Guild Wars 2

TLDR:
Reading about the adjustments to “qualifying” for loot on monsters, I realized something. It was described that “qualification” for loot depended on the damage done to the monster. This brought up my first memory of disillusionment with GW2 and revealed what I think is the true basis for getting rid of the MMO “holy trinity.” It is this: because measuring group contribution by damage dealt is far easier than accounting for heals, buffs, debuffs, revives, and cures, GW2 shoehorns all players into damage dealing roles at the expense of meaningful support roles and synergistic group play.

Full Explanation:
My first memory of disillusionment in GW2 came fairly early on. At first, everything was wonderful. Mob “tagging” was gone! Everybody is encouraged to help everybody else! You get XP for reviving fallen allies! Then came a particularly tough fight against a Champion. He was slaying allies left and right. I got a few hits in, but spent the majority of the time helping revive my fallen allies and buff them with my warrior shouts and banners. This was what GW2 was about – great exploration and players being encouraged to work together – to view each and every person as a true ally and not a competitor for mobs and resources.

After a lengthy battle, at last the enemy was slain! But then I realized – I had received no credit for the kill. No experience, no event completion medal, no loot. Meanwhile, the players I had helped to revive and who gleefully went back to damaging the boss were fully rewarded for their efforts – efforts that I had made possible by bringing them back to the fight. Had I contributed? Absolutely. Did I have fun? Yes! Yet the game did not think I was deserving of reward. I realized then that GW2 was less about working as a team and more about individual play. It was not about playing how you want to play – it was about damaging the boss.

Ultimately, in GW2, the group activity that is the most “fun” according to the developers and the only viable option for achieving personal rewards and growth – damage dealing – also happens to be the group activity that least involves other members of the group. It contributes to the feeling that GW2’s groups are less about groups working together and more about gathering reasonably decent players who can individually achieve high enough performance that victory is achieved.

And that brings us to the truth about the trinity. The true innovation in GW2 is not the removal of the trinity. The removal of the trinity limits players by funneling everybody in the damage dealing role. The true innovations are individual loot tables and unlimited mob tagging and how they come together in GW2 with dynamic events. It is the fact that anywhere from 1 to 100 players can be beating on a bad guy and still benefit from experience and loot without being grouped. It creates a sense that everybody is working together in a way other games (at least those that I have played) have never done before. It fosters roving bands of players that patrol a zone, going from event to event, as in the glory days of Orr. It is a unique and wonderful experience in gaming.

Yet how do you achieve that experience and still adequately compensate players for their efforts? You need some measure by which to gauge player participation in events and boss kills. You cannot just award loot to all members of a party, because partying is not mandatory. You cannot just award loot based on proximity to events, because that that could reward players standing around AFK and not truly participating. There are really just 2 options: (1) damage dealt; (2) group contribution.

Damage dealt is simple. Create a formula where you have the boss’s total health, the number of participating players, and the damage each player contributes. Any players meeting the right criteria get loot. It is as simple as that.

Group contribution is far harder. You have to measure not just damage dealt, but how every revive, buff, debuff, cure, and heal helps increase the overall damage and success of the group as a whole. Of course, we all understand that these things are meaningful and fun – there are skills and entire builds based on “support” roles. Many people, including myself, yearn for more meaningful support roles in GW2.

So my theory is simple. GW2 developers opted for the simple formula – damage dealt. To make it work, they eliminated the “holy trinity” and shoehorned all players into damage dealing roles. It was the only way to make their very cool, very fun, innovative system of working together without grouping work well without requiring complex computations for rewarding players.

Health bars filled could be added to damage dealt pretty easily. They just don’t do it.

yes, they removed the holy trinity so that it would be easier to calculate drops
kitten /p>

I actually was discussing the damage = loot problem this morning, the problem is we don’t actually know how damage interacts with loot if simply doing 1 damage to Jormag gives you the same chances of an exotic than say a glass canon or if the game has a second hidden ranking system which awards loot along those lines. Playing through dungeons seems to suggest dungeon bosses do rank players and award exp differently than the visible way events do (bronze, silver, gold). If damage is really the single major factor that decides drops from dragons and bosses ( we already know magic find affects champions / looted bodies) then the system needs extensive work because non damage builds are useful and often contribute massively to boss fights (giving group fury or Aoe heals can speed up dungeon times considerably).

doing 1 damage to jormag won’t be enuff. I’ve zoned in with just enough time to hit him about 10xs and got no loot.

It not the more damage you do, the better lot you get. It you gotta do a certain amount of damage to be able to get the loot.

Which I am a bunker/support build in PvE and I always do enough damage to get loot. So I spend a lot of time supporting others and tanking the mob and boss.

While not attacking much at all.

yet ive always done enough to gt lot.

I’m deeply disappointed that healing and rezzes don’t count; in the Manifesto one is lead to believe that it was equal to dealing damage and you would be equally rewarded. Surely Areanet could find a way to put this in their formula, because it is easy to just let other players die and stay dead so you get more damage dealt for the loot table; not that my personal ethics would let me.

EsLafiel.4517:

It not the more damage you do, the better lot you get. It you gotta do a certain amount of damage to be able to get the loot.

Which I am a bunker/support build in PvE and I always do enough damage to get loot. So I spend a lot of time supporting others and tanking the mob and boss.

While not attacking much at all.

yet ive always done enough to gt lot.

Funny, I do enough damage to get loot and ALWAYS, CONSISTENTLY, for months on end, get whites and blues while my buddies get 6 ectos a run.

Considering how most pugs in dungeons actually have no DPS and thus are not contributing to the fight, yet get the same rewards as those of us who are glass cannoning specifically to fill in for those people, I’d say the opposite needs to be true. In fact, loot drops should scale better with damage dealt, and it needs to be more obvious so people actually know they need to contribute.

A simple bronze/silver/gold reward upon killing a boss would be sufficient. Deal 10% of the boss’s maximum HP for bronze, 15% for silver, 20% for gold. Seems reasonable. Also, make it visible to all players in the party, so you can see who’s dead weight and who isn’t.

Really, please. I’m sick of being the only DPS in every pug.

getting loot because you did the most damage is not the best most honest way of handling it. there are alot of little things that go into these fights like using the cannons killing adds and rezzing players that should ALL contribute to the process. It’s a really bad design in any game to require the most dps out of a situation to determine who gets the best loot. we have too many childish players ignoring everything as it is in these DE’s.

You can’t remove something that was never there in the first place. The lack of trinity is not the issue. I do however feel bad for you about the whole event where you were reviving people and not getting rewarded. The issue is actually how rewards are handled in dynamic events and how they calculate contributions.

Hi.

I am a supporting guardian.

When i do WvW, i probably get 2/10 of the lootbags my DPSing guildies get. Oh well, atleast i keep people alive for them to get the loot. Why do i deserve it anyways?

/sarcasm off

i think the best fix would be to count healing = damage contibution for the loot. person A & C deals 10k damage to the boss gets an rare, but person B was healing and rezing Person A and C and healed 20k’s worth of damage gets an exotic for his efforts.

Guanglai Kangyi.4318:

Considering how most pugs in dungeons actually have no DPS and thus are not contributing to the fight, yet get the same rewards as those of us who are glass cannoning specifically to fill in for those people, I’d say the opposite needs to be true. In fact, loot drops should scale better with damage dealt, and it needs to be more obvious so people actually know they need to contribute.

A simple bronze/silver/gold reward upon killing a boss would be sufficient. Deal 10% of the boss’s maximum HP for bronze, 15% for silver, 20% for gold. Seems reasonable. Also, make it visible to all players in the party, so you can see who’s dead weight and who isn’t.

Really, please. I’m sick of being the only DPS in every pug.

Yeah we really need sats or rewards that tell us who is the best healer, the biggest boon giver, the most dps, the best tank, etc. with out these your group is left with little info on the quality of their build beyond token counts and Ctrl clicks in the hero panels which of course don’t include Mr. Has 25 stacks of might etc.

zeromius.1604:

I do however feel bad for you about the whole event where you were reviving people and not getting rewarded. The issue is actually how rewards are handled in dynamic events and how they calculate contributions.

That is exactly what I meant.

I don’t think the developer post about damage contribution was meant to imply that more damage = better loot. My post is about how basic game design hinges on damage dealt, which shifts the focus too far away from support roles (in my opinion), and how it really does not have to be that way. But to make support roles more meaningful is a more difficult task given the rest of the game’s design.

OP you failed to understand that in this game there is no specific pidgeon-holing because we all play all roles.
You are the tank, the healer and the DPS at the same time.
Go ahead and show me a fractal 30 without your team dodging, healing and using defensive CDs, just pure DPS team.
That, is a “DPS only” team, and it wouldn’t work.

Simply put all classes have built-in 3 roles.
It’s not just DPS all classes also heal through 6/regen and tank through defensive CDs.
You want a game where every player has only 1 role instead of 3?
Traditional MMOs are that way —->
We have so many of them, why trying to turn the only game that lets you be all roles into another pidgeon-holing fest?

So now everyone must make glass cannon builds to get loot? Which is strange because my glass cannon Ranger still get blue crap consistently…

I get that everybody is the tank, healer, and DPS all at the same time. My point is simply that damage being the qualifier for loot shows that DPS is #1 and the tank, healer, support role is secondary at best. DPS is the least interactive role in a group because it largely comes down to you and the bad guy, and you just have to hope that your team mates know how to properly use their own tank, healer, support skills, because your own aren’t going to be much help to them. That’s because, by the basic game design of damage being the qualifier for loot, everybody needs high damage at the expense of support skills. So support skills are severely gimped in favor of damage, effectively “pidgeon-holing” us into a DPS role with strong self-buff/heal skills.

OP, I tend to disagree on your causation theory, i.e., that they relied on damage alone because it was easiest. As a programmer I know it is not all that difficult to add in another factor or two to consider and certainly nothing you’d design combat around..

However, I do agree with your sentiments. A successful fight involves healing and other support. I think one of the issues that arises out of the abandonment of the trinity is meaningful roles in combat. I approach it from a larger human perspective assuming that what we do in games is what we do in the rest of life. We are creators yet we don’t create ex nihilo, we create after ourselves. Assume a task-oriented human activity. Even a scavenger hunt will serve our purposes. What is the first thing that occurs? Roles are defined and tasks assigned. One person commits to X item or searching Y area. Why? Because it’s inefficient for everybody to just go for it and do everything. As you go up the complexity scale you find the same dynamic. In an operating room you find a group gathered together around an objective. How do we do it? In highly defined roles executed in standard ways. We do it this way for many reasons. Certainly it is the most efficient way. It also yields the highest chance for success in an activity. It also gives us meaning and a sense of contribution. In short, we do it this way because this is the human way of doing it.

This is what I believe is missing in GW2 combat. We have a very primitive implementation of human group behavior. Basically, it’s the berserker battlefield where everyone goes for it and does whatever is right in their own eyes. Roles at least organized effort under the trinity and gave players a sense of meaningful contribution. I’m not arguing for the trinity here. But, I do recognize a weakness in GW2 combat in terms of meaningful roles. One step toward meaning here would simply be to account for the contribution of the various methods of contribution and explicitly add them to the determination of reward for participation.

Guanglai Kangyi.4318:

Considering how most pugs in dungeons actually have no DPS and thus are not contributing to the fight, yet get the same rewards as those of us who are glass cannoning specifically to fill in for those people, I’d say the opposite needs to be true. In fact, loot drops should scale better with damage dealt, and it needs to be more obvious so people actually know they need to contribute.

A simple bronze/silver/gold reward upon killing a boss would be sufficient. Deal 10% of the boss’s maximum HP for bronze, 15% for silver, 20% for gold. Seems reasonable. Also, make it visible to all players in the party, so you can see who’s dead weight and who isn’t.

Really, please. I’m sick of being the only DPS in every pug.

Ok yea because yours is a perfect solution – Making every player to go glass cannon in order to chase the rewards will definately work out for the best /sarc.

There was a guy in one of my last dung runs that was a pure water ele. he didnt switch attunements at all but stayed as the party healer (or at least as much as you can heal in gw2).
I thanked that guy specifically because without his constant heals and insta react rez’s the run wouldnt have been so smooth. Ok it wasnt the fastest iv done but we didnt wipe once and in a PUG things like that are extremely important. With the traditional mindset of some players the ragequits from 1 wipe were beginning to test my patience.

I dont understand why people think that DPS is most important. I really dont understand why people who DPS think they are carrying others that are support. The same argument could be made from either side of the fence.

Supporting needs to count for participation, I don’t even care about a few exploiters, it’s a quality of life fix for the many legitimate support minded players

I have to agree that not counting other contributions really gimps GW2 strategy of encouraging social interaction and grouping, especially in battles where all efforts are required to succeed. I have an elementalist and when I run in our guild WvWvW group, I always stick to the air attunement for the party speed buff and then switch to the water attunement to assist with heals and such.

I think GW2 lost out on a greater game because I feel I HAVE to do dps in order to get anything remotely resembling decent loot. Most of the time while doing the events in the world, I receive a lot of porous bones, trophy flowers, trophy pebbles, etc., maybe a few blues and once in a while a green (usually all lower level); all of which my character cannot use.

Pretty disappointing. The game is beginning to make me lose interest. I don’t get that thrill I used to because no matter my effort, my rewards are not rewarding.

ok, you are mixing up a lot of things here.
There is a point about kill claim benefiting DD more. But you are adding in other things. It really has nothing to do with the trinity or lack thereof.

Also, the way those rewards were figured out seems like they were different for a group, IE in a group after less tagging effort, your whole groups contribution was figured. IE support focused players in a group have to do a lot less damage to tag. This is probably why loot feels better in a party, because you are getting full loot contribution.

Anyhow, yeah support and non damage types appear to get screwed when it comes to credit, this is mostly only an issue with super large events, in smaller groups its a lot more likely you do enough damage to get credit, since it appears to be comparing %s done to the monster.

Its very likely they never really realized the effect until the karka event, and even then they didnt realize the extent to which it effected drops, got to remember, their live team is fairly small in comparison, how often do they have 30 people at one event, and then how much data can they even get to see how loot is being effected.

So yeah, its messed up, but i hardly think it was intentional, they thought they tuned the damage contribution low enough that even a support chr would get credit, they consider the groups overall contribution in a group, they probably thought that would be enough. Outside of large events (and possibly bugged situations where others have done damage and failed before you got there) it really is enough. Dont think this is intentional.

Guanglai Kangyi.4318:

Considering how most pugs in dungeons actually have no DPS and thus are not contributing to the fight, yet get the same rewards as those of us who are glass cannoning specifically to fill in for those people, I’d say the opposite needs to be true. In fact, loot drops should scale better with damage dealt, and it needs to be more obvious so people actually know they need to contribute.

A simple bronze/silver/gold reward upon killing a boss would be sufficient. Deal 10% of the boss’s maximum HP for bronze, 15% for silver, 20% for gold. Seems reasonable. Also, make it visible to all players in the party, so you can see who’s dead weight and who isn’t.

Really, please. I’m sick of being the only DPS in every pug.

Yes, that sounds like a fantastic idea. We’ll have pure glass-cannon thief/warrior groups and they’ll speed through the dungeons up until a boss knocks everyone out with an AOE and the party wipes. After all, why would anyone want to sacrifice loot in favor of keeping said glass-cannons alive?
Trust me, if PUGs stopped going for survivability, your experiences would be much, much worse. As it stands, it just takes a little longer.

Unless that post was meant to be a parody of players you have encountered. It sounds so extreme, it might well be.

+1 the OP

I am so sick and tired of not getting any loot in DE situations because I can’t do the amount of dmg that other classes can do. The fact that dmg done is the way rewards are distributed is really stupid since some of us want to be support.

We get punished for ressing and throwing up boons instead of going full zerker glass. It sucks!

I’ve paid attention to mob tagging and loot for a while now in Cursed Shore and these things I know to be true:

1. MF does effect the loot you get, incredibly so.
2. You get better loot in a party.
3. The more dmg you do, the mroe mobs you tag / get loot on.
4. The faster you do dmg, the more likely you are to tag. For example, if I run into a group when the mobs are half dead and use whirling axe on a warrior, I’m not going to be able to loot the same amount of mobs I would have if I’d caught them at 100% health and I was the first person to hit them.

I’ve tested this on my mesmer and warrior. I never bring my mesmer to cursed shore anymore because there is no point. She hardly ever gets tags and if she does, they’re whites. Meanwhile my dual axed / GS warrior gets 10+ rares a day. Doing the same thing.

This needs to stop. This is broken and needs a fix. I really hope whatever they are addressing takes supporting classes into account.

@Snow White

10 + rares / day?….in CS?…..

Guanglai Kangyi.4318:

Considering how most pugs in dungeons actually have no DPS and thus are not contributing to the fight, yet get the same rewards as those of us who are glass cannoning specifically to fill in for those people, I’d say the opposite needs to be true. In fact, loot drops should scale better with damage dealt, and it needs to be more obvious so people actually know they need to contribute.

A simple bronze/silver/gold reward upon killing a boss would be sufficient. Deal 10% of the boss’s maximum HP for bronze, 15% for silver, 20% for gold. Seems reasonable. Also, make it visible to all players in the party, so you can see who’s dead weight and who isn’t.

Really, please. I’m sick of being the only DPS in every pug.

Odd. I’ve never seen a PUG with no DPS. I’d love to see a video of one of the these mythical groups to see how they manage to get through. I’m guessing it’s all about Retaliation/Regeneration?

Nonsense aside, I’m guessing you’re someone who doesn’t actually pay much attention to what’s going on around you, or what’s happening on your display. You would tend not to notice all the boons being dropped on you or the combo fields being generated at your feet, by those lazy, slacking scrubs you run with. I’d also guess that you’re far too focused on your own skill bar to actually see that the rest of your group is typically dishing out plenty of DPS, while also buffing the rest of your group and CCing/weakening your enemies.

But I guess that’s why you’re the hero and everyone else are just sycophants, standing in the shadow of your cosmic uberness.

Guanglai Kangyi.4318:

Considering how most pugs in dungeons actually have no DPS and thus are not contributing to the fight, yet get the same rewards as those of us who are glass cannoning specifically to fill in for those people, I’d say the opposite needs to be true. In fact, loot drops should scale better with damage dealt, and it needs to be more obvious so people actually know they need to contribute.

A simple bronze/silver/gold reward upon killing a boss would be sufficient. Deal 10% of the boss’s maximum HP for bronze, 15% for silver, 20% for gold. Seems reasonable. Also, make it visible to all players in the party, so you can see who’s dead weight and who isn’t.

Really, please. I’m sick of being the only DPS in every pug.

What a marvelous idea. Let’s remove what small amounts of complexity GW2 has in build choices. Let’s remove stats other than armor and weapon damage from gear. Since everyone would have glass cannon stats, just give everyone glass cannon stats. Also, let’s remove stats from traits — turn traits into just another talent tree. You’ve really nailed what this game needs. After all, if everyone should be doing x dps, why not just make everyone the same?

+1 OP. GW2 PvE is FAR too much about DPS. It’s so much about DPS that the more utility classes such as Ranger, Necro and Engineer often get denied from groups. Now someone may argument that getting denied from groups is problem with people not the game. Well it isn’t. You can change the game but you can’t change the people.

Now speaking as a ranger, imho my class is pretty well balanced. Sure the spirits could do with some improvement and the pets can be stupid sometimes but overall my class can do anything it’s supposed to. The problem arises when people compare my balanced class to non-balanced class such as Warrior. I remember Anet saying Warrior was the only class they’re completely happy with. That was many moons ago and yet Warrior is STILL the only class that will never get denied from a group. uhum.. Got a little sidetracked there

Back to the subject at hand. At release I was playing elementalist. Elementalist was descriped as the versatile class, so ofc when seeing hordes of mobs attack peninent and shelter (who had max 5 people, all wearing greens and yellows, doing them at the time) I used my AoE chill to help out my comrades. After that I proceed to do some supportive dmg. What happens is that by chilling the mob I saved a warriors life and then that warrior dealt so much damage to the mobs that I was not qualified for the kills. Well, at that point I thought it was just an oversight and will be fixed soon. But here I am today, reading how getting loot is STILL all about DPS race.

Since the second week after release I’ve been feeling more and more like the game is pushing me to roll warrior. It saddens me as warrior is the dullest class to play in any mmo I’ve ever played.

tl:dr

Please Anet, don’t force everyone to roll a warrior just to get groups for dungeons. Make bosses (and PvE in general) more about utility than DPS race. Also make support, control and conditions applied (as in you applied 5 stack of bleed = loot even if the mob died too fast to take much damage from them) count for loot too*.

*Necros using epidemic like this doesn’t differ much from warriors using cleave damage. But balance as you see necessary.

Edit:

This post is 100% about PvE and ofc PvP needs a completely different balancing .