The last Guild Wars 2 raid wing — The Key of Ahdashim — launched in June 2019. It has been over a year. In that time, ArenaNet shipped four Strike Missions as part of the Icebrood Saga and confirmed, without directly saying it, that Strike Missions are the new direction for instanced group PvE. The raid community noticed. The debate has been running on the forums and r/Guildwars2 for months. I want to actually engage with it — because both sides have something real to say and the discourse usually collapses into tribalism before anyone’s made the useful points.
Key Highlights
- The last GW2 raid wing (The Key of Ahdashim, Wing 7) launched June 11, 2019 — no new raids in the 12+ months since
- Strike Missions launched with the Icebrood Saga: currently four missions available (Voice in the Deep, Shiverpeaks Pass, Fraenir of Jormag, Boneskinner)
- Strikes are 10-player like raids, but shorter, single-encounter, and significantly less mechanically demanding
- Fractals remain the most consistently updated endgame pillar — Tier 4 and Challenge Motes still the best regular endgame loop
- No official statement from ArenaNet on whether raids are discontinued or simply paused
What We Don’t Know Yet
- Whether ArenaNet will ever return to full raid wing development or if Strikes have permanently replaced the format
- Whether Strike Missions will receive Challenge Mote (CM) versions — which would address the difficulty gap
- The long-term reward gap between Strike and Raid exclusive content
What Raids Were — and Why They Mattered to a Specific Player
Let me be precise about what raids are, because “raids” means something specific in GW2 that’s different from the word in other MMOs.
GW2 raids are 10-player instances with multi-boss wings, complex pre-event chains, build-specific compositions, and mechanics that require every player to understand their role. They have no scaling. They have no auto-matchmaking. You go in with nine other people who know what they’re doing, or you spend three hours learning why the mechanics exist by dying to them repeatedly.
For a specific subset of the GW2 player base — let’s be honest, it’s a minority — raids were the pinnacle of what the game offered. Not because of the gear rewards (GW2’s raid gear is Ascended, which you can get other ways). Because of the challenge. Because of the organizational culture around raid guilds. Because of the shared vocabulary of working through a new wing: the theory-crafting, the progression kills, the meme deaths that live forever in guild memory.
That experience doesn’t exist in Guild Wars 2 without raids. Strikes don’t replicate it.
What Strikes Are — and What Problem They Actually Solve
Strike Missions launched as “accessible instanced group content” — ArenaNet’s phrasing. The intent was to create a bridge between open-world play and the coordination demands of raids.
Does that work? Yes. Partially.
Strikes are genuinely good at what they’re designed for. Shiverpeaks Pass and the Voice in the Deep require coordination — you can’t just ignore mechanics and brute-force the numbers. They reward team awareness. They run in fifteen to thirty minutes, which fits a schedule that raids don’t. The LFG tool actually works for Strikes in a way it never reliably worked for raids, because the content is forgiving enough that a mixed-skill group can complete it.
The players who were never going to touch raids are doing Strikes. That’s real. That’s not nothing.
The problem is that the content ceiling is too low for veterans. Once you’ve cleared all four Strikes, they become farming runs at best. There’s no equivalent of a raid’s Challenge Mote system — no harder version of the encounter that pushes optimal players. Experienced raiders are clearing Strike content in under ten minutes with organized groups. That’s not challenging endgame. That’s warm-up.
Fractals: The One Thing That’s Still Working
I want to give credit where credit is due: Fractals have held up. Tier 4 Fractals with Challenge Mote conditions remain one of the most consistently engaging endgame loops in the game. They scale reasonably well from player skill, the weekly rotation keeps content fresh, and the Ascended gear track via the fractal currency system gives players a reason to keep running them.
Fractals are also where the endgame playerbase mostly landed after raid development slowed. The fractal CM community is active. Snowcrows and other build sites have fractal-specific optimization guides that get real engagement. Hardstuck has teaching fractal runs that are turning new players into competent CM runners.
The fractal ecosystem is healthy. It’s not a substitute for raids — the player count cap and single-instance structure are different experiences — but it’s the part of GW2’s instanced endgame that’s still getting genuine investment.
The Accessibility Argument, Taken Seriously
Here’s the argument for Strikes that deserves engagement rather than dismissal:
GW2 raids had an accessibility problem. Not a difficulty problem — a culture and tooling problem. The LFG barrier for raids was real. Pick-up raid groups demanded kill proofs, specific builds, and an implicit experience that new raiders couldn’t demonstrate without first getting into raids to demonstrate it. Raid training guilds did extraordinary work filling that gap, but they couldn’t solve it at scale.
Strikes remove that barrier. No kill proof. No composition requirement. Post in LFG, get a group, play the content. For the player who wanted to try instanced group content but kept bouncing off the raid LFG wall, Strikes are meaningfully better.
ArenaNet had to make a choice about who they were building endgame content for. The raid community is vocal but not numerically large. The players who would do instanced content if it were accessible are a much larger group. This is a real tension, and it’s not crazy to resolve it in favor of the larger audience.
What I’d argue is that resolving it by effectively ending raid development, rather than continuing both formats, was the wrong cut. Strikes and raids aren’t competing for the same development resources in the same way that two separate game modes do. A studio committed to both could serve both communities.
What Would Actually Fix This
The ask from the raid community isn’t complicated: Challenge Mote versions of Strike Missions and a signal that raid wings aren’t permanently over.
Strike CMs would give veteran players the mechanical ceiling they’re missing. The foundation already exists — fractal CMs have proven the model works. Apply it to Strikes. Make Strikes scale into raid-complexity territory for groups that want that. The content exists; the difficulty layer doesn’t.
On raids: ArenaNet doesn’t have to commit to a new wing tomorrow. But “raids are paused while we focus on Strike accessibility” is a different message from “raids are done.” The community deserves clarity on which it is.
Who Should Be Paying Attention to This Debate
Veteran raiders: Your concerns are legitimate. The mode that defined your end-game has gone quiet. Keep pushing for clarity on its future — but engage with the Strike format on its own terms. The two things aren’t mutually exclusive.
Casual players who’ve never done instanced content: Now is the best time to start. Strikes are the most accessible group PvE GW2 has ever shipped. Get in LFG. Find a teaching run. You might find out instanced content was never the barrier you thought it was.
Fractal runners: You’re fine. The content you love is still getting attention. Keep running your CMs.
WvW and PvP players: None of this affects you directly, but the endgame discourse does affect the overall player population that keeps the game funded and developed. A healthy PvE endgame keeps people subscribed to the ecosystem.
What to Watch For
- Any Strike CM announcement — if ArenaNet adds challenge modes to existing Strike Missions, it’s a meaningful signal that they heard the difficulty feedback
- Raid wing 8 — there’s been no announcement, no teaser, and no acknowledgment of the gap. Watch for any developer comment on raids’ future in AMAs or forum posts
- Fractal update cadence — Fractals are carrying the endgame right now. How much investment they receive in the IBS’s remaining episodes tells us a lot about where instanced content priorities sit
The endgame isn’t broken. But it’s at a crossroads, and the path ArenaNet picks in the next twelve months will define what GW2’s competitive PvE community looks like for years.