Guild Wars 2

Making enemies constantly pulse damage in order to force groups to bring more dedicated healing is not an interesting, fun, or challenging mechanic. It’s a cheap way of forcing certain builds and squad compositions in order to appease players who dislike the current metagame.

You can do better, ANet.

Uhhh, you’re fine just by taking a couple of reapers and having your eles blast water fields every once in a while…
… or just take a zerk druid, it’s not the end of the world as we know it?

Giving enemies single, rare and dodgeable skills to allow more damage is not an interesting, fun, or chllenging mechanic. It’s a cheap way of forcing certain build and squad compositions in order to make 99% of all other builds useless and be nothing but a waste of time.

You can do better, ANet.

sicsempertyrannis.3510:

Neox.3497:

Giving enemies single, rare and dodgeable skills to allow more damage is not an interesting, fun, or chllenging mechanic. It’s a cheap way of forcing certain build and squad compositions in order to make 99% of all other builds useless and be nothing but a waste of time.

You can do better, ANet.

In other words, “I don’t have a counter-argument, so I’m going to mock you instead.” Stay classy.

Adding more frequent attacks is the only solution for the system used in GW2 and a raid wide damage skill fulfills that. As long as not every raid boss has this same mechanic that’s totally fine.

I’m liking the thought of the change in meta. If there was a better way of controlling aggro then it might flow a little better, but a need for one or two dedicated healers is a good change in my opinion.

Giroro.4879:

I’m liking the thought of the change in meta. If there was a better way of controlling aggro then it might flow a little better, but a need for one or two dedicated healers is a good change in my opinion.

The issue isn’t the need for healers per se, it’s how they force that need. The combat system wasn’t designed with dedicated healers in mind, but I hope they get a bit more creative than constant raid-wide damage.

That’s basically the only reason healers are needed in any game: Constant unavoidable damage, sometimes it just comes in different forms. While the first boss / trash is supposed to be the easiest, there are also mechanics that aren’t unavoidable, such as standing in the lightning so that the entire raid doesn’t take a spike of damage. Sometimes the seekers hit you while you are doing that, so healing is necessary or else your entire raid takes damage which cannot be self healed if it happens before cds are up. Would you rather have him target random players and deal unavoidable damage to them? This is a mechanic in other MMOs. There are no (or very few) single target heals in GW2, thus the need for AoE damage.

Obviously tuning still needs to take place, but I think it’s definitely a good start for creating build diversity.

For example, the red guardian can only take condi damage. At phase 2, the real boss splits into the 3 guardians, thus you have to have your condi focused dps focus on red, unless they have the red debuff (in which case they can’t do any damage to red). It’s a simple mechanic, but it adds another thing to the fight that you have to learn and deal with.

Also, people have to remember, you’re supposed to be able to defeat the first few bosses / first wing without full ascended gear. All beta characters have full ascended gear.

Why bring dedicated healing when you have 10 players who can provide small amounts of support to one another?

What they have to find is a balance where there isn’t so much unavoidable damage where you need a bunch of dedicated healers; but not too little where you can go into the instance dressed up like glass and survive just from your heal skills.

I think the ideal situation is where a comp of 3 clerics and 7 berserkers could be comparable to say 2 clerics and 8 zerker/knights/sentinel or 1 clearics 5 sentinels and 4 knights. See what I mean?

Nothing wrong with unavoidable damage if it means being more conscious about what role everyone is filling. Even then, everyone can just build themselves just a little bit more towards survivability and get by with minimal support roles. The unavoidable damage doesn’t make healing mandatory, but some form of group healing is very useful; even if the character isn’t built to heal.

Adding onto Malt’s point, I think it’s better that the raids force importance on group-wide combination effects – AND PERHAPS A WAY TO EXTEND THE COMBO FIELD SYSTEM HINT HINT.

Really, though – the best balance IMO is when you can pick whether to go offensively built with minor buffs that you can apply to the group to mitigate damage, OR balance with dedicated healers.

Couple thoughts:

- An NPC that you need to support/heal that provides a certain buff to your raid or debuff to the encounter boss to make the fight successful.

- The bomb mechanic from the first boss (where you have to damage split by standing in it, or everyone takes a nuke lol) is a solid way, it can also be blocked too so that’s a really nice mechanic.

- Retaliation on a mob that also negates (or more menacingly, reflects condition damage) during a few phases in the fight is another method, that can be controlled by players simply waiting for self-healing, but Enrage Timers do exist in raids and they might have to keep doing damage to make it.

It’s kind of hard creating mechanics for healing, we should make a thread dedicated to ideas around it. Maybe even put ideas on mechanics on Crowd Control and Damage Soak.

Sykper.6583:

Couple thoughts:

- An NPC that you need to support/heal that provides a certain buff to your raid or debuff to the encounter boss to make the fight successful. No. Placing the fate of your group in the hands of an NPC which you have no direct control over is a stupid idea. (See, AC path 3)

- The bomb mechanic from the first boss (where you have to damage split by standing in it, or everyone takes a nuke lol) is a solid way, it can also be blocked too so that’s a really nice mechanic.

- Retaliation on a mob that also negates (or more menacingly, reflects condition damage) during a few phases in the fight is another method, that can be controlled by players simply waiting for self-healing, but Enrage Timers do exist in raids and they might have to keep doing damage to make it.

It’s kind of hard creating mechanics for healing, we should make a thread dedicated to ideas around it. Maybe even put ideas on mechanics on Crowd Control and Damage Soak.

I’ve always hated traditional MMO raid mechanics, and I’m sad to see them weaseling their way into GW2. There has to be a way to create truly challenging PvE content without including things like enrage timers and unavoidable damage.

Quarktastic.1027:

Sykper.6583:

Couple thoughts:

- An NPC that you need to support/heal that provides a certain buff to your raid or debuff to the encounter boss to make the fight successful. No. Placing the fate of your group in the hands of an NPC which you have no direct control over is a stupid idea. (See, AC path 3)

- The bomb mechanic from the first boss (where you have to damage split by standing in it, or everyone takes a nuke lol) is a solid way, it can also be blocked too so that’s a really nice mechanic.

- Retaliation on a mob that also negates (or more menacingly, reflects condition damage) during a few phases in the fight is another method, that can be controlled by players simply waiting for self-healing, but Enrage Timers do exist in raids and they might have to keep doing damage to make it.

It’s kind of hard creating mechanics for healing, we should make a thread dedicated to ideas around it. Maybe even put ideas on mechanics on Crowd Control and Damage Soak.

I’ve always hated traditional MMO raid mechanics, and I’m sad to see them weaseling their way into GW2. There has to be a way to create truly challenging PvE content without including things like enrage timers and unavoidable damage.

There are plenty of ways to do that, like with a soft enrage or damage requirements for phase shifting. The only problem is that they probably would make the content even more exclusive (see: harder) and have even stricter build requirements.

Sorry but your little unicorn doesn’t exist so long as ArenaNet panders to their typical demographic.

This has probably been mentioned a thousand times, but I too find the druid extremely useless and not having any place in PvE whatsoever. A well timed block from a guardian does way way more than all the healing in the world from all the druids. If you want to support your group defensively, that’s great, but you’ll still do much more with blinds, soft CC and blocks. In the rare cases you need healing because of unavoidable damage, as mentioned above, water fields should suffice perfectly.
Anet can try as hard as they can to artificially shift the PvE meta, but unless they completely remake the game from scratch, the principles are already so deeply rooted in the game, that I don’t see it changing in any way.

Tarasicodissa.7084:

This has probably been mentioned a thousand times, but I too find the druid extremely useless and not having any place in PvE whatsoever. A well timed block from a guardian does way way more than all the healing in the world from all the druids. If you want to support your group defensively, that’s great, but you’ll still do much more with blinds, soft CC and blocks. In the rare cases you need healing because of unavoidable damage, as mentioned above, water fields should suffice perfectly.
Anet can try as hard as they can to artificially shift the PvE meta, but unless they completely remake the game from scratch, the principles are already so deeply rooted in the game, that I don’t see it changing in any way.

Blinds I believe only affect the Breakbar on certain champion mobs not bosses, I could be wrong and maybe the mob will miss its next strike. There are already mechanics being made unblockable (though they do have mechanics that can be blocked or HP soaked, so optimally ‘Metazerk’ groups will just coordinate 2 people to save their blocks), and soft CC doesn’t apply the conditions ‘effect’ on Breakbar mobs however a crippled mob will still give raiders benefits from having traits catered towards Cripple if that makes sense.

I am almost certain there will be certain encounters requiring the persistent external healing that protection, blinds, blocks, weakness won’t work on, but we will see. There’s a lot of unknown involved with raiding, but given the smallest taste from the raiding done thus far, they are definitely thinking about how to spread out the builds to cover everything from making Direct Damage alone not viable to freaking Boon Stripping.

Quarktastic.1027:

Sykper.6583:

Couple thoughts:

- An NPC that you need to support/heal that provides a certain buff to your raid or debuff to the encounter boss to make the fight successful. No. Placing the fate of your group in the hands of an NPC which you have no direct control over is a stupid idea. (See, AC path 3)

- The bomb mechanic from the first boss (where you have to damage split by standing in it, or everyone takes a nuke lol) is a solid way, it can also be blocked too so that’s a really nice mechanic.

- Retaliation on a mob that also negates (or more menacingly, reflects condition damage) during a few phases in the fight is another method, that can be controlled by players simply waiting for self-healing, but Enrage Timers do exist in raids and they might have to keep doing damage to make it.

It’s kind of hard creating mechanics for healing, we should make a thread dedicated to ideas around it. Maybe even put ideas on mechanics on Crowd Control and Damage Soak.

I’ve always hated traditional MMO raid mechanics, and I’m sad to see them weaseling their way into GW2. There has to be a way to create truly challenging PvE content without including things like enrage timers and unavoidable damage.

Well feel free to come back when you figure it out. There is a reason “traditional” MMO raid mechanics exists. This reason is because its the only way it can be done. There has to be a balance. Take away the enrage timer and everyone can cheese the fight by going full defense and whittling the boss down. Take away any raid wide unavoidable damage and everyone can go full glass cannon with zero support and beat the fight. You need both of those things to actually make a fight challenging. One of the strongest aspects of GW2 combat is active Dodging. As long as they throw in mechanics which require you to Dodge in addition to the other mechanics listed above (which they have) you get a great raid system with the potential to provide a great challenge to the player base.