Guild Wars 2

I feel Anet don’t fully understand what the majority of people want for the combat system in GW2. Everywhere on the forums and subforums of other gaming sites that speak of GW2 you see people complaining that Zerker gear is the main style of play. Most characters run the high “risk” builds for maximum damage output because with the current dodge system, defense of any kind is kind of meaningless. Most attacks that kill players one shot them and dodging is superior to defense anyways. This makes most players run only the glass cannon build. That’s not fun to do. Well that’s not true. It’s fun at first, but then becomes really boring really quickly when you either die because a boss can’t be crit making your set worthless (Teq anyone?) or you breeze through everything because it died in 4 seconds or was easy to avoid and died in 10 seconds. Now I’m not going to give multiple ways to fix this because I’m not a developer. I can’t say for certain what changes to the Zerk/Glass Cannon type sets will help or hurt it. What I can say is what would probably make players happier.

Guild Wars 2 loved stressing that it did not have a Tank/Healer/DPS system. It told everyone that each player had self healing, and good dps capabilities along with conditions and boons. So now we have the Control/Support/DPS trinity. However, with the current state of combat, Control and Support are almost non-existent. The thing I believe players would love to see, are builds that are 100% based on Controlling mobs or targets, and Supporting the DPS and Control players. This way, a character could play a beefy character based on controlling the enemy, not letting them move, or making them weaker so that other players don’t get hit for 14k damage from a single spike hit. A supporter could play a somewhat durable character based on either giving the other players helpful buffs while doing damage to the enemy, or could put multiple DoTs on the enemies to help Control characters keep control while giving heals or buffs to other characters as they help DPS.

Sadly this basically sounds like the Tank and Healer type classes, but it’s more so focused on just being help instead of essential. Let’s say the Supporter died, hopefully with the boons active or the debuffs to the enemies that the Supporter gave, the rest of the team could either kill the enemy in question, or survive long enough to risk having a DPS quickly get the supporter back into the action. Same thing with the Control type. If the Controller did his/her job, the enemy should either be stuck, slowed, or Weakened (As in terms of hits do less damage to the players) that the other players can either kill it, or bring the Controller back up.

If you work on this then other armor types besides Zerker will look appealing to try and play. Teams would be more balanced instead of just giant piles of Zerks rushing in like they need blood sacrifices. The game would feel more like a spec based game rather than a Damage is King game.

Just in case it’s tl;dr for anyone. Basically, buff other sets to Zerks level. Make other armor types viable! Make other build sets that arent exactly damage based usable in fights for something other than a human meat shield.

IIRC they already said they were working towards it (can’t find the exact quote), but most likely won’t see anything about it at least until after the current living story arc ends (in march)

We must clarify that zerker gears is only stats. It’s not a style of play. Your traits and the weapons choice, utility choice is your style of play. So a control/support player can still wear zerker gear. Zerker gears only determine how much direct damage you will take vs how much direct damage you will inflict. The style of play is determine by the other setups not the gear. Nerfing zerker gears would only nerf group total dps, no matter what type of play style you choose. The important thing should be noted is that zerker gears shines mainly in pve. In WvW or PVP, it’s inferior and other gear setups shines esp condition oriented gears. So every gear has it place. The thing is ANet annouce a critical damage change, which means not only zerkers will be affect. Valkyrie and Cavalier gears will also get nerf. Anyone who mix and max different stats will also get nerf. Is that what everyone wants? More players to do less dps, so everyone now takes a lot longer to kill a boss that seems to get larger HP pool as times go?

Maybe they should start by fixing the shatterer – give him a health pool of 1, so we don’t have to stand there for 10-14 minutes while drinking tea. That’s the issue.

There are some boss mechanics that makes Dodge the only meaningful way of defense (and Vigor the second or third most important boon)
* One-shot that kills even for the most heavily armored, PVT based Bunker
* AoE that gives you so many conditions that if you stay inside you won’t be able to recover from the downed state (and you will be downed).
* Chain-knockbacks, Chain-Stunts, Chain-Pulls, Chain-Daze. Fail to dodge the first hist, you’re dead.
* AoE so big and with too much damage that if you don’t escape at first, you’re doomed.

Then add some other mechanics that greatly favor DPS as the best defense:
* Bosses that do so much damage that you can’t stay at melee range for long (you can use Ranged, as some do with dear Jormag, but still…).
* Agony. You really, really want to destroy the mobs as fast as you could to quickly advance the fractal.
* Tons of trash mobs that either you AoE/Cleave, die of boredom after kiting every single one of them, or they eventually eat you (I’m thinking a cluster of Reef Drakes, Karkas or Wind Riders in Southsun).

And the logical conclusion is to run zerker and be very, very good at dodging and reflecting, because the only damage mitigation for a lot of encounters is to not receive damage at all.

Ofc, this is all about PvE. sPvP and WvW are different beasts.