Guild Wars 2

There have been many posts over the past few days with regards to the PVE meta, the upcoming nerf to Critical Damage stacking in Berserker gear, and the ongoing problems with most Dungeon encounters being largely a DPS race. Co-ordinated groups roflstomp content in clear times that were probably not expected by the content designers, whilst PUG groups struggle to even get to a dungeon boss. There have been assertions that GW2’s lack of MMO trinity (Tank, healer, DPS) muddies the waters between roles and as such full DPS has emerged as the way to go given the lack of complicated scripting AI for most PVE encounters.

The problem with GW2 dungeons is not the lack of trinity at all. That assertion makes absolutely no sense when GW2 was designed from the ground up to eliminate the necessity of the Trinity.

What is the problem with GW2’s PvE is 2 things: Defiance, and slow, instagib attacks.

Defiance: It was a slapdash bandaid solution to bosses being stunlocked to death since the public betas and it has never been re-addressed since to the detriment of the PvE community (which is arguably the largest)

• Defiance single handedly eliminated the support/control archetype from dungeon running builds. Content designers have since designed around the Defiance mechanic also, further entrenching this halfway house solution. There are practically no worthy attacks to interrupt because you can just DPS race the boss down before the sequence initiates.
• Interrupting is also not rewarded with a shorter encounter either – which further erodes support/control. DPS has become entrenched in such a toxic fashion because there is no other role that is as efficient. There are no roles because the only role is DPS.

Slow, instagib attacks: – Bosses attack slowly and hit extremely hard, often meaning that Toughness is essentially a wasted stat because it slows you down.

• What attacks there are are therefore one-shot mechanics to punish players that don’t dodge. Again, this further reinforces the DPS race meta.
• If you are to be one shot anyway, what does it matter to have 10% damage reduction when you can DPS the boss down 10% faster and take less attacks?

What should be done is this:

Reworking defiance to re-introduce Support/Control.

• Interrupting a key boss attack should be rewarded with bonus damage to shorten the encounter – the boss should not simply repeat the attack with 5 extra defiance stacks to completely negate your CC efforts.
• This is an interim solution that requires no extra AI – just scripting for the boss to delay its next attack, and for a percentage of its health to drop off and make the encounter easier.
• Rewarding clutch interrupts will slowly bring back the control/archetype, but this is not enough on its own.

Bosses must attack faster, but hit softer.

• Toughness is a wasted stat at the moment. Semi-tanky builds are numerically inferior to Glass cannons.
• With this change, Toughness does have a value in surviving an encounter along with all the other support stats like Boon Duration or Healing Power.
• This is an interim solution until more advanced efforts, like designing Bosses to have PvP centric mechanics can be implemented. Bosses cannot simply be a damage sponge that you dodge. It must have combos it will try to pull off to try to kill you. Before you start, spamming AOE Red circles does not engaging boss fights make.
• In terms of advanced boss AI design, I’m talking Poisoning your heals, Dazing your rezzes, interrupting your burst combos, ripping/corrupting/stealing your Boons, teleporting to a Trebuchet and AOE nuking your dungeon runners.

For the future
Make it easy on your content designers and give a boss a PvP meta build, like Condi Necro, Bomb/Nade Engi or Triple Stance Hambow Warrior with a Doom Sigil, or something super cheesy like 1-shot Signet Thief.

• Make your players fight several of these builds all at the same time.
• Now you have research data and metrics on how these builds are strong.
• You have insight into balance because you’ve now got an underground PTR of players fighting against and learning how to counter these builds
• This also introduces the possibility of introducing new skills, traits and mechanics into the game through the PvE “ghetto PTR”. You can test your changes before they go live against groups of varying co-ordination so you can have an estimate of the effects of your changes at all levels of play and skill.

I agree with many of the points in the OP.

Basically you have to get to a point where it´s more profitable to bring some defense in your group.

Maybe give each profession in one trait line the option to remove 5 stacks of defiant as a grandmaster trait if you rly want to have defiance in the game. That way it would be build defining.

I really looking forward to see faster hitting bosses. Maybe it´s better then for everyone to bring more toughness or maybe bring more healing power just on one party member. Things to try out. Would make things more interesting for organized groups.

edit: Maybe, just maybe, get rid of the different Healthpools on the different professions? Just a thought. I can´t help but i feel that difference just makes things more complicated for no reason at all. The difference in the Armor should be enough in my opinion. But as i said… just a thought

Excellent post. I fully agree with the OP. In fact I was about to make a similar post.

Dungeons and bosses are full of one-shot mechanisms, which completely defeat the purpose of having a bit of extra toughness. You either time your dodge correctly and completely avoid the damage or you miss your dodge and get downed.

CC is useless against champions and legendary bosses.

Bosses and the enemies in general should attack at faster rate, but bosses should do considerably less damage per hit. Then toughness would matter at least somewhat (not counting those rare champions who do mostly condition damage).

Now it is all about DPS, which makes it very boring.

Added idea (but this requires significant programming efforts from Arenanet):

Improve the pve AI. Make the enemies dodge damage over time AoE attacks and chained attacks. Now you can just spam your attacks, wait for the slow attack, dodge it, rinse and repeat. This would make CC more more needed (immobilize, freeze, knockback, knockdown, launch, stun).

Guild Wars 1 had superb AI compared to this game.

Please stop creating same threads that use hyperboles, misinformations and misconceptions. Research the subject matter at hand before doing that.

haviz.1340:

Please stop creating same threads that use hyperboles, misinformations and misconceptions. Research the subject matter at hand before doing that.

I would like you to lay out in detail which of my hyperboles were misinformative and misconceived, please. I would find it edifying and I will make every attempt to correct my errors given sufficient evidence.

MonMalthias.4763:

• Defiance single handedly eliminated the support/control archetype from dungeon running builds. Content designers have since designed around the Defiance mechanic also, further entrenching this halfway house solution. There are practically no worthy attacks to interrupt because you can just DPS race the boss down before the sequence initiates.

How defiance eliminated the support archetype?

• Interrupting is also not rewarded with a shorter encounter either – which further erodes support/control. DPS has become entrenched in such a toxic fashion because there is no other role that is as efficient. There are no roles because the only role is DPS.

There are no dedicated roles which is by design. Every person brings dps, support and control (which currently doesn’t work against bosses).

Slow, instagib attacks: – Bosses attack slowly and hit extremely hard, often meaning that Toughness is essentially a wasted stat because it slows you down.

• What attacks there are are therefore one-shot mechanics to punish players that don’t dodge. Again, this further reinforces the DPS race meta.
• If you are to be one shot anyway, what does it matter to have 10% damage reduction when you can DPS the boss down 10% faster and take less attacks?

There are probably less than 5% bosses than have instagib attacks even if you have a lot of toughness and most, if not all of them, have 3s long wind-ups which is their mechanics. If you don’t agree with that number, please list those instagib attacks.

Bosses that do attack frequently are most often using projectiles which are fully negated, even turn against them, with the help of reflections/absorptions.

At higher scales of fotm, a lot of end bosses attack very frequent for a lot of damage. What people do in those cases? Stack guardians and rotate aegis (6 aegis with 2 guardians). Try doing bosses like archdiviner or mossman at high scales without any guardians with tanky team and then with glass cannons. Tanky team will kill slower only in perfect situation where your glass cannon party can dodge everything because one frequently occuring autoattack kills 3 people, unlike with tanky team that can then use thier sustain to heal up and continue attacking, unlike with glass cannons.

• Toughness is a wasted stat at the moment. Semi-tanky builds are numerically inferior to Glass cannons.

Toughness and vitality are wasted if you exclude sustain from your argumentation. Both or those stats play the role of buffer that allows you to get hit more often but in order to “reset” that buffer you need sustain (regen, healing symbols, soothing mist, healing shouts, etc).

I don’t know if you seen recent videos of people playing arguably the hardest dungeons with dodge key disabled but they prove defensive stats are not exactly wasted though they promote bad gameplay. Just remember that this game was advertised with active combat in mind so if you are active you should be rewarded more than someone who rely on passive stats.

All in all, I agree with some of the changes you proposed (more human like bosses, changes to control, etc) but a lot of stuff you put there is just false and it doesn’t help.

I recommend taking a look at my thread on this topic a while back.

It offers a lot of suggestions to try and solve this problem.

The very basic ways in which encounters are designed is probably an easier place to start with improvements than trying to create an AI that can succesfully run the PvP meta builds. (Which would be an astonishing feat, and absolutely awesome if we can have it though.)

Increasing the power of support would be nice. Increasing the necessity of toughness encourages lazy play. Active defenses, and thereby players skill, should always be superior to passive defense in an action MMO. That’s the beauty of the GW2 combat system: you get rewarded for being good, not just bringing the right amount of toughness to the fight.

maxinion.8396:

Increasing the power of support would be nice. Increasing the necessity of toughness encourages lazy play. Active defenses, and thereby players skill, should always be superior to passive defense in an action MMO. That’s the beauty of the GW2 combat system: you get rewarded for being good, not just bringing the right amount of toughness to the fight.

But utilizing passive defense as a form of active defense (such as through body-blocking or obstruction) should take precedent over both, as it is the only way to make tank gear skillful and relevant in PvE.

There are a lot of upset zerker players right now. Not for the obvious nerf reason though.
I don’t think the upset stems from their gear being nerfed, but rather because anet have failed to acknowledge at least a little that the dominance of damage in pve scenarios is a result of the core game mechanics and poor pve encounters.

The change was seen as an easy fix to appease people, an easy way out, a band-aid to temporarily hide the problem. This is why people are upset – it is extremely disappointing to see this approach taken rather than an objective look at why things are the way they are. It shows a severe lack okittennowledgement & discussion on it from anet. It is almost like a statement saying that they are happy with the state of pve, it just needs to go a little slower. And for those of us yearning for diversity and interesting/challenging fights, that is disappointing. With things the way they are, it won’t matter what is increased or decreased in damage – whatever does the most will be the preferred setup.

fadeaway.2807:

There are a lot of upset zerker players right now. Not for the obvious nerf reason though.
I don’t think the upset stems from their gear being nerfed, but rather because anet have failed to acknowledge at least a little that the dominance of damage in pve scenarios is a result of the core game mechanics and poor pve encounters.

The change was seen as an easy fix to appease people, an easy way out, a band-aid to temporarily hide the problem. This is why people are upset – it is extremely disappointing to see this approach taken rather than an objective look at why things are the way they are. It shows a severe lack okittennowledgement & discussion on it from anet. It is almost like a statement saying that they are happy with the state of pve, it just needs to go a little slower. And for those of us yearning for diversity and interesting/challenging fights, that is disappointing. With things the way they are, it won’t matter what is increased or decreased in damage – whatever does the most will be the preferred setup.

U hit the point!