Guild Wars 2

So with the recent patch a lot of people balked at how their professions had been affected by balances.

Myself, I was rather fortunate, as I rarely follow flavour of the month builds and make my own rather than waiting for someone to make a build for me.

My Warrior build was barely affected, moving 5 trait points from Arms to Defense; my Mesmer wasn’t affected at all, although I find myself playing with scepter more now as it’s more viable.

However, I can understand why others are upset, and I’m a bit disappointed that ArenaNet have, against all assurances, fallen into the Nerf/Buff cycle that plagues the vast majority of MMOs out there.

To that end, I propose that instead of continually tinkering with professions, traits and skills, they rather look at tweaking the overarching game mechanics.

Things that still aren’t satisfactory and feel like unfinished hack jobs are as follows:

ALL AoE being limited to 5 targets
I propose they look at tweaking this on a more granular scale. It was made like this because of the perceived power of buffs affecting massive amounts people in WvW.
I believe there is room for AoE that affects entire groups of people, but understand the need to balance that against the more powerful group affecting AoE. To that end they should examine AoE effects on a case-by-case basis, limiting or unlimiting the amount of affected targets where necessary. The blanket fix they applied initially feels rushed and amateur. It also promotes the ridiculous “Stacking” tactic in WvW and ensures that zergs remain king.

Continued below

Crowd Control and Unshakable/Defiant
These boss abilities are the reason direct damage weapons and skills are massively more useful than bringing along any form of crowd control. Again, it feels like a lazy fix to prevent bosses getting stunlocked, and the end result is why virtually all PvE Warriors and Guardians favour greatsword above every other weapon.
It also goes directly against one of the development goals they had in mind while developing GW2. Throughout development they were stressing how they wanted to move the player’s attention away from watching healthbars and buff / debuff icons back towards the game window itself. Yet if you bring any form of crowd control to a boss fight, you have to watch their health bar like a hawk in order to properly time your skills.
As for suggestions on how to fix this problem, I’m unsure, but I know in my bones that Unshakable/Defiant need to go.
Maybe treat bosses like players and give them stability skills with cooldowns? That way, the buff can be stripped, but they still have some CC protection.

Maximum Condition Stack Size
Like Unshakable/Defiant, this limit ensures that direct damage remains king. In group situations it ensures that only a couple of people running condition builds quickly hit the limit with any condition stacks after 25 essentially being wasted damage.
I propose that the stack cap should remain, but that any condition damage applied above and beyond the cap be applied as direct damage. Sure, use an algorithm to balance the damage, but this needs to happen.

Stealth
This one is going to provoke the biggest amount of negative feedback. If I had my way, it would be completely removed from the game.
In Guild Wars 1, ArenaNet considered adding Stealth to the game on two separate occasions, but both times realised that it’s ridiculously overpowered and backed away from implementing it.
The first time was during initial development. In one of the original Public Beta weekends, my Ranger had a stealth attribute; this was eventually removed prior to release. With the development of Factions and the addition of the Thief’s Grandaddy class , the Assassin, ArenaNet once again considered giving it stealth, but backed away from it as being ower-powered again, instead creating the fantastic compromise of shadow stepping.
These design sensibilities flew out of the window with Guild Wars 2 and we ended up with the Assassin class but with added invisibility.
And the problem is, ArenaNet didn’t learn anything from any of the other MMOs out there that have invisibility.
In almost every other MMO, invisibility can be broken if the invisible character is in plain sight in front of other players, especially if there is no environmental cover around. There are dice checks against an invisible player to see if they successfully remain hidden. If the invisible player attacks from invisibility, they are unable to re-enter invisibility unless they completely break out of combat.
Invisible players in other MMOs definitely do not move faster than visible players.
And finally, cooldowns for abilities that confer invisibility are measured in minutes.
So maybe Guild Wars 2 should learn from those other examples if they’re not looking to remove invisibility from the game completely.

Does anyone else have other game mechanics suggestions?

And I know it’ll be tempting to make this all about Stealth, but please try to discuss the other suggestions too!

I haven’t developed an opinion on your other idea’s yet need more time to think about it.

However I have to agree stealth is crazy over powered. Simply because the only counter measure is in wvw and it’s a trap you have to place and build…. no one does that. It’s a useless item. I feel like certian classes like ranger, and mez should have some inherit utility or skill that could reveal stealth, or if break it somehow.

Still I like the idea of it so much that I don’t think it should be removed but all things should have some sort of built in counter. Stealth as of right now is one of the few skill that there is no real counter to other than spamming aoe. Thieves do have an unfair advantage and more substain than a class with that much burst should have.

I totally agree with the AoE thing. Take it on a case-by-case basis. A lot of skills (like simple direct damage ones) could hit every target in the area, but scale down the damage depending on how many targets there are. Other AoEs (like Chaos Storm) definitely should not be able to tick on more than 5 people at once. It’s way too good.

As for unshakable/defiant… I’m fine with it being in the game.. but tone it down! double digits of stacks that deny you from doing any sort of strategic play? Really? Give the boss a few stacks, maybe 2-5, just to create a sort of CC cooldown after you knock him back. I also really like the idea of giving them stability as well, since stability can be cleansed.

I absolutely agree about the condition stack thing. It seems like with this new patch Anet are trying to make condition builds more viable, which I love! Yes give us variety!! I don’t want people telling me I can only be one of two builds as a Mesmer. But… the game’s inherent mechanics kitten our ability to play with conditions. I’m trying to understand why they did this. It seems counter-intuitive. The main suggestion I have to fix this is to re-consider conditions. Make some of them do more damage, but make it harder to stack maybe? They would have to balance conditions to not lose any overall damage, but maybe each person would be able to afflict fewer stacks. This way at least, condition is more viable in groups, though not ideal. I’m not sure what a long term fix would be. I don’t really like your direct damage idea though. Maybe if a lot of conditions were stacks, they ticked faster and faster scaling with the number of stacks, which would also make the stacks go away faster, which would make it viable for more condition people to keep doing it, since the increasing stacks would make it tick faster.

And finally… stealth. I honestly think a few relatively simple fixes could help this situation a lot, though I think more is needed to truly balance it. Here’re my thoughts: I don’t think stealth is inherently OP. It’s kind of the thief’s thing, you know? I think the reason that it’s so godkitten ed horrible is that it’s the single most frustrating mechanic to fight against. We spend so much time learning visual clues to protect ourselves from things like quickness bursts, and stun locks… and then with stealth.. we can’t see them. Stealth makes the person fighting it feel very helpless, and as a player, we hate that. I think to help this a bit, Anet should implement some sort of reward system consisting of two things: make stealth cause you to take more damage (not much, maybe 10-20% more) and give the attacker some sort of notification when they hit someone in stealth. Maybe if we hit someone while they’re in stealth, briefly flash the “invisible” skin that stealthy NPCs get. That way we can try to actually chase them down a bit. Maybe just show us numbers if we hit them, just like a normal attack would.

I agree that some classes should be able to reveal stealth, but I think they should have to really spec into it. For example, maybe the hawk or eagle pets could, instead of their normal special attack, use their incredible vision (these birds really do have incredible eyesight) to locate a stealthed target. Don’t give this ability to Mesmers though, we’re already too good at 1v1, and since thief is our main competitor, we don’t need this advantage over them.

What about giving a class like Engineer something like a “Pulsing Turret”.

This turret would create a pulse on a fixed interval (range 900 or 1,200), like every 5 or 6 seconds that would reveal players in stealth for like 2 seconds. If these players in turn receive damage in this “revealing period” they lose stealth.
The pulsing turret can be given additional effects like causing small AoE damage to everyone in its pulse or create a combo field of some sort.

Good stuff so far guys. I particularly like the “Pulsing Turret” suggestion. Maybe it could be an addition to the Thumper turret?
It seems much more reasonable to make certain professions have inherent hard counters rather than making a one-off expensive item purely to counter a badly balanced mechanic.

The pulsing turret is ridiculously OP. Stealth lasts for 3 seconds, 4 at the very most. You want to reveal them for 2 seconds, and they can’t do anything to block it? That’s not fair.

A revealed thief is a dead thief. Hard counters are never fun. I’d rather win by skill, not spec.

But no opinions on the other stuff Temariah? Just the stealth stuff?

I think stealth should be removed in PvP settings (including WvW), just because it has the most impact there. But then again, this is coming from someone who was only able to get world completion using a thief and lots of shadow refuge spam for skillpoints, vistas, etc. I can’t see why I’d waste time waiting for people to come help me at a skillpoint when I can just stealth and do it myself. I also don’t see myself getting world completion on another character anytime soon, for that same reason.

AoE being limited to 5 targets would be tough on a lot of people. I run a shout-healing build for WvW and sometimes go for banners, so that would render both types of builds pretty useless. Then again, warriors have plenty of other options and we aren’t exactly the best healers in the game…

I won’t play the game anymore until you change the warrior back to its former glory.
You guys should stop doing drugs. It’s not healthy.

Reisinger.4203:

AoE being limited to 5 targets would be tough on a lot of people. I run a shout-healing build for WvW and sometimes go for banners, so that would render both types of builds pretty useless. Then again, warriors have plenty of other options and we aren’t exactly the best healers in the game…

Um, that’s EXACTLY how it works at the moment, and that’s my point. With ALL area-of-effect skills currently only affecting a maximum of 5 players, it encourages stacking and zerging.
Did you not know about the 5-person limit on AoE?

Mungrul.9358:

Um, that’s EXACTLY how it works at the moment, and that’s my point. With ALL area-of-effect skills currently only affecting a maximum of 5 players, it encourages stacking and zerging.
Did you not know about the 5-person limit on AoE?

I knew of some limit, but I didn’t know it was 5. I thought you meant Anet was reducing the limit down to 5. Regardless, the AoE targeting limit (on most skills) is pretty silly.