Guild Wars 2

Before I start, this is not a rage post. Too many posts in this forum right now are raging like crazy. However, I do want to discuss (civilly, please) what seems like a pretty serious issue to me. I am a proud casual, who just started playing this game a month or two ago, now working on my level 70 necromancer.

Lots of people have been saying things like “Liadri/Salazar is impossible as one profession or another.” Those people are silly. We have all seen people beat Liadri as every profession. However, I also don’t think any of us will deny that it is much harder playing as certain professions (necromancer I can say for sure) than as others (warrior, guardian, etc…). This bothers me enormously. I like that there are extremely difficult achievements to get, and the fact that they require a little luck is even ok. They are supposed to be super difficult. However, shouldn’t that difficulty be the same for every level 80 with good gear? Shouldn’t any strong necro be just as viable as any strong warrior, but for different reasons? Isn’t that the very point of the profession system? Coming into the game as an ascending necro, the possibility that I’m inherently worse solely because of my profession is pretty disturbing.

I respect the balance teams at ArenaNet enormously, and so should you. They are good people doing hard work, trying to moderate the QQing of thousands of angry gamers. However, I feel that they have an impossible task at this point. PvE, PvP and WvW have entirely different balance concerns, but still try to operate around the same skill mechanics. Nerf Warriors in PvE, and we’ll never see another one in PvP. Buff Necros in PvE to have better survivability or higher DPS, and all of PvP will be playing necromancers. I honestly have no idea what could be done to solve the problem.

Like I said, I’m a newbie necro with crummy gear, and I’ve never faced Liadri myself, so I’m mostly talking out my butt. I’m interested to hear what other more knowledgable players think though. Ideas on a solution? Agree/disagree? Why? Be specific, I’d like to learn something.

Sincerely,
Your Friendly Neighborhood Casual

Well, what ArenaNet would be best off doing is hiring additional gameplay designers to focus on each of GW2’s areas Currently the balance team is stuck balancing around PvP while the content team is mostly producing PvE oriented stuff.

However, I don’t think they will fork over several hundred thousand more dollars to hire more gameplay designers.

+ 1 to your post, try doing the tornado guy as an elementalist and enjoy it… burned something like 20+ ticket for doing it

BoboMcBob.3672:

I like that there are extremely difficult achievements to get, and the fact that they require a little luck is even ok.

I wanted also to quote this, I really like that there are difficult ach. to earn. But NOT WHEN they are bonded to a ridicously limited timeframe. I want to do them when I can, when I want and when I’m in the right mood for doing it.

They could just split the skills for pvp/pve like they did in GW1.
But they say it would cost too much money I understand it might but when you compare the two… It’s like they could afford it with GW1 (which had a TON of skills) but not with GW2 they are obviously making way more money through GW2’s gem store than they ever did with GW1’s box sales. Just seems fishy. (And yes I know they have a bigger staff to pay, but this game has FAR FEWER skills to balance; they’re making it harder on themselves by not splitting the skills in the long run.)

That kitten ate thirty of my tickets.

Deneb.2697:

+ 1 to your post, try doing the tornado guy as an elementalist and enjoy it… burned something like 20+ ticket for doing it

It’s not really that the gauntlet as a whole is easier for certain classes and harder for others – it on a boss by boss basis. Some classes have easy enough access to certain boons and effects as to trivialise certain boss mechanics, while others have nothing whatsoever and have to purely rely on a combination of skill and luck. The tornado boss is the most glaring example – if you are a thief or elementalist you’ll get ping-ponged across the arena with the slightest mistake. If you are a necromancer or warrior.. you just use one of your elites and then casually press 1 a few times. If you are necromancer you don’t even have to move from the spot you spawned.

The bosses were for the most part not designed well – they were designed in a way that they have one or two counters and if you do not have access to that, you’re screwed. One exception is Suriel – on other one-hit bosses you rely purely on invulnerability abilities and bursting the boss down before you run out of them, but in this one you also have the option on sitting on a dark spot and using armor/heals to tank the damage and slowly kill her. We need more bosses like this, both in gauntlet and in PvE in general, otherwise we’ll never get away from the current “everyone is full glass-cannon because everything kills you in one hit regardless of armor and heals” situation.

Honestly, some content not being as easy to profession/class 1 as on class 2 or 3 is ok, as long as its fair on a baseline and doesnt require a “minimum dps”.
On the fair side, i dont mean damage or mechanics, i mean actual information and control the player has as a person, ignoring what your character can/cannot do.

Example would be if in melee Boss x doesnt do a instakill leap, but if at range, he spawns less adds or takes more damage OR if the player has no endurance/hp under some number, he will start casting skills that can be interrupted with cc (and with that i mean all cc not instant only)/goes into a exectuion mode that lowers his defenses to nil but allowing him to kill you pretty much instantly if you allow him to get to you.
Also camera and aoe indicators as well as spawns/other mechanics that influence the game have to have set patterns (just how the shadow blobs have a set rotation).

As for minimum dps, just like how puzzle games (should) have different ways to fix a puzzle and better adventure games multiple object interactions, boss fights used to have this idea of "x DPS, y Tanks and z Healers can do it, but if you do y DPS, z Tanks and x+y Healers you get the same end result but with a different kind of fight/playstyle (or in a strategy game, 2 builds using the exact same buildings but different order of units spawned changed the entire type of game you were trying to force the opponent into), what kinda died out with the rise of 3d and gaming for the masses; but ofc there should be things like enrage times not to allow for a 100% tank/healer composition or in GW2s case a 100% chaincc effect (as in defiant should be removed, but cc should not be chainable/bosses should have stun breaks that change how some fights go).

I really enjoyed Suriel, it is the only boss that have a good mechanic in it. You can’t just spam buttons and smash your keyboard to do it…

It’s just not possible to have different classes with different skill sets to be completely balanced in all these PvE situations.
Back in GW1 every class has like 95% access to the skill pool of the game, and you get to pick your own 8 out of like 500 skills. Thus even though it’s not 100% balanced, it’s 95% balanced if you will.
In GW2 they decided they wanted to discard this marvelous system. And here we are, QQing about class balance like a bunch of WoW players.

I agree that they should just split skills to have different effects in PvP and PvE. It’s very hard to properly balance skills if you need to keep both in mind, because PvP and PvE are just too different from each other.

I’m not sure of that many reasons against this actually, sure players need to learn both effects, but they’ll be making a whole new build in sPvP anyway, surely that’s when they’d have a detailed look at what they now do, and work around it then. After that, simple practice will sort everything out.

PMilkos.9103:

We need more bosses like this, both in gauntlet and in PvE in general, otherwise we’ll never get away from the current “everyone is full glass-cannon because everything kills you in one hit regardless of armor and heals” situation.

Yes, please. I was a tank in WoW for seven years, and I just do not like playing glass cannon DPS, yet it feels that in PvE, we’re “meant” to and that is frustrating. More diversity and viability of builds, please.

Also, I do not PvP myself, except for very occasional stints into WvW, and it aggravates me to no end that a tiny part of the game that I have zero interest in (sPvP) seems to dominate balance concerns so much.

I tanked in WoW for five years and I found myself drawn to that kind of thing still, so it’s a shame that there’s so much zerker or nothing sentiment and design out there.

Chadramar.8156:

PMilkos.9103:

We need more bosses like this, both in gauntlet and in PvE in general, otherwise we’ll never get away from the current “everyone is full glass-cannon because everything kills you in one hit regardless of armor and heals” situation.

Yes, please. I was a tank in WoW for seven years, and I just do not like playing glass cannon DPS, yet it feels that in PvE, we’re “meant” to and that is frustrating. More diversity and viability of builds, please.

Also, I do not PvP myself, except for very occasional stints into WvW, and it aggravates me to no end that a tiny part of the game that I have zero interest in (sPvP) seems to dominate balance concerns so much.