Guild Wars 2

“Do you want to use Support skills?”

“No, just dodge whatever the enemy does.”

“Do you want to use gear other than Berzeker?”

“No, just dodge whatever the enemy does.”

Dodging is an issue. It has become a crutch. The belief that any kind of hit can be dodged (regardless if it’s true or not) has led to a “DPS only” mentality in which support is seen as useless (unless “Support” means applying Might or teleporting with a mesmer), and any stats combination other than Berzeker is seen as useless.

ArenaNet needs to change how encounters work in order to change the mentality behind this kind of reasoning. And, of course, in order to change the mentality, more dramatic measures are required than what it would take to simply make dodging less of a crutch.

I’m curious to see if the community can think of any way to deal with this issue. I’m against nerfing dodge or base endurance regeneration in the entire game, as I think those are good enough as they are in solo content.

One solution, IMO, would be to create environments in dungeons with negative endurance regeneration, so players cannot dodge. The boss fights in CoE path 2 are a perfect example of a situation in which the encounter would be greatly improved if dodging weren’t possible – players would be forced to understand how Subject Alpha’s attacks work and how to avoid them, instead of just dodging. Doing the same in all of CoF would also have interesting effects in the community.

It’s an issue with any mechanic that allows one tactic to be used in all situation (see stealth).

One of the major problems of GW2 is the huge difference in behavior between foes in PvP and PvE. Unfortunately for PvE, the game is balanced with PvP in mind. Dodging is only a problem because monsters have an extremely low attack speed, resulting in fights where all damage can be dodged.

So, my ideal solution would be increasing mobs’ attack speed to at least one attack per second while keeping the same DPS. Of course, that would require a lot of work, so it’s unlikely to happen.

The non-obvious attacks, need an audible queue, IMO. This game is very visual and very noisy. Make the mobs say/do something before a ‘big’ hit and players will react faster.

Went over all of this in detail a few weeks back in this:

I don’t think dodging itself is the problem but as AntiGw said: “It’s an issue with any mechanic that allows one tactic to be used in all situation”
And I must say I was happy to see so many zerkers die so horribly in the AR dungeon.

I know you are trying to make the case that dodging makes everything easy and so everyone goes full DPS, but I can tell you from first hand knowledge that not everyone is good at dodging. In fact, I would say the majority of players don’t dodge properly.

Removing this function would only make things more interesting for players that find dungeon encounters relatively easy. A large majority of people find dungeons to be hard in this game for some reason. I do not suggest taking out dodging. It’s not like you can spam it so I don’t see what the problem is.

The only groups I’ve ever seen run full zerker and demand full zerker are people doing speed runs. I specifically don’t run those because that’s where the elitists are. In no other circumstance will anyone require specific gear set-ups. I’ve finished every dungeon path while running a support build and never had a problem nor had anyone question it, only speed runners (and more power to them if they want to play like that, I have the choice to run with a normal group).

Plus I AoE heal when I dodge so I’d be pretty PO’d if that was taken out.

It’s like this: If you want that added difficulty of not being able to dodge, go for it. No one forces you to dodge, so feel free to up your personal difficulty. But there is absolutely no problem with dodging as a mechanic in GW2.

Primernova.5791:

The non-obvious attacks, need an audible queue, IMO. This game is very visual and very noisy. Make the mobs say/do something before a ‘big’ hit and players will react faster.

Um…read the OP.

Primernova.5791:

The non-obvious attacks, need an audible queue, IMO. This game is very visual and very noisy. Make the mobs say/do something before a ‘big’ hit and players will react faster.

That just increases the problem :/

AntiGw.9367:

It’s an issue with any mechanic that allows one tactic to be used in all situation (see stealth).

Let another Thief bashing begin!

Draknar.5748:

A large majority of people find dungeons to be hard in this game for some reason.

Because when they ask for help or try to read guides in order to improve, or even just ask players in chat how to play better, they are given the same replies: “Go full Berzeker with full DPS stats”. It’s the most efficient way to play through content, and that’s because of dodging.

This mentality is bad for new or less experienced players. It tells them that unless they master a single mechanic, they are not going to become good. Removing dodge from some environments would force people to learn that mastering a single mechanic is not enough, at the same time it would force people to employ some diversity in their builds – suddently Bezeker with full DPS is not the best answer to everything.

Once that mentality is gone, applying the same concepts to the rest of the game would come naturally. But taking that first step requires extreme measures, such as removing the ability to dodge from CoF.

Remove dodging, and have people face tanking bosses, while someone heals them.

Dodging is something that makes this game Unique and actually quite fun…

However, you need the right balance, and I feel the issue is not the huge spike damage you have to dodge (though it doesn’t 1-shot like a lot of Zerkers claim). It’s that there is no fast attacking, low damage auto-attack on most bosses.

dekou.6012:

. Dodging is only a problem because monsters have an extremely low attack speed, resulting in fights where all damage can be dodged.

This is pretty much part of the solution and what does need to be changed. Quite simply, bosses regular attacks need to be more dangerous some how, and impractical to frequently dodge.

The solution is pretty simple. Enemies can still retain their slow, big one-hit K.O. or near K.O. attacks that in order to defeat the enemy the group must consistently dodge or block.

However, the enemies regular attacks (the ones that do low to moderate damage) need to come faster and hit a little (don’t go overboard ANet) harder, so that ’zerkers will go down if they take too many of them over a certain time frame without support (them of course hitting often enough to be impractical to always dodge if you want to retain dodges for the big one-hit K.O. attacks), adding more value to the Toughness, Vitality and Healing stats.

Basically, adding more variety to mob attack patterns could go along way to help alleviate these problems.

The issue isn’t berserker gear, and it sure as hell isn’t dodging. It’s horrible mob design.

It’s still a vast improvement over GW1 where the standard advice for most situations was pretty much ‘give one of your heroes the current meta-build for healing, then do whatever you want because you’re now pretty much invincible’.

“Just dodge everything” only really works for a relatively small number of people who are good enough to time every dodge correctly and are always in situations where you’re either fighting trash mobs exactly scaled to the number of people in the fight or single bosses who telegraph every attack – in other words dungeons.

Most people who try to dodge every attack will mistime it, and/or overdo it so they don’t have any endurance when they need it, or find themselves in situations where there’s damage coming from too many different enemies and can’t dodge them all.

I suspect this is something that will be addressed in the planned dungeon updates.

I don’t see much of a problem at all. Dodging allows for greater build diversity without having to always resort to tanky builds, and in order to just dodge everything all bosses in the game can do, you have to learn and recognize any and all things all the bosses can do. To actually reach the point where you can “just dodge” everything is actually really difficult.

That said, there’s content in the gam that isn’t constrained wholly by dodging. Anytime enemies have a sustained damage output that is performed at range, it makes dodging non-viable. Problem is, this makes most things non-viable as well.

I wouldn’t mind greater tactics. Aetherblade’s retreat had enemies with more in-depth tactics, and I would like to see that and Molten Facility be the new norm for game content.

I’m against a change that obsoletes my zerk gear by making it unusable in some dungeons :o

I’m not unemployed to farm all the gear combinations that exist. In fact, I think ANet should just delete from PvE all the non zerker gear and balance the PvE from that point on. It’d probably be a much better designed game in the end.

I do agree though that “dodge” is a little too universal as a PvE counter mechanic. We need more encounters where you need to jump or move or maybe at times put up a reflect skill and where dodging doesn’t work. For that ANet needs more bosses with attacks you can avoid without dodge but that go through dodge itself.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Dodging allows for greater build diversity without having to always resort to tanky builds

That’s not really what we see today. It’s all Bezeker gear; even in the few situations in which dodging is not the “end all be all” solution, the community believes it is and so still claims that the best tool would be Berzeker gear. Heh, it’s not hard to find people claiming that Berzeker gear is the best stats for all PvE, regardless of circunstance (and of number of enemies/attack speed/use of immobilize).

Removing the ability to dodge from some (not all) scenarios would add some diversity – at least in a few circunstances, it would become unquestionable that Berzeker gear is not the best option. This would finally remove the mentality that Berzeker is the best everywhere, and maybe people would begin seeing more variety even outside the dodge-less areas of the game.

I kind of like the “issue”. I’d rather see a situation of “hit this button at this time” or “move out of the way at this time”, as opposed to other MMOs views of “wear this stat at this time” and “change to this stat at some other time”.

I would rather my personal playing be the damage mitigator, not my armor stats.

Remove dodging? They tried that didn’t really work. Remember Orr with it’s bajillion chain immobolize?

AntiGw.9367:

It’s an issue with any mechanic that allows one tactic to be used in all situation (see stealth).

Protip: Stealth is effective against scrubs.

I don’t see dodging as a crutch as being the primary reason for the DPS-only mentality. The Inquest grenadier taught me a valuable lesson about dodge around level 12-14 on my first character. Dodge is based on a limited resource and there will be times when there is more to dodge than you have dodges available. Use it wisely.

There are fights, of course, where well-timed dodging is able to mitigate damage and save you from death. But, the ability to avoid taking damage is not a problem in a healerless game; it’s actually a solution.

The real problem is more around how combat is conceived in GW2. GW2 promised a new trinity around control, support, and DPS. Control and support often feels inconsequential in relation to DPS. What we saw emerge, actually, was a guardian, warrior, mesmer trinity that was quasi-tank, DPS, and support. But, it was obvious that the key was DPS in terms of efficiently dispatching bosses—there were three warriors in the common trinity group.

The answer lies in rethinking the trinity in the light of our experience and rethinking encounters in terms of boss abilities. It’s not an easy problem to solve, but it will be worth it.

full zerk gear is fine, just tired of people telling you to L2P because you’re not using full zerk gear.

just remove zerk gear from being able to be used in PvE and rebalance the dungeons around that. we’ll probably have a more mature playerbase.

In most dungeon runs, its usually the zerkers who I see faceplanted and calling everyone ELSE out in chat as bad… Repeatedly… pull after pull…

The dodge everything and use zerker gear either only works for a very small set of players, or only in a very small set of content – or both.

For everyone and everywhere else:
http://kichwas.wordpress.com/2013/06/19/guild-wars-2-mythbusting-if-damage-is-all-that-counts-why-are-you-getting-one-shot/

Kichwas.7152:

In most dungeon runs, its usually the zerkers who I see faceplanted and calling everyone ELSE out in chat as bad… Repeatedly… pull after pull…

The dodge everything and use zerker gear either only works for a very small set of players, or only in a very small set of content – or both.

For everyone and everywhere else:
http://kichwas.wordpress.com/2013/06/19/guild-wars-2-mythbusting-if-damage-is-all-that-counts-why-are-you-getting-one-shot/

You can take the trinity out of the game but you can’t take the trinity out of the players. Isn’t it the same old story? Things go right? Obviously because of the DPS character. Things go wrong? Tank/healer’s fault.

The reason why dodge > support skills/defensive armor is because of the removal of the trinity. Bosses have to do enough damage quickly enough so that tanking is impossible, as well as keep healing mostly self centered, otherwise we would still have a trinity. That only leaves damage mitigation as a means of survival(outside of self healing which will never be enough, because we can’t have healers). In fact it would be easier to just say that since we no longer have tanks or healers the only role left is dps. Without the trinity this is more or less how combat will remain. If, as some have suggested, bosses had some attacks that did less damage and a few that did a lot it would then allow for tanking. People could simply take the small hits and dodge/aegis/block the large ones. Without the trinity damage mitigation will always be the main method of survival, there is no “solution” to this.

Sadranis.1738:

The reason why dodge > support skills/defensive armor is because of the removal of the trinity. Bosses have to do enough damage quickly enough so that tanking is impossible, as well as keep healing mostly self centered, otherwise we would still have a trinity. That only leaves damage mitigation as a means of survival(outside of self healing which will never be enough, because we can’t have healers). In fact it would be easier to just say that since we no longer have tanks or healers the only role left is dps. Without the trinity this is more or less how combat will remain. If, as some have suggested, bosses had some attacks that did less damage and a few that did a lot it would then allow for tanking. People could simply take the small hits and dodge/aegis/block the large ones. Without the trinity damage mitigation will always be the main method of survival, there is no “solution” to this.

I think the point is not to try and remove tanking. But to mitigate the need for specific tanks.

If they upped the amount of fast low damage hits you would have multiple options. You could have a mix of hybrid toons with enough Toughness and Healing to look after themselves and everything else in DPS. You could have a group with a High Toughness “Tank”, some DPS heavy toons and maybe some support. A more Tanky toon and 4 hybrids supporting would also work.. You wouldn’t have a pure trinity game (for one thing a group of hybrids would work and definitely not be Trinity). Most setups would still work. But you would stop this game being a DPS only game.

At the moment there are DPS checks (though weak). But almost no healing checks. And no Control checks. Dungeons should be a mix of all 3.

All they need to do is lower the damage on each individual hit a boss does, but increase the rate at which that they attack. Zerker+dodge works because all the incoming damage is loaded into one easily dodged attack every now and then.

As it is now, with these lethargic but hard hitting enemies, that’s all you need to do, just dodge. Since condition damage is completely kitten in PvE, and survivable stats are not required (since you just avoid getting hit), the only stats that matter are Power, Precision and Crit Damage.

Of course some content has enemies that can actually hit the players every now and then, so a Guardian with a little bit of survivable stats (the rest zerker stats) is a nice addition to absorb some of that incoming damage.

EDIT:

At the moment there are DPS checks (though weak). But almost no healing checks. And no Control checks. Dungeons should be a mix of all 3.

That is a very good point. The unfortunate thing about control is that Defiant basically tells you to not bother with much interrupts/pulls/blinds/etc, and since the enemy’s attack rate is so abysmally slow, Confusion generally doesn’t do anything either.

There is no small wonder why the PvE game is all about zerkzerkzerk, every other playstyle is generally punished by the mechanics. When the new AR dungeon came out, I was happy because I thought that we were getting a dungeon with a heal check, rather than a DPS check (last boss), until I figured out that no, you can simply avoid the incoming attacks and just zerk down the boss as usual.

Sadranis.1738:

The reason why dodge > support skills/defensive armor is because of the removal of the trinity. Bosses have to do enough damage quickly enough so that tanking is impossible, as well as keep healing mostly self centered, otherwise we would still have a trinity. That only leaves damage mitigation as a means of survival(outside of self healing which will never be enough, because we can’t have healers). In fact it would be easier to just say that since we no longer have tanks or healers the only role left is dps. Without the trinity this is more or less how combat will remain. If, as some have suggested, bosses had some attacks that did less damage and a few that did a lot it would then allow for tanking. People could simply take the small hits and dodge/aegis/block the large ones. Without the trinity damage mitigation will always be the main method of survival, there is no “solution” to this.

There is a solution to this, and it’s already in the game – monster AI. It’s impossible to “tank” a mob in the old sense, because if it survives long enough it’ll target your squishies anyway.

Dodge is just a crutch, not a critical part of the game that couldn’t be improved.

AntiGw.9367:

There is a solution to this, and it’s already in the game – monster AI. It’s impossible to “tank” a mob in the old sense, because if it survives long enough it’ll target your squishies anyway.

Not if you are built to tank and know how to do it. Get a nice amount of toughness on your AH Guardian and you will draw most of the aggro and be able to survive the incoming damage (still using your dodges ofc).

However in a party where you can depend on your party memebers to know how to dodge, this is largely unneeded. It does help to have that AH Guardian with enough toughness to be able to grab aggro off your full zerker party of 3 Warrior/1 Mesmer, but since everyone’s toughness is going to be closer to 900 anyways, ~1500 is probably more than enough for you to get that aggro.

But of course, the vast majority of the content in the game does not need one party member to absorb the incoming attacks, instead favouring the ability to kill stuff quickly… so zerkzerkzerk to your heart’s content.

FYI, making support or tanking impossible is not the goal of the “no-trinity” design.

Guess what, DPS is one of the trinity, jokers! Clearly if the goal of “no-trinity” is to make being a DPS class impossible, it is failed to the nth degree! Look at all those zerkers….

What it means is that most classes are adaptable to multiple roles and that content can be done without strict setups like Healer-Tank-3DPS as in some other popular game you may have heard of……

The only way to make being a DPS (Damage Per Second) class impossible is if you turn this game into Hello Kitty Online and remove the concept of Damage altogether.

Else, there will always be one class that does more DPS than the others and will be the defacto DPS class.

Dodge is overdone. Dodge, dodge, dodge —- that’s what the mechanics amount to. Just dodge high damage attacks and rez people who didn’t…. dodge. Hey guys how does this boss work? “Dodge.” How about that boss? “Dodge” what do these trash mobs do? “I dunno, just dodge.”

It’s a fun mechanic, but too much of anything isn’t good, and there is too much dodging.