If you enjoy Guild Wars 2 combat, then you will enjoy raids. I have not met anybody who enjoys the game that, given a safe and friendly environment and the right opportunity, didn’t enjoy raids. But there are some common misconceptions that I’d like to clear up.
So I’ll preface this by saying that raids are endgame content. I don’t recommend raids to people that are fresh out of the dodging tutorial in Queensdale. Give yourself time to experience the game, do your story, get some masteries, try dungeons, fractals, strikes, DRMs, and so on and so forth. Does this mean you need to have all your masteries done and full ascended gear and all dungeons complete and fractal level 100 to start raids? No. I can’t give a concrete value for when you’re “ready” for raids, but I would say that you should at least be used to the game’s movement, dodging, know what the different boons do, know how to play your class, have done some more casual group content, and so on first.
For a lot of you tuning into this stream though, I imagine that you’re already past the stage of learning how to play the game and feel ready for raids. So what next?
Firstly, make sure your masteries are ready to go. In RTI, we have a command called ?raid-masteries which you can type in the #bot_spam channel that gives you a nice spreadsheet telling you what masteries to go for. As a broad rule, you’ll want all of gliding, all of raids (you unlock this track after completing your first raid encounter, by the way), and at least the Raptor, Springer, and Jackal masteries fully done. For those who don’t know, you need both mastery points AND experience to level up your masteries, and it’s also all expansion-specific. If I want, say, raid masteries, that’s in the Heart of Thorns section, so I need to get Maguuma Mastery Insights in Heart of Thorns maps, I need to select these masteries, and then I need to grind experience for those masteries.
This is an often overlooked aspect of preparation, but knowing what settings to turn on and off is sometimes a really big deal. Navigating into our settings menu, we have a lot of checkboxes in front of us. A lot of these are personal preference, but there are some things you definitely should take my advice on:
General Settings:
Show Skill Recharge -> On.Show Target Health Percent -> On.Thick Party/Squad Health Bars -> On if you’re a healer.Always Show Party/Squad Health Bars -> On if you’re a healer.Ground Targeting -> Fast with Range Indicator.Double-Tap to Evade -> Off.Double-Click / Right-Click to Attack/Interact -> Off.Autotargeting -> On if you keybind the toggle, off otherwise.Promote Skill Target -> On.Lock Ground Target at Maximum Skill Range -> On.Snap Ground Target to Current Target -> Off.Allow Skill Retargeting -> On.Graphics Settings:
Shaders -> At least Medium.Character Model Limit -> Highest.Effect LOD -> On.Also, make sure your keybinds are all set to comfortable keys (you can use key modifiers like Shift, Alt, and Ctrl!) and that you don’t skill-click!
Now you need to decide what raid build you want to run. Your one-stop shop for anything related to raid builds right now is Snow Crows. Most people already have a good idea of what class they want to play in raids, so choose your class in the list under Raid Builds. Let’s say I’m a Mesmer, that’s the class my heart is set on, so I click on Mesmer and now I’m on the page with all the different kinds of builds I can take.
You should notice that there’s a distinction between power builds, condition builds, also whether or not the build gives boons, whether it heals, what special buffs it gives, and so on and so forth. To understand what all of that means, we should understand what a typical raid squad composition looks like in a raid.
So let’s take a squad. You have two subgroups, subgroup 1 and subgroup 2. Now the concern is that all ten players get all of the important offensive boons in the game: Might, Fury, Quickness, and Alacrity. Since there’s currently no super reliable way to give quickness to ten players on your own due to target caps, we have a quickness source in every subgroup. The quickness source can be either a boon Chrono or a boon Firebrand. Then we need an alacrity source - there is a reliable way to give alacrity to ten players and that’s using a Renegade, so we throw an alacrity Renegade in one of the subgroups. With quickness and alacrity covered, we need a might source. This is done for ten players using a Druid. In some cases we can also manage this with a Tempest, but Druid is really the most popular source of might for ten players. We also want a fury source, which comes from a lot of different sources, but the standard setup has a quickness Firebrand in one subgroup giving fury with axe and their Feel My Wrath elite and a Druid giving fury with their Warhorn skill 5 in the other subgroup. Finally, we want Warrior banners for all ten people, so the vast majority of groups will throw a banner Berserker in there so that they can buff the squad with their Banner of Strength and Banner of Discipline.
There are other ways to set up a squad for sure, like having two Chronos in either subgroup, each giving quickness and alacrity, or having a boon Thief and alacrity Renegade to cover all boons for certain bosses where a boon Thief works, and so on and so forth. The most important thing is that the four offensive boons I mentioned - quickness, alacrity, fury, and might - are covered for all ten people.
Heals are an important consideration too. Most groups will run two healers, the first being almost always a Druid and the second being either the quickness Firebrand or the alacrity Renegade. Whether to go for a heal quickness Firebrand or a heal alacrity Renegade is down to preference. Here in RTI we run mostly heal alacrity Renegade, but pugs will most often look for a heal quickness Firebrand. There are pros and cons of each choice and it’s not really part of the scope of this guide to be talking about that. For your information, the stat of choice for healers is almost always going to be Harrier’s, and a nice thing you can do is go for ascended heavy armour, trinkets, and weapons with Harrier’s stats and then be able to share that gear both with your Firebrand and your Renegade to be able to play both builds.
Once the boons are covered, the remaining spots are where the DPS players go. DPS builds are a dime a dozen, and every class in the game has at least one decent option for DPS, and many have multiple options. An important consideration about DPS builds and certain support builds is whether they are power- or condition-based. As many of you will know, damage comes from two main sources in this game: power damage and condition damage. Generally a damage-oriented build you’ll prepare for raids will either be focused on power damage and have stats like Berserker, Assassin, Diviner, and so on, or it’ll be focused on condition damage and will have stats like Viper, Sinister, Grieving, and so on. This is a really important distinction to make, because for certain raid bosses, power damage is a lot more effective than condition damage, and vice versa.
Heading back to Snow Crows, we now have a better idea what this different builds are about. Power Boon Chronomancer is a source of quickness, and in fact it will tell you in the description that it gives quickness to its subgroup and is taken when there’s an alacrity Renegade in the squad, meaning the Chronomancer doesn’t need to cover alacrity themselves. If we instead click on Condition Mirage, it tells you here that it’s a DPS build that is focused on confusion and torment.
One more thing to note here is the viability section on the right. This part will tell you how well a build performs on each boss in the game based on the well-informed opinions of the people in Snow Crows at least. Often times you’ll find that, for DPS builds in particular, some bosses can be green and others can be orange or red. This is very often because of what we were talking about, where power DPS is good for certain bosses and condition DPS is good for other bosses. For example, if we head to the Ranger section, we’ll find that power Soulbeast is good for certain bosses but then bad for others, and if you swap to condi Soulbeast, you’ll find that it’s good at the bosses power’s bad at. If we check out heal Druid, we’ll see that it’s viable pretty much everywhere, because it is basically a cornerstone of the meta due to how good it is at so many different things, not just healing others.
For some classes, the viability doesn’t look too good. If we navigate to Necromancer, we’ll see that they’re in a pretty sorry state of affairs. That’s alright though - remember that these viability sections are catered towards top tier gameplay. Power Reaper and condition Scourge are actually both very good beginner-friendly builds for getting into raids as a DPS player, and outside of the really high-end raiding, you’ll find that what really matters isn’t what build you’re playing but how much you’ve practised and how well you can adapt to the fight. In my raid trainings I find it really common for Necromancers to be top or close to top DPS, for example.
Anyway, once you’ve decided what build to pick, it’s time to prepare that particular build.
Make sure your elite spec is unlocked. This is pretty obvious to most people but I want to get it out of the way. If you’re playing power Holosmith, for example, then you want the Holosmith specialisation fully unlocked, and you get that by doing Hero Challenges in the world (especially in Heart of Thorns and Path of Fire maps since those give ten Hero Points each rather than one), and then spending those points on the specialisation.
Back to Snow Crows, we can see that they actually tell you exactly what traits and utilities to take. There’s often a lot of room to change things up, and the better you know your class, the more you’ll be able to adapt to whatever situation you come across. For example, if you’re on a Renegade and you’re in a fight where the swiftness boon helps a lot, like Dhuum for example, but you’re not actually getting that much, you might know that you can take the trait Rapid Flow in the Invocation trait line at a very small loss to your damage output and have basically permanent swiftness on yourself. For the most part though, the recommended traits and utilities are recommended for a reason and will come into play when you start learning the skill rotation of your class and how to play it.
This part is where your wallets start fearing for their lives. Good gear in this game is a lot less grindy to get than in other similar games, but we have to remember that in the end this is an MMORPG and it can be a bit of a time sink to get the gear you want. I will say that the universal advice for all new raiders is to focus on getting weapons and trinkets of ascended rarity, and then going for exotic armour for the time being. Exotic armour is often much easier to get than ascended armour and you’ll experience a very minor loss in performance by using exotic for the time being, whereas weapons and trinkets being ascended makes a big difference compared to exotic.
The most important thing is ALWAYS that you get the correct stat prefixes, so if you mouse over each item of gear, it has to match the same pattern of stats that are on Snow Crows. If Snow Crows tells you to get, say, a Berserker headpiece, that means that whatever headpiece you get, whether exotic or ascended, will need to have power as its main stat and precision and ferocity as its minor stats. Getting the correct runes and sigils is also very very important, and you really shouldn’t cheap out over here.
As for HOW to get the gear: the wiki is your best friend. If you just search for what you want on the wiki, chances are you’ll find a page telling you how to get it. You can get good gear from the trading post, fractals, raids, story, elite specialisation collections, world bosses, achievements, and - the most reliable way - crafting. I also need to give a big shoutout to the amazing guide on the wiki for gearing your character. It goes into a lot of detail and is really your best guide for preparing your character with the correct gear.
A couple specific tips about gearing:
Back to Snow Crows - their website also mentions what food and enhancement you need to take. This is usually a matter of buying it straight off the trading post or crafting it if you have the right professions. I will mention that in RTI we have our own storage of ascended food that we use in trainings quite often, and in pugs you might find some generous people that drop ascended food as well, but for the most part, always have the correct food for your build prepared. Enhancements will never be dropped by anyone too, so make sure you have that prepared as well.
So, you have all the masteries you need, your settings are correct, you’ve drilled it into your head to stop skill-clicking, you’ve chosen your class and build, you have the elite spec trained, and you have the correct food, enhancement, gear, traits, and utility skills. Great. You’re still not ready to raid, but you are getting very close. Now you need to make sure that you can perform your build’s skill rotation at a decent level. A skill rotation is just a fancy way of saying what is the most optimal order of buttons to press on my class to contribute the most that I can contribute to the raid.
This part is important, because just jumping in with no idea what you’re doing will not do anyone any favours, and you’ll find yourself very overwhelmed. You should do this even for builds that don’t necessarily have a strict rotation, like healers, simply because knowing what each and every skill does and what sort of skills you should cast on autopilot will do a lot to help you be more prepared.
What Snow Crows does is that on each and every build page, they link to a benchmark video showing you the optimal skill rotation. They will have spent hours grinding as high of a DPS number that they can, and then they record themselves doing it and post it for everyone to see. Not only are there videos like this, but there’s also a written rotation for those who prefer that. I always recommend watching the video as well, because sometimes the written rotation will leave out certain thing that are pretty important, but this is basically the rotation you will need to memorise.
First things first, we need to go to the golem area that they’re in. That’s the Special Forces Training Area and we visit that place by going to the Lion’s Arch Aerodrome, which is basically the raiding hub in the game.
To enter this area, we need to first open up a squad. This is something anyone can do, even if you don’t have a commander tag. Just turn on Raid Mode and then you can enter. This cave over here allows you to spawn a golem with just the right attributes and set up your boons and buffs in just the right way to make it closely mimic what sort of environment you would get in a raid.
We can start by spawning the golem, which we do via the Golem Spawner. We’ll set the golem hitbox size to Average, unless told otherwise on Snow Crows, set the health to 4 million (which is standard), and then head into additional options to apply conditions. At this point, we want to start mimicking what we see in the benchmark video. The most important condition to apply is vulnerability, which should be at 25 always since that’s a 25% damage increase right off the bat. You’ll sometimes find that your DPS is a lot lower than it should be, then look at the golem and realise that you forgot to give it vulnerability.
It’s also a golden rule to mimic what they have in the video, because certain traits interact with conditions applied to your target. For example, Thieves will likely have a trait that allows them to deal more damage the more unique conditions there are on their foe. Since not all conditions are realistic to maintain permanently in a raid, you’ll want to go for the conditions that the person in the Snow Crows benchmark has to be more realistic about what conditions you’ll likely come across in the raid and also to be able to better compare how you’re doing with how the benchmarker is doing.
Once we’ve spawned our golem, we can start adjusting ourselves. Again, we mimic what we see in the video. For Daredevil, for example, we’re going to apply Alacrity, Vigor, Swiftness, Regeneration, Quickness, 25 Might, and Fury. We’ll also go to the profession-specific combat enhancements, which are all pretty much standard for every benchmarked build, and apply Frost Spirit, Sun Spirit, Banner of Strength, Banner of Discipline, and Empower Allies.
Finally, we’ll consume our food and enhancement, which is probably not something we want to do while practising but definitely something we want to do when comparing how well we do with the benchmark DPS, and we’ll start practising.
This part is probably tedious for a lot of people. Memorising a rotation and hitting a punching bag that doesn’t hit back isn’t necessarily fun, but I do encourage you all to put a decent bit of effort into it. You want to get to a stage where your skill rotation is pretty much muscle memory.
Some rotations are harder than others. With Daredevil, for example, you have a very simple rotation, but with something like Weaver or condi Holosmith, you’ll find that it can get a bit more complicated. At this point it’s always wise to understand what makes the rotation work rather than memorising each step in the rotation like a parrot. For example, for Daredevil, we know that the rotation works by keeping your endurance low because of multiple dodge-related traits we’re taking, spamming skill 2 since that’s your highest damage output, unloading as many skill 2s as you can when your Assassin’s Signet can be cast, and otherwise following a very simple loop while always standing behind or to the side of our target. So just like that, without trying to memorise a literal shopping list of skills, I’m able to do a pretty good job with this rotation.
A good number to aim for is around 80% - 90% of the benchmark. Compare the benchmark’s final DPS number with the final number you get in the chat log when you kill the golem, and if it’s within that range and you feel confident with it, then you’re in a good spot. Remmeber that you can use your special action key, the Mushroom King's Blessing, to reset your skills every time you want to have another go at the golem.
Another thing to point out is how to pick up speed. You will start off very slowly as you learn the rotation, but as you get better, you will get faster at pressing the buttons, which is really the key to upping your DPS number. For this, it’s nice to know about an advanced concept called skill-queuing. Basically, if we cast skills in quick succession in this game, then what it often tries to do is queue them so that when the first skill we press finishes its animation, the second skill starts right afterwards.
This allows us to be a lot faster at pressing our skills, but another important to concept to understand is skill priority. Skill queuing works for a lot of skills in this game, but certain skills, especially defensive skills and heal skills, will often have higher priority than regular skills, such that if you try and press one of these skills while casting a lesser priority skill, then that first skill’s animation will get interrupted and won’t actually cast.
ArcDPS is a very common tool for raiding. I’m not going to go into a huge amount of detail on how it works because I have a guide that covers it in some more detail, but basically ArcDPS will tell you how good your DPS and the DPS of your squad mates is in real-time. You can also configure it using Alt+Shift+T to save log files that you can upload to the site dps.report and then get a better look at how the fight went, how your DPS was compared to everyone else, how good your boons were, and all sorts of other very useful things. You can install it through the links in the #raid_resources channel on RTI’s Discord.
If you navigate to the #boss_guides and #class_guides channel on RTI’s Discord you’ll find a ton of guides and point-of-view videos giving you a whole bunch of information to prepare yourself for any given raid boss. It’s always a good idea to brush up on these before going into a raid for the first time, or even the first time on a new role, just to get an idea of what is expected of you. I’d also like to give a shoutout to Snow Crows’ guides on their website. They have a detailed boss-by-boss guide for so many of their builds, and it’s always a good idea to read through them. Some of the information might not be relevant to you and your squad since often times they write things that are relevant more for high-end groups or different strategies to what you might be running, but these guides are otherwise insanely good resources.
If you’ve done everything we’ve covered so far, then congratulations. You’re now more prepared than the vast majority of people at your level. Now we can talk about actually getting into a raid.
If you’re on EU, you want to join RTI. Here we have raid trainings open to everyone posted on a highly regular basis, and as long as you get your Member role via the #join_us channel, you can join any one of them. Refer to the RTI Quickstart Guide for some step-by-step instructions on how to get started raiding with us. Make sure you put in a training request via the #training_requests channel to get given priority to join raids whose bosses you’ve never killed before.
If you’re on NA, then our recommendation is going to be Raid Academy. Just go onto the server and follow the instructions they have listed there.
Pugging is a mixed bag to say the least. While I maintain that toxicity is not nearly as prevalent as people make it out to be in pugs, it is there. You’ll also find it a very common occurrence that you’ll just spend ages waiting for groups to fill only to have two attempts on the boss and then people who feel entitled for a quick kill end up leaving.
That being said, it’s not all bad, and for a lot of people, pugging is their main source of raiding. A couple of tips:
Ctrl+Left-Clicking on whatever you want to ping around 3 or 4 times. Pinging it in quick succession like that will prove to them that you actually have the KP that you say you have rather than just forging a fake chatcode and pasting that into your chatbox, which is actually something that’s possible to do as well.When you’ve gotten some experience with raids and want to do it on a regular basis, you might find the prospect of joining a static raiding group pretty attractive. This is definitely something you can do. There are groups out there that look for people to raid with them regularly every week. What you’ll often find is that they’ll trial you to see if you’re a good fit for the group and that your performance is at a level that they’re happy with.
You can find raid static groups on the /r/guildrecruitment subreddit and using the #lf_static and #static_lfm channels on RTI’s Discord.
Once you’ve found a group and gotten into a raid with them, it’s time to start the actual process of raiding. This is where the fun begins. Now I can’t exactly give suitable raiding advice to you guys in this guide since it will vary a lot depending on your group, class, build, and boss, and if you’re in a training guild you will probably get class-specific and boss-specific advice from the commander, but I can give you a couple of tips. These tips are taken straight out of the RTI Quickstart Guide.
/gg allows you to quickly suicide without damaging your armour. It’s used to reset a raid boss attempt to try again./gg to teleport to the squad upon entering an instance./gg), they respawn with their cooldowns reset.P or click the arrow at the top left of the squad UI and ready up from there./p) is only visible to people in your squad subgroup. Squad chat (/d) is visible to everyone in the squad.Every time you beat a boss, you’ll get a bunch of different rewards. Let’s start with the currency.
Magnetite Shards are the currency you get from Heart of Thorns raids, whilst Gaeting Crystals are the currency you get from Path of Fire raids. You can spend them at the vendor in the Lion’s Arch Aerodrome or, for wing-specific rewards, spend them at Scholar Glenna’s vendor in the respective wing.
You’ll also get a guaranteed 2 gold for each boss kill which is 4 gold for bosses in the newest wing, currently wing 7, and in the wing designated as the Call of the Mists wing that week, which is the wing with a special icon above it in the Lion’s Arch Aerodrome.
You’ll get a guaranteed Exotic weapon or armour.
You’ll get anywhere from 1 to 5 (inclusive) KP, like we covered.
You’ll get raid-specific rewards, which include ascended weapon and armour drops with unique skins, minis (that you can exchange for currency if you drop duplicates or don’t care for them), and rarely you can even get high-value items like infusions that you can sell for hundreds of gold on the Trading Post.
And finally, you’ll get a Legendary Insight from Heart of Thorns raids, which are wings 1-4, and a Legendary Divination for Path of Fire raids, which are wings 5-7. These are what you’ll need for your full set of legendary armour or for your legendary ring, Coalescence.
Legendary armour is a pretty popular reason for people getting into raids so I’ll focus on that a little bit. The Legendary armour is called Envoy Armour, and you get the things required for it via two collections: Envoy Armor I and Envoy Armor II. You can type /wiki followed by your search query in-game to go straight to the wiki page and take a look at what you need to finish these collections.
Most of them involve killing raid bosses, needless to say. When you complete the first collection, you will get a full set of fully stat-selectable ascended armour of whatever armour weight you choose. When you complete the second collection, you’ll get ANOTHER full set of stat-selectable armour, but this time, the weight you choose for this ascended armour will be the weight you’re stuck with for your legendary armour.
That covers pretty much everything I could think of that a raid beginner would like to know. If you still have any questions, you can always ask in the #ask_questions channel of RTI’s Discord. I hope I’ve encouraged you all to give raids a shot and that you’re a little less overwhelmed about the idea of getting into raids!