Guild Wars 2

I don’t think we’re being victims of “bad class balance”; I think we’re just getting closer and closer to realize that combat needs a serious overhaul. Allow me to explain.

We are playing a game where instanced content is all about dealing as much damage as you can if you don’t weant to die. Every encounter in the game (save the Nightmare Fractal and similar, which I’ll cover in a little bit) is all about HP bloated targets which take too long to die and therefore there are two viable methods of dealing with them: skipping or pumping out your damage. No one stops anymore to kill the mobs unless it’s completely necessary, and being honest, maybe less than half the current players actually know how to properly do skips, but this isn’t something that SHOULD happen, it’s just terrible game design.

For me classes are good as they are. I don’t call this last patch a “Power Nerf” but an adjustment. Condition damage is weak against mob groups but very effective against large HP single targets, which makes sense! However only the classes are tunned up/down and the enemies stay exactly the same. Raids are pushing this kind of mentality if “kill it faster” with the enrage timers. Tho many of us have defended raids as being content “easily completed by anyone in any build”, this couldn’t be further from the truth… Raids are all DPS checks with mechanics; mechanics that even raiding guilds try to ignore in order to deal damage. It is still all about beating a piñata to death while ignoring the rest of the fight. Imagine a raid without the timer, and now we could be talking about more viable builds that go beyond pure DPS.

The current “meta” shines for being very unaccessible to new players or more casual ones. It’s riddiculous that HoT stats are all gated behind expensive crafting, even on exotic quality, while the rest of the game’s gear can be easily acquired by spending Karma (a long time useless resource it would seem) and treading with others. You can’t just walk into a Vendor and get exotic Viper’s, you have to either craft or do extremely niche things to get it! This locks some people into the “This is your first job but you have to be experienced first” cycle. Imagine a Power Build Reaper who wants to farm Ascended Gear on Fractals; he’ll be kicked because he isn’t a Condition Reaper, but he can’t be a Condition Reaper yet, since he must get that gear.

GW2 has two “brothers” who do some things way better: Wildstar and The Secret World. Both games have an extremely similar focus on exploration, non-linearity of quests, and the combat on both games is pretty much a copy paste of the GW2 combat engine, yet both games manage to do something good with it.

Wildstar takes advantage of the game’s dynamic combat by making every single mob have an attack pattern and AOEs like those seen on the Nightmare Fractal; that instance is an example of how dungeons in Wildstar are like, every one taking advantage on the class’s strengths. Classes in Wildstar, like in GW2, are multi-purpose, however the game lets you know their roles beforehand (As a Medic, you can be both DPS and Healer, as a warrior, you can be DPS or Tank, etc.), and changing roles on the fly make things more dynamic and adaptable to whatever is needed at the moment. In the end Wildtar and its raids (which are arguably some of the best on the MMO industry) go beyond just pumping out damage, opening its doors to even more class and build variety and depending on player skill and knowledge of the encounter’s mechanics; they have you moving arround using your skills, pulling enemy aggro, using special skills to trigger mechanics, etc. GW2 is a supposedly dynamic game which has a laughably static combat: you have dodges, you have jumps and dashes, yet everythign is reduced to combining the best boons with the best static field combinations. Yes, maybe removing stuff like combo feels would remove some “depth” but hell, it would allow a lot more things to become less reliant on spamming them stacked on a corner.

The Secret World’s dungeons are fanatstic, and they are a very reasonable introduction to Raiding later on. The dungeons tell a story, and every one of them has interesting mechanics, from fighting on a corridor that is closing in, having other party members trying to stop the walls while the rest fights the boss, to fighting jumping on boxes above electrified water. And they are also 5 man instances like in GW2. Tho Secret World has a stronger focus than Wildstar or even GW2 on class roles, said builds are also gear dependant, can be changed on the fly, and at least outside of raiding there are hundreds of possible combinations like hybrid DPS tanks, dedicated healers, dps healers, ranged tanks, etc. It also manages to make combat feel good on Dungeons by making use of background mechanics and enemy AOEs which force tactics and repositioning. Most of the Dungeons can be cleared with whatever build you like, as long as you know what you’re playing.

GW2 has three examples of brilliant gameplay design: Swamp Fractal, Nightmare Fractal and Thaumanova Reactor. They have interesting mechanics that make the fractal easier (albeit longer, but more fun!) if properly followed, bosses that force the players to learn attacks and take advantage on the game’s dodgind system instead of remaning stacked, and a good length, being more similar to Raids than dungeons would ever be, and usually without having “bs” mechanics found in said dungeons, like hundreds of randomly overlapping AOEs or hundreds of enemy mobs with inflated HP.

It would be interesting to see central Tyria have unique mobs like in Wildstar, instead of having exploding meat that dies by spamming 1111 and leading players to understand the importance of dodging and using breakbars and skills (Wildstar’s first dungeon is simply brilliant, it is fun and introduces players to basic mechanics like tanking, breaking bars with CC, healing and working together).

As long as Combat isn’t worked on we’ll be stuck looking at benchmarks wondering why our favorite class will never be a good DPS dealer, which is the only role that matters besides healer and boon stripper.

The biggest flaw in your whole argument is that you are assuming Raids are the main endgame content, which is the furthest things from the truth, Raids are only there for the relatively small subset of people that wanted challenging coordinated for organized groups.

the combat is relatively fine across the board in PvE content, especially now that they are making it more unfriendly to stack and Spam like Gw2 at launch and before raids were ever conceived, Raids and like newer Fractals get away from the stack and Spam by forcing players to move there is no more stacking outside of old abandoned content like dungeons and in Open world in core Tyria.

Gw2 shouldn’t be changed because of your vision of what Raids should be since it is content designed only for a fraction of the Player base, and shouldn’t have a large impact on the gameplay outside of Raids, look at all the Salt that came up from HoT when it first released and open world had an iota of challenge, and gen look at all the subsequent nerfs to said content to appease the masses that only want to stack and Spam 1.

Aldath.1275:

I don’t think we’re being victims of “bad class balance”; I think we’re just getting closer and closer to realize that combat needs a serious overhaul. Allow me to explain.

We are playing a game where instanced content is all about dealing as much damage as you can if you don’t weant to die. Every encounter in the game (save the Nightmare Fractal and similar, which I’ll cover in a little bit) is all about HP bloated targets which take too long to die and therefore there are two viable methods of dealing with them: skipping or pumping out your damage.

I’m not going to say that you don’t experience this, but I don’t think your analysis is actually correct. The same argument has been made in the game before — especially around the “clone quantify” LFG approach for raids, in which it’s what quantify do, or nothing.

It’s also true that was a super-common position in WoW — for the sake of simplicity, from WotLK onward — regarding their dungeons and raids. In that case, it is actually more possible than in GW2 to simply out-gear the content, and deliver so much damage that you don’t deal with mechanics.

In both cases I’d suggest the popular view isn’t actually as broad-based as people imagine: most people in raids, both in GW2 and WoW, don’t employ the absolute best theoretical DPS builds, and in both cases, clear the content before the strategies and “best in slot” gear/build is known.

It’s also true at the other end: plenty of people complete content without using the “meta” builds, without gearing for absolute maximum damage output, and without using the “best” strategy … by simply mastering the mechanics, and doing them correctly.

It’s not false that “maximum dps == minimum mechanics”, but it’s also not true that this is the only possible way to complete content, or that it is the only way people do complete content.

Aldath.1275:

I don’t think we’re being victims of “bad class balance”; I think we’re just getting closer and closer to realize that combat needs a serious overhaul. Allow me to explain.

We are playing a game where instanced content is all about dealing as much damage as you can if you don’t weant to die. Every encounter in the game (save the Nightmare Fractal and similar, which I’ll cover in a little bit) is all about HP bloated targets which take too long to die and therefore there are two viable methods of dealing with them: skipping or pumping out your damage. No one stops anymore to kill the mobs unless it’s completely necessary, and being honest, maybe less than half the current players actually know how to properly do skips, but this isn’t something that SHOULD happen, it’s just terrible game design.

For me classes are good as they are. I don’t call this last patch a “Power Nerf” but an adjustment. Condition damage is weak against mob groups but very effective against large HP single targets, which makes sense! However only the classes are tunned up/down and the enemies stay exactly the same. Raids are pushing this kind of mentality if “kill it faster” with the enrage timers. Tho many of us have defended raids as being content “easily completed by anyone in any build”, this couldn’t be further from the truth… Raids are all DPS checks with mechanics; mechanics that even raiding guilds try to ignore in order to deal damage. It is still all about beating a piñata to death while ignoring the rest of the fight. Imagine a raid without the timer, and now we could be talking about more viable builds that go beyond pure DPS.

The current “meta” shines for being very unaccessible to new players or more casual ones. It’s riddiculous that HoT stats are all gated behind expensive crafting, even on exotic quality, while the rest of the game’s gear can be easily acquired by spending Karma (a long time useless resource it would seem) and treading with others. You can’t just walk into a Vendor and get exotic Viper’s, you have to either craft or do extremely niche things to get it! This locks some people into the “This is your first job but you have to be experienced first” cycle. Imagine a Power Build Reaper who wants to farm Ascended Gear on Fractals; he’ll be kicked because he isn’t a Condition Reaper, but he can’t be a Condition Reaper yet, since he must get that gear.

GW2 has two “brothers” who do some things way better: Wildstar and The Secret World. Both games have an extremely similar focus on exploration, non-linearity of quests, and the combat on both games is pretty much a copy paste of the GW2 combat engine, yet both games manage to do something good with it.

Wildstar takes advantage of the game’s dynamic combat by making every single mob have an attack pattern and AOEs like those seen on the Nightmare Fractal; that instance is an example of how dungeons in Wildstar are like, every one taking advantage on the class’s strengths. Classes in Wildstar, like in GW2, are multi-purpose, however the game lets you know their roles beforehand (As a Medic, you can be both DPS and Healer, as a warrior, you can be DPS or Tank, etc.), and changing roles on the fly make things more dynamic and adaptable to whatever is needed at the moment. In the end Wildtar and its raids (which are arguably some of the best on the MMO industry) go beyond just pumping out damage, opening its doors to even more class and build variety and depending on player skill and knowledge of the encounter’s mechanics; they have you moving arround using your skills, pulling enemy aggro, using special skills to trigger mechanics, etc. GW2 is a supposedly dynamic game which has a laughably static combat: you have dodges, you have jumps and dashes, yet everythign is reduced to combining the best boons with the best static field combinations. Yes, maybe removing stuff like combo feels would remove some “depth” but hell, it would allow a lot more things to become less reliant on spamming them stacked on a corner.

Well, the first problem is that you think classes and balance are great to begin with… Both are not, sorry, and you can’t improve combat if classes need a lot of work and balancing needs to be treated more seriously… They all go hand in hand.

Also, I highly doubt most people will read through your thread to decipher what improvements you want to the combat in gw2. Try making some bullet points, with brief descriptions, instead of just using a wall of text to get your ideas out.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/How-to-Give-Good-Feedback-1

All they need to do about combat is remove the PVE cleave auto atack spamway from the game :|

This would be a good start, then reduce the cleave zone radious for the rest of the skills that cleave.

this would help reduce the lag as well.

Kind of related to combat redesigned i also cant think of where else to post this ideal.

Changes all icd to a charge system but have though charges used up per attk / attk pules (making them aoe and if you miss you still lose 1 charge). At the same time add in charges to non icd effect that are kind of op because they do not have them (chilling death).

This will keep that burst ppl love but make it so you have time in-between that burst a kind of cd like effect. This will add in more counter play to seeing a person with these charges and more bating of holding your charges. It will remove a bit of the rng of icd and give players a bit more control over there attks.

A sport isn’t flawed because the top players focus on things that turn it into a less interesting competition Cycling is still really interesting for the vast majority of cyclists, even if all the top competitors turn it into a combination of engineering & biology (not to mention all the doping).

The best players are always going to turn things into an efficient numbers game. The game developer is always going to try to challenge those efforts, but they are primarily going to be concerned with keeping things balanced for everyone else, too.

Aeolus.3615:

All they need to do about combat is remove the PVE cleave auto atack spamway from the game :|

This would be a good start, then reduce the cleave zone radious for the rest of the skills that cleave.

this would help reduce the lag as well.

Cleave on auto has big impact because AA in gw is a lot of your damage output, unlike in other games I played. In fact in GW 80% of skills are AoE, cuz of cleave, which do 100% damage to secondary targets. In WoW maybe 20% skills are AoE and they usually are made for AoE and usually are weak or at best semi-effective in single target combat. Here every skill is as good for AoE as it is good for single target.

Furthermore, from my experience with MMOs, I’d say, that problem can be dynamic buff system. In fact it’s awesome and introduces a lot of co-play, but through might, fury, vulnerabitlity (idk if there’s something else, had a looong break from gw) you can easily double your DPS and you can manage 100% uptime, I haven’t seen something like this before. And my bet is, that changing buff system would have biggest impact on combat, dunno if good or bad, but then maybe more builds would be viable, and I’m not talking about trash stats, because everyone knows that in every game people are taking the most optimized build and stats, as they are most effective. Inb4 why should you raid without timer with 10x clerics and fight for 30 minutes when you can beat the same within 5 minutes using zerks, still no timer, though xD

However, imo combat change is not that important, if at all. Bigger problem is, that some classes can be completely unplayable. I understand one class being better than the other, but making class non viable as any role in MMO is misunderstanding (necro for 3 years since start, don’t know equivalent which is up to date). And the biggest problem is progression/endgame, but it’s another thing. Inb4 another ascended set and legendary grind is neither progression nor endgame

Sly.9518:

The biggest flaw in your whole argument is that you are assuming Raids are the main endgame content, which is the furthest things from the truth, Raids are only there for the relatively small subset of people that wanted challenging coordinated for organized groups.

the combat is relatively fine across the board in PvE content, especially now that they are making it more unfriendly to stack and Spam like Gw2 at launch and before raids were ever conceived, Raids and like newer Fractals get away from the stack and Spam by forcing players to move there is no more stacking outside of old abandoned content like dungeons and in Open world in core Tyria.

Gw2 shouldn’t be changed because of your vision of what Raids should be since it is content designed only for a fraction of the Player base, and shouldn’t have a large impact on the gameplay outside of Raids, look at all the Salt that came up from HoT when it first released and open world had an iota of challenge, and gen look at all the subsequent nerfs to said content to appease the masses that only want to stack and Spam 1.

I disagree about combat. Your forgetting that gw2 skills have multiple effects per skill which you cannot say about other mmorpgs, I do not think I’ve seen other mmorpgs with so many functions pet skill. They are versatile, your blaming the combat when it’s not the combat, your sayingthat it is the world and it’s mechanics if I understand your concerns correctly.

Also I played the secret world and regardless of mechanics it is not that different, you can cheese in the secret world as well and roles are still not as rigid was your making it out to be. However builds where not all that fun in dungeons as cc was only the tanks job because it caused to much agro for example. There was see debuffing but in the end it was still a do meta game.

Ryou.2398:

Sly.9518:

The biggest flaw in your whole argument is that you are assuming Raids are the main endgame content, which is the furthest things from the truth, Raids are only there for the relatively small subset of people that wanted challenging coordinated for organized groups.

the combat is relatively fine across the board in PvE content, especially now that they are making it more unfriendly to stack and Spam like Gw2 at launch and before raids were ever conceived, Raids and like newer Fractals get away from the stack and Spam by forcing players to move there is no more stacking outside of old abandoned content like dungeons and in Open world in core Tyria.

Gw2 shouldn’t be changed because of your vision of what Raids should be since it is content designed only for a fraction of the Player base, and shouldn’t have a large impact on the gameplay outside of Raids, look at all the Salt that came up from HoT when it first released and open world had an iota of challenge, and gen look at all the subsequent nerfs to said content to appease the masses that only want to stack and Spam 1.

I disagree about combat. Your forgetting that gw2 skills have multiple effects per skill which you cannot say about other mmorpgs, I do not think I’ve seen other mmorpgs with so many functions pet skill. They are versatile, your blaming the combat when it’s not the combat, your sayingthat it is the world and it’s mechanics if I understand your concerns correctly.

Also I played the secret world and regardless of mechanics it is not that different, you can cheese in the secret world as well and roles are still not as rigid was your making it out to be. However builds where not all that fun in dungeons as cc was only the tanks job because it caused to much agro for example. There was see debuffing but in the end it was still a do meta game.

Think you quoted the wrong person there, I never mentioned or referred to secret world….

Can’t agree with everything the OP has written but most of it.

Hands on the chest, the Raids in GW2 are absolutely no masterwork, they are just cheap Dungeons 2.0 with more diffucult enemies and permanent time/DPS pressure to make them artificially more difficult this way due to the designers being clueless how to design otherwise challenging content, because the people that are responsible for Raids are not part of the dev team from day 1 on, they just got recruited later to the team, once the decision was made, that GW2 should get raids, which was basicalyl also the moment they decided to abandon Dungeon Support and focus on just only on Fractals..

The Combat System in GW2 needs no redesign, its the various parts of the Combat System that need rebalance and readjustments based on the lots of skill and trait changes Anet made in the last 4 years while ignoring 95% of all the times completely all the rest of the gameplay mechanics of the combat system, that they need rebalances and adjustments as well too and not only just skills and traits only.

The whole game still suffers until today from the massive condition system change from 23rd June of 2015, because Anet hasn’t done anything at all until today to adjust this terrible balance patch that was just the start of everything that made it for HoT impossible to begin good, because the later added Elite Specs made everything just worser, because they got implemented at the worst possible moment, when the game was shaken still from the imbalances of the June Patch, because anet simpyl doesn#t care about that fact, they just cared about to rease HoT in their time plan, to make quick money, because the Gemstore simply is too weak to finance the game completely alone, cause the game has lost constantly active players over the time and all actions that anet did in the past, like Mega Serves, Asia release, Free to play doesn’t stop this player exodus, it just slowed it down.
Therefore shoveled Anet with their many bad decisions themself already too deep their own grave by ignoring too much/long WvW and their penetrant focus on E-Sports which drove this game into its ruin – we all saw into wherein all this has lead now, that the ESL has officially dissed Anet and kicked GW2 from their list now, because they think that this game is not worth it due to its terrible balance state to be used as E-Sport title.

thats the imprerssion that people had from day 1 on already, but Anet kep of pressing the game into their E-Sport hype and wasted alot of money on this E-Sport witch hunt they had, that would have been better used for rebalancing and readjusting the important gameplay mechanics of the combat system and focusing on more content for WvW and Pvp in form of more new maps earlier.

The best thign ANet could do now as soon as possible to make things better is to begin first with a complete overhaul of the Boon and the Condition System.
After doign this making adjustments to Skills and Traits again based on the new boons and Condition System, then rebalance the Health System and getting rid of the outdated 3 class type balance system and change the balancing over to a class individual system, where the max health for each class gets individually balanced, regardless to which class type the class belongs to.

Because the outdated health system is still under the 2012er state of balance, under which all the power creep that we have now didn’t exist.

Once that is done has ANet to rebalance and rework the Attirbute System and implement more defensive mechanics into that that have also synergetic effects lik the offensive ones, so that offensive and defensive attirubtes become finalyl equally good, because the current system works obviously with favor on offensive attributes, just out of the fear, that an equally balanced attribute system could lead into defensive playstyles dominating the PVP leading into longer and stale battles potentially if too defensive groups should meet on each other.
But the counterside is even more boring and stupid, if gameplay becomes too offensive with powercreep, if you can kill enemies too quickly so that you even have no chance to react at all, because conditions and CC spam are just so out of control now, that combats just make no fun anymore!! Thats Anets biggest problem of the current combat system since 2015 and HoT just added oil to that fire with alot more CC spam due to the whole expansion being focused alot more on CC gameplay with the addtion of Breakbars (which should be implemented for players as well as counter to all this CC spam, CC should be coordinated gameplay, not spam gameplay!!)

@Orpheal

Dungeons were completely abandoned years before Raids were even a contemplation……. just so you know

Aldath.1275:

snip

I feel that more ARPG mechanics could really help.
Elemental damage and elemental resistance.

• Physical damage -> bleed, mitigated by physical resistance
• Water damage -> chilled -> freeze, mitigated by cold resistance
• Fire damage -> burning, mitigated by fire resistance
• Lightning damage -> shock (interrupt), mitigated by lightning resistance
• Poison damage -> poisoned, mitigated by poison resistance

Player progression is too predetermined, as a class will have all aspects of that class unlocked.

• Player choice on attribute points per level (more focused characters)
• Hero points spent in a class based tree, nodes containing skills, specializations, and attributes gained through progressing down various paths (resistances and damage type increases as well) (elite specializations accessible through the tree). Reduction of hero points.
• Proficiency system with weapon types to unlock alternet weapon skills.

Equipment is very bland, the pool prefixes and suffixes, and the lack of unique equipment in an ARPG game.

• Gear and Unique gear should be able to define a character
• Gear should be more than 3 attribute increases and an upgrade slot.
• Gear farming should always be an important goal.
• Unique weapons should have some alternet unique skills available to them.

Player break bar systems.

• Toughness: Increases push back, interrupt, launch, and knockdown break bar.
• Vitality: break bar to avoid damaging conditions.

In my opinion one of the core issues with combat is that there is too many effects and you can’t see clearly what’s happening, sometimes it just feels like you’re being hit by invisible random things.
Too many flashy effects if you ask me.

thats due to the game having too many conditions and boons, than it is good for this game.
thats why i am demanding the redesign of the boon and Condition system first, because that would have the most impact on the combat system now and would make class balance also easier, if Anet would for first reduce the effect spam of the games combat system by reducing the total amount of boons and conditions – especialyl conditions.

Alot of the effects that currently work as conditions should be reworked just class specific Trait effects or skill effects. That would not only help thespecific classes to make them more unique and to strenthen their build roles in certain aspects, but it would massivwely help also the game balance, because those mechanics could be kept then easier in check, if they have to be overviewed more on only specific classes, not for all classes having access directly or indirectly to the effects, because it are boons or conditions to which all classes can have access to either through skills, traits or if these don#t help, then with the help of upgrades of either sigils or runes that can give classes access to boons and conditions that these classes normally wouldn’t have by their class design, which is the reason ,why Anet needs to rebalance more oftenly on a same pattern upgrades as well too. Instead Anet ignored them for mostly 4 years!!

The last balance patch finally did for once again something on upgrades a tiny bit.
But far away from what would be really needed to bring them all back on the right balanced path. What Anet did with the last balance patch was mostly adjusting stuff only for PvP nerfing a bit the E-Specs for PvP, while keeping the rest of the game away from the Nerf-Bat, which is good, because thats what Anet should do basically constantly, balancince the game modes more individually per mode, so that no mode ever suffers for the changes over an other game mode and its overdue, that anet reduces the E-Spec Powercreep from HoT.

GW2 would run well enough, if the game has maximum 8 condtions and boons, anything over this number is obsolete and should be reworked into skills and trait effects.
The game has too many damaging conditions. GW2 needs not more than 3 damaging conditions.

Burning, Poison and a reworked Cripple with merged Torment is all what GW2 needs.
Bleeding and Confusion onm top of that is too much, with the Reaper Anet turned even Chill now in a damaging condition!! Seriousl,y if that goes on, we will have soon all conditions turned into damaging conditions under the right situations with the right used classes7specs/builds and that simply can’t be right, nor good for this game and its state of balance.

Enough is enough with effect spam and the time has come, that ANet needs to reduce it.
it can’t be true, that Anet wastes ressources and cripples the effect spam on so pointless things like “skill noise” and degenerates the visual effects of our skilsl into ugly garbage, while ignoring the true problems of too much noise in this game that is too much skill effects spam coming from have too many boons and conditions that players spam non stop, because boons and conditions can be stripped and removed also way too easily, so that you need to spam them constantly to make sure, that you have them active, when you need them either to survive in combat, or to make enough dps pressure in combat to win your fights…

The point is also, that anet will add more and more E-Specs, each new E-Spec is also the potential for new gameplay mechanics being added that will become part of the combat system.
HoT added with the first set new conditions and boons (Slow/Alacrity).
We will most likely see with the next expansion eventually again more new effects…
If Anet adds with the next expansion again more new effects with new boons and condtions, without reducing first the total amount of both, then this will lead only too more chaos in the future and combats becoming harder to balance so more effects Anet adds to the combat system, without making needed adjustments first.

Aeolus.3615:

All they need to do about combat is remove the PVE cleave auto atack spamway from the game :|

This would be a good start, then reduce the cleave zone radious for the rest of the skills that cleave.

this would help reduce the lag as well.

Removing cleave from autoattacks would ruin the combat system and make fighting more than one thing at a time tedious at best. I don’t know how you still don’t see that.