Guild Wars 2

So last night I was exchanging thoughts with a friend who is a GW and GW2 veteran and knows a lot of people behind the development scene. It went basically like this, the game was rushed at start, abandonned in the middle; decisions were made to dumb it down and new people lack experience and expertise to build up from the established foundation. As a result, a lot of efforts have gone to “fix” the unfinished/unpolished parts instead of making new contents.

I’m honestly becoming very skeptical.

Well what they have said in recent interviews made sense. Its very difficult to create good encounters before you know how players will use the combat system. They now know how their system works thanks to us. So they have a better idea of how to create engaging encounters which utilitise more facets of their combat system.

I have confidence the encounters will be a huge improvement from the base game. But im skeptical whether they will be truly challenging enough to satisfy those of us in elite guilds.

What I wanted to point out that the new game will not be at the same taste level as its original, since it is not the same people who have been around “created”, “tried” and “tested” as they make it sound.

There are many ways to make challenging content. The questions always are how challenging should the content be? Will anyone enjoy it?

TLDR Conclusion: No good way to make challenging content in GW2 because its either does not fit for MMO or to punishing for the average player to have fun.

A list of ways to make more challenging content and insight:

No waypoints full wipe=fail: This is very unforgiving especially if combined with other ways to make content challenging. It only hurts newbies as they are more likely to fail than veterans. Spending more time is already punishment enough according to Anet.

Dodge Tax: Dodge/move or die encounters such as Subject Alpha. Once players learn what to do it becomes muscle memory. No longer challenging.

Split Second Decisions: Attacks that require a high reaction time. If you ever attempted to solo Lupi with lag or high ping some of his attacks occur way too fast to react to without predictions. Guild wars is an MMO and not a twitch game so this mechanic is not appropriate.

Give all enemies CC: They did this in old Orr and they removed it because players complained. Something about being CC chained did not sit well with the majority of the community

Give enemies GIANT HP pool: Already happened when fractal 80 was a thing all it did was make completion take longer.

Infinite spawn mechanic: Already have it in dredge fractal and cliffside. People hate dredge fractal spawns mechanic so much they came up with every exploit possible to skip.

Create fast and hard hitting enemies with varied skills: Already exist in Molten Facility. Making enemies with more synergy and abilities as veterans would just make it a requirement to have a blind bot in the party. This would be against GW2 design philosophy.

Adding mechanics to augment game-play: We have this plenty of it. Seems to me the only way to add enjoyable challenging content to the game. The only problem with it is it gets stale.

Increase AI capability: Out of Anets budget/scope from what can be observed.

In conclusion: No good way to make challenging content in GW2 because its either does not fit for MMO or to punishing for the average player to have fun.

Vlad.1739:

TLDR Conclusion: No good way to make challenging content in GW2 because its either does not fit for MMO or to punishing for the average player to have fun.

Just because you cannot solve the puzzle doesn’t mean it cannot be solved.

Let me start by linking two videos of challenging raid bosses from other games my guild plays.

So what do we see in these that we don’t currently see in GW2 bosses?

1. Complex AOE patterns. the bosses all have aoe attacks that are rather complex and require you to avoid them or be killed. GW2 bosses have relatively simple AOE patterns. The Vinewrath bosses and some of the breach bosses are a step closer in complexity but still considered casual. Take several of those bosses and COMBINE them to have a multiplicity of patterns that require constant movement and memorization of extremely varying AOE patterns. This would be quite challenging and well within the bounds of the GW2 combat system.

2. Secondary objectives. Sure there is a boss to kill. But often in these fights some other objective has to be accomplished to enable that. Perhaps the boss summons adds at 4 different places in the arena and if they aren’t killed the boss will heal or become invulnerable. Or perhaps the adds will detonate and cause a wipe. Or maybe instead of adds there are three capture points that players must stand on and defend from adds while the rest of the team continues fighting the boss. That would certainly give a role to characters built, ahem, sustain themselves against heavy damage in a solo setting.

3. Lot’s of movement around the arena. A lot of this has to do with points 1 and 2. There are times where the raids will “stack” and unload tons of DPS as a dps check is an integral part of effective boss design. But a lot of the time the group is on the move and constantly repositioning themselves for, or in anticipation of, a mechanic.

So it’s pretty easy, on the macro level, to see how much more complex encounters could be designed. Is there anything about these encounters that WOULDN’T fit in the gw2 combat system?

Nope.

OMG TANKS?

Sorry no. It’s quite easy to solve the tanking situation. Most of the boss killing power comes from wipe mechanics and AOE. The bosses “auto attacks” per se are rather inconsequential. Even if they WERE of great consequence, this can all be done in GW2 system without aggro or a taunt. A simple debuff like the Arah Deadeye buff telling you the boss is aggroed on you and you have to dodge. Or passively tank it. The boss can aggro at complete random and you’d have to avoid the attack, or passively soak it. Imagine a boss who amid the complex aoe patterns and adds and other mechanics had an “auto attack” similar to the arah deadeye, except in lieu of a purple debuff that does a high powered single shot, you had multiple different attacks he could do. Depending on the debuff your reaction would be different. Purple debuff? that means count to 2 and dodge like deadeye. Blue debuff? That means there will be a PBAOE on you and everyone around you had to dodge in 2. Red debuff? that means you’re about to be given 10 stacks of every condition in the game. Green debuff? That means you’re going to be given an unavoidable 20 second debuff like Agony that will spread like a disease to anyone near you, so you have to isolate yourself quickly.

None of those “auto attacks” require a main tank to draw and hold aggro. They all require huge situational awareness and are perfectly reasonable difficulty for GW2 players to learn, while being quite challenging. The random nature of the aggro will mean that everyone has to be onn their toes, especially while paying attention to the AOE and other mechanics.

In short, yes it is possible. I’ve described here how it can be done quite effectively.

-Nike

for dungeon and fractal make slot machine like gambling party leader at start use slot machine and then got debuff and buff like -50-80% critical dmg but got +100%mf or -1000 thoughness / -% vitality/ disable dodge / 2x more cd on skills/ permanent degen 50-100 every 2s/ every debuff have some buff ( disable critical dmg have better buff to mf/coin that -50% critical chance or we can have 1.5 or 2x better reward like 90-100 token + golds. This can remove stacking beacause why stack if dont have critical dmg for quick kill?

@Hybrid: I watched both video’s and barely understood what was happening in each one. I read what you typed and that i could understand.

TLDR-Rebuttal: This is not a personal attack. I believe there is value in what you say and some of it may be worthwhile additions if balanced and used properly. It is not our job as players to make the game but the developers. My opinion is it doesn’t matter if a game is hard or easy but how fun it is. Designing MMO to cater to Hardcore crowd is counter to MMO business model. If you want to play something with stress inducing difficulty there are other genres of games.

There is a push and pull in GW2 between Casual and Hardcore (for lack of better word) For example highly experienced group can do lvl50 fractals in less than 40 min where as complete casual run could take 1.5 hours. Here in lies the problem the game can not be balanced in difficulty to please Hardcore crowd. Reality is no matter what encounter developers design it will get beat unless its not beatable. The best solution is to make GW2 mechanically fun. To iterate, there is no point in making an encounter only 100 of 100,000 can beat in an MMO. It is a waste of resources to make content 1% of the community will see or beat for an MMO developer.

You don’t need to rebut me. I wasn’t engaging in a debate. The thread is “how can it be done.” I explained how it could be done, simply and and clearly and offered video examples. End of story.

The topic is about “challenging content” not “content thats hard but also pug casual friendly.” That is something else. I was talking about the actual topic, challenging content. Is my idea too challenging or too easy? I dunno. They have to build it and playtest it to know. I’m fairly certain any content can be tuned to match any desired difficulty.

The key thing for you to take away from this is that you shouldn’t talk in absolutes. If you say “never” or “impossible” or “can’t” you’re setting yourself up to get proven wrong quite easily.

It’s not like challenging content exclude more casual content too. Fractal show it clearly. Level 50 is more challenging than level 1 so that everybody can play the level they prefer, even pushing slowly more casual player toward more challenging content without giving them a brick wall of difficulty that they won’t be able to go through without making the experience a pain in the kitten.