Guild Wars 2

HARMONY: Bringing PvE and PvP skills into tune.

The greater the differences between the behavior of Player Heroes and Critters, the greater the call for splitting skills between PvP and PvE functionality. Four major differences mangle any prospect of balancing professions and the Damage, Support, and Control roles across all modes of play.

Skill Tempo. Weak Critter AI relies on only a small range skills with both long inductions and long cooldowns compared to Heroes streaming out actions as fast as their cooldowns allow. This makes dodging, interupts, and Blind highly effective while trivializing Retaliation and Torment. This balance reverses itself against human opponents who tend to be extremely mobile and may make over a dozen attacks across the span of 3-4 seconds. Making Mob AI generally more creative with more boons and multi-hit attacks while looking for opportunities to make Player skills slightly more ‘bursty’ (greater effect/impact, longer cooldown) could bring the two aspects of play more in tune.

Many on One: Where Conditions go wrong. World Bosses and other major NPC are often deployed against 10 to 50 Heroes. Problems with Condition Damage vs. Direct Damage become wildly apparent. Mobs of all sorts need to be equipped with active or passive condition cleansing skills (or both). This would allow condition-heavy groups to achieve a form of soft-control as the boss is forced to spend a certain amount of time cleansing itself rather than attacking. Active abilities that selectively convert conditions to boons or transfer conditions to nearby heroes would also greatly increase the variety and strategy of gameplay – they produce specialized risks but again occupy the boss with active skill use, taking time way from its main DPS rotation.

The New Defiance. Control is unquestionably the role most hamstrung by sharp dichotomies between PvPlayers and PvCritters. The Unshakable/Defiance mechanic needs two major changes to makes Control more valuable in PvE and less frustrating in PvE (through the horrors of stun-lock…). First, stacks of Defiance decay – a character with Defiance loses one stack every two seconds since they last gained or lost Defiance. This provides a natural countdown while allowing groups with high volumes of control effects to drill through the shield as they do now. Second, ALL PLAYERS now gain 1 stack of defiance each time they suffer the effects of control. With Players now slightly resistant to stun-lock, and Critters less reliant on long inductions, the extreme cooldowns on most Control effects could be trimmed making them less meaningless in Boss encounters.

Ferocity vs. Guts. Rather than having some critters be 100% completely immune to critical hits, Heroes and Critters have access to a new Stat: Guts. Guts is subtracted from the attacker’s Ferocity on a 1:1 basis before determining if an attack is a critical hit. This allows some Critters to be exceptionally difficult to crit against without completely negating a player’s choice of stats. It also provided some value to builds that have over a 95% critical chance as the excess Ferocity acts as a buffer against the target’s Guts. Finally, it adds a new Hero stat that can be used to create new Traits and gear stat-combinations.

agree with “new defiance” concept, but it should be a master/grand master trait under protection or healing trait tree. each time you are a subject to CC you gain one stack of defiance.

and not a default state of character as it will make the DPS meta even more prominent.

cant agree with “guts”
i think perception should scale much much lower.
in every game in MMO industry critical chance of 25% considered high crit chance for high DPS builds. ( 10%-15% is the average)
in this game it is not hard to reach 100% build with perma fury, and 30% crit is the “average” for tanky/support builds.

Many good ideas here.

I think the defiance idea could be used in pvp, or at least in WvWvW. Being chain CCed is a big problem in WvWvW. Melee train lead by hammer warriors has been the meta since Autumn 2012. A typical WvWvW zerg battle has lots of people telling “Hammer stun” and “static field on the choke” just a highlight how extremely important and powerful area stun is. I do NOT want this meta to be nerfed to the ground, but it would be refreshing to have it less overpowered. Now everytime a character gets hard CCed (stunned, knocked, launched etc), he will gain defiance, which lasts 2 seconds. This would give a needed opportunity to escape. I am not sure about the 2 second duration, maybe make it just 1 second or 1.5 seconds or maybe even 3 seconds. This needs testing.

Many on one is also a good idea, but will once again require testing.

Currently the strong NPCs of this game hit way too hard, but way too rarely. Dungeon bosses can one-shot characters. You dodge the right time or you die. This makes the armor rating and toughness kinda irrelevant and that is why berserker gear prevails as the best defense is to kill the boss as quickly as possibly. If the attack rate would be considerably higher, but the hits would also be weaker, this would give players more reason to have stronger armor. The DPS of the monsters could be adjusted to that it remains roughly the same.

The difference between the light and heavy armor isn’t that much especially if both have invested over 1000 points in toughness. So I don’t think would favor too much the heavy armor professions (which are right now in very good position for all game modes).

agreed 99% of this.
i didnt get the defiance effect on players though. do you mean, if a player gets cc’ed he’ll get one defiance stack, making him immune against the next cc? that would mean only half of all cc’s would hit him. i don’t like this. as a player you could be wasting an essential dodgeroll to not be cc’ed (alhtough u had defiance anyway) and then you would lack endurance for a dodgeroll that would evade the next big damage burst.

love everything else though. especially the anticrit-stat you called guts.

Reducing CC would require you to redo ranged damage. As it stands, the melee classes move like greased lightening and do far too much damage. CC is essential and defiance would have to carefully consider not making CC avoid its primary purpose. The key problem would be in zergs where a random CC throw could trigger defiance and make it a hammertrain/guardian zerg fest. BORING!

PvE should not dictate how you balance. You balance person against person and then make the critters fit that system.

Bombsaway.7198:

PvE should not dictate how you balance. You balance person against person and then make the critters fit that system.

Neither aspect of the game, be it wvw, pve, dugneons, tpvp/spvp should dictate how the others get balanced.

You wont be able to achieve “harmony” between all aspects, the core elements are just too different (e.g. balancing cc in dungeons/pvp/wvw at the same time).

Anet is trying to “spare players from having to learn multiple game modes” (or really anything at all, “autoattack rulz”).

The original Guildwars had a better approach to this. PvE and PvP were seperated, a lot of skills were severely toned down in PvP compared to their PvE equivalents. Some skills were even PvE only (and those tended to be extrenely strong). This made all game modes, aswell as most classes relatively enjoyable at the same time, unlike (…)

Another issue comes from those players that don’t want to play certain builds (“meta builds” for pvp and pve if you want to call them like that), which on its own wouldn’t be a problem. However this becomes the problem once they ask for their build to be as effective, or at least come very close to the effectiveness of these “meta” builds.
Achieving this would either result in a massive power creep (creep wouldn’t be the right word for that) or the whole game beeing toned down to their infantile, slow paced style and at least IMO neither of those is really desirable.

So what’d be a solution? Split up pve/pvp/wvw and start balancing these until the result is somewhat bearable (not just one “feature patch” every 6 months, flavour of the month should stay fotm and not become flavour of the year). The downsides? People would need to learn how2play their class and how to accept that not everything is possible.