Guild Wars 2

I’ll grant that control, which is robust in PvP, is of little use in most PvE. Even the disciplined, coordinated groups that might be able to use controls on bosses don’t bother. However, there is plenty of support, if you choose to use it. What it takes to recognize this is the realization that you aren’t going to be sitting back and filling up health bars, or just being a buff-bot.

lordkrall.7241:

Shockwave.1230:

I think we’re just talking semantics. To me, a player who used to play Guild Wars maining a Monk actively identifying and utilizing different skills ever couple seconds or less to prevent and recover from damage and debuffs, using a skill every 30 seconds is very passive.

But that is not the meaning of the word passive.
The word passive suggest NO active interaction at all.
Maintaining might stacks is a VERY active job (unless everyone is running Warriors with Forceful Greatsword and 75% crit chance)

Again semantics. Using a skill to maintain an effect every 10 seconds, which is less passive than using a skill every 20 to maintain an effect, which is less passive than using a skill every 30, which is less passive than using a skill every 60.

There’s obviously multiple ways to maintian 25 stacks of might, but to call that a support role on a team is hardly the case. It’s a secondary purpose. Also the most optimal way of maintain might is the most passive, because people look for long duration might. The longer the duration the more passive it is.

A 20+ second duration effect from the game that I came from was EXTREMELY passive. You don’t have to just take my word for it, if you know of anyone else that played Guild Wars just ask them.

digiowl.9620:

All in all, GW2 is more action game than RPG.

Not just GW2, every MMO is just an action game, RPG doesn’t exist anymore, because a game that can be called by this term would require, you know, an actual role-playing (and I guess every person who have an idea about that term knows that role in it doesn’t mean tank/heal/dps, right?)
So no change in comparison to other MMOs here, Anet just have their own system how combat works, nothing more, nothing less.

I played GW1 and funnily enough one of the main builds for a monk in the meta was built around bindings, which usually required quite little active playing

lordkrall.7241:

I played GW1 and funnily enough one of the main builds for a monk in the meta was built around bindings, which usually required quite little active playing

Is that the good ol’ life bond build you’re talking about? That’s a good example of a more passive build.

I preferred Prot or Prot/Heal hybrid builds using a combination of skills like Patient Spirit, Cure Hex, Draw Conditions, Spirit Bond, Protective Spirit, SoA, Seed of Life, Aegis, Selfless Spirit, and an elite of either WoH, Healing Burst, or Divert Hexes. I used very active builds like that becuase I enjoyed the challenges they present, due to them being higher skill cieling highly effective builds.

Galtrix.7369:

I laugh at all berserkers like you, because I buff myself and heal myself while I watch you people basically throw yourselves at the enemy and blow yourself up into a thousand tiny pieces.

P.S: Keep going berserker in PvP, I love the free one-hit kills.

i might be in full berserker in most dungeons, but that’s because i can avoid all fatal hits and step out of red circles. i buff and cleanse not only myself but my group too. i charge in first and taunt foes to waste their initial strikes on me, while avoiding damage and chopping them to pieces

got to dissapoint you, but i change some of zerker gear to celestial for wvw

if you are on NA servers – invite me, and we can go kill some stuff together, its more fun in game than in forums

colesy.8490:

Xae Isareth.1364:

They easily could make healing matter quite a bit.

For example, they could introduce an encounter where there’s constant uncleansable DoTs thrown around such that you need a healer to constantly group heal to keep the party on the safe side.

And then one player drops a water field and the party spam blast finishers to get their health back up mid fight. All in dps gear. I don’t even know what you guys are talking about, dps groups are the ones who have the most boons active since they know how to support their party properly mid fight with blocks, reflection, fury, might, etc. just because you can’t watch yourself bring hp bars up or tank doesn’t mean support doesn’t have a roll, it just means you don’t like the kind of support present in this game, in which case I suggest you stop playing since obviously you can’t comprehend it.

Wow, someone sure sounds mad. I don’t recall killing anyone’s puppies in the last week though, but sorry if I went and traumatized your life in some way or form for you to be so rude.

Just going to stop reply here because I sense a risk for my own sanity if I continue. Have a good day.

I feel the biggest problem with this game in terms of combat/encounter design is that most boons, conditions, and more tactical moves are very overtly balanced around PvP, which tends to mean they are much less effective in PvE than they should be (wooh I stunned a mob for 1 second). In particular, this applies to offensive conditions as well as some defensive ones (including Stealth), meaning that in virtually all situations pure DPS is going to give you more bang for your buck than any support or control oriented setup the majority of the time in PvE encounters.

Frankly, it’s a huge design problem and one of the primary reasons a lot of people find the combat boring (the other would be the relative lack of skill options). The fact that they so overtly balance around PvP with significantly less regard to how well things work in PvE is mind-boggling.

Honestly, they should balance conditions primarily for PvE than make a universal rule about how they work in PvP, such as having half the duration length.

Boons and conditions are spammed, and little thought goes into their application most of the time.

Saulius.8430:

there are no trinity roles here. and game was advertised as such

“Damage Dealer” is a trinity role.

Personally, I would like to see more support in the form of CC in PvE. It would be nice if certain bosses were vulnerable to certain types of CC.

lordkrall.7241:

It is interesting that people usually talk about how DPS is the only viable role.
Funnily enough in order to maximize and make said role useful you have to utilize support, but for some reason people seems to completely ignore that.

More that you can do support without a support build, because the few stats that have any impact on support barely do so. the difference between running zerker and chumping on some “support” food, and running a support focused build is minimal in terms of extra support, but staggering in terms of lost DPS on the support build side.

STRanger.5120:

digiowl.9620:

All in all, GW2 is more action game than RPG.

Not just GW2, every MMO is just an action game, RPG doesn’t exist anymore, because a game that can be called by this term would require, you know, an actual role-playing (and I guess every person who have an idea about that term knows that role in it doesn’t mean tank/heal/dps, right?)
So no change in comparison to other MMOs here, Anet just have their own system how combat works, nothing more, nothing less.

At least in other games, stats and builds matter. In GW2 PVE, you can go whole hog zerker, swap some utilities around, and go form DPS to “support”.

But the issue is not really the stats, it is mob design. They are simply big bags of health with little of the interplay between mechanics that you find in PVP. End result is that fights are simply attrition. And for that you go DPS heavy, no ifs or buts.

Einlanzer.1627:

I feel the biggest problem with this game in terms of combat/encounter design is that most boons, conditions, and more tactical moves are very overtly balanced around PvP, which tends to mean they are much less effective in PvE than they should be (wooh I stunned a mob for 1 second). In particular, this applies to offensive conditions as well as some defensive ones (including Stealth), meaning that in virtually all situations pure DPS is going to give you more bang for your buck than any support or control oriented setup the majority of the time in PvE encounters.

Frankly, it’s a huge design problem and one of the primary reasons a lot of people find the combat boring (the other would be the relative lack of skill options). The fact that they so overtly balance around PvP with significantly less regard to how well things work in PvE is mind-boggling.

Honestly, they should balance conditions primarily for PvE than make a universal rule about how they work in PvP, such as having half the duration length.

Or introduce longer durations, but the potential for breaking, on PVE control effects. I tried to do a classic MMORPG move on some skritt a few months back. Opened up the fight with a daze on a small group of them, and started taking pot shots at one of the group. I had barely gotten the first shot of when the rest woke up and charged me. In any other MMO, they would have been out long enough for me to do significant damage to their compatriot. And depending on my build, i may have been able to stun/daze them again once they woke up.

That said, i have no problem with the active dodge mechanic. But i want OPTIONS! Right now we are forced to constantly use dodge no matter how we build. Because the alternatives are nerfed into futility for sake of PVP, and because it is the only defensive action we have that is on a short cooldown (10s without vigor, 5s with). The rest of them are on 30s or longer, with effects lasting 1/10 of that.

Support is a very meaningful ability that all classes can do. With out it most of the time your team will die. Its just in GW2 your not just supporting your playing all the rolls at once so every one is supporting and your personal supporting of the time is just not that “i am important” feeling to it the main feeling that support and tank players want to feel when playing a game.

i don’t know how supportive can all the classes be but i had the pleasure of doing fractals with a suport elementalist. He had no damage and played mostly with water but nobody got downed the entire fractal run. He was all over the place with heals and condi removal. I don’t know elementalist skills and how he was doing all that healing but it was really impressive to see someone keep people alive so well.
You might want to check out elementalist if you are looking for a good support class.

I agree the OP is a bit tunnel visioned on healing, but his point that the game is one dimensional is valid imo. In the few games that actually does support well, the playstyle is often paired with control-a good example is the psionicist in Allods online. To the people claiming gw2 has anything remotely resembling a decent support/control, I suggest you test out the psi then re-evaluate control in gw2.

Honestly the first major problem is this is a mmorpg trying to focus on pvp and all the skills and mechanics are based on that. PvP in a rpg is a total joke-oh my set of percentages are better than your set of percentages…or ha!-I have skills that you didn’t happen to select counters to…wow…so competitive and skill-based. Strategy games, fighting games, fps-those are games that can have worthwhile pvp since you aren’t limited by the set of skills your opponent picked or percentages; your opponent does something (not by chance) and you react-and you have your full kitten nal to make your choice. As such a pve centred game will have terrible pvp and a pvp centred game will have terrible pve…this is a pvp centred game.

The second problem is this obsession with accessibility-every dungeon should be completed with any profession set up and any build within that profession…well you just severely limited what type of content you can produce. Everything will be based on gimmicks then. Since you can’t rely on groups having perma protection/reflection/blind/condi dmg (flaws aside) etc the only thing your encounters will be based on is ‘get this red bar depleted asap’. What I think would have been better is to create dungeons that require certain roles, but not make ways of fulfilling that role unique to a single class. E.g. this boss does this thing that horribly murders you-you need anti-projectile to protect your party…well fine ele/guardian/mesmer/thief/ranger all have ways to defend against projctiles-is ’ X dungeon lfm, need anti-projectile’ really such a terrifying thing?

Don’t misunderstand-there are some such things in game, but for the most part (in dungeons) it’s ‘aw, isn’t that cute’ rather than a role such as: ‘quick everyone run to the whirling ranger/smoke screen/shield of avenger/wall of reflection/iwarden-temporal curtain/ele..wind…thingy if you want to live!’ that’s more prevalent in traditional mmorpg pve encounters. The support/control durations are waaaaaay too short, cd waaaaaay too long and they are rarely even useful anyway-obviously a side effect of the game being developed with pvp in mind.

…..Hmm….I just made myself sad and very disappointed in gw2. Dungeons are underwhelming and gimmicky (and either poorly designed or buggy, depends on how you look at it with regards to stacking), pvp in a mmorpg is always laughable and open world is now either a champion zerg train or an event zerg chain….

TLDR: support/control roles exist in only pvp, if you don’t like pvp and want to play a support/control role in pve you are out of luck-better start looking for another mmorpg. And if you think stacking might is the extent of a support/control role take a look at support/control classes in other mmorpgs.

Imho, it is mostly a matter of “support” stats either having an impact too low, or “dps” ones having an impact too high, relatively speaking.

A problem in this game is that if you heavily support, you don’t get rewarded. In events you may get bronze medal. Sometimes on champions you might not even be counted as one of the killers because you didn’t do enough damage.

In WvW, if you mostly support you won’t get many kills. The people you supported will get all the bags.

Any class can technically be built into support – but I guess most pick it as a secondary backup choice.

A dungeon run I was in a few days ago was with a party of damage dealers. After we found it wouldn’t work, a few of us switched to our supportive skill sets. We got through the dungeon quickly after that. There are support roles, but everyone takes a bit of the work, instead of dumping all the responsibility on one person.

Arikyali.5804:

Any class can technically be built into support – but I guess most pick it as a secondary backup choice.

A dungeon run I was in a few days ago was with a party of damage dealers. After we found it wouldn’t work, a few of us switched to our supportive skill sets. We got through the dungeon quickly after that. There are support roles, but everyone takes a bit of the work, instead of dumping all the responsibility on one person.

That’s what I wish was different, as well as others based upon what I see in this thread.. DPS is the only primary role that exists, support, and control are only secondary roles. They aren’t primary roles.

I would love to see support as something meaningful, but with the current design of dungeons, I think it would take a huge overhaul to do this.

Also, PvP already has had huge fluctuations in balance with very minor changes as well as a very bunker-heavy meta. Any large skill changes to help support in PvE would probably demolish any semblance of balance in PvP without ton of time and effort.

That being said…I hope I’m wrong on this.