party that was complementary to each other and could burn down axe master and co within a reasonable timeframe so you didn't run out of time.

[Ayrilana.1396]

I assume that it _could_ be done with 15 but it’d likely have to be a coordinated group of skilled players.

[Tzarakiel.7490]

Most group events in the game are scaled for 5 players and up. If you have less than 5 players the game stills scales to 5 players. You could probably do the meta with 15 players, but it would be better with 30.

[Ayrilana.1396]

Unfortunate the blighting pod event is technically two group events. You need enough for the champion and enough loop around for each vine-tender.

 

Although a tactic that could make killing the bosses easier is to just bring the bosses to 1% and then not kill any until they are all down to that. At least this way its HP doesn’t go back to 50% or whatever when people mess up with the vine-tenders. Unless you actually need to move the boss team to another lane, there really isn’t any reason to kill the bosses until they’re all ready to go down.