Guild Wars 2

Tiger Ashante.1792:

Young Somalia.1706:

And then you clear it in 3 minutes.

Now, now that is total bull lol. There’s no way u clear City in 3 min in Hard Mode, not even by speed clear, or even in Normal Mode. What ur saying is pure exaggeration. Anyone that has done those runs would know that. You must have been listening to some bravado mate of yours lol. I’ve run full clear DoA runs 100’s of times in Hard Mode (including speed clears) and i know exactly what the place is about and how long it takes and it definitely takes longer than 3 minutes.

Yea, nah. I’m betting as many hundreds of runs as you did, I did that many hundred more. So trust my authority on the matter, especially because I was one of the lead tactic and build developers for my guild’s attempts for a fair period of time when world records were between 20- and 30-minutes, and these were the outlines I imposed for my team (that were beaten SEVERAL times).

A HM DoA of the teamway variety (eg/ no world record terra splitting tactics) was capable of being done sub-25 minutes with some fair breathing room. My personal record is 23 minutes. But for a 25-minute run, it still imposes restrictions on how quickly you must complete areas. Including time spent running from area to area (perhaps 60-80 seconds), a simple time table would look like this (and these are maximums):
Foundry 6 mins (6)
City 4 mins (10)
Veil 8 mins (18)
Gloom 4 mins (22)

So that would be a 23-to-24-minute run. City is easily completable in ~3:30, and often, a legitimate world record attempt (prior to tactics involving City being soloed while others cleared Veil), your group MUST resign if it took you anything over /age 3 minute to pop Jadoth.

Phoebe Ascension.8437:

Aplier.7829:

Phoebe Ascension.8437:

I loved gw1, but please for the love of god keep the stupid mana system there!! Elementalist was TOTALLY destroyed by this mechanism. 25 mana (and exhaustion!) costing skills that didn’t even have a big effect to begin with while others would spam strong no mana/only 5 mana skills and regain mana quickly. In the end, mana is also stupid cause the prof with best mana management skills wins most of time. Now at least you can keep attacking no matter what (and gw1 auto attack doesnt compare). The only place it might be good is pvp, but some profession were also not good there cause of the mana system.

I’m sorry about your poor memory, but, those 25 energy and exhaustion ele abilities hit like trucks and amazing effects to go with them. Elementalists also got up to 60+ energy without even trying. Each class had energy management mechanics to go with it, and instead of spamming exhaustion skills, they should be treated as though exhaustion is their cooldown. GW1 wasn’t just about choosing all the big skills you want and putting them on your bars and going spam happy, you had hundreds of choices and had to decide on just 8 skills that all worked together. For me, this usually ended up being 2-3 fairly spammable damage skills, 2-3 healing/buffing skills, 1-2 energy management skills, and 1-2 big cost skills. GW1 end game progression wasn’t designed around earning the highest stat armors or weapons, but about mastering your skills as a player, learning what your character can and can’t do, and customizing and playing around with all sorts of different build options.

The only place energy should have been a limiting factor was in pvp, where there was an abundance of energy denial builds, and controlling your opponents resource was one way to win a fight.

You really know nothing about it do you? Maelstrom etc while a 10 sec lasting skill where weak overall spamming a 5 mana skill (a good one) 5x (like discord) could do the same if not better. Secondly having base mana of 60-100 doesn’t mean a thing. You can burst a few more spells but that’s it, the MANA REGENERATION RATE was the same. And that hurted ele’s badly needing to cast 10-25 mana skills while professions like necro could get away with 5 mana skills.

yes… compare direct damage necromancer elite discord spell with a elementalist water spell that interrupts every second. you were looking for big damage and you thought 10 sec aoe interrupt was a good choice? why not compare meteor shower, or better yet rodgort’s invocation. both expensive massive damage skills that needed some build thought how to maintain and when to use, but if you built properly you could use them on recharge. it’s like all you looked at was damage numbers but you didn’t bother to look under fire magic. idk man.

Vayne.8563:

Smith.1826:

Vayne.8563:

It’s interesting..because my understanding of energy management when it was first introduced in MMOs was for developers to slow down the game, so their servers could keep up with all the calculations. It DID add more depth to the game as an affect effect, but the main reason it was used was to slow down skill usage, so that there would be less lag.

Today servers can handle more, so it’s not as necessary.

Ow, my brain. I need a source for this so I can properly dissect it’s contents.

What do you mean by “not as necessary”, by the way?

Also, I thought that the GCD was the major player with assisting and balancing lag.

GCD also played a part of course, but the less system calls you handled the better you performed. Very often different programming problems are attacked from different angles.

The articles I read on this were written years ago, but I’m sure you can dig some of them up. Me….I’m too lazy.

I just don’t think that the fact that latency is more manageable is an excuse to throw out resource management. It’s one of the major foundations that adds a lot of depth, balance, and replayability to games like Dota and League of Legends. It’s something that goes above and beyond what’s present in MMOs.