Guild Wars 2

Hi,

This post is to quickly address a growing concern I’m seeing amongst players that you’re going to suddenly develop a happiness for the nerf bat on just about everything.

For a long time I’ve been on a pretty die hard campaign against Berserker showing up as the only meta.

I want to be clear about this. My rant on that is specifically to do with grouping through the Party Search function. Specifically the party search function and nothing else.

You see, when you make a game and want to have all of these options for how to build a character you cannot then go and create a Party system that enables players to force all players into just one kind of play style.

No matter how much you nerf Direct Damage all you will be doing is kicking your player base right in their nethers from sheer ignorance.

The reason there is such a frustration with the Zerker Meta is that the way in which you have designed content is ultra-simplistic. I cannot overstate this.

Look at any design for a dungeon in World of Warcraft from 2004 to 2007 and you’ll understand what I’m talking about. It isn’t where you place the creatures or how you design their combat tactics. It is rather how your damage and healing is produced. You moved away from the classical holy trinity model in Guild Wars 2 believing this to be innovation: perhaps it is. Nevertheless, you dumped the baby with the bath water.

The complexity of raiding from 2001 to 2007 in all MMOs was the concept of types of damage and resistances.

In Dark Age of Camelot there was, Heat, Cold, Spirit, and several other kinds of damage which a caster might cause. A melee type damage (not magic) could do Piercing, Blunt, Slash, Crush, and several others. It’s this dynamic which Guild Wars 2 has no concept for. Thus, if I do water damage to an ice elemental it is not something which I pay any mind even though this was going to be an incredibly idiotic tactic in every other MMO before now and for many still is. In the same vein I would not attack a person wearing Plate armor in Dark Age of Camelot with a Sword with any hope of doing much to them because that’s what Plate armor was made to counter: I’d want to use a kind of Crush damage against plate.

You cannot solve the Direct Damage issues by nerfing it. All that will do is break your game because you only have two damage sources in your game: Direct Damage and Damage Over Time.

The solution to your Direct Damage problems (which really don’t exist) is doing some hard work you’ve been doggedly avoiding: creating more skills and developing tactics creatures use and players much use to combat those used by creatures.

I should also say: “Creating more skills and the situations for which those skills apply”… by extension this means creating situations where such skills would apply. A great example of a ‘half way there’ step forwards Dragon Hunter. It’s all about traps by the look of things. Unfortunately, we have no content what so ever in the current game which really would need such traps or be engrossingly fun to use them. Skills are for situations and situations reflect adaption to skills. It’s a biome. You’re getting there more and more. Good luck!

I really don’t understand what the issue is developing a balanced approach.

You make a Boss mob for testing, do base rotations on it using direct then condi damage then some hybrid styles and see that it lands within your target bracket, most MMOs have this as within 8%, some vary. You may alter it so that some will be more burst concentrated while other may achieve a higher sustained and have that alteration within your target variance number. kitten develop and use a freagin add-on, DPS meter just for these internal testing purposses if you don’t want it out in the live game, so you can monitor, adjust and confirm changes on the fly.

You can also repeat this process to balance mitigation via both passive and active skills, it really isn’t that hard. Just make a mob spam whatever types of attacks or combos you want at you.

Then you worry about individual encounter mechanics afterwards. But mechanics may prevent some classes / builds from applying the already balanced damage, or use mitigation via passive or active factors. you address those seperately and individually.

If A-net does follow this or similar process and the base damage application and mitigation is balanced, then they decide to alter the values due to other factors such as skill availability, duration, etc. Then the whole thing just gets whacky at that point. They are making these adjustments far too large scaling things up or down too much in either direction.

The zerker meta, and to an equal extent, any other meta that might/have developed, is a symptom of a simple problem – the game is balanced by humans.

Humans simply aren’t good enough to balance a game so that no one attribute combination or playstyle comes out on top. Personally i’m quite happy that all or most professions are viable within the ‘zerk’ meta and that condition damage can be/is as viable as direct damage for some professions.

Put simply, however we tweak the numbers, some specific attribute combination will, in theory if not in practice, yield the greatest dps/highest efficiency. Given enough time, Players will determine what that combination is, or what they think it to be (and can make a convincing case for) and as knowledge of that “best” equipment propagates, players who wish to be as effective as possible will adopt it and start demanding others who wish to group with them do the same. This is how a ‘Meta’ forms.

Currently there is no reasonable way to avoid this occurring. Think about it logically; either the encounter puts out so much avoidable damage that some defensive stats are required, or it does not. Either way, the bare minimum to ensure survival and success is going to be the optimal setup.

The situation we have right now where both direct damage and condition damage are viable is really the most optimal situation possible. The skilled players are not forced to invest into defensive attributes, which would create an artificial and arbitrary limitation on itemization choices, while those who wish that extra degree of surety can do so, and have their survivability visibly increase even from just a couple of hundred points.

The only complaint i have ever seen on this subject is by people who want the added surety of defensive stat investments but also want to feel they are optimally geared or fall within that category of most skilled players. There’s an inherent contradiction there. The best players are the best because they can do the content with the bare minimum of defensive investment. If you force the content to change, you also change that minimum which means that you will no longer have that safety net of defensive itemization. All you’ve done is make soldiers the new meta, and you’ll need to switch pieces out for nomads in order to get your former sense of safety and you still won’t be amongst the top players.

The only change that needs to happen, imo, is a rebalancing of defensive stats

Eirdyne.9843:

I should also say: “Creating more skills and the situations for which those skills apply”… by extension this means creating situations where such skills would apply. A great example of a ‘half way there’ step forwards Dragon Hunter. It’s all about traps by the look of things. Unfortunately, we have no content what so ever in the current game which really would need such traps or be engrossingly fun to use them. Skills are for situations and situations reflect adaption to skills. It’s a biome. You’re getting there more and more. Good luck!

If you’re a thief you can set up a trap on the stairs of a Silverwaste fort and watch enemies trip.

These are all constructive replies. I really applaud everyone for taking the time to think this out.

Narrrz, I hadn’t read your post before, but “Yes! Absolutely!”. What you’re saying goes back to my own points that there’s essentially a different mechanic going on in Guild Wars 2 than what has been done with other MMOs. I personally like it, but I’m not sure the developers have wholly processed what they’ve created yet. By saying that I mean that we’re not playing in a game where I have to take into account the every infinite minutiae of the game’s mechanics: damage type, weapon type, armor type, cooldown, duration, etc, etc. All I really need to understand is press 5 to block for this round. It’s a wholly different world than the Trinity system so you’re 100% on to it.

Tongku, I wholly agree with you as well. Unfortunately, by all evidence I’m not sure Anet developers much aware of other games. They’ve really got it fixed in their minds, “We’re going to be different”. It seems like their strategy to do this is “ignore as much as possible what’s been done elsewhere”. I’m not saying that’s a bad strategy either. It’s quite valid to just try very hard to not hear about what everyone else is doing or risk getting caught up in some kind of mental funnel. I.E. Wildstar is just Borderlands the MMO, Warhammer was a WoW clone, and mostly everything Blizzard since 2004 is just “let’s see how long we can keep doing cartoons because then we don’t have to update our tech”.
Guild Wars 2 seems to have launched with the intent to take the Z-axis as far as it could go climaxing with truly unique and brilliant Jumping Puzzles, some epic landscapes, but also a feeling of being a bit cramped and samey as its maps are populated by creatures that really only have a purpose while you’re doing hearts – afterward being largely without purpose.
Another baby that went out with the bathwater in Guild Wars 2 is camps. In Guild Wars 1 different sections of the map were blocked off and consequently iconic for having Trolls, Centaur, Dwarven War Pandas, and all the rest of that entirely unique and rich game. This meant a trek to Droknar’s Forge or run to Icetooth Cave meant Grawl, Iceworms, Trolls, and etc all became iconic just as Dryder would be along the other path. By contrast Guild Wars 2 has… … … Yea. Nope. Can’t think of anything. There’s just no reason to ever see any creature ever again under your own volition in this game unless you make up a reason for it in your own head. Even farming is so unlikely to be productive that it’s only done in desperation.
This demonstrates either that the developers have cast this baby out too under the idea that it’s somehow an innovation or they simply do not understand what iconography is. That the latter is the case seems to be unlikely as they so soundly used it in the creation of the God Statues, the astrolabes in Nahpui Quarters, giant Nefertiti heads in Nightfall, and etc etc. So, it’s back to the baby got cast out with the bath water. The result is that we have creatures placed just far enough apart from one another that combat with one of them will not result in combat with another, but traveling across any path of any map on a straight line will forcibly result in agro from any and all creatures. This breaks the purpose of their being there to the point of a complete removal of their significance in any way.
This summarizes to a lack of recognition for significance and construction of accidental recognition of significance on the part of the developers. If you played WoW in 2004 you utterly understand the implications and utilities for the Rogue’s ability to Sap. Sap was used by Rogues (GW2 equivalent to Thief) to knock a creature out. The Rogue would go into Stealth, travel out into a “group” or “camp” of creatures and “sap” one that would be the most disastrous to the party that was preparing to combat this group. The Sap effect lasted up to a minute, but could be broken if the creature received any damage. Since a player might be able to kill one of these creatures (roughly equivalent to a GW2 an elite silver marked creature) a group of such creatures was considered appropriately dangerous to the party to warrant the use of tactics… i.e. brain power.
I’m not sure how to do the quote thing so, quoting Tongku “Currently there is no reasonable way to avoid this occurring. Think about it logically; either the encounter puts out so much avoidable damage that some defensive stats are required, or it does not. Either way, the bare minimum to ensure survival and success is going to be the optimal setup.” … It’s true. Players will develop some recognition over time of what ‘works’ and that will become ‘the meta’. However, what I am ultimately arguing is that being a ‘diverse’ group of ‘multiple and possibly unconventional builds’ is better realized by creating a diversity of situations which would reward such play.

The current design of how creatures are placed in Guild Wars 2 is nothing less than landmines. If you do not approach them they are without threat. It is only because our characters have the capacity to move and us the will to be perturbed such that our mechanisms for anticipation are overwhelmed do we even encounter much in this game at all. By contract, in World of Warcraft we would kill a creature because we can skin it or clear a “camp” again because there is ore there. The confrontation of one creature was a battle of endurance and duration, more about timers and tactics, than damage and meta. Meta really only came later, long after Molten Core when the taint of inaccessible ever-more-powerfully statted gear came into the game.

Narrrz is right about how to deal with things from their points.

Tongku, while I support you and agree, I think the issue with Guild Wars 2 – for the moment – from your part of this response is the game is lacking is how to create meaningful content. Silverwastes addresses some of this by making us capture and then defend bases for a duration. It’s this duration that creates the sense of an iconic moment I was talking about.
So if the developers made a creature, some animations for it, then the maths for its abilities it could be used to model for these iconic moments. Similarly, a camp creatures developed just as you have said would also work. Unfortunately, nothing in the game’s design currently has any use for Agemnon’s traps as yet. They’re cute, but not usually practical as we might be permanently using up one ability for run-speed increase, another for group stealth, and so on… A one-off trip wire doesn’t justify wasting the utility slot very often. And that summarizes the last issue within this. The vast majority of skills are not diverse enough that a complex “iconic moment” can be constructed out of them. For as long as the game has existed I’ve used the game 4 abilities on my warrior and just maybe 6 on my Guardian. My mesmer really doesn’t do damage in PvE and so on. It just comes down to a lack of development on the dev’s part when it comes to skills and too much liberal throwing out and casting away of things from the devs that really they had no business throwing out: all of which I covered above. Combined with encouraging a minority of the player base to force everyone using the search feature to force meta builds (whatever they may be) the devs have worked the game into a corner.

I completely disagree with the OP’s premise and therefore with the conclusion — I think it’s perfectly sensible to reduce damage on skills that are overpowered.

I think the OP has conflated a bunch of vaguely related issues:

• Nerfs to skills that were overpowered.
• The current meta, which is primarily due to the AI and encounters designed around that AI.
• People who think that zerker matters more than skill & experience with the dungeon/fractal.
• People who think that zerker doesn’t speed up runs, for those who know what they are doing.
• ANet changing things up with HoT, including introducing new encounters, foes, etc.

Put it all together and it suggests to me that there’s no reason to suppose that it’s a bad idea to nerf direct damage skills that are unbalanced compared to other skills.