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)
(edited by Grackleflint.4956)