In this week's article of The Scrying Pool, I look at Guild Wars 2 raiding post-Tequatl revamp.

What I would like to see is a collapse of the path system. Bring the dungeons down to a one dungeon, one path system for the normal explorable modes. Now there are eight group story instances, eight dungeons and eight “heroic” dungeons.

Not only does this make the amount of instance content more marketable, it also allows for expansion. ArenaNet has commented that it doesn’t want to release a bunch of new dungeons because it would split the player base. A player might want to go to Caudecus's Manor but wouldn't be able to find a group as everyone would want to do the new hotness. We already have that in a way, trying to find a group for one of the 25 paths can be hard when everyone just wants to run the easy paths. With only eight normal explorable paths, adding a few more dungeons wouldn't be as big a split.

So what does all of this have to do with raiding? All of the dungeons have three or four paths, but this collapse I am talking about brings it down to only two, an explorable and a heroic. What could fill in for the last path is a 10-man version of a dungeon.

ArenaNet has said that they are not working on any instance content for over five players, but I would say that the 10-man additions should be the last thing changed for dungeons. Before we get to adding 10-mans, the dungeons need to get overhauled and these heroic paths added.

The 10-man would essentially be another path in the dungeon. For difficulty I would put it somewhere between normal and heroic paths and the rewards would be similar to whatever heroic would give. With this setup, players who want the larger group content can do the 10-man path and those who want a challenge can do heroics. This way there isn't the situation where a player wants the large group content but doesn't want do the 10-man path because they don't like the finely tuned challenging content that heroics would provide.

As for rewards, the typical gear treadmill that raids have in other games just wouldn't work in GW2. Without that carrot, most people probably wouldn't hang around too long for a typical challenging raid which is why the difficulty should be lower than the heroic path. There are some things that can give better rewards such as the dungeon tokens and daily gold rewards can be increased for the heroic content because of harder content and for 10-man for organizing all of the players.

Then Guild Wars 2 wouldn't just have eight dungeons, but eight dungeons, heroics, story missions and 10-man “raids”.

Matt "Mattsta" Adams can't wait for the Halloween season and return of the Mad King!

One of the features coming with the patch on Tuesday is the Exotic Nightmare Weapons. These weapons are the same as the weapon purchased with TA dungeon tokens ecept they have an added glow and drop from mobs within the explorable paths. A while ago I made a Reddit post saying how I think there should be the skins bought with tokens, but a rare chance to get special, fancier skins as drops from the dungeon's chests. If only I had made this comment in an earlier article of The Scrying Pool...

As always, if you have a question for me or a topic you would like to see talked about here, comment below or tweet it to @MattstaNinja.