Guild Wars 2

Not sure if I should post this first part in bug section but, with the new changes, sometimes a party member dies (falls off a cliff etc) and we don’t want him/her to just lay there while we play, we try to get out of combat.
We’re over 2000 range away from enemies, no one’s attacking, no one had conditions, no enemies are aggro…still, everyone was in combat. We pretty much had to run another mile to get out of it. There were scenarioes where we can’t get out of combat at all we just mass suicide on purpose even tho we know we can eventually win over time, because we don’t want our friends to just lay there for next 5 mins.

In my opinion, the in combat/no waypoint change is the wrong approach to gravezerging. It feels like a lazy implementation and one can almost speculate that it’s to promote revival orb sales (which as much as I hate to believe, this may well be the case and it breaks my heart because AwesomeNet once cut sales just to preserve the existing players’ game latency experience and this is going the opposite way, I’d understand if you were a cheap free to play kMMO but being the 2012goty with so many players which many have already spent $100s if not $1000s in gems, this is just wrong.)

May I suggest an alternative?

Put a waypoint respawn timer on deaths. If you lay there for lets say 30 seconds and your party isn’t suffering more casualties due to your death, it means the boss poses no challenge to your party overall, your death was a fluke, and it’s just a timesink at that point that you’ll have to sit/afk through. Most of the Waypoints are so far away from the bosses anyway so an additional 30 seconds respawn timer should sufficiently reduce gravezerging.

Gravezerging, in my opinion, is already a really ineffective way of doing dungeons. The punishment for the group, and for the individuals that die is loss of time and lots of walking back in most cases. However, if there are party/build compositions in the game where gravezerging turns out to be more time-efficient, then something needs to be done about it. In this case, a simple flat respawn timer would totally cripple that playstyle.

I’m going to call skeptic on the res-orb sales theory, but I do agree with the waypoint respawn timer.

I would, however, propose a slightly larger timer on the respawn. The group cohesion aspect this update is promoting actually favors ressing even the dead, rather than just the downed. If the timer was 30 seconds, I might be inclined to just leave the body and let them waypoint back after the 30. Given 1-2 minutes, instead, there is more motivation, closer to current game play, to get that player back up and in the action ASAP.

It’s really up to the rest of the group to decide whether or not to spend time and effort to res the dead ASAP. Keep in mind there are scenarios where the dead can not be ressed (on lava, fell off a cliff), 2 minutes is just too long of sitting around doing nothing imo. Maybe 1 minute.

Anet, If you really want to stick with this “in combat no respawn” thing, can you put an effort into building a spectator mode after death? This way new players can actually learn stuff from experienced players while dead? At the moment new players are punished pretty hard and they don’t really gain any fighting experience from it because they’re dead. I hate to see new players say stuff like “i’m never doing that again” because they died and had to sit their twiddle their thumbs while the 2 experienced players take awhile to finish the boss/event/whatever.

I did did suggest that in another thread and missed this one that is more on-topic; guess I’ll put what I had to add to the mechanic here too.

Firstly, allow players to res when an objective is over, maybe, 90% complete. This means that you won’t be denied involvement during the final stages of a boss fight because you got bad timer luck.

Alternatively, remove the current mechanic where only the final part of the DPS counts towards contribution and instead use the contribution since the boss last spawned OR regened health due to the invulnerability mechanic. The current contribution mechanic plain out encourages players, for a start, to use the troll against Kohler – I don’t see it really achieving anything else. Either way, if the players total contribution is known it doesn’t matter if they die 40% of the way into the fight; they still get their share of the fight (whether the rest of the party can complete the fight is another story entirely, leading to reinforcement timers likely being the only suitable solution).

Another player and I got been stuck “in combat” in Orr, when no mob was apparent. I wanted to go to a waypoint, but couldn’t because “we were in combat”. We tried doing an emote (/sit) and it worked! It took us out of combat, one at a time, as we each “sat down.”

Not sure that kind of thing would work in a dungeon, but might be worth a try.

As far as using a waypoint upon death, I have seen it done where you could use the nearest “waypoint”/rez spot, go get repaired, switch weapons, whatever you wanted to do, but you could not return to the dungeon until the group was out of combat. Since waypoints are in dungeons here, I think the timer idea makes sense, especially if you die out of reach of other players. I have been known to fall through holes in a floor or not be able to cross a chain. Not sure if my character died from the fall or from embarassament. lol

I upvote this suggestion, respawn timers that stack to punish constant WP’ing but allows the freedom for slip ups

stpetemermaid.5947:

Another player and I got been stuck “in combat” in Orr, when no mob was apparent. I wanted to go to a waypoint, but couldn’t because “we were in combat”. We tried doing an emote (/sit) and it worked! It took us out of combat, one at a time, as we each “sat down.”

Thanks for that suggestion, i’ll try it next time we get into a situation like that. It just felt really buggy when we’re like 2 rooms over from the mobs, no signs of aggro, all mobs regen’d to full hp, and we’re still in combat. Pretty biased towards players it seems to regen mob to full as soon as they are out of combat but for players it doesn’t even count as out of combat until u fly to a different country. lol

Does thief hide still do that thing where if you were targetted and flee past the mobs leash you remain in combat? That would be annoying.