Guild Wars 2

… and ways to remedy issues of cheapness within GW2’s combat (curse you, character limits).

One of the biggest issues that detriments GW2’s combat experience is with the game’s poor attack projection. It’s the frustration that occurs when players are instantly knocked back, immobilized or stunned by attacks they can barely see or hit by attacks that looks much smaller than their animations. When poorly projected attacks occur, players are not challenged to use their reflexes and attentiveness to avoid danger, but rather they’re frustrated because the game doesn’t give them the means. These kinds of attacks encourage a playstyle where players must often use their skills after being hit and this disallows them the benefit of clever and pre-emptive use of their abilities. The result of this design is an unpolished combat system that is often frustrating and unengaging to the player.

So, ANet, I come to you today with a list of issues regarding the combat system and suggestions on how you could fix these issues. These suggestions are focused on the PvE side of the game, but I’m sure the principle behind them can be applied to PvP as well.

1) For melee attacks, increase enemy weapon/character model to match the AoE hitboxes of their attacks.
In action oriented games it is a common convention that the hitboxes of attacks should rarely ever extend past their animation, and this convention is in place for good reason. If not for the actual visible attack itself what else is the player supposed to use in order to help them position their characters? This combat system was touted as one that required players to move around after all. There’s little point in moving around if the enemy’s attacks cheat their hitboxes and players will get hit anyway.

2) Ranged projectiles should never seek/lock-on to the player. Ever.
This is an incredibly cheap way of increasing the game’s difficulty. One that doesn’t increase the challenge, but does increase the level of frustration. Remove the lock-on capabilities of these attacks and make them fire less frequently, giving players a change to dodge them. To compensate make the animation, model and hitboxes of ranges attacks larger, and increase their damage to offset the fact that players will be able dodge many of them by strafing. If there must ever be a ranged lock-on attack, make the projectile slow to give players a change to dodge it using their precious dodge bar.

3) Make CC abilities more noticeable

One of the worst things that can be done to a player in an action game is for the game to take away control of their character. There’s nothing challenging about enemy abilities that make the player into an observer, especially when the attacks that do so are difficult to see. The main offenders here are the Krait, but there are many others spread throughout the game.

My suggestion in this area is to increase the windup of such abilities and give them more noticeable animations. For instance, the Risen Acolyte’s immobilize attack should use the Grasping Dead (necromancer scepter #2 ability) animation and give players about 1/2-1 second to move out of the AoE.

4) AoE’s should themselves be projected, and not red circles the rely on

This is a no brainer. Red circles are a workaround to animation and camera. In some cases, like with trebuchet shots in Malchor’s leap, there’s no way around them The thing about them in GW2 is every AoE relies on this lowest common denominator of attack. The game should give the player the tools to make decisions themselves and not do it for them, and red circles do this blatantly. It tells the player not to go somewhere rather than to let them figure it out on their own through their own attentiveness. This takes a way an important level of engagement in combat.

My solution is to take away red circles when the oportunity permits, and redesign attacks that previously relied on them. A simple way of fixing this is to turn many of these AoEs into projectiles that turn into AoEs when they land on the ground. If a projectile is out of the question an animation to warn players, giving them enough time to dodge before they go off would suffice.

An example of this done right is the mine field attack used the mining suit in the dredge fractals. The mines are clearly thrown at the player and when they hit the ground the coloration lets them stand out on the snow covered floor, sufficiently projecting areas that the playe should avoid. The red circle isn’t really needed for this attack but it does help if the player for whatever reason wants to stand right at the edge of the AoE.

5) Make enemies work together to achieve similar levels of difficulty

By removing much of the cheapness of enemy attacks, the game’s difficulty will no doubt decrease as a result. In order to boost difficulty back to a substantial level, I suggest giving enemies abilities that synergize with one another, increasing the chance of them hitting the player and also increase the challenge these enemies post. For instance AoE heavy enemies will sometimes be accompanied by melee pets that will relentlessly chase the player and inflict cripple, freeze, or immobilize. Players who fight this ensemble of enemies will be challenged to either kite the melee pet and kill the enemy firing the AoE, or they could kill the melee pet first. Different professions will be forced to handle the situation in different ways in accordance to their strengths and weaknesses, and this will greatly increase the replay value of the game through alts.

Guild Wars 2’s combat system is already a massive leap ahead of other MMOs I have played, but this is still a very well thought-out suggestion and would help to make it even better – you have my support.

Also to a certain extent ranged projectiles do need to ‘lock on’ as otherwise they would probably never hit, unless ArenaNet can code in predictive trajectories for moving targets which would be awesome, but they certainly need to be made more visible so players can actually dodge them let alone see them coming.

Drakonhammer.2148:

Guild Wars 2’s combat system is already a massive leap ahead of other MMOs I have played, but this is still a very well thought-out suggestion and would help to make it even better – you have my support.

Also to a certain extent ranged projectiles do need to ‘lock on’ as otherwise they would probably never hit, unless ArenaNet can code in predictive trajectories for moving targets which would be awesome, but they certainly need to be made more visible so players can actually dodge them let alone see them coming.

Some projectiles, such as the ice worm boulder attack, do use predictive coding, so I don’t think it’s impossible for ANet to the same for normal projectiles. Even if it that’s not a feasible thing to do ANet could balance it by increasing the number of ranged enemies and also increase the number of directions the player could be shot from. At the very least making ranged attacks more visible would alone be a great improvement.