Guild Wars 2

I was so hyped after hearing all the dev comments at twitchcon and others. They said “the berserker meta wont make it”, “we think its not healthy for the game”, “if you are in the jungle you will be very happy to see a druid coming up!”.

After 3 weeks, full maguuma exploration, a few WvW evenings and a bunch of high fractal stuff the status of group gameplay is grim.
Dungeons and Fractal haven’t changed an inch besides lower rewards, condi over direct damage and OP alacrity (yes you know it will be nerfed, and/or its going to spread to some profs, but its not the topic).
So basically it is still just dps dps dps dps dps all over the place.

Same goes for world events and exploration. Once you know the few tricks and what to dodge there is 0 reason to run any stat that is not pure damage. I wont go over how great and immersive the new zones are and stuff, there are many good points in the expand, but the gameplay, or, the meta gameplay is still completely ridiculous.

Heals are bad, scale bad with healing power, are narrow, short ranged, at best situationnal. Defensive buffs besides projectile reflect are completely useless.

The brought two “new” pure healing lines to the game (druid and ventari) and no one ever uses them in a PvE environment.

They said raids will bring utility to the other 12376123 suffix stats set they created and no one ever used. I hardly believe it, and even if they do what about the rest of the game?

Why dont you go and play a game based on trinity? I really like the fact if you have skill you dont need passive defenses.

Zerker is still meta for PvE, maybe together with some viper condi builds now for longer fights.

Let’s see if raids change that.

Edit: Don’t nerf Chronomancer. I like that now, Chronomancer is not part of the meta, but the meta is part of the Chronomancer. Classes are now ranked with how well they perform with alacrity

Raids will change nothing.

Something something world’s smallest violin.

Man i wish people were happy to see my druid, instead they all just run around as i try to heal them.

The healing design in this game is borked. Everything from health bars to heal radius discourages playing a healer. I understand why it is the way it is but it really doesn’t work except in the most organized of groups.

Ryn.6459:

Why dont you go and play a game based on trinity? I really like the fact if you have skill you dont need passive defenses.

Why, yeah really why? I do actually play other games, its not the point.

GW2 devs created a wide variety of stats, item suffixes and trait lines. Which of about 10% is used in 90% of the game. Now if they said at some point “it is working as intended and we meant the whole PvE to be about damage and dodge” it would be fine, or at least it would be another topic.

But they don’t. They did actually communicate on the fact that Zerk meta isn’t healthy for the game, and we still… have that.

Now about the skill factor. Stacking toughness or vitality will not make you any better at PvE, with or without skill. First, most big attack will kill you anyways, second, it is much safer to assume you will kill before you get killed, which at the end of the day isn’t involving any more skill.

Skill would eventually be knowing which attack you must dodge, and which you must take knowing your fellow team members will help you survive until the next one.

I am not saying the game does not involve any skill (tho it is mostly knowledge and habit, but heck, what is skill anyways?) but the presence of skill is not at all related to the fact healing sucks and all PvE is about DPS.

1) PVE is not 90% of the game.
2) I disagree on Anet here.
3) Why then you want to stack vit or thougness if you are gonna be dead anyway?
4) Again, if you know what to dodge or block, whay do you want vit or thoug?
5) Go and fight lupi on nomads (is boring as hell but you won’t die at all) or do it on zerk; then we talk about skill. What is the matter? If you are good enough you can go glass cannon. That is how it should be in my opinion.

The problem is that people wants that support = healing. Well, sorry, but in this game support = reflects, blinds, aegis, alacrity, quickness, etc. That is how the game is designed and I love it for that.
On the other hand, pvp and WvW are 2/3 where you cna play the healer role.

By the way, if you think that “all is dps dps dps”, sorry, but you have been carried all this time.

We can tal,k and probably agree, about smarter AI, but that is another issue and has nothing to do about classical trinity or lack of it.

Ryn.6459:

1) PVE is not 90% of the game.
5) Go and fight lupi on nomads (is boring as hell but you won’t die at all) or do it on zerk; then we talk about skill. What is the matter? If you are good enough you can go glass cannon. That is how it should be in my opinion.

Why do people always exemplify this debate with the two extremes possible?

For example, as someone who has done Lupicus with full celestial: You have enough toughness, vitality and healing power to tank/sustain a limited amount of his less dangerous attacks (lupine blast, phase 2 teleport) but you will still need to use active defenses for things like phase 2 and phase 3 Frenzied Blast. There is some decision making involved.

I believe that might be the point of the person you are quoting: this game could aim to achieve a good balance of active and passive defenses, instead of either face tanking forever with Nomad or killing things so fast with Berserk to the point where players are barely exposed to the mechanics of the encounter (which is not “skilled” at all imo, just look at the Molten Duo boss fight)

If you’re not a good player, you use passive defenses to keep yourself alive, learn content and how to get through it, improve yourself, slowly swap the gear for something more offensive. This is perfectly fine and how it should be in PvE.
Trying to put defensive specs on the same level as offensive ones would be extremely dumb; Anet is aware of that. That “horrible” berserker/full offensive-meta can’t be killed without making really bad design decisions that limit your gear choice. Sure, you could argue “enrage timers force a minimum amount of dps and thus offensively laid out gear”, but this also forces a certain skill level on it. I’d argue you could kill at least some of the raidbosses without berserker/sinister/viper gear on everyone in your squad, but that will require more effort in terms of perfect rotations, buff uptime etc. while more glassy comps will be able to mess up a bit more often when it comes to those things, but have less room for error when it comes to staying alive.

The system we have now is fantastic. There is tons of customization available from swapping weapons/traits/skills, and you don’t have to carry tons of different armors.

Imagine if PVT was the meta, then what? It would all be the exact same, you’d just be wearing different armor. You would still customize yourself for the fight at hand by swapping weapons/traits/skills.

So then, what are you complaining about? Do you want different armor sets to be meta at different events? Because that just sounds like a huge pain to carry all that gear in our bags.

If you think the only thing pve uses is damage, I think you have been stuck in dungeons too long. dungeons have been ignored for a couple years, and really shouldn’t be considered in these discussions. The only thing to fill that roll are fractals and raids (soon).

Ascalonian monks? Better bring them blinds.
Mai trin? Get some condi clenses
Grawl time? Reflects (don’t forget the chill/knockback/immob for the 2nd fight)
Dredge? Stun lock em, chill too. Stealth would be smart too.
Aetherblade? You’re gonna need unblockable cc, and stability
Diviner? Drop a water field on him when he drops that hammer, make sure the party is healed up so they can actually pick it up.

It goes on.

Ryn.6459:

By the way, if you think that “all is dps dps dps”, sorry, but you have been carried all this time.

Nailed it.

innocent ouarior.1954:

Ryn.6459:

Why dont you go and play a game based on trinity? I really like the fact if you have skill you dont need passive defenses.

Why, yeah really why? I do actually play other games, its not the point.

GW2 devs created a wide variety of stats, item suffixes and trait lines. Which of about 10% is used in 90% of the game. Now if they said at some point “it is working as intended and we meant the whole PvE to be about damage and dodge” it would be fine, or at least it would be another topic.

But they don’t. They did actually communicate on the fact that Zerk meta isn’t healthy for the game, and we still… have that.

Now about the skill factor. Stacking toughness or vitality will not make you any better at PvE, with or without skill. First, most big attack will kill you anyways, second, it is much safer to assume you will kill before you get killed, which at the end of the day isn’t involving any more skill.

Skill would eventually be knowing which attack you must dodge, and which you must take knowing your fellow team members will help you survive until the next one.

I am not saying the game does not involve any skill (tho it is mostly knowledge and habit, but heck, what is skill anyways?) but the presence of skill is not at all related to the fact healing sucks and all PvE is about DPS.

Defensive stats and healing work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0anv1XswfIc. There are plenty of other vids that show how brokenly easy pve can be when you run this kind of kitten. The ‘kill before you get killed’ and ‘you get one shot anyways’ arguments are incorrect.

Being ‘skilled’ involves more than just being able to stay alive in glass gear during an encounter. Keeping your party buffed, using defensive abilities correctly and executing your dps rotation properly are all part of skillful gameplay. Right now it may be quite easy to do these things, hopefully raids wil make all of these tasks more difficult. The rewards for skill? Faster clear times and for raids beating the enrage timer.

Tatsu,
People tend to understand argumemts better if you use extrem exemples. I could have used celestial. you realize that if you invert more time in lupi you will be able to do it on zerks? And that is what makes the system good, the better you are the more glass you can go. So you can improve and have new challanges.

innocent ouarior.1954:

but the presence of skill is not at all related to the fact healing sucks and all PvE is about DPS.

This sentence remove all credibility you could have.

1) Healing is OP, just not needed. You can create an immortal party that heal itself more than anything the game can throw at you so far. You can think it’s just semantic, but it’s really important. Buffing Healing Power or Healing skill WON’T change a thing since healing will still be not needed. It could if content was too hard for our active defense, but dungeon don’t move and fractal is actually less demanding on our active defense than it used to be.

2) Really just DPS? Yes DPS is the main factor, but it’s not the only one. Otherwise we would see only Engineer or Elementalist in parties. You need banners, fury, might, reflection, blind, aegis, condition removal, etc. If they could give us hard enough content, protection, vigor, weakness. Their break bar system isn’t good in all situation, but CC is also important now for a lot of fight. What you want to say is that PvE is all about glassy GEAR. Because gear only bring you three thing. Healing, Passive Defense and DPS. Two of those thing are not needed. But a lot of thing that are needed and are not in the gear? Support, CC, Active Defense.

At the initial release of the HoT jungle was hard but now it is really watered down and now it is typical pre HoT.

You know what to dodge nothing will happen you, the problem with GW2 there is either one shot damage or not damage.

A healer can not to anything for one shot damage and it can’t do anything for no damage.

A healer can only do something, if there is continuous source of small damage or more frequent attacks with smaller damages, which we don’t have at the moment, until we have it, there is no need for a healer.

People hate so much tanks/healers in this game that ministrel amulet removed from the game in one week. It is better have 1000s of hybrid that can self heal and do damage then having this 2 stereotypes.

I am waiting for 3 years these 2 stereotypes to have an existence reason in this game other wise lets delete the skills and gears for those, there is no reason to confuse new players…..

posthumecaver.6473:

At the initial release of the HoT jungle was hard but now it is really watered down and now it is typical pre HoT.

You know what to dodge nothing will happen you, the problem with GW2 there is either one shot damage or not damage.

A healer can not to anything for one shot damage and it can’t do anything for no damage.

A healer can only do something, if there is continuous source of small damage or more frequent attacks with smaller damages, which we don’t have at the moment, until we have it, there is no need for a healer.

People hate so much tanks/healers in this game that ministrel amulet removed from the game in one week. It is better have 1000s of hybrid that can self heal and do damage then having this 2 stereotypes.

I am waiting for 3 years these 2 stereotypes to have an existence reason in this game other wise lets delete the skills and gears for those, there is no reason to confuse new players…..

This game has no classic trinity and will never have, if you’re looking for that go play something else.

Ryn.6459:

1) PVE is not 90% of the game.
2) I disagree on Anet here.
3) Why then you want to stack vit or thougness if you are gonna be dead anyway?
4) Again, if you know what to dodge or block, whay do you want vit or thoug?
5) Go and fight lupi on nomads (is boring as hell but you won’t die at all) or do it on zerk; then we talk about skill. What is the matter? If you are good enough you can go glass cannon. That is how it should be in my opinion.

The problem is that people wants that support = healing. Well, sorry, but in this game support = reflects, blinds, aegis, alacrity, quickness, etc. That is how the game is designed and I love it for that.
On the other hand, pvp and WvW are 2/3 where you cna play the healer role.

By the way, if you think that “all is dps dps dps”, sorry, but you have been carried all this time.

We can tal,k and probably agree, about smarter AI, but that is another issue and has nothing to do about classical trinity or lack of it.

the only skill you need in lupicus fight is ressing people fast enough when they fall. it is just putting lupicus on the wall and stack until it dies. there is no skill in this, just press 1 to 5, f for revive, end

Amadan.9451:

Ryn.6459:

1) PVE is not 90% of the game.
2) I disagree on Anet here.
3) Why then you want to stack vit or thougness if you are gonna be dead anyway?
4) Again, if you know what to dodge or block, whay do you want vit or thoug?
5) Go and fight lupi on nomads (is boring as hell but you won’t die at all) or do it on zerk; then we talk about skill. What is the matter? If you are good enough you can go glass cannon. That is how it should be in my opinion.

The problem is that people wants that support = healing. Well, sorry, but in this game support = reflects, blinds, aegis, alacrity, quickness, etc. That is how the game is designed and I love it for that.
On the other hand, pvp and WvW are 2/3 where you cna play the healer role.

By the way, if you think that “all is dps dps dps”, sorry, but you have been carried all this time.

We can tal,k and probably agree, about smarter AI, but that is another issue and has nothing to do about classical trinity or lack of it.

the only skill you need in lupicus fight is ressing people fast enough when they fall. it is just putting lupicus on the wall and stack until it dies. there is no skill in this, just press 1 to 5, f for revive, end

ok please go do that and record it, no dodging, no utilities/heal, kill him like this and then come back thank you very much.

NovaanVerdiano.6174:

Amadan.9451:

Ryn.6459:

1) PVE is not 90% of the game.
2) I disagree on Anet here.
3) Why then you want to stack vit or thougness if you are gonna be dead anyway?
4) Again, if you know what to dodge or block, whay do you want vit or thoug?
5) Go and fight lupi on nomads (is boring as hell but you won’t die at all) or do it on zerk; then we talk about skill. What is the matter? If you are good enough you can go glass cannon. That is how it should be in my opinion.

The problem is that people wants that support = healing. Well, sorry, but in this game support = reflects, blinds, aegis, alacrity, quickness, etc. That is how the game is designed and I love it for that.
On the other hand, pvp and WvW are 2/3 where you cna play the healer role.

By the way, if you think that “all is dps dps dps”, sorry, but you have been carried all this time.

We can tal,k and probably agree, about smarter AI, but that is another issue and has nothing to do about classical trinity or lack of it.

the only skill you need in lupicus fight is ressing people fast enough when they fall. it is just putting lupicus on the wall and stack until it dies. there is no skill in this, just press 1 to 5, f for revive, end

ok please go do that and record it, no dodging, no utilities/heal, kill him like this and then come back thank you very much.

i did it like this, we stacked on lupicus on the wall, the elementalists were dying like there is no tomorrow, me (mesmer) and the guardian ressing them. lupicus dead in about 20 seconds, i didn’t even realize the phase changing.
yes, well i self healed my self once.
i was so surprised lupicus could be fought like that i was disappointed that i spent so much time in the past fighting lupicus from range payng attention to all tells

edit: if you manage to use well a wall of reflect people will never dies

here (this is not me, but this is how “skilled” you need to be for lupicus)

or you can lure lupicus on the wall with one guardian using no skill just taking aggro while all the party is out of range. when aggro taken and lupicus follows you on the wall all party stack and smash random button from 1 to 5.
if you really need dodge once from phase 1 to 2 (if ever this happen). collect reward

omg

15 dead lupis

Amadan.9451:

NovaanVerdiano.6174:

Amadan.9451:

Ryn.6459:

1) PVE is not 90% of the game.
2) I disagree on Anet here.
3) Why then you want to stack vit or thougness if you are gonna be dead anyway?
4) Again, if you know what to dodge or block, whay do you want vit or thoug?
5) Go and fight lupi on nomads (is boring as hell but you won’t die at all) or do it on zerk; then we talk about skill. What is the matter? If you are good enough you can go glass cannon. That is how it should be in my opinion.

The problem is that people wants that support = healing. Well, sorry, but in this game support = reflects, blinds, aegis, alacrity, quickness, etc. That is how the game is designed and I love it for that.
On the other hand, pvp and WvW are 2/3 where you cna play the healer role.

By the way, if you think that “all is dps dps dps”, sorry, but you have been carried all this time.

We can tal,k and probably agree, about smarter AI, but that is another issue and has nothing to do about classical trinity or lack of it.

the only skill you need in lupicus fight is ressing people fast enough when they fall. it is just putting lupicus on the wall and stack until it dies. there is no skill in this, just press 1 to 5, f for revive, end

ok please go do that and record it, no dodging, no utilities/heal, kill him like this and then come back thank you very much.

i did it like this, we stacked on lupicus on the wall, the elementalists were dying like there is no tomorrow, me (mesmer) and the guardian ressing them. lupicus dead in about 20 seconds, i didn’t even realize the phase changing.
yes, well i self healed my self once.
i was so surprised lupicus could be fought like that i was disappointed that i spent so much time in the past fighting lupicus from range payng attention to all tells

edit: if you manage to use well a wall of reflect people will never dies

Pfft, I hope you’re aware the guardian threw up a wall of reflection and oneshotted Lupicus with that, which is a kittening sad way to kill him. Besides, the real fun starts in phase 2.

As for that DnT-Kill, yeah sure it’s possible thanks to insane DPS/low HP on Lupi, but do you really think pugs do that? They even fail the Oneshot-Tactic I mentioned on a regular basis…

I’m also pretty sure you wouldn’t be able to solo him without reflect-cheesing despite claiming that he’s so easy.

Amadan.9451:

here (this is not me, but this is how “skilled” you need to be for lupicus)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDM1gMJ06cY

2 Important things here

1) The guardian use the one shot wall mechanic. Of course it’s not really hard, the mechanic is broken. Not an exploit, but something that Anet missed and now don’t care to fix. Of course any content with a back door like that doesn’t require skill.

2) Lupi was designed to be fought by 5 people in full exotic. The power creep was HUGE in gw2 since day one. Ascended gear, is already a big power creep, but not the only one. Take Guardian for exemple. It used to do around 11.5k dps full buffed. Then the specialisation update came and buffed that to 15k. Then we got the Dragonhunter which give us a dps of around 16-17k. We kill that content so fast now that we just bypass all the mechanic that need skill.

The PvE will always be a predictable environment after players figure things out. So it never creates a hostile enough environment to force players to go tankier.

In WvW and PvP, you see much more prominent usage of defensive stats. e.g. in PvP, the meta has always been marauder amulet instead of zerker even for the burst damage spec.

NovaanVerdiano.6174:

posthumecaver.6473:

At the initial release of the HoT jungle was hard but now it is really watered down and now it is typical pre HoT.

You know what to dodge nothing will happen you, the problem with GW2 there is either one shot damage or not damage.

A healer can not to anything for one shot damage and it can’t do anything for no damage.

A healer can only do something, if there is continuous source of small damage or more frequent attacks with smaller damages, which we don’t have at the moment, until we have it, there is no need for a healer.

People hate so much tanks/healers in this game that ministrel amulet removed from the game in one week. It is better have 1000s of hybrid that can self heal and do damage then having this 2 stereotypes.

I am waiting for 3 years these 2 stereotypes to have an existence reason in this game other wise lets delete the skills and gears for those, there is no reason to confuse new players…..

This game has no classic trinity and will never have, if you’re looking for that go play something else.

I don’t care what you think, I only care what ANet thinks.

They have to explain me the dilemma, if they don’t want healers/tanks in this game, why did invest so much time to develop those skills and gear because with your logic there is no reason for those to exist ‘There is no trinity lets delete those skills and gear’.

If ANet is ready to loose that paying population lets say %10, sure I can go and play another game.

Again, pvp and wvw also exists.

But more importantly, people has been playing the same content for over 3 years. People wants (and can) to go glass cannon so the runs are faster and rewards cme faster.

I don’t want to run with people like you becasue USUALLY is people that doesn’t want to improve their skill or are selfish enough to sneak into meta LFG.

Just make your own LFG and let people plays how they want. And I am very sorry if most of us wants to play with a meta that you don’t like. But, again we make our LFG requirments, just do your own LFG.

You can PHIW but we cannot?

This has nothing do with skill, this has completely related how the developers design the game.

If you get constant damage you can’t deal that with your description of skill (which is nothing more knowing the animation and dodge which comes from repetition and that is being a robot doing the same content for 1000 times, interesting that some people can define this playing game and having fun, it looks like more job description to me).

Doing the same run with the berserker gear with same strats over and over is so brain dead that I can’t describe.

I don’t die to play a healer or tank, it is just when I am doing that content over and over, I just like to experience something different.

And this not having holy trinity in GW2, is nothing but a marketing move to bypass the problems the others MMO having by waiting as a DPS for Tank/Healers to do a content.

At the end, what we have an one sided game people just clicking 3 buttons to explode something, then get bored and leave the game.

Omg 2015, almost 2016, still the trinity talk? Oo

RSLongK.8961:

Omg 2015, almost 2016, still the trinity talk? Oo

But someone stated a new fact, its a “pure marketing decission”.
Let’s open the discussion again with this fresh thought on our minds.

posthumecaver.6473:

I don’t care what you think, I only care what ANet thinks.

I believe this is a quote from Isaiah Cartwright from a few years back. “Our professions aren’t dedicated healers, DPS, or tanks because frankly, we built a combat system that just doesn’t allow it.”

posthumecaver.6473:

why did invest so much time to develop those skills and gear because with your logic there is no reason for those to exist

Go play a build with a lot of group based healing power in a WvW zerg, or a bunker build in sPvP and you’ll find yourself being quite useful if you know how to play it. The nice thing is that if you do play one of these, you can still do decent damage with them and you aren’t just a heal/bunker bot.

posthumecaver.6473:

If ANet is ready to loose that paying population lets say %10, sure I can go and play another game.

So because they don’t change one of their initial main ideas of the game for you, they don’t care about a “paying population”? Sounds like a serious case of unwarranted self importance.

Every MMO ever made systematically destroys rangers classes from day one, but forcing rangers to suddenly morph into raiding clerics is the cruellest and most short-sighted punishment I’ve ever encountered in any game toward any class. It’s borderline psychotic. Best of luck with that.

Loxias.2375:

Every MMO ever made systematically destroys rangers classes from day one, but forcing rangers to suddenly morph into raiding clerics is the cruellest and most short-sighted punishment I’ve ever encountered in any game toward any class. It’s borderline psychotic. Best of luck with that.

You aren’t forced to play druid and rangers are viable DPS options. Pets recently got a buff. More specializations are coming and will surely bring more tools for other raid requirements (e.g., control/DPS). The current specialization was clearly meant to fill the gaps in ranger’s healing support options. Spirits were okay, but they have many issues. Rangers had no support weapon option (outside of one warhorn skill) before the druid specialization.

Yep, so far on the Raid, all we could think about was, not enough DPS. No matter the issue, since it is timed, you need DPS. Without a timer we would have overcome the boss eventually. We would have been overjoyed just to beat the boss. But since we couldn’t produce enough DPS we only got to the first phase of the boss splitting up. In about 2 hours of trying to get past him we reached that stage twice. Yes, I like hard content, but if the goal was to break the zerker meta, they failed. The timer necessitates high DPS. ala zerker.

The one to Rule.2593:

Raids will change nothing.

I disagree, ArenaNet just loves to put massively high toughness on everything. Groseval is a perfect example of trying to create the condi meta.

While the other classes had support(thief loaned lots of poison and such) and heavy combat output, the ranger was mainly combat output. ANeT gave the other classes MORE combat output and gave the ranger, less – Druid. Heck, they should have given the ranger the Sniper ability of the mordrem snipers.