Guild Wars 2

I’ve given a lot of thought to the following and feel that these are design features that need to be addressed to make Guild Wars 2 a long term hit.

The removal of roles, and My Story:

My Story has some very clear problems that have been outlined in many posts already, so I won’t go into detail. To sum up, My Story is not making people feel special—like their character matters in Tyria. The removal of roles further erodes a players ability to feel special, and here’s why. The up-side of having roles in MMOs is it allowes players to carve out a niche for themselves. Who didn’t like being such a good tank, healer, or damage dealer that they were called upon for exactly those skills? I gave a lot of thought to what made my character feel special to me in World of Warcraft. It wasn’t being part of the ongoing story. Although I enjoyed participating in it I knew the focus was on NPCs such as King Wrynn, Tyrion Fordring, or Thrall. It was being good at my role and being asked to join guilds and groups because of it.

With the removal of roles also comes homogenization, and with homogenization comes disparity. When you have eight professions to balance and only three “styles” of play, some will simply outshine others. This is the case we’re seeing especially with Arenanet’s “support” and “control” focused professions. I won’t go into great detail here suffice to say that some are clearly, and by a large margin, just more useful and powerful than others. There is also some discrepancy among the damage dealers, but not as much. This disparity existed in other MMOs that chose to use traditional roles, but for the most part could be overcome with skill.

Solution: Make styles matter.
Give support and control more of an effect in group play. Make that hard to apply group stealth, retaliation, might, etc last longer. Make controlling your enemies actually help the outcome of a fight—not delay the inevitable.

How self healing, the proliferation of defensive skills, and doge rolling hurts group play:

There is a large amount of self sufficiency built into GW2, but it comes at the cost of greatly diminishing the group dynamic. This is a very broad issue because it also dips into bad balancing and tuning of trash mobs and bosses in dungeons. So, we all have a heal. Great. And we all have defensive utility skills and the ability to dodge. Even better! So what’s my incentive to stand in that light field again? I’m sorry, were you channeling a group buff with a small radius? I was over here—way, way over here—spamming my dps, casting my self heal, and keeping dodge on cooldown.

Being self sufficient is awesome. I love knowing that I can get myself out of some very bad situations, but on the downside I don’t feel like I’m in a group even when I’m in a dungeon. This is due to support and control having little to no effect on completing said dungeons (unless you count the near necessity of having group stealth to bypass ridiculously overpowered trash mobs). It almost never matters that the kindly engineer is plopping down a healing turret and using his Elixir Gun. It doesn’t matter that the Guardian can stack Retaliation to a ridiculous degree when people are all over the place.

(continued)

Combos are probably one of the coolest ideas to hit an MMO in years. So why don’t we care? Because of the lack of incentive. They don’t add enough to a fight to matter. Does that fire field matter? No—using that boss fight gimmick matters more: picking up the crystal, throwing the boulder, pulling the chain, etc. Not only do combos not matter, in a game of dodge rolling you probably won’t be in position to benefit from that field anyway. Why stress about it when the benefit has no effect on the outcome.

Solution: Make combos matter.
Instead of going to the well on boss gimmicks, force players to apply poison, fire, or confusion at just the right time for massive damage or to stop the boss from healing itself or doing something horrible to your group. Make buffs last longer so there is a reason to blow 4 cooldowns on Area Might. Make Area Healing numbers bigger so people have a reason to communicate and work together.

(more to come)

(reserved for more content)

Very well said, and I share with your concerns.

How much that really matters coming from an ex-player (who is awaiting some signs of a more MMO-ish design refocusing) is debatable, however. :P

I take it none of the posters have played WvW :/. We use “tank”, “DPS” and “Heal” builds in our metas all the time. My mesmer heals myself and allies for 2700 every 3 seconds without the restriction of the AoE cap. If that’s not a healer I don’t know what is. I don’t know if you’ve heard of a bunker, but that’s basically a super tank in sPvP and WvW. And as for DPS I’m just going to assume you’ve heard of full zerker armor. I don’t know about you, but I’m sitting comfortably in a lot of different roles across my alts. Warrior is DPS/survivability, my mesmer is DPS/semi-passive healer, my guardian is a symbol bunker, my ele is D/D DPS/tank hybrid and my thief is a sword/dagger flanking strike evade bunker. All of these builds I’m quite proficient at and enjoy each and every one of them. Just because GW2 doesn’t “have a trinity” doesn’t mean you can’t put yourself into a role. It simply means that a warrior doesn’t HAVE to DPS. A guardian doesn’t HAVE to tank. An ele doesn’t HAVE to heal. The game lets you play your own niche on the class you love to play.

EDIT: as for combos, you won’t find a place where they’re more used. Than WvW or elitist dungeon teams. Buffing up, using light fields for condition removal, utilizing whirl finishers for AoE range, etc are a staple of the “elitist” community.

I’m an avid tPvP player and have a good understanding of roles in that facet of play: roaming, burst, bunker, bunker buster, etc. My problem with the style system is exactly how I outlined it. Whether or not you put yourself in that role has little to do with mechanics that diminish the power of doing so: dodge rolling and self healing doesn’t promote cooperation and makes positioning to receive or dispense buffs and heals harder, the amount of set up required for 3 seconds of retaliation or 3 stacks of might hardly seems worth it to most players, there is no such thing as chain crowd control so hard to handle packs of trash mobs are simply bypassed—the list goes on. I feel that because of the design running at cross purposes most players (not speaking for myself) would rather zerg things down (my experience with pugs in all aspects of play) than coordinate for what seem like negligible buffs that restrict play more than enhance it.

I’m glad your experience has been different, but I feel that the larger (non elite) player base isn’t being lead to how good these facets of play can be—rather they’re encouraged to play the role of lone wolf and the community becomes a homogenization of similar play—frenetic and prone to spamming abilities without thinking. The only co-op going on is reviving.

Combo fields are constantly used in WvW, Air fields and fire fields to preperate a Zerg Vs Zerg fight. In dungeons as a thief I cluster bomb everything, you can easily give people stacks of might massice heals, combo fields are awesome!

and I don’t like the defined roles, it’s fun that (most) professions can do multiple roles and try out alot of things.

Please read my entire post. I’m not advocating for a change to traditional character rolls. However, they are a ways off from the “styles” being equally valuable in group play. Right now damage is on top with support and control very far behind and not very well understood by those outside the “elite” community. This is due in large part to the lone wolf style of play that is learned in a character’s first 50 levels. You dodge roll, and you heal, and if things get really bad you use your defensive utilities. Furthermore, just die and someone will revive you. Not only that but in dungeons there are red circles everywhere causing players to run around like headless chickens to avoid AOE for fear of being one shot (which happens often when a player is new to dungeons).

Grackleflint.4956:

Make controlling your enemies actually help the outcome of a fight—not delay the inevitable.

Consider, as an example, the “wave fight” in Citadel of Flame, path 3. Many first-time groups will be wiped by that fight, because the enemy forces have strong offense as well as toughness (which undermines the usual “full berserk gear, charge in, maximize damage, healing is for sissies, rally on kills” approach to CoF).

However, almost all of the enemies in that fight are vulnerable to control effects. The key determinant for success (among the newbie groups that I’ve coached through it) has been coordination and control. If you can keep the team together then the mobs will tend to clump together. Guardians (or Mesmers) can then pull them into a disorganized heap against a nearby wall, and the team can pile on more control effects (chill, immobilize, cripple, blind, smoke, reflection, and even Knockback if it’s used carefully). Enemies will tend to remain “trapped” in a small area, unable to fight effectively, and meanwhile the team can score high damage via AoE attacks and melee-weapon cleave.

A newbie group facing the same encounter without coordinated use of control abilities will tend to get routed rapidly. Enemy fire fields and imps can produce a lot of area-denial; players get chased around by Shadowblades and can’t assist teammates; AoE attacks don’t achieve much because enemies are constantly moving; a single Eruption can takedown several players who are focused on evading an immediate threat.

I think that this example illustrates the concept. A lone Mesmer or Guardian cannot shape the battle with Pull effects – as you said, their efforts will only delay the inevitable. Control can turn a “desperate” battle into one that is merely “intense,” but you need to communicate with your teammates and get everyone to agree on a plan. I think that this is appropriate from a balance perspective. After all, everyone is expected to contribute to damage and healing, so it’s sensible that everyone would contribute to Control as well (even if their role is as simple as “lure mobs towards the scrum so that the Guardian can yank them in”).

When designing Control as a role, you have to keep in mind that death is always the best form of control.

Controller, Dominator, and Blaster archetypes in City of Heroes all take this into account. Guild Wars 2 specializations, not so much.