Playing the raid last night for what felt like a surprisingly short two hours, I think it's fairly clear they're heading in a good direction. A few thoughts;
The fight we encountered was
excellent, cleverly designed to put emphasis on all players, and because of that I'm not quite sure I would conclude that there's any kind of trinity, soft or otherwise, based on what we saw. For example, Varix was
very clearly holding the boss' attention throughout the entire fight, unrelentingly. But there was no threat meter, no snap aggro skills, no taunts; it was because he had more toughness than anyone else, and Jira confirmed this was the case in his PUG group as well.
Right off the bat, since
any class can stack toughness (and many can build for it), who can fill the role of "tank" isn't based around which class is designed to taunt or hold aggro, but who has the tools and the skill to survive in that position. Every class has access to a variety of blocks, evades, boons and conditions and good ol' fashioned dodge. I can see
any class stepping into the role, and based on the needs of each individual fight that could produce some pretty unexpected results. I wouldn't be shocked if they build raid fights that purposely force players to think outside the box and really dig down into what their class can do. ArenaNet has built a pretty big toolbox for the players who have deliberately found ways to ignore that in favor of exclusively focusing on the hammer. Raids are going to force players to dig into their options and success is going to be based on how quickly they can evolve.
That's very important, because there's a
lot more going on than managing aggro; this fight alone
absolutely can not be done without condition damage (straight damage was 100% useless), boon stripping (boss was impervious to damage unless a boon was stripped), control (every enemy had a breakbar that needed to be cleared before you could advance) and support (not just straight healing, which was effective, but lots of additional survival and recovery). Varix was just as important in those roles as he was moving the boss around, and people need to be prepared to be flexible with their builds (I personally had to switch in Personal Battering Ram, a skill I don't think I've ever actually used, just to aid in the control part of the fight).
Second, we don't know if Toughness is going to be the de facto "Tanking stat". It was in
this encounter, by all accounts, but later encounters may emphasize something else entirely, and maybe not related to stats at all. I wouldn't rush out and grab a full set of Nomad gear just yet is all I'm saying. That does raise a concern though, because if it's entirely dependent upon gear then a lot of players are going to have to spend a lot of money getting different sets of gear together. I would hate to get into a situation where players have to carry 4 or 5 sets of gear with them for each encounter, something we had to do way back in the bad old days of Vanilla WoW with resistance gear. That would be, as Proven put it, regressive. Disappointingly so, and I really hope there's more in the pipe than just "Stat X draws aggro," or they settle on Toughness so at least everyone knows what to gear for.
Legendary Armor being able to swap stats on the fly is going to make it the first goal of everyone who wants to be on the front line of raiding. Because there's no gear treadmill, however, that's actually
very good news for those who want that kind of experience (they are always prepared for the next curveball) but not a complete wall for those who are content to move at their own pace (since they can leisurely put together a set and not have it immediately invalidated when new content is added). It's important that the needs of both of those groups are covered and I hope ArenaNet makes getting into raids easy (despite the hour and uncertainty, we managed without much trouble).
Finally, here's some pictures;
Still mulling it over; we kind of smashed the group together, jumped online and went at it mostly blind at an hour when most people should have probably been heading to bed. I'm definitely glad with the progress we made without looking up what others had done (all we knew for sure was that one fight required condi damage), we were getting the boss down past half health but running up against the timer is going to be a big factor too. The best part about that though is, it wasn't because we needed more statistical DPS, but needed to work on our strategy to make it as efficient as possible. That's a VERY GOOD SIGN.
