Guild Wars 2

TLDR: I can’t tell if what I am doing helps, how can this become more apparent to the players?

I have done a couple of dungeons and felt the muddy chaos that many players have expressed on these forums and in game. I understand the idea of breaking the holy trinity of tank/healer/dps and making all players responsible for the encounters and group dynamics.

I personally have not had a drastic failure in dungeons that I see some people express concern over where they have died 10-30 times just to get through a dungeon. At most maybe 1 or 2 times throughout the duration of the whole dungeon I had a complete death and had to run back as a group or individual, but I don’t count the downed state a death where others might.

What I think the problem is with groups is that players do not have any real tactile sort of feedback that what they are doing is taking any positive or negative effect on the group’s effectiveness.

If I am dishing out protections or regeneration on my group I know it is helping in some ways and anything is better than nothing, but is it worth it? I don’t want to develop a holy trinity and I am all for the idea but how do we give players the feedback they need to continue to perform a good thing or stop doing a non effective thing?

I have seen many times that all players need to be a healer/buffer, control/damage mitigator, and dps all at once (i.e. healer tank and dps) and many times the typical idea is L2P and or learn the fight mechanics. I understand and learn boss mechanics and learn to anticipate or read a big attack that needs to be avoided or blocked or when condition damage or CCs need to be wiped so that I or my fellow group members can live, but it does seem like beyond those big obvious mechanics the normal pace of combat auto attack damage is also so powerful that my regen or protection can not keep my group or myself standing and fighting effectively enough.

If we were to have more “clutch” save moves and tone down the regular attacks while keeping the “if you are not paying attention you die” attacks then that would allow combat to slow down and let players make more effective decisions. Normally in single target fights I feel this criteria is met, but in group fights you can only choose to avoid or block one or two attacks. Unfortunately there are three or four other enemies also ready to do attacks that you need to dodge/block/or CC so you don’t die.

Maybe the frequency of those attacks need to be regulated or a debuff and/or a buff when you avoided one of those attacks so as to allow you to not be hit by sequential spammed one shot type attacks or CCs on your group. Sometimes it feels like kitten if you do and kitten if you don’t.

I will keep doing dungeons and hope to find more sense of it all and maybe learn the secret way that we were meant to play and become more effective at the game.

- Help allies by reducing incoming damage. You can judge how much you’re helping by looking at how much damage you’re mitigating.
- Blinds, blocks and reflect are very powerful. Protection and weakness are good.
- Cure conditions when necessary. Situations where curing conditions is good should be obvious. Try to have one aoe condition removal most of the time.
- Good groups need less help because they use the dodge button and use skills smartly.
- If the group is surviving easily then do more damage.
- If the group isn’t surviving with you helping them, get a better group.
- Someone going max dps isn’t helping unless the group is very good (it probably isn’t because of the person going max dps)

You say autoattacks happen too fast. I disagree. You obviously can’t keep track of every autoattack but that’s why so many player skills are aoe. AOE blind, aoe protection, reflect, etc. One skill can mitigate the next attack of 3 enemies. Your party has 5 members. If they’re all using one or two skills that mitigate damage then the party takes nearly no damage. And when players don’t take much damage it lets them dps easier, which leads to easy and fast runs.

It just sounds like your party doesn’t dodge and doesn’t use skills that are very powerful (blind).

But you mistake what I say, I am having success. I am not wiping and we are not constantly dying left and right. A few here and there sure but not where it feels like hitting our heads on the wall.

But you do not get a gratifying sense of what you did had significant impact.

In essence I feel like they have tried to shy away from the traditional roles so much that it is so diluted it feels weak and mushy.

For an action RPG when I push a button I believe we should feel/see the effect. Right now we do these damage mitigation and control abilities because we know it is there to help and it must help someway, but you can’t tell definitively if it made a difference.

Or maybe I need suckier groups so I can see just how well what I am doing IS helping? :p

I find that using a blind and completely nullifying the next attack of 3 enemies is pretty satisfying. Using the guardian reflect wall is just gamebreaking.

You have to remember that you’re only 1 out of 5 people, so your effect on enemies should only be 1/5th of what’s affecting them. In that sense, blinding 3 enemies is very powerful (if all 5 players use blind the enemies basically do no damage). Enemies doing no damage is a pretty noticeable effect in my opinion.

If you’re thinking about regen, then yeah it isn’t very satisfying because regen just isn’t that good. Protection is noticeable in some situations. For example in HotW butcher, when fighting the ice troll champion next to the door, he will usually focus 1 guy. If the person being focused has protection then his chances of surviving increase dramatically.

Edit: If doing thing X is making a small difference, then it isn’t satisfying because it’s only making a small difference. Things that make a big difference are satisfying because they make a big difference. If you don’t know how much you’re helping then analyze what’s happening, think about it.

I play an ele, guardian and necro, and I can’t always tell how effective I am, but giving a glance to my party window, I can usually plan my next few moves pretty well (condi removal, healing well/field, blind spam to get a rez on someone, etc.).

If everyone is at full health, not suffering from many conditions, and nothing particularly huge is happening, your best bet is laying on the deepz (or buffing group dps via might stacking with fire fields or whatever you have).

I guess you are just very satisfied with what was provided but I had a different idea or view on how the game would play. I know I’m not completely alone with the general mood and discussions on these boards and in the game but I also see many player like yourself that have found that comfort zone and really do feel at home with the current mechanics.

I really feel that an adjustment would make both parties appreciate dungeons and combat in general more.

In the spur of ideas I posted additional thoughts on this topic on the suggestion forum. If interested.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/suggestions/Combat-without-tanks-and-healers/first#post453905

I don’t think I have the only and best idea but I was hoping to throw more perspective from another point of view and maybe adjustments by the developers would come up due to these talking points.

It’s less about measuring a particular effect in isolation and more about “what did this skill do when you used it at this particular time ”. Regeneration is meh for single large hits, but aegis is amazing (so is timing blast finishers on water fields or any direct group heal). Protection is meh against lots of little hits (retal is arguably better, but regen and blindness are probably best), but amazing for heavy aoe bursts that would otherwise leave several people down (or even ground aoe). Blind is not all that great against regular white swings on single mobs, but great against groups of bursty mobs or if you have to pick someone up (necro plague form is great this way). The list goes on.

I see what you mean about not having a tangible measure for some effects, but sometimes it takes a while to figure out what is really the best set of skills to use at a particular time (and it may change from scenario to scenario) which is part of the fun in this game.

What I would agree with is improving the ‘tells’ for certain abilities, because in lieu of all the particle effects (and large char/norn melees, no offense) it’s often hard to time your skills right when you can’t see what’s coming. Another possibly useful addition would be having friendly health bars and ‘aggro’ indicators.

Honestly, until we finally get the combat log we were promised, we can only guess at our performance. There’s just too much going on for a human to comprehend in real time.

Until then, we can dream of combat logs and parsers, and stare at this page.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Combat_Log

Dont we have a combat log? we have one on the chat box, altho its not got any features its a basic one