Guild Wars 2

Why?

- Instant unavoidable attacks
- Locked-on ranged attacks

^ Makes the rest of the combat system pointless. You’ll find yourself kiting even as melee and dodge roll is simply used to sustain better kiting. 2% of the game is actually anticipating an attack and dodging/blocking it, the rest is a balance of kiting and corpse running, the better you are the more time you’ll spend kiting.
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• You can’t anticipate instant attacks and some that do have animation hold up into a pose for an undistinguished amount of time showing no sign of when they’re going to unleash said attack. Then there are attacks that happen so fast you can’t anticipate those and then there are attacks that are so laughably slow you can simply move out of the way.

• Locked-on ranged attacks trivializes the point of positioning, moving around and dodging. There are many attacks that last longer than two dodges and there is no way to avoid this damage than sit there and take it. Moving out of the way doesn’t work because it follows you faster than you can run and dodging doesn’t work because the attack lasts longer than you can dodge and because it moves just as fast as you, changing your position amounts to nothing.

I reeeally wanted to stick with GW2, but the combat just doesn’t work for me. This should have been glaringly obvious that something was amiss when melee professions want to kite and the bread and butter of gameplay is just endless kiting. It’s a shame because I really loved how dedicated and devoted the development team are and things like jumping puzzles are just genius, but at the end of the day it’s only filler in a sandwhich and sometimes I like to go bonk things with my pointy stick but that isn’t a fun activity at all.
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Dragon encounters are just…just…they’re so bad I don’t really know how to describe how boring they are. They should have been a mad clock tower with mobs trying to kill you making it to one of its wings and slowly chopping it off while trying not to fall off the dragon puzzle, then while its gone to ground you take off scales to plant bombs while trying to not fall off the puzzle again, finally mounting its head to pluck out its eyes and plant bombs in its eye sockets to really send the message home.
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Survive > bring the dragon to ground > mount dragon puzzle > lop off its wings > survive > bring it to ground > mount dragon puzzle > blow up vital organs > surivive > bring it to ground > mount dragon face puzzle > blow up its &*^%ing face off. Loot.
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What did we end up doing? Giving it a %^$#ing manicure.
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The combat system does not support boss fights because it’s fundamentally flawed from the point at the top. When they get as big as dragons the combat literally becomes redundant instead of epic.

I think it works,

If you know you are about to take focus fire, This gives ever class a way to delay the focus burst and give team mates time to help.

It more for PvP.

They can easily make it so you have stuff to dodge in PvP.

The combat system is set up so everyone is responsible for keeping themselves alive instead of making it the work of just the tank and healer.

I do think they have some work to do to though, Namely setting up harder battler for massive zergs. Right now if the zerg is big enough you can go to sleep at the wheel and know the boss is going down.

But that is true for any zerg in most game

Auto aim and target lock doesn’t penalize poor play as much as manual aim and timing projectile velocity does.

Since the inception of Diablo in 1997 we are still “kiting” NPC’s 15 years later.

Lt Latency.7415:

I think it works,

If you know you are about to take focus fire, This gives ever class a way to delay the focus burst and give team mates time to help.

It more for PvP.

They can easily make it so you have stuff to dodge in PvP.

The combat system is set up so everyone is responsible for keeping themselves alive instead of making it the work of just the tank and healer.

I do think they have some work to do to though, Namely setting up harder battler for massive zergs. Right now if the zerg is big enough you can go to sleep at the wheel and know the boss is going down.

But that is true for any zerg in most game

The combat works better in either lower damage areas or more predictable damage areas. Due to pvp’s frequent repetition you can have strats down to a tee and know what someone will do before they do it.

The combat isn’t actually set up to keep yourself alive, only a group can, this makes it painful when you do the dance perfectly but the boss is stuck on you and you’re out of CD’s. What the combat actually does is have you live long enough to alert people that you’re going down, giving them enough time to react to the event and get you on your feet again.

If a boss sits on you for more than 30 seconds, chances are you will go down, you will run out of CD’s and you go to ground, if the boss for one reason or another does not divert aggro when you go down, if your team mates don’t get to you soon enough you will actually die – the duration of the event you are usually quite useless/helpless.

The problem with that is it renders you helpless and makes you feel like dead weight when you’re down and most of the time it isn’t even your fault. Unless there is a way to juggle defensive CD’s to always keep a boss at distance or be in a position to absorb a blow there will always feel like a steep lack of control which is not fun.
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• #1 if you go down it has to be because you screwed up, not because there is a kitten load of unavoidable/locked-on damage coming your way or because you’re out of CD’s when you used your CD’s correctly and conservatively

• #2 if someone has to go down, the party should be able to choose who i.e. group tanking, that way when someone is put in a position of helplessness it is a choice, when someone is rendered powerless involuntairly it is not fun. This also encourages group co-ordination and strategy which all bosses sorely lack

• #3 actual gameplay that can be your fault, this requires an action that can actually be anticipated, if it is impossible to do so then it will never be fun. It is very rewarding to see an attack that could kill you and manage to survive it via dodging/blocking.

Tera actually does wonders with boss fights by using this enrage mechanic:

- boss starts off as normal, its attacks are a bit slow but it displays how they start and finish very well

- at 60/30/15% hp the boss will enrage for “x” amount of time, the attacks of the boss are dramatically sped up, but there is enough time to be able to react to

What this does is it introduces you to the fight and then ramps up the difficulty at certain intervals. It’s like going around an F1 track at 30Mph to get the feel, then doing it again at 70-100mph then going back to 30 to cooldown and going back up to 70-100 to keep things interesting.

OP’s post is golden.

I have always been a huge fan of blocking and evasion, it is heartbreaking that so few games implement it. Instead, they just expect you to take the hits—that’s so kitten Brain dead, dumb kitten.

The ONE good block skill (complete with cool animation) that they did add, (Greatsword block/whirl kick) has a kitten-long cool-down = fail.

Nice Post OP.

@ OP – Well let’s be clear with this, Anet doesn’t want you to be able to “dance” around because they like the protect the players who doesn’t have the ability to do so from getting stomped by players who can. Plain and simple; it’s obviously a skill cap limit that they don’t want good players to reach atm.

It’s sad to see that Anet doesn’t give a kittens about all these combat mechanics suggestions and feedback. I think why this happen is because post like this would get severely flamed (at this point of 200 views) throughout the beta phase when the game hasn’t been launched, and those first buyers for GW2 were GW1 players (dedicated fans since as far as back to 2005) and players that heard Anet said that GW2 has a mature MMO (ie. a game that can be played by adults without annoying kids trolling them with good gaming skills). Those two types of players have completely defended GW2 from any bad things; Anet as smart as they are knew that would happen (free marketing baby!), and it’s like being god in MMO (do what they want & everyone is going to speak on their perspective for them <- so they “saw no benefits in making proper changes to the game until the game has been sold”).

But now after 2 months since the game has been released, the players who are buying GW2 now are finally the “real so-called casual GW2 players” – no strings attached to GW1 or Anet, they play the game to “figure out what the fuss is about with GW2”. Players like them won’t cover up their doubts about combat – which for a fair player he/she would have known that these grindy mechanics in combat will eventually grow to become boring sooner or later. Hell, it’s not like they haven’t played typical MMOs before… * target cast, target cast, target cast~ (until the mob dies).

Most of my buds quit because of there being a lack of depth in combat. Actually, the most recent cases were 2 of my buds who both played GW2 for about a week and one of them has already quit MMO for life! He said, “If this is the best MMO out there nowadays (which I think he feels it is), then I’m better to just stick to my SC2 from now on”.

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Honestly though – a lot of the MMO these days have an issue of keeping both combat and the contents equal in terms of quality level. I think GW2 has pretty descent content (even with all these bugs – they were always going to be fixed, so not that big of a deal), but just the lack of polished combat mechanics killed it for most players; such as the flaws mentioned in the OP :\

If Anet wants to polish the mechanics in GW2, they need to first do something about 1v1 melee fights in terms of adding some mechanics depth to it for gods sake.

!! -> Stop trying to go to a dumbed-down version of both an RTS style and FPS style combat & pick one style and stick with it. They just failed so hard trying to mimick concepts from other games that they made combat in GW2 shallow instead of exciting like all the players had anticipated. It’s sad to see that they’ve went away from their own combat concepts in GW1… which IMO they could have actually built on instead of scrapping them during the development process of GW2.

I brought that up early on when I started playing that combat feels like it’s stuck between two worlds.

If you took melee combat and removed all ranged, made all attacks anticipatable you’d have a proper combat system that makes ‘sense’; “big sword is coming, better get out of the way”. The way ranged works now is simply “blow for blow” just like any other traditional MMO: “big arrow is coming, better get out of the way, oh wait it’s following me. Never mind”.

I think the best way to summarize the combat in GW2 is that it’s “counter intuitive” this is because it’s trying to be combat from two very different paradigms.

PVP should be more than spamming conditions and crits. They say that everyone would be a hybrid, however what they meant was everyone will be DPS with some hybrid abilities. You ARE DPS condition, crit spec no matter what you do, every class is homoginized into close range, 900, 1200, AOEs no meaningful control, no meaningful healing or lifesteals, nothing, just stacking crappy weak dots in stacks or crits with high levels of base damage base line abilities you can spam.

If I wanted A button smashing boring combat I could just play Street fighter and spam Blancas spin attack.

Vaulken.6983:

I brought that up early on when I started playing that combat feels like it’s stuck between two worlds.

If you took melee combat and removed all ranged, made all attacks anticipatable you’d have a proper combat system that makes ‘sense’; “big sword is coming, better get out of the way”. The way ranged works now is simply “blow for blow” just like any other traditional MMO: “big arrow is coming, better get out of the way, oh wait it’s following me. Never mind”.

I think the best way to summarize the combat in GW2 is that it’s “counter intuitive” this is because it’s trying to be combat from two very different paradigms.

What’s odd is that some ranged attacks you can dodge and others you can’t. The one that REALLY annoys me is that rapid fire golem laser thing. It is impossible to do anything about it unless you have an interrupt (which are always on long cooldowns) as the golem tracks your movement. Having to eat that on an ele or thief is extremely frustrating…

That’s the thing Alberel, I find it so weird that people talk about loot and “end game”, but I barely hear a peep about how backwards the way combat works is in GW2. What’s so strange about most attacks that are unavoidable is that they do the most damage (mobs not players) and avoidable attacks usually do less damage.

Best example I can think of a really lame mob is the drake. It takes 3-4 seconds to charge up and shoot its fire breath, all the while standing in place. Then the spectrum goes all the way over to the Skale boss in explorable mode AC does AE 1 shot that is really long ranged.

Who designs this stuff??? Is it the guy who thought waiting 1 minute per fail and watching the clip of the clock tower in the mad clock tower jump puzzle was going to be fun?

Can my Ranger’s arrow attacks lock on please? It’d be nice if players couldn’t casually strafe out of harm’s way.

Alberel Leonhart.9640:

Vaulken.6983:

I brought that up early on when I started playing that combat feels like it’s stuck between two worlds.

If you took melee combat and removed all ranged, made all attacks anticipatable you’d have a proper combat system that makes ‘sense’; “big sword is coming, better get out of the way”. The way ranged works now is simply “blow for blow” just like any other traditional MMO: “big arrow is coming, better get out of the way, oh wait it’s following me. Never mind”.

I think the best way to summarize the combat in GW2 is that it’s “counter intuitive” this is because it’s trying to be combat from two very different paradigms.

What’s odd is that some ranged attacks you can dodge and others you can’t. The one that REALLY annoys me is that rapid fire golem laser thing. It is impossible to do anything about it unless you have an interrupt (which are always on long cooldowns) as the golem tracks your movement. Having to eat that on an ele or thief is extremely frustrating…

Then there’s the Eye of Zhaitan’s laser eyes of death. You can dodge twice during that thing and still take half your health. Imo a dodge should cause target lock to drop.

I agree 100% with the OP.

Coming from Tera myself I really do miss the ability to block/dodge effectively and have it actually matter. Having to sit there and take hits because they can’t be reacted on is stupid, mainly of course this is ranged attacks which Tera handled fairly well. You could dodge projectiles by strafing or just block the attacks depending on your class. Ranged classes were encouraged to move in closer to melee range to reduce their miss chance and actually increase their damage too. Not to mention having a FEW lock-on skills which followed the target until it either hit them or the target evaded/blocked the attack.

Vaulken.6983:

Tera actually does wonders with boss fights by using this enrage mechanic:

- boss starts off as normal, its attacks are a bit slow but it displays how they start and finish very well

- at 60/30/15% hp the boss will enrage for “x” amount of time, the attacks of the boss are dramatically sped up, but there is enough time to be able to react to

What this does is it introduces you to the fight and then ramps up the difficulty at certain intervals. It’s like going around an F1 track at 30Mph to get the feel, then doing it again at 70-100mph then going back to 30 to cooldown and going back up to 70-100 to keep things interesting.

This is something Everquest did in 1999 with rampages and enrages. I don`t think it would work to great in this game. You can go to the cursed shore and trying to melee fight a vet abomination that frenzies. You can only kite them because they hit so fast and for so hard. If we had a manual block like ddo or raiderz has, it might make the gameplay a little better.

Sometimes I wish I could just take Tera in one hand, and GW2 in the other, and smoosh them together to create a beautiful thing of sparkle and wonders.

Then we would have Tera’s superior dodge/target-free combat, GW2’s superior content and player convenience, and amani and charr existing in harmony. It would be amazing.

Lifelike.5862:

Sometimes I wish I could just take Tera in one hand, and GW2 in the other, and smoosh them together to create a beautiful thing of sparkle and wonders.

Then we would have Tera’s superior dodge/target-free combat, GW2’s superior content and player convenience, and amani and charr existing in harmony. It would be amazing.

I thought I was the only one :’D

@Vaulken

I was literally typing up, “So how do you feel about the TERA combat system?”

But you just answered.

I to enjoy a more “target-free” system myself. Guild Wars 2 got pretty close, but most abilities still have laser guided heat-seeking missles mounted to them.

Before settling on gw2, I trialed TERA. I loved that I could move out of the way of attacks. This is something that annoys me in gw2.

You’d think as a thief you could avoid attacks like that of the golem or eye of zaithan by going stealth…nope. Mob still knows you’re there… You’re locked-on. During my personal story, I even had orrian specters FOLLOW ME EVERYWHERE while I was stealthed. They were locked-on but couldn’t attack because “I was in stealth” and the code didn’t allow them to until I reappeared… You’d think stealth would cause mobs to lose/reset their target or continue shooting at the last place they saw you, till the skills ended…nope.

Stealth should cause enemies to reset aggro on you…it doesn’t. Soon as you come out of you 10 second stealth, they go “Hey, I remember you!” And somehow the damage others did in that time isn’t enough to get them the aggro? Screw the holy trinity. I’m still a thief. If I wanna tank damage I’ll play my war or level up my guardian. That’s what guardians are for, right? Tanking and healing? As OP said, you can’t really plan or use tactics to let someone who’s better equiped to take the damage actually do that. Maybe I should use green gear and auto-attack from the back so I do as little damamge as possible so as to not get aggro?…But….wait…if you’re…then that means….oh, boy….

I’ve been playing mmo’s for a while, but maybe I’m too stupid to get how this game works? After 3 Lv80 chars, 2500 achievement points, 6/8 crafts LV400 (all that farming…), 1700 events completed and 98% of the world map completed? And a good portion of this done solo…you’d think I’d have figured out how to take care of myself by now… Unless…

I like this game alot. But most of the “challenge” seems to come from surmounting my frustration of not being able to do things anyone would expect to be able to do… like being in the safe zone when a tar elemental is facing the other way and he launches his ranged attack…. wait, is that thing heat-seeking vomit… ewww

seriously, the combat in GW2 is a lot more
complex than lets say “skyrim’s 2 buttons”.

GW2 has 2 weapons + 5 other skills + F1-2-3 skills + dodge.

AND you can swap those between fights.

you guys dont know what youre talking about, you can be “better” than other in this game by a large margin, solely based on your gameplay skill.

• Enemies should have somewhat smart AI.
• It’s sad when all those cool skills you’ve got become useless, as all the mobs are resistant to it in one way or another, so all you got left is button mashing no matter how skilled of a player you are. This, along with limited selection of skills, is a huge slap on the face! I don’t mind having less skills than GW1 if my skills are meaningful in PvE, which at the moment, they simply aren’t.

So how to fix it?

• If a monster sees I’m using a skill that will blind him, he should attempt to prevent it by using Aegis, dodge, or interrupting me.
• Instead of the dumb/lazy/passive Defiant/Unshakable mechanic, the enemy should try to dodge, aegis, blind, yadda yadda, and maybe even get temporary 2 second stability.
• If I’m using a heal or aegis he should try to interrupt me!
• Protection on detection of Fury and Might.
• They did the AI for GW1 so if they wanted to, they could see a lot more skillful combat mechanics there.

Things like these instead of passive resistance and high health pools will make combat a lot more engaging.

Of course, none of this should happen in 1-15 areas, none of this should happen all at once, and none of this should be present in all monsters. It should be introduced little by little so by the time we are level 60 we are familiar with what to look out for and how to fight it skillfully.

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I know this game is targeted at busy people with limited time to play (actually I don’t know anymore), but must you insult our intelligence? Next year when I’m going to be really really busy with work, will I lose IQ points therefore needing easy kindergarten-style combat?
I was super busy when I first played GW1, I was really casual and it was my first PC game, and yet, playing as a[n elementalist disguised as a] domination mesmer [oops!], I had fun playing the game and learning the combat mechanics little by little (and yes, I knew about Mesmer primary attribute when I made my character but I decided to make elementalist-mesmer instead because mesmers looked too haughty and snob for my taste) :P

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seriously, the combat in GW2 is a lot more complex than, lets say, skyrim’s

I don’t know about skyrim but if it’s anything like oblivion, no, GW2 combat is not more skilled than oblivion. Oblivion is far more skilled by a long shot. I never feel like I’m bored just sighing and mashing random buttons. I don’t know, maybe it’s just the way I play it, but I use my spells carefully and need to think how to use them depending on what I can see is going to happen next. I actually use my brain there ^^

i have a shield fighter in skyrim and oblivion, and its very easy.

gw2 have a lot of buttons, and if you dont press ALL of them including swaping, well youre not optimal in the toughest moments.
and if you can do that without fail, without looking at your keyboard, gratz man. i still lag sometimes or miss a key.

MMO combat in general is a crappy system. It’s all about just pressing hotkeys or clicking on little pictures at the bottom of the screen at certain times. The fact that you can only dodge twice per a few seconds just makes it more obvious the GW2 developers had no idea how they wanted to actually make the game play.

They thought they could just bolt on a new move to a bombed out and depleted system and it’d make everything fresh and exciting. Guess again.

I agree with OP.

“Dodge” seems like it was shoe horned in, and the AoE circles are misleading as your mind wants to react to THAT, not the hard to see attack it’s warning you of (which hits you well before you register the AoE)

Ranged Enemy NPC attacks track you regardless of how you move, and Melee Enemy NPCs stick to you like glue. Why is the stamina bar so stingy considering the pace of attacking? Blah. Nice try but no.

Teras battle system is flawed slightly but it’s leaps and bounds above other MMORPGs including GW2.

Dodge only works as intended in the most dullard of bossy fights. No

A lot of the time you need to anticipate a move before it happens, and dodge early to avoid it. Enemies, for the most party, have cool-downs just like we do, but they don’t just fire off all their attacks at once either. Once you get the rhythm of an enemy down, what attacks it can use, and when it likes to use them, evading isn’t too difficult, and is mostly limited by whether or not you are playing a class that has limited evasion skills.

As for long “channeled” attack which you cannot dodge the entirety of; Enemies have a line of sight too. Try to dodge towards cover. I’ve played Benny-Hill with many an enemy in this game.

Since we brought up Tera: The problem I have with that game (mechanically speaking, anyway) is that it puts SO MUCH emphasis on boss battles. I honestly get burnt out on the marathon encounters the game constantly puts you through. Once you get used to the timing/dodging its’ really just a very repetitive test of endurance and time. That I can get bored in a game heralded for its’ “action” is a statement in itself.

Avatar.1923:

seriously, the combat in GW2 is a lot more
complex than lets say “skyrim’s 2 buttons”.

GW2 has 2 weapons + 5 other skills + F1-2-3 skills + dodge.

AND you can swap those between fights.

you guys dont know what youre talking about, you can be “better” than other in this game by a large margin, solely based on your gameplay skill.

This game is E Z. There are 15 buttons, 5 of which are situational and the other 10 are split into 5 button sessions, people learn to swap weapons to stop being bored, it just so happens to also be optimal.

Every fight is the same, run in > blow control CD’s and dps during control > switch to kiting till control CD’s are back up.

EVERY FIGHT IS LIKE THIS. Avoiding spots of damage is always the same in boss fights too since they’re not animation based like in Tera; same old &^$@ of get out of the fire and turtle because he’s coming at you.

It would appear that the game has more depth than it has in its combat and it probably would if most of it wasn’t made redundant with so many contradicting mechanics like lock-on attacks.

That this game has a lower user-skill level requirement than Tera shouldn’t really be a surprise. Tera is designed as a more “hard-core” playing experience, which is partially why I found it to be so exhausting. There are benefits to GW2’s more casual and easy approach to combat (compared to Tera, anyway). I really don’t want a balls to the walls challenge in every encounter. It loses its’ charm.

Ive actually started pondering going back to tera. The combat is brilliant. I came to GW2 to avoid the grind so many games seem to think are ‘basic needs’. But rolling down that hill in GW2 i start to wonder why I shouldn’t play a game with better combat if im going to grind a dungeon over and over I might as well have more fun doing it.

I think what gets me the most is the way the Risen work. They move SO FAST in combat it’s nuts. They’re difficult to kite and seem to be in some permanent state of fast-forward.

The worst part is how when I dodge them, by the time I can start doing something, they’re already on me, hitting me.

In that vein, it’s exceedingly frustrating to have defensive abilities on long cooldowns when the offensive abilities vomiting conditions all over you are being spammed. Sometimes I just leave conditions alone because I swear the mobs stop adding them if they see you’re already wearing some.

And what’s with dodging only to have whatever it is hit you anyway? Stupid marsh drakes.

Thing that gets me about dodge is that if you don’t press it at the right time, you’ll dodge the attack for the animation but you’ll get dragged back/teleport back to get hit.

I’m not sure if that (or this) makes sense or if it only happens to me, but so many, many times I’ll dodge a projectile then it’ll turn into a super homing projectile and hit me anyway and teleport me back three feet to the direction I dodged from.

Paul.4081:

Thing that gets me about dodge is that if you don’t press it at the right time, you’ll dodge the attack for the animation but you’ll get dragged back/teleport back to get hit.

I’m not sure if that (or this) makes sense or if it only happens to me, but so many, many times I’ll dodge a projectile then it’ll turn into a super homing projectile and hit me anyway and teleport me back three feet to the direction I dodged from.

That sounds a lot like “rubberband” lag. I’ve done that a few times lately as well, likely as a result of the servers being so busy this weekend.

Warkupo.1025:

Paul.4081:

Thing that gets me about dodge is that if you don’t press it at the right time, you’ll dodge the attack for the animation but you’ll get dragged back/teleport back to get hit.

I’m not sure if that (or this) makes sense or if it only happens to me, but so many, many times I’ll dodge a projectile then it’ll turn into a super homing projectile and hit me anyway and teleport me back three feet to the direction I dodged from.

That sounds a lot like “rubberband” lag. I’ve done that a few times lately as well, likely as a result of the servers being so busy this weekend.

It’s not just this weekend, it happens a lot, I seem to teleport back to monsters to get hit. I seriously doubt it’s lag/rubberbanding. It’s very like rubberbanding but just if I don’t dodge at the exact time, I’ll get pulled back so the attack can hit me mid dodge (I teleport back halfway through a dodge roll).

I should probably try to record what I’m talking about on fraps or something.

It really probably is though. I don’t know what kind of connection you are running, but it sounds exactly like what rubberbanding entails, and exactly like what has been happening to me lately. If your connection isn’t good to begin with then I wouldn’t be surprised if you’ve noticed it since you started playing.

At any rate, monsters teleporting you during your dodge is definitely not a feature of the game and you should send a request to the bug area to see if you can get it resolved. Definitely take a video of it if you can.

I don’t understand why everyone is so fussy about loot/gear when combat is in the state that it’s in. I seldom see anyone really discussing the short comings of combat at all :s