Wouldnt it be awesome if instanced group content scaled on gear?

[Stand The Wall.6987]

No more waiting around for specific builds (ironic as anet didn't create healers for this reason). If you pick up a noob sure they'll go down a few times but your dps wont suffer if they are running some weird build. No idea how this would even be possible but I think it would be pretty cool to not have to worry about all this gear rune sigil nonsense and just pick up 5 or 10 random ppl and have a decent chance at beating the content (ofc they would have to be somewhat experienced). I'm guessing the "hardcore" crowd wouldn't favor this change since it would impact their "skill" but for all us noobs, hey forget about it. Wanna do Honor of the Waves path 1 with 5 healers and be done in a reasonable amount of time? No problem. Would make sense to not only scale down the monsters hp in this example, but scale up their damage as well.

 

Edit

You would have to put some gear lock thingy on so people couldn't switch out bad dps gear to scale down fights. A big downside. Unless the difficulty was changed the moment after gear was put on, but that would require a lot more resources.

[Biff.5312]

What I think you're aiming at here is something akin to the way pvp works - everyone being issued generic gear when entering, so there's no basis for preferring a team-mate due to gear. But is that really the issue? I'm pretty sure it's more a matter of prof/build discrimination and dps monitoring.

 

As for being able to run the content with really any mix of players - isn't that already generally the case? My understanding is that all the elitism is more about doing MAX dps than it is about being able to complete.

[DeanBB.4268]

So, if you want to do easier Fractals and Raids, you would equip Rare or worse gear? Otherwise, how would the game judge between different Exotic or Ascended gear?

[ReaverKane.7598]

> @"Biff.5312" said:

> What I think you're aiming at here is something akin to the way pvp works - everyone being issued generic gear when entering, so there's no basis for preferring a team-mate due to gear. But is that really the issue? ** I'm pretty sure it's more a matter of prof/build discrimination and dps monitoring.**

>

The word you're looking for is **Balance**. The only reason there's profession/build discrimination is that balance isn't balanced. As for DPS monitoring. Well, most of us don't take kindly to having to do the work for other people and reap the same (or less due to RNG) rewards. If you're into that kind of thing, go ahead and carry the world. It's your prerogative.

 

> As for being able to run the content with really any mix of players - isn't that already generally the case? My understanding is that all the elitism is more about doing MAX dps than it is about being able to complete.

 

That's kinda true for fractals. The thought behind having optimized builds in Fractals is not to be able to complete it (for the most part), but more about completing it within a decent amount of time (around 10m per fractal at most). This is because the content becomes repetitive after the 50th run, but the rewards require the grind, so people will do whatever works to minimize the time spent. So, yeah, for Fractals, especially T1-T3, you can do it however you like, and i doubt you'll see many "elitists" at those tiers. T4 for the most part can accommodate one or two lesser players for the most part, but it'll increase the time it takes to finish the fractal exponentially, the worse the player is. CM Fractals are much harder and i don't think you'll complete them with just any build, but i've never tried.

 

As for Raids, that isn't quite the same story. Because most Raid bosses have an Enrage timer, meaning after that time the boss becomes much harder, it also means that if you can't kill it within that time, you're not going to be able to last after that, unless you have a very specific extra tanky group to outlast that. This is why Raids are much harder to get into than Fractals (although not as impossible as many people claim), and why it requires specific DPS targets to be able to finish a boss. After a while, you can tell if you're going to make it or not into finishing some bosses just by looking at the damage your group did.

 

[Khisanth.2948]

and what will you do about the person that does less damage than a healer while going down constantly? essentially providing negative DPS. do the enemies suddenly start stabbing themselves to compensate?

 

If we go with your suggestion then we might as well remove stats, levels and rarity all together. This would be much easier to test, implement and balance. Functionally the same.

 

Either way skill becomes an even bigger determining factor. For the scenario you describe it doesn't make things better, it makes it worse. Right now even if you are a noob but as long as you have the same level of gear it provides a sort of training by giving a higher baseline. Some people can do raids in masterwork while others fail in ascended. How much do you think that is dependent upon gear and how much upon skill?

 

> @"Biff.5312" said:

> What I think you're aiming at here is something akin to the way pvp works - everyone being issued generic gear when entering, so there's no basis for preferring a team-mate due to gear. But is that really the issue? I'm pretty sure it's more a matter of prof/build discrimination and dps monitoring.

>

 

What OP wants goes further than just normalizing gear.

 

> As for being able to run the content with really any mix of players - isn't that already generally the case? My understanding is that all the elitism is more about doing MAX dps than it is about being able to complete.

 

It is. I've been doing that with my friends since launch.