Guild Wars 2

Why is different damage types not in the game?

What do I mean with damages types? It’s really simple, let’s say that you’re up against the Megadestroyer, which is a huge fiery effigy, and you cast a firestorm on him and applies full damage. This makes no sense. The Megadestroyer should inflict fire damage to players and also have more resistance against fire damage. So if you try to do any fire spells or attack against him he will not take full damage. However he does not have that much water resistance so dealing water typed damage is a good idea.

Every damage resistance should of course have a counter damage type. How many damage types and resistance there should be in the game is really up to the devs, but perhaps the generic fire, water, earth, air (and shadow, holy ?). Every NPC and mob does have a resistance table. For example Megadestroyer have a lot of resistance against fire but very little against water, undead have a lot of resistance against water (primary) and earth (secondary) but less against fire and air. This would mix things up more than christmas and make every single fight more interesting. You have to adapt towards your environment, failure to do so will give you a hard time.

How do you adapt? Every spell in the game will have a damage dealing or damage resistance type. To be effective in combat you need to know not only the enemies weakness but also your strengths. The elementalist is a simple example, switch attunements towards what mob you’re up against. This might seem limiting but in my opinion it’s only so slightly considering that most mobs that is not bosses won’t have neither a great variety of resistances nor will they have a lot of resistance in total. It gives you more of a reason to use all different attunements and think about what you’re actually doing. So what about the other classes? Well all spells have a damage dealing or damage resistance type, so even warriors have different “attunements” when choosing weapons and switching between them. The sword for an example can be of fire damage and the shield can be water damage or resistance.

What about PVP? All players have a base resistance of zero in every damage type (it wouldn’t make any sense for players to have resistance). In this way you could just ignore damage types completely in PVP if that’s what the devs want. However I do think that adding damage types in PVP is a great idea. Think of it this way. You see a elementalist casting a firestorm over you allies so you pop your fire aura that gives your allies more fire resistance, and all of a sudden you have turned the tide in battle. This system would bring more complexity to PVP fights, something that I personally think is desperately needed. With more complexity in the game there is more that you can practice on and master. This system will bring that extra complexity into PVP (E-Sport hint hint).

Some final thoughts. It’s a big system that will require a lot of testing and tweaking before it’s perfect. However starting small and limiting the number of fights using this system will make it easier to implement. It’s just easy enough for anyone to understand but hard for everyone to master. The potential is great as you expand into damage bonuses on weapons (enchantments?) and special damage types only found in dungeons and Tyrias darkest corners. I would like to hear your thought on this and why i’ts not in the game.

GW1 had damage types. In fact, some builds were designed around them. However, I agree that they can be complex, and I never fully understood how they worked in GW1.

Wouldn’t this only affect Element a list though? And having an “Elemental Wheel” would mean all elements would have to have equal part damage, healing, utility and movement skills, as at the moment each element represents one of those areas.

For example fighting the megadestroyer as a staff ele in water attunement would suck, because the skills are healing based.

Personally I think it’s too late in the game, it’s something a game needs integrated from the very beginning. If anything I’d prefer weapon damage types of piercing, slashing and blunt, with each doing more/less damage to armour weight categories but even that would probably be awful.

This would screw over every class that isn’t an ele.

One way to implement it could be adding an aura mechanic to all classes which changed the damage type of all of their skills for a certain period of time (i’m thinking in minutes here, not just a crappy few seconds).

How to get the aura is up for discussion; i’m a little against it being via a consumable, because you’ll need inv space for each damage type.

Though this is something else which will need to be kept out of starter zones…

I’ve seen other mmo’s have this and it was rarely a good thing it would bring grief more then anything.

The first thing that came to my mind was the old Ragnaros fire resist gear-gating back in WoW. That was not fun and added no value to the encounter other than a gear grind.

Deifact.3095:

Wouldn’t this only affect Element a list though? And having an “Elemental Wheel” would mean all elements would have to have equal part damage, healing, utility and movement skills, as at the moment each element represents one of those areas.

For example fighting the megadestroyer as a staff ele in water attunement would suck, because the skills are healing based.

Personally I think it’s too late in the game, it’s something a game needs integrated from the very beginning. If anything I’d prefer weapon damage types of piercing, slashing and blunt, with each doing more/less damage to armour weight categories but even that would probably be awful.

In GW1 it didn’t just affect eles because all attacks had a damage type. Physical attacks are divided into slashing, blunt and piercing. But there were also various skills which would change the attack type, for example if a ranger uses flaming arrows they do fire damage.

I think it would make combat more interesting and give players an incentive to vary their builds more, but I also agree that it’s too late to integrate it into the game now. In GW1 it worked not only because of the design of the skills but because you were generally working on a specific quest or missions where you’d be fighting a specific type of enemy so you could plan ahead and use appropriate skills. You’d rarely be roaming around fighting whatever you came across, which is much more common in GW2.

I don’t buy this too advance, too complex mentality. With that Guild Wars 2 is going to end up more like “My little pony” for carebears rather than a great MMO.

You can gradually introduce this system to new players much like any other system in the game. I don’t think that’s a problem. When I started playing wow many years ago I did not understand much at first ( I was a newbie kid). However that did not scare me away, more the opposite. I wanted to get better at the game and learn more about it.

This is not about gear, think of it more like the dodge mechanic. It’s available independent of your character or gear. This system would bring more awareness towards what you actually is fighting against, and require that you think about your attack approach.

Kings.7491:

I don’t buy this too advance, too complex mentality. With that Guild Wars 2 is going to end up more like “My little pony” for carebears rather than a great MMO.

You can gradually introduce this system to new players much like any other system in the game. I don’t think that’s a problem. When I started playing wow many years ago I did not understand much at first ( I was a newbie kid). However that did not scare me away, more the opposite. I wanted to get better at the game and learn more about it.

This is not about gear, think of it more like the dodge mechanic. It’s available independent of your character or gear. This system would bring more awareness towards what you actually is fighting against, and require that you think about your attack approach.

Except it wouldn’t work well in GW2. Let’s take the example of the enemies that are immune to burning. If you’re a guardian, you just basically can’t damage those enemies through conditions because burning is your only condition and you can’t do anything about that.

Stuff like that only works if there’s a high degree of easy-to-access character customization, otherwise it’s more of a straight-up limitation that screws over certain classes or introduces more grind as opposed to a adaptation mechanic.

I’m pretty sure the main reason they didn’t add something like this in is because it would be too similar to having the Trinity. That being certain builds would be needed/demanded for certain encounters. We all know Anet’s stance on that issue.

Meh … It was in GW1 but even after many years of playing it was just there to be ignored most of the time.

Same with piercing/blunt/slashing physical.
Same with local armor values.
Same with separate hit chance for each piece of armor.

There were probably some people who took those things very very seriously but everything worked out fine if you just ignored all of them as well. Most of the time.

Profession Balance would seem much easier without resistances & immunities to damage.

I think Damage Types from GW1 were a great example about how adding complexity to a system doesn’t necessarily make it more interesting or fun. Using fire damage on plant creatures? Pretty straightforward. Use blunt damage instead of piercing damage? Blunt is good against skeletons and week against…Hill Giants? Piercing is bad against skeletons and good against…Um…And chaos damage is…I need to lie down for a while…

I used Winter and Greater Conflagration against Destroyers in GW1, but 90% of the time elements weren’t worth bothering with, in my experience.

Elemental Damage is a staple of the RPG genre, but that means it shows in places where it doesn’t add much. If designers commit to it, and most enemies have a known type that can be played against or around, that’s fun, but it’s unnecessary without that commitment. In GW2’s case, which was designed without, making that commitment would be impractically difficult, and anything less wouldn’t make a meaningful difference.

I really liked damage types in Guild Wars 1 and I was disappointed not to find them in Guild Wars 2. I also liked that you couldn’t use specific conditions on say skeletons, that poison, disease and bleeding wouldn’t work on them. I used them all the time. Shadow damage ftw.

But yeah, I think even in Guild Wars 1 most people didn’t know or care.

Different damage types really made some parts of GW1 more interesting.
Undead took DOUBLE damage from Holy damage, and Shadow damage ignored armor and character level.

Now, I agree that it wasn’t always a priory for most people. Usually it only came into play in certain situations, like taking Winter to kill titans, or bringing a party of smiters in Shards of Orr.

A lot of you like to compare this to GW1. I played GW1 for more than 400 hours and did not even knew there was different damage types that affected mobs, which indicates that GW1s approach was poorly implemented and non significant. That is not what I want to see in GW2.

I want this system to be properly introduces to players early in the game so they know what it is and aware that it exists. You should be able to complete encounters without even having to think about the damage types, however it comes with the cost of more deaths and less damage per second. Keep in mind that no enemy should be immune to a certain damage type, just make it less effective. If you want to make your adventures easier and more effective you should be required to think about the damage type you apply and what resistance to use.

Switching between damage types should not be that hard, but not free. You could for example switch weapons from a sword which has fire damage to a greatsword which has earth damage. Or if you really like that one greatsword that you always carry with you, there can be other alternatives like sharpening stones or maintenance oils that change that weapons damage type.

If you argue that this makes your build or character useless in some situations this is kind of what I want. To clarify, you should be less effective in some situations but if you just stop and think for a moment you can adapt your character and have no problems to complete that specific task. You can’t be jack of all trades without any drawbacks. You should not be able to complete everything in GW2 without having to somewhat customize or adapt your character.

Just speaking for myself, I talked about GW1’s damage type system because the question was simply “Why are elemental types not in the game?” and that’s a good example of a damage type system being present, but not really adding to the game in a major way.

Could it be baked into the game in a major way that would be a lot of fun? Of course. But it wasn’t designed that way, and I think it would be a distinctly different game if it was. I think trying to integrate it after-the-fact is trying to make it something it isn’t, and wouldn’t go well.

So this is a scheme to sell more bag slots?

Khisanth.2948:

So this is a scheme to sell more bag slots?

No it’s to confuse new players more so that we can all get those coloured bags easier!