Guild Wars 2

Despite what most people on this forum may say, this game will not last without an overhaul in pvp gameplay. Pvp is what sustained GW1 through all its expansions, so the dumbing down of the pvp gameplay in GW2 may ruin this title.

I’ve been a big fan of GW1 since its beta. What it implemented ingeniously was its pvp oriented gameplay. Unfortunately, GW2 lost almost every aspect of design brilliance present in GW1.

GW2 gameplay feels like an incredibly stripped down version of GW1. Whereas GW1 required every skill cast to be perfectly timed to have the greatest effect, in GW2, it’s more like an endless casting cycle. Without anything like energy to limit casting, enough available skills to never be frozen in cooldown, and with very few skills that even need to be timed for the greatest effect, the game becomes a mashy beat em’ up nightmare. It also doesn’t help that you cannot see activation times on yourself, your allies, or your enemies.

Also, I find it strange that fully customizable skill bars were removed for balance purposes when it was the fully customizable skill bars in GW1 that kept classes balanced. In GW1, each class had enough skills to choose from to counter most other builds in the game. And if that class could not, they could simply use a secondary class’s skill to do that. How GW2 currently is is if there is an imbalance in overall class skills, the weaker class is just screwed with the skills they have. That combined with the “rolenessless” of this game (making everyone effectively the same role), and the removal of a lot of unique skill characteristics from GW1 by having a combined “condition” and “boon” system, makes for an extremely homogenized game where everyone is pretty much the same and if they are not, there is an imbalance.

In the end, the draw to this game is not the large scale WvWvW, it’s the smaller skirmishes where it’s a game of strategy rather than swarm or be swarmed.

Here’s what GW2 needs to do:

• Allow weapon skill customization including replacement of the autoattack skill. There should be a list of weapon skills to choose from for each weapon instead of having half the bar being forced upon the player.
• Show activation times, not sure why that was removed in the first place.
• Assuming energy is already too late to implement, have some kind of repercussion for mindlessly cycling through skills. Seeing someone casting for a while should have a “crap, I better interrupt them” effect. Have longer activation times for skills and have distinctly greater and more diverse effects for skills with longer activation times.
• Remove dodge. I know this is not going to be done, but dodging removes the positional advantage of the attacker which renders being in the right spot at the right time much less advantageous. Like a lot of the changes made to this game, it “mellows out” the gameplay by removing a “checkmate” kind of finality when someone is out of position.
• The “Downed” system needs to be adjusted at least for pvp. This is also a “mellowing out” gameplay change except it just unnecessarily draws out the gameplay for both the downed player and the attacker. If I’m downed and manage to kill the other guy, even I feel cheated. As of now, I’d rather just die when I have no hp.

I do agree that weapons should have more than one locked set of skills per weapon, but I think that as the game goes on and they add more skills, this will happen as a necessity. More importantly I think is the fact that GW2 skills seem to have lost a lot of the vitality and complexity that GW1 skills had, and this is a lot harder to fix.

For the longest time, I would tell my friends that what made GW special is that the default answer for “do skills A and B work together?” was “yes,” and while this hasn’t necessarily changed, it’s become almost irrelevant as the grand majority of skills simply stand on their own or just have generic combo field effects.

I don’t agree that dodge is a bad thing, though. It could however stand to be a bit more integrated. A thief who wants to spike someone to death should have to (and be able to) drain their endurance by doing something more involved than creating a situation that necessitates dodging, for example.

I slightly agree with Turnip. I found a LOT of mechanics and systems that should be kept from GW1. They not only worked fine but made Gw1 so brilliant.
And the most of them would still be usable in open world system.

Sorry, but no. Guild Wars 1 just wasn’t good. It’s deck of powers made the whole thing Build Wars and there really weren’t that many builds because certain builds became meta. If you weren’t running those specific builds, you became a hindrance.

A common thing I hear that is related to GW1 is that players say they feel combat is about just pressing all your skills when they pop up.

This works in PvE (and by that I mean anything PvE that isn’t dungeons).

However it doesn’t work in sPvP. At the moment players are still trying to find how to play their characters, so there is a lot of button spamming going on. But it is a lot like the card game “kitten Head” or Tarok. At a first glance it may seem that there is not much tactics, but through playing you will realise how much there is to learn.

I thought the same when I first started playing GW2. I assumed it would turn in to button bashing. But now I think it is the opposite.

More weapon skills could be nice though.

And I agree the downed mechanic should be tweaked for sPvP and WvW. Dodging is a good mechanic though, and you can prevent your enemy from dodging.

I miss some of the builds from Guild Wars 1… I miss a lot from GW1, and I’ve played since the alpha. But I think Guild Wars 2 PvP is fine. They just need to add more PvP options. All we got is just WvW and sPvP. Guild Wars 1 had equivalent to sPvP, AB, GB, HoH, I think I’m missing a few but you get the point.

needs a change in PvE also zergs standing still auto attcking bosses in story quests not fun and wont last as long as gw1 did imo gets boring quick

Well the problem with the skills in this game is that the system is not built versatile enough to have that much skill diversity. The permutations of what skills can be created with the current mechanics of the game have been exponentially reduced because of the simplification and reduction of skill characteristics. In GW1, mesmers had very few skills that did direct damage. In GW2, probably 90% of skills are damage+something else, usually a condition or boon. Punishing damage is all lumped into the “confusion” condition so you don’t even need to look at who you are attacking to use it because it’s equally useful against every class. In fact, almost all the skills in this game are equally useful against everyone in the game. The whole foundation is just built to be spammy.

• Allow weapon skill customization including replacement of the autoattack skill.
  This wont change. Core mechanic. They’ll probably add more weapons, but not picking and choosing the skills you want there.

• Activation times already show. Enemy times do not, but that’s probably intentional to reduce lag or something. You don’t need them for enemies, anyways, as all skills have visual cues.

• have some kind of repercussion for mindlessly cycling through skills.
  There is already, you’ll be WAY less effective. You not noticing it doesn’t change the fact. With proper skill usage, you can easily beat groups bigger than 5 or deal with several veterans. Just spamming may get you killed.

• Remove dodge.
  Again, core mechanic, not gonna happen. And checkmates are not done in one move. Dodges have limited uses, so you get checkmate when you make them use their dodges, evades and blocks, and then they can’t prevent the next skill from hitting.
  This behavior comes closer to Checkmate mechanics, than thngs like an assassin shadow stepping to your face, deadlocking you in knockdowns and killing you in under 5 seconds.

• The “Downed” system needs to be adjusted at least for pvp. I’ll agree with making changes to the downed skills to make them more homogeneous, but not with removing them. I’ve survived countless times by properly using those skills, yet I get killed when there’s no allies (or water) around, so it serves its purpose.

The thing about Guildwars which I liked was the low level cap.

So you hit 20…
You get your base max gear at 20 and you’re off exploring the world with no worry of having to upgrade or anything of that sort, just enjoy the journey and the story.

The thing with such a high level cap is you have to upgrade your eq every 10 – 15 levels or so. like it or not, and by the time you get to 80 and get your full exotics, theres only 1 level 80 zone and you dont really get feel the rest of the game… because…. thats the last stop….

You could say, hey so now you can go back to the lower zones and complete the map.
Okay but why? they’re not worth it… you get low level rewards

Actually i need to make this my own thread
As a means to improve end game

I agree that the builds for characters feel pretty dumbed down compared to the last game; I was going to make a thread for this but this one is pretty similar so I just wanted to say how this feels weak even for the enemies.

The enemies in GW1 were usually all different from one another. They did different things in different ways. Like, in The Desolation I quickly learned the mesmers carried Hex Eater Vortex, which made playing through it on my sin a pain in thekitten since it countered my two builds I had (MobiusBlossom and Assassin’s Promise) so I had to change up my team to succeed. Again, in certain extremely condition heavy areas I’d have to change up my team and again for other areas with high spike damage or hex-based. Things felt different from zone to zone.

Here though, I can’t tell the different between the Sons of Svanir and the Charr. The GS guys both spin at me and thats it. The imps and spiders all seem the same too. There are a few mobs that do feel like they stand out; the Risen, Dredge, and Pirates in particular, but other than that I miss wondering what I was going up against and how I can adjust myself or my heroes properly.

I’m glad casting timing is out; it was a horror fighting extremely low ping mesmers

Sena.2761:

Here though, I can’t tell the different between the Sons of Svanir and the Charr. The GS guys both spin at me and thats it. The imps and spiders all seem the same too. There are a few mobs that do feel like they stand out; the Risen, Dredge, and Pirates in particular, but other than that I miss wondering what I was going up against and how I can adjust myself or my heroes properly.

Yeah, it doesn’t happen in-world as much, but I go through five or six loadouts per dungeon run on my engineer depending on how the boss fight works. That adaptive feeling is there, not everywhere but it’s there.

agreed with some form of energy mechanism, despite what you all wanna believe, cooldowns only are not good enough. everything else you suggested is crap.