your missing a little in your description.
You have to keep in mind that partially its the fault of the capture point meta though.
Bunker builds not only are highly survivable ‘tank’ builds they also have significant area control and denial.
The only 2 things I see missing out of gw2 are pure healers (which I don’t miss) and shutdown builds. Shutdown is only needed when healers exist in my opinion though because if you cant shut down healers then you wont get kills. Sounds like you just prefer the healer included system.
If you are talking gw:p vs gw2, there are far more viable builds right now in gw2 than gw1 had 6 months in. GW1 with everything included has far more viable builds today than gw2 has, but that’s not apple to apple.
Bunkers have some area control (like the Guardian), but there aren’t builds that are centered around it like, spirit walls, minion walls, Wards + DoT AoEs. Guild Wars 2 has some of those concepts in the Bunker, Roamer, Pressure playstyles, but they aren’t a playstyle in and off itself like in Guild Wars.
I definitely like the healing playstyle, as my primary in GW1 was a monk. I miss it a lot. Shutdown was also something I liked playing, but I didn’t just utilitize it for healers, I would also use it to keep pressure off my party. There is a lot more depth and breadth to GW1 combat, which I prefer.
I don’t know about you but I called what you are calling shutdown as mitigation.
No matter how hard you tried in gw1, you couldn’t completely shut down someone especially if they knew what they were doing. I am running a physical shutdown build in gw2 right now that can lock an enemy player for quite a bit of time – if they let me.
If it was GW1 that build would be more powerful, but in GW2 you have a dodge button which can create gaps in my shutdown.
There are shutdown builds in gw2, the game doesn’t revolve around or allow hard shutdown builds – they arnt fun to play against.
I loved the mesmer from GW1. Psychic Instability, Cry of Frustration, Cry of Pain, Diversion, Blackout and other hard shutdowns, and then soft shutdowns like Shared Burden and other move and attack speed inhibitors. Love love love shutdown. You don’t have to like shutdown builds, but it made combat far more interesting. There’s nothing that comes close to the kind of shutdown that came from a GW1 mesmer in GW2.
GW1:
-7 of 1026 normal skills (roughly 125 per profession, everyone has 2 professions, second profession can be changed. 81 skills are common across all professions).
-1 of 293 elite skills (you can choose to drop an elite for a normal skill instead)
-200 attribute points (to distribute across 1 primary attribute and 8 of 36 secondary attributes)
To add to that:
You can choose 2 of 10 professions. And this choice restricts your other choices to 7 from about 200 skills and 1 from about 60 elite skills. I know that’s a lot of combinations but not so many as you stated.
You also forgot to add that attribute distribution restricts number of skill pools to choose from. Like putting most of your attribute points into Sword Mastery restricts you to choose from sword pool.
GW2:
-5 sets of 5 weapon skills with aquatic counterparts (on average).
It’s not like that at all…
Elementalist: Choose 2 of 5 combinations. Each of this combinations has 4 versions.
Other classes: More weapons instead of attunements.
So it’s more like: choose 2 of about 16 weapon combinations(that you can swap).
-3 of 22 utility skills (2 racial)
-1 of 4 healing skills (1 racial)
-1 of 6 elite skills (3 racial)
-70 points (to distribute across 5 trait lines)
-7 traits (1 for each 10 spent in a single trait line)
That’s about right. You just forgot to mention that attributes are strictly tied to gear in opposite to gw1. But attributes still exists.
(edited by HiddenNick.7206)
The nickname of GW1 among PvP’ers was “build wars”. Not the playerskill, but the team composition was the deciding variable in top matches.
People who thought this were bad at the game.
Bad teams copied the top builds and were still bad. Matches between top teams very frequently featured unorthodox skills and team compositions that were composed not for some strict mathematical efficiency reason but to enable specific strategies for that particular match. Quite a bit of the ‘build wars’ on the high end was tweaking your build skeleton to exploit particular strengths or weaknesses of your opponent – issues with energy management, reaction time, map awareness, movement, etc.
The problem GW1 had in its skill system was that it was so deep that it was totally illegible to people who were not heavily invested in the game. There was an enormous amount of counterplay around different build choices that even the best teams in the world, at their peak, were only skimming the surface of; it was so complex that no one could appreciate the depth of it.
They needed to dial that back a bit with GW2. They just overshot pretty badly, and instead of dialing it down to 10 we got a 2. There’s still plenty of room to turn it back up, it’ll just take a lot of balance work to do so.
Yeah… I never played GW1, but I was reading the Mesmer skill page and it just made my head hurt. Then I tried reading about hexes and enchantments and… agh… how anyone managed to learn that game is beyond me.
Dedalus and Serephous thank you, especially Dedalus for the video links. I’m looking at the skills issue a bit different now. More is not necessarily better.
omg you actually changed my mind.
As soon as I saw the video of the elementalist and thought about my ele, I realized the skill system in GW2 gives plenty of freedom to manipulate the skills, through the traits and equipment builds but it also encourages players to coordinate the mobility of the character with the use of the skills. The playing field lends itself to a more focused approach. ok, duh… I had an epiphany… Like Dedalus said, words do not convey so much as the videos.
GW2 encourages players to excel.
Now I re-evaluate my GW1 skills experience. I was casual, but with a whole party of heroes, each having a build that suited their place in my home-grown party. That was totally a different time and game.
I suddenly realized I am much more involved and satisfied in GW2. GW2 wants me to use my brain. I really like the encouragement to think better than the “freedom” to choose a build from a zillion skills.
It feels so good to change my mind sometimes. Then I know I’m not a total … I would say it but the forum would replace it with “kitten”
Yeah… I never played GW1, but I was reading the Mesmer skill page and it just made my head hurt. Then I tried reading about hexes and enchantments and… agh… how anyone managed to learn that game is beyond me.
In the first GW, Prophecies, you got new skills most of the time as quest rewards, even up to more than halfway through the game. It was actually a much slower pace of adding to your arsenal than unlocking skills in GW2 is today. Skill vendors only had limited choices for you, so you were never overwhelmed.
I didn’t care too much for GW1’s skill system. On first sight it looks pretty awesome, having that many skills to choose from. But then you realise how little skills are actually useful in general. A lot of skills are very situational, not something any player would want to use except for maybe that one boss fight, or mission objective.
Guild Wars 2 skills suffer from this a lot less. Yeah, there’s still some useless or situational junk in there, but it’s not even half as bad as it was in GW1. Having traits available to boost certain types of skills really helps too.
Two things I would like to see in GW2’s skill system:
Add weapon skill choices. Like, put 2 different skills on weapon slot 2, 3, 4 and 5, and let players choose which one they want to use.
While levelling a new weapon, let the player choose which of the 2 skills they want to freely unlock, and them have them spend a skillpoint to unlock the other option for that slot.
Add more elite skills. Probably the only thing that GW1’s skill system did better is how elite skills were so nicely and easily connected with the rest of their build. Most builds were even built around their elite skill, which was quite cool. GW2 elites just feel kind of out of place. Like something I use once in a while, but really try not to use so I can have it available in a tough situation, but then end up forgetting about it anyway due to the huge cooldowns on them.
your missing a little in your description.
You have to keep in mind that partially its the fault of the capture point meta though.
Bunker builds not only are highly survivable ‘tank’ builds they also have significant area control and denial.
The only 2 things I see missing out of gw2 are pure healers (which I don’t miss) and shutdown builds. Shutdown is only needed when healers exist in my opinion though because if you cant shut down healers then you wont get kills. Sounds like you just prefer the healer included system.
If you are talking gw:p vs gw2, there are far more viable builds right now in gw2 than gw1 had 6 months in. GW1 with everything included has far more viable builds today than gw2 has, but that’s not apple to apple.
Bunkers have some area control (like the Guardian), but there aren’t builds that are centered around it like, spirit walls, minion walls, Wards + DoT AoEs. Guild Wars 2 has some of those concepts in the Bunker, Roamer, Pressure playstyles, but they aren’t a playstyle in and off itself like in Guild Wars.
I definitely like the healing playstyle, as my primary in GW1 was a monk. I miss it a lot. Shutdown was also something I liked playing, but I didn’t just utilitize it for healers, I would also use it to keep pressure off my party. There is a lot more depth and breadth to GW1 combat, which I prefer.
I don’t know about you but I called what you are calling shutdown as mitigation.
No matter how hard you tried in gw1, you couldn’t completely shut down someone especially if they knew what they were doing. I am running a physical shutdown build in gw2 right now that can lock an enemy player for quite a bit of time – if they let me.
If it was GW1 that build would be more powerful, but in GW2 you have a dodge button which can create gaps in my shutdown.
There are shutdown builds in gw2, the game doesn’t revolve around or allow hard shutdown builds – they arnt fun to play against.
I loved the mesmer from GW1. Psychic Instability, Cry of Frustration, Cry of Pain, Diversion, Blackout and other hard shutdowns, and then soft shutdowns like Shared Burden and other move and attack speed inhibitors. Love love love shutdown. You don’t have to like shutdown builds, but it made combat far more interesting. There’s nothing that comes close to the kind of shutdown that came from a GW1 mesmer in GW2.
I don’t particularly disagree with you. There was sufficient counterplay to shutdown in gw1, but there was also overcompensation to certain classes because shutdown existed.
Meaning if you weren’t bringing some kind of shutdown in your build you would get rolled over.
Part of the problem GW1 suffered with is that not all forms of shutdown worked against the different builds. Remember how I said at the start of gw:p the metagame came down to a couple of builds? This ended up being a good thing for competition, it means the shutdowns skills you brought into the game were pretty much always useful, because as a team build your team was going to be stronger than any of the gimmick builds that could be brought to the table. Blinding flash for example was always useful because there was almost always an enemy warrior to use it on.
Then the game became more balanced, and now shutdown abilities that used to be strong quickly became useless. Whats the point of blinding flash if the enemy team is mesmers and necros hex and condition pressure with no warriors at all? A lot of shut down or counter abilities become suddenly useless when hex builds became viable.
Hex meta is one of the most unfun metas that ever existed in gw2. There was no real excitement, no sudden spikes of huge damage, purple bars everywhere, and monks withering under a diminishing energy bar before they cant heal the team anymore (because prot is useless), warriors almost completely shut out with really powerful hexes. So you run into that team and you mod your build to bring more hex mitigation like holy veil (best anti-hex skill ever).
Then you run into a physical warrior/ranger team, or bunny thumpers (r/w). :X again rendering several skills you brought as a team useless.
Don’t get me wrong, the REALLY good teams can overcome build disadvantages by just playing really awesome but there was way too much rock/paper/scissors with this setup. And on several occasions was rather unenjoyable. I found the game more fun in the gw:p days of boonprots and rainbow spikes than I did post factions.
GW2 gets around that completely. I haven’t run into a situation where a certain skill on my bar is completely useless.
I personally believe they should bring back Hamstorm.
I couldn’t agree more, I really couldn’t. GW2 skill system seems archaic to me. It’s even worse than WoW’s skill system! I feel so restricted and combat becomes incredibly boring using the same stuff over and over, especially since boss battles in the game really aren’t interesting or even that fun. Dodge 1hit kill attack, rinse repeat all while getting knocked down and stunned all the time (NOT MY IDEA OF FUN) which I can see being in pvp but pve? Come on. That has ANNOYING all over it.
It doesn’t seem the original team is working on GW2. Sorry for being so dramatic but that’s how I feel, there were some huge annoyances in GW1 but there were ways around it. I can’t punish things in GW2 for using CC, I mean where the hell are hexes and such?
On the topic of traits, now this was a huge disappointment for me because I played a condition sin a lot in GW1. Deadly arts… has become a power line? Wat. One of my favorite pvp builds was basically a process of getting conditions on target stacking as many as possible, then landing finishing blows with my direct damage signets. (example: signet deals xx amount of damage per condition when activated on target)
Much more interesting build concepts, rather than just put a bunch of stacks of bleeds on target and watch them count down while my initiative regens… and hope for the best that my enemy doesn’t just remove the entire stack with one skill or even worse, a passive trait requiring them to do absolutely nothing. Now THAT’S innovation! /rollseyes
Oh yeah I think they should bring back hamstorm too ;p
The nickname of GW1 among PvP’ers was “build wars”. Not the playerskill, but the team composition was the deciding variable in top matches.
People who thought this were bad at the game.
Bad teams copied the top builds and were still bad. Matches between top teams very frequently featured unorthodox skills and team compositions that were composed not for some strict mathematical efficiency reason but to enable specific strategies for that particular match. Quite a bit of the ‘build wars’ on the high end was tweaking your build skeleton to exploit particular strengths or weaknesses of your opponent – issues with energy management, reaction time, map awareness, movement, etc.
The problem GW1 had in its skill system was that it was so deep that it was totally illegible to people who were not heavily invested in the game. There was an enormous amount of counterplay around different build choices that even the best teams in the world, at their peak, were only skimming the surface of; it was so complex that no one could appreciate the depth of it.
They needed to dial that back a bit with GW2. They just overshot pretty badly, and instead of dialing it down to 10 we got a 2. There’s still plenty of room to turn it back up, it’ll just take a lot of balance work to do so.
This is all spot on. My guild ran around top 10-20 in GvG for about the strong competition period in the game when Evil, WM, and IQ were the king pins. We ran a completely unique pressure build which we got a lot of compliments on. A lot of guilds tried to copy it and just butchered the play style because, well, frakly they weren’t us who had invested a lot of time to get it right.
But as good as it was, when encountering the top few guilds we always struggled because even though we thought we had a build advantage those guys were just frankly better tactically and quicker reactors.
Calling GW1 build wars just completely ignores the fact that as many as varied as the skill system and build variety were possible tactics and playstyle > all. At least true for GvG and reasonably applied to HA.
PvE suffered from “comfort zone” builds if you ran in PUGs – tanks, mid line damage, backline monks – dull.
Anet believed they had invented an exclusive game and tried to develop a game halfway between GW1 and WoW and you can’t blame them in terms of a business decision. But it would have been nice to have elements from GW1 that made it a tactically powerful game still in play.
I have re-installed and been having fun but having gotten now pretty much all professions to the (unlock Elite Skill). I’m like…Umm. Why bother. I’m not gonna stop playing but Christ, there are so many rubbish skills, sure it could be argued that GW1 had many but did GW2 have to take all of the bad ones and amplify them with traits?
Insidious Parasite or Spiteful Spirit, jesus my main is a Necro and I thump things well but I miss skills like that.
It just seems that the dev’s left any creativity out of it and just went and replaced the trinity with damage/damage/damage.
Replacing 3 with 1 isn’t a good idea to me but I still enjoy the world
(edited by Paul.4081)
Of course you guys agree. You accuse me of being a GW 2 fan boy. Well you’re GW 1 fan boys and you know, memory is not a perfect vessel.
I never called you or anyone else here a fanboy, there’s no need to go there.
And my memory is pretty fresh. I went back to GW1 a month before GW2 came out to finish my Hall of Monuments.
On first sight it looks pretty awesome, having that many skills to choose from. But then you realise how little skills are actually useful in general. A lot of skills are very situational
That is part of why GW1 skills were so awesome.
Suppose you have a skill that costs little mana and has a quick casting animation, causes weak to moderate damage and inflicts a strong condition on the target but also on yourself (poison/deep wound).
By itself, this would not be a very useful skill. But what if you have another skill that purges conditions on yourself and you gain life/mana for each? Or maybe you have a skill that grants you a buff that gives you condition immunity, and you found a way to keep up that buff indefinitely because it has a mechanic that refreshes its duration (lets say, for the sake of argument, that it reduces its own cooldown each time you crit). Combine these with a number of other skills that put conditions on you but also grant you advantages that are substantially better than they otherwise would if they were less situational, and you have yourself an interesting build.
That’s just one example. There were skills like that and builds made around such mechanics.
Look at the 55 hp monk.
The monk had a skill that reduced all incoming damage to no more than 10% of the player’s HP, and yet all of the monk’s life regenerating skills granted flat bonuses. The pool of HP to work with wandered the 450~500 health at max level, and regeneration skills were balanced around those values. If a player’s health then, happened to be lower, each point of health granted by regeneration skills was that much more valuable.
So there happened to exist items in the game that lowered the player’s health. Anything from Superior Runes to odd offhand items. Players realized that they could stack these to lower a player’s health to something as low as 55 hp. That means the most damage you could take from any one normal attack, was 5. If you regenerate upwards of 15 health per second, mobs will be hard pressed to kill you. And so with that in mind players devised variations of that idea with mechanisms to regain mana points so they could continue to recast all the spells necessary to keep this going and some form of AoE damage dealing that they could keep up indefinitely. This was as early as the first GW game, no expansions or anything. 55hp monks were farming trolls in ice caves for rare drops.
Sure by the end of the game’s lifetime everyone knew about it through PvX and other such websites, but think about how creative and ingenious the game allowed their players to be, and how rewarding it was to be able to completely change the way you play the game.
Experimenting and stumbling upon fun little combinations was the highlight of my day.
You can choose 2 of 10 professions. And this choice restricts your other choices to 7 from about 200 skills and 1 from about 60 elite skills. I know that’s a lot of combinations but not so many as you stated.
Anyone can change their second profession, so everyone has access to every single skill. You may only draw from a combination of two professions at a time, so 125+125+60+81 for a single choice of two professions, or about 1300 for a single person across all possible choices.
All changes to your build are completely free.
You also forgot to add that attribute distribution restricts number of skill pools to choose from. Like putting most of your attribute points into Sword Mastery restricts you to choose from sword pool.
It’s really the other way around. You pick the skills that will work and then assign attribute points to hit the thresholds of effectiveness that you need out of each skill. Your mileage may vary, and you should try to keep your spell schools to 2 or 3, which often leads you to look for skills that provide similar results in more convenient attributes.
GW2:
-5 sets of 5 weapon skills with aquatic counterparts (on average).
It’s not like that at all…
Elementalist:
…is the big exception. I should know, since I play one. Can you guess why? It’s the least boring class in this game and it has the most skills.
And even the Elementalist suffers from 5-most-important-skills-are-always the same-syndrome, they just have more of them at a time…but they still can’t change them. The lack of build customization persists, it’s only the variety in their available loadout that is superior to the rest of the GW2 classes.
That’s about right. You just forgot to mention that attributes are strictly tied to gear in opposite to gw1. But attributes still exists.
Attributes in GW1 have more in common with GW2’s traits than GW2’s attributes since they are a flexible part of build customization as opposed to something you try to stack the most of in gear.
I do like how you could customize your builds more in GW1.
However, I wanted to note that many of the skills in GW1 were repetitions.
For example Jamei’s Gaze and Heal Other:
http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Jamei's_Gaze
http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Heal_Other
GW1’s skill system would never been put in GW2, no matter how I much I love it.
What I want to see in GW2 is to promote more countering gameplay. I only play pve in GW2 so I’m not gonna comment on the other 2. I want people to think more before they go into fight. For examples, more condition and less direct damage in certain dungeon, so players has to bring a tons of condition removal into fight. Or area effect that constantly KD players like in certain mission in kurzick area in GW1 (sorry I really don’t remembe the name). So player may need to bring stability. Or a boss that requires player to interrupt a devastating skill. These would bring more diversity and deepen the gameplay than the only DPS PVE we currently have.
I do like how you could customize your builds more in GW1.
However, I wanted to note that many of the skills in GW1 were repetitions.
For example Jamei’s Gaze and Heal Other:
http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Jamei's_Gaze
http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Heal_Other
That is to allow some kind of build based on those skills but without making the single skill too OP (or having a too short CD)
I do like how you could customize your builds more in GW1.
However, I wanted to note that many of the skills in GW1 were repetitions.
For example Jamei’s Gaze and Heal Other:
http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Jamei's_Gaze
http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Heal_OtherThat is to allow some kind of build based on those skills but without making the single skill too OP (or having a too short CD)
I thought it was so people who made a Monk starting in factions could still get the skill that was in Prophecies. Though your explanation makes more sense, as I did not understand why not just allow factions to purchase Heal Other. I ran a Healing only monk and bringing both of those never seemed like a good idea to me.
On first sight it looks pretty awesome, having that many skills to choose from. But then you realise how little skills are actually useful in general. A lot of skills are very situational
That is part of why GW1 skills were so awesome.
Suppose you have a skill that costs little mana and has a quick casting animation, causes weak to moderate damage and inflicts a strong condition on the target but also on yourself (poison/deep wound).
By itself, this would not be a very useful skill. But what if you have another skill that purges conditions on yourself and you gain life/mana for each? Or maybe you have a skill that grants you a buff that gives you condition immunity, and you found a way to keep up that buff indefinitely because it has a mechanic that refreshes its duration (lets say, for the sake of argument, that it reduces its own cooldown each time you crit). Combine these with a number of other skills that put conditions on you but also grant you advantages that are substantially better than they otherwise would if they were less situational, and you have yourself an interesting build.
By situational I meant that they weren’t really useful for anything except in very rare and extreme situations. Such as using Water Magic to snare the runners in one of the missions in Nightfall for the bonus objective. Anywhere else in PvE Water Magic was pretty much inferior to Fire and Air, because it did less damage and/or was on longer cooldowns.
And no Warrior ever used hammers in PvE, except maybe doing it for teh lolz. Sword and axe both had good options for AoE damage, which is just way superior over what hammers had to offer in PvE.
I sure do miss skill hunting, gave me a reason to wander around the world, searching for special enemies.
I do like how you could customize your builds more in GW1.
However, I wanted to note that many of the skills in GW1 were repetitions.
For example Jamei’s Gaze and Heal Other:
http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Jamei's_Gaze
http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Heal_OtherThat is to allow some kind of build based on those skills but without making the single skill too OP (or having a too short CD)
I thought it was so people who made a Monk starting in factions could still get the skill that was in Prophecies. Though your explanation makes more sense, as I did not understand why not just allow factions to purchase Heal Other. I ran a Healing only monk and bringing both of those never seemed like a good idea to me.
There was a particular build, “vampire”, using Ranger/Necromancer that used the same skill twice, the Prophecies version and the Factions version.
Repeting skills were very few though, compared to the vast amount of skills available in the game, they were a very small minority.
… This thread is not about how much better GW1 is, it’s about the one thing GW1 did that is still leagues above GW2: skills…
I agree with this 100%. It’s the no. one reason why I could not level past 75 before I got sick of the game and why I futz around in GW1 now while I wait for TESO.
I really can’t understand people who say having a deep and complex skill system, with alot of metagaming and counterbuilding is a BAD thing.
I can uderstand from a deveveloper point of view, it was hard to balance, but i think anet did a pretty good job in gw1 – sure, there were always OP builds, but due to the heavy constant rebalancing, those builds changed over time and forced pvp’ers to keep the mind open, learn, spectate, think, adapt.
Anyone who played an esport knows that great depth and a healthy, everchanging meta is what keeps the game alive and exciting.
^That for the pvp side. Pve wise balance is so off that it’s kinda hard to see the benefits of a less complex and easy to tweak skill system. The pve class discrimination and tiering we have now were never a problem before…
(edited by Aegis.9724)
Anyone who played an esport knows that great depth and a healthy, everchanging meta is what keeps the game alive and exciting.
Anet didn’t buff or nerf a build; they tore it into dust when it was overpowered. Smiter’s Boon, for instance.
@vayne finally someone who also sees at least a noticeable part of the picture.
I’m just a new former so I don’t know this forest trees thing. But I totally understand your views.
Now let’s just leave this thread because I know that you know that everything we are talking about here is 99% pointless.
Perspective… It decides the people who will be stuck as mere gamers and those who will move onto the next level.
Good day young ones.
Like you and Vayne we all love GW2 and we don’t want to change it to GW1.
We just need it improved to be a better game.
How many players left ( or taking long break) GW2 because they found it boring to like only one weapon and using the same skills for months.
the question is do you want them to come back and play again?
@vayne finally someone who also sees at least a noticeable part of the picture.
I’m just a new former so I don’t know this forest trees thing. But I totally understand your views.
Now let’s just leave this thread because I know that you know that everything we are talking about here is 99% pointless.
Perspective… It decides the people who will be stuck as mere gamers and those who will move onto the next level.
Good day young ones.
Like you and Vayne we all love GW2 and we don’t want to change it to GW1.
We just need it improved to be a better game.
How many players left ( or taking long break) GW2 because they found it boring to like only one weapon and using the same skills for months.
the question is do you want them to come back and play again?
I’ve never ever said the game doesn’t need to improve. I’m just against knee-jerk improvements like Rift did where they changed the game too much, too frequently. It was, in my opinion, much worse than what Anet is doing.
The game WILL change. Real change takes time. In a year, the stuff we’re complaining about now will not be valid, and we’ll be complaining about completely different stuff.
@vayne finally someone who also sees at least a noticeable part of the picture.
I’m just a new former so I don’t know this forest trees thing. But I totally understand your views.
Now let’s just leave this thread because I know that you know that everything we are talking about here is 99% pointless.
Perspective… It decides the people who will be stuck as mere gamers and those who will move onto the next level.
Good day young ones.
Like you and Vayne we all love GW2 and we don’t want to change it to GW1.
We just need it improved to be a better game.
How many players left ( or taking long break) GW2 because they found it boring to like only one weapon and using the same skills for months.
the question is do you want them to come back and play again?I’ve never ever said the game doesn’t need to improve. I’m just against knee-jerk improvements like Rift did where they changed the game too much, too frequently. It was, in my opinion, much worse than what Anet is doing.
The game WILL change. Real change takes time. In a year, the stuff we’re complaining about now will not be valid, and we’ll be complaining about completely different stuff.
I dunno, its already been almost a year and some things have actually gotten worse like the addition of ascended items. Who the hell knows what they have next on their agenda. All we can do is hope for the best that maybe someday they’ll remember the game that started it all and stop trying to forget it ever existed and the philosophies behind it.
Yes the game will change, but it could go either way as ANet have proven time and time again. The day GW franchise saw vertical progression was the day a lot of us lost all hope.
Remind me, when was that scavenger hunt for legendary/pre-cursor coming out? It was mentioned months ago… lol, time indeed. So tired of the grind.
@vayne finally someone who also sees at least a noticeable part of the picture.
I’m just a new former so I don’t know this forest trees thing. But I totally understand your views.
Now let’s just leave this thread because I know that you know that everything we are talking about here is 99% pointless.
Perspective… It decides the people who will be stuck as mere gamers and those who will move onto the next level.
Good day young ones.
Like you and Vayne we all love GW2 and we don’t want to change it to GW1.
We just need it improved to be a better game.
How many players left ( or taking long break) GW2 because they found it boring to like only one weapon and using the same skills for months.
the question is do you want them to come back and play again?I’ve never ever said the game doesn’t need to improve. I’m just against knee-jerk improvements like Rift did where they changed the game too much, too frequently. It was, in my opinion, much worse than what Anet is doing.
The game WILL change. Real change takes time. In a year, the stuff we’re complaining about now will not be valid, and we’ll be complaining about completely different stuff.
I dunno, its already been almost a year and some things have actually gotten worse like the addition of ascended items. Who the hell knows what they have next on their agenda. All we can do is hope for the best that maybe someday they’ll remember the game that started it all and stop trying to forget it ever existed and the philosophies behind it.
Yes the game will change, but it could go either way as ANet have proven time and time again. The day GW franchise saw vertical progression was the day a lot of us lost all hope.
Remind me, when was that scavenger hunt for legendary/pre-cursor coming out? It was mentioned months ago… lol, time indeed. So tired of the grind.
First of all, gotten worse as the addition of ascended items is an opinion, not a fact. I don’t care about them one way or another, but a lot of people seem to like them.
Second of all 9 months is 75% of a year, not almost a year. Within regards of the MMO industry, the game is still young. MMOs really do take years to mature. I don’t know why you think even a year is a long time.
Most MMOs at the 9 month mark are still babies. You don’t have to believe it, but it doesn’t make it untrue.
I do like how you could customize your builds more in GW1.
However, I wanted to note that many of the skills in GW1 were repetitions.
For example Jamei’s Gaze and Heal Other:
http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Jamei's_Gaze
http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Heal_Other
And I wanted to point out that this only happened in the Factions expansion. It was pretty sad, I agree. While it was cool to have duplicate skills, it was blatant lazy design. But, again, thankfully it only happened in the first expansion and never again.
The game WILL change. Real change takes time. In a year, the stuff we’re complaining about now will not be valid
If nobody speaks up about it, then nothing will change.
Most MMOs at the 9 month mark are still babies.
Prophecies (The first GW1 campaign) did not have this issue upon release, and clamming up and never bringing up the shortcomings of an MMO is not how improvement happens.
If I didn’t care about the game I would not even bother posting. Clearly I like the game to some degree, but I’m disgruntled with where it falls short of expectations. I bring up these issues so that others may potentially echo my sentiment. And like I said, while I don’t expect a massive overhaul to the skill system, I have a glimmer of hope that Anet at least considers some changes in the right direction.
(edited by Space Cow.2431)
@Space Cow
Prophecies and indeed all of Guild Wars 1 was not an MMO. Anet has said so. It was a cooperative RPG, which is quite different than an MMO (though there are some similarities). One of the big issues that an MMO has (that Guild Wars 1 didn’t) is the balance of not just a group of people (at most 12 in Guild Wars 1), but also groups of hundreds of people. It’s a whole different level of programming.
Aside from that, saying if no one complained things wouldn’t change is unprovable, since there was never a time when no one complained. You’re assuming Anet is happy with the state of balance. I don’t think they are.
Its still worth talking and discussing about.
Whether ANet actually reads whats going on here is rather irrelevant.
Its still worth talking and discussing about.
Whether ANet actually reads whats going on here is rather irrelevant.
I don’t think it’s irrelevant, though I agree it’s worth discussing either way. But it would be better if Anet did see what was being said (and I’m sure they do).
I couldn’t stand the GW1 skill system. far too many useless skills. prophecies was manageable but factions got silly. never played the others though. the combat system is what put me off GW1. I much prefer the GW2 system because there are less useless options. While there are still many things that need a buff but on my mesmer main I still cycle between at least half my utilities. And I use most of the weapons (just not torch and sceptre). To me that’s excellent.
I don’t know why all these GW1 and Wow famous keep coming on thus forum and requesting the game be turned into GW1 or Wow etc. Just go play that game instead and let us enjoy ours.
You can choose 2 of 10 professions. And this choice restricts your other choices to 7 from about 200 skills and 1 from about 60 elite skills. I know that’s a lot of combinations but not so many as you stated.
Anyone can change their second profession, so everyone has access to every single skill. You may only draw from a combination of two professions at a time, so 125+125+60+81 for a single choice of two professions, or about 1300 for a single person across all possible choices.
This is exactly what I meant. You have access to all skills but you can’t pick skills from more then 2 professions at once. So your first decision is to choose 2 out of 10 pools/professions and that restricts you to about 250 skills. I’m not saying this isn’t huge amount of possibilities. Just saying how it really is in Gw1.
You also forgot to add that attribute distribution restricts number of skill pools to choose from. Like putting most of your attribute points into Sword Mastery restricts you to choose from sword pool.
It’s really the other way around.
I think that you wrote exactly the same thing as I did but with different words…
GW2:
-5 sets of 5 weapon skills with aquatic counterparts (on average).It’s not like that at all…
Elementalist:And even the Elementalist suffers from 5-most-important-skills-are-always the same-syndrome, they just have more of them at a time…but they still can’t change them.
False. They can change those 5 skills by changing weapon sets. Also you constantly forget that you can choose 2 weapon sets at the same time.
For example warriors can set those 5 first skills in 16 different ways and swap during combat between two of them. So that makes 16 × 15 = 240 different combinations.
That’s about right. You just forgot to mention that attributes are strictly tied to gear in opposite to gw1. But attributes still exists.
Attributes in GW1 have more in common with GW2’s traits than GW2’s attributes since they are a flexible part of build customization as opposed to something you try to stack the most of in gear.
I can’t understand why your saying silly things like that…
Attributes in gw1 is just a simple number that determine damage, duration or healing of skills. This is exactly what attributes in gw2 do. Traits are much more then that.
The only difference is that in gw1 you can reassign attributes by spending points from a pool and in gw2 your doing that by changing armor.
(edited by HiddenNick.7206)
That’s another thing I forgot about. Speaking only of PVe now, PVe only skills were pretty OP in Guild Wars 1. So OP that it was very rare that in any profession, it wouldn’t make more sense to take one of those skills than a profession skill. You were limited to 3 of those skills.
That left five skills, for which you had two professions. Some of the skills were no brainers. One of them was usually a self-heal, which meant four skills left. You had an elite skill, and then three profession skills.
Yeah, it was fun to make builds, but really there wasn’t quite as much freedom as you were led to believe. Of course, it didn’t matter if you played with heroes, because if you specced them right, it didn’t matter what you brought to the table.
Totally agree with OP.
I just want to give you my 2 cents:
In my honest opinion, I think that if Guild Wars 2 would have implemented GW1’ skills system but removing secondary professions for being more casual-friendly and more easy to balance, this game would be AWESOME.
I mean, imagine if we didnt have weapon sets and mandatory-healing skills and, instead, we have about 60 skills for every profession, each one tied to a specific trait line which should be focused on:
– Direct damage: crits, deep wound, etc.
– Damage on time: conditions,hexes, etc.
– Control: armor, crowd control, etc.
– Support: healing, boons, etc.
– Profession-specific line: have skills of all roles but using the profession mechanic.
This way, we had a more clear system, more easy to balance (less skills than GW1, more focused on a role than GW2), casual-friendly (you just invest points on the lines you want to play and use those skills) and gives room for creativity on builds.
Casuals found it hard
They did? May I ask how you know?
Okay, let me qualify that. Some casuals found it hard. I know because I’ve met and talked to them over the years. There’s one guy in my guild right now who couldn’t figure out Guild Wars 1 at all. He couldn’t. He’s played lots of other games, but Guild Wars 1 was just too complicated. Too different from other games. It’s not the first time I’ve heard the complaint.
In some ways, Factions was worse than Prophecies in this way, because you could level to 20 in a day. They threw skills at you so fast you didn’t have time to adjust. Prophecies was a much slower game, during which you got skills much slower. But over all, the complexity of the skills, which people keep touting, were too complex for some people.
And these aren’t necessarily unintelligent people. They were people who were overwhelmed by the game’s complexity.
Hell one of the guys in my guild didn’t even know there missions because he didn’t notice the enter mission button the party panel in Prophecies. He spent the entire time doing side quests and wondering why there was no story.
LOL. I had a similar fate on my first toon. I was new to the game and didn’t know anyone really. But I started noticing that everytime I bought a skill, the price would go up some: 200g, 400g, 700g… I told myself that if it got to 1 plat I would restart the entire game and be very selective on which skills I bought. Since they obviously kept increasing exponentially. lol
Wish someone had told me it capped at 1 plat before I started over. :P
Psh. GW1 had way better voice acting, remember the amazing Factions scenes?
The Guild Wars 1 combat system, skill system, and trait system is better than what’s in Guild Wars 2 in every possible way. Guild Wars 2 is more like a Hack a Slash than anything else. They really created something special with the original Guild Wars and it’s a huge shame they abandoned it in Guild Wars 2 to cater to lesser skilled individuals. Just look at the quality of players Guild Wars 1 had over Guild Wars 2.
And FYI if you were staring at your skill bar the entire time in Guild Wars 1 you are an absolute fail of player…………
And FYI if you were staring at your skill bar the entire time in Guild Wars 1 you are an absolute fail of player…………
Totally agree, you need to watch what is happening as well: elementalists casting their fire magic’s AoEs on you, ranger trappers, where is their monk, etc.
Sure thing is that instead of watching some animations in the middle of a chaotic combat (like currently is in GW2), you had to watch a casting bar. Or sometimes you need to look at your bars for micro-controlling some CDs, hp or mana JUST LIKE in GW2 hp, CDs and energy for dodges…. So I don’t see much difference.
Thanks to half cooldown items in gw1 you still had to glance at your skillbar.
Aside from that, saying if no one complained things wouldn’t change is unprovable, since there was never a time when no one complained. You’re assuming Anet is happy with the state of balance. I don’t think they are.
That’s ridiculous. I don’t need to prove it, it’s common sense. If nobody ever brought up an issue, the development team would focus on churning out content to retain players instead of wasting time and effort (and money) reworking mechanics.
So yes, talking about what is less than stellar is absolutely essential. Look at Blizzard’s Diablo 3. They move at a snail’s pace, but over the course of a year they have improved the game, and nearly every change was brought about by the rabid forum community.
Aside from that, saying if no one complained things wouldn’t change is unprovable, since there was never a time when no one complained. You’re assuming Anet is happy with the state of balance. I don’t think they are.
That’s ridiculous. I don’t need to prove it, it’s common sense. If nobody ever brought up an issue, the development team would focus on churning out content to retain players instead of wasting time and effort (and money) reworking mechanics.
So yes, talking about what is less than stellar is absolutely essential. Look at Blizzard’s Diablo 3. They move at a snail’s pace, but over the course of a year they have improved the game, and nearly every change was brought about by the rabid forum community.
You don’t know what brought about changes. You see cause and effect. People complain, a change is made. You see one causing the other.
How do you know what changes were planned, or what they wanted to do before people complained.
The LFG tool in Guild Wars 2 is a perfect example. Do you really think Anet is working on an LFG tool because people complained? You don’t think it was already on their list of things to do? I’m pretty sure it was because they did talk about it back in the old days. They hadn’t gotten to it.
It’s easy to see cause and effect, but without being privy to inside discussions no one really knows.
This is exactly what I meant. You have access to all skills but you can’t pick skills from more then 2 professions at once. So your first decision is to choose 2 out of 10 pools/professions and that restricts you to about 250 skills. I’m not saying this isn’t huge amount of possibilities. Just saying how it really is in Gw1.
Jesus Christ…
Read the preamble, and then read what I wrote, and tell me where I failed to specify skill choice restriction.
The following is an analysis of what each player has access to in ONE character as far as creating a skill build goes.
-7 of 1026 normal skills (roughly 125 per profession, everyone has 2 professions, second profession can be changed. 81 skills are common across all professions).
I think that you wrote exactly the same thing as I did but with different words…
And I think you lack reading comprehension.
GW2:
-5 sets of 5 weapon skills with aquatic counterparts (on average).False. They can change those 5 skills by changing weapon sets.
Read what you just quoted. If you still don’t get it, read it again until you do.
Also you constantly forget that you can choose 2 weapon sets at the same time.
You’re right, I did forget that, my bad.
It should really read 2 of 5 sets of weapon skills (on average).
I will change the opening post accordingly.
I can’t understand why your saying silly things like that…
Stopped reading here and won’t bother with your posts anymore. If you resort to ad hominem you lose all credibility.
How do you know what changes were planned, or what they wanted to do before people complained.
…
The developers themselves post in their own forums on a semi-regular basis, often discussing player feedback. These changes make it into the game. They have a PTR where they encourage players to play and post their two cents about what’s being done right and what could be improved before the final version of the patch rolls out. And they love to brag that they listen to what their playerbase is saying, even if they are slowpokes in reality.
And, again, are we really arguing this? It’s common sense. If the community responds negatively to a feature en masse, it becomes something the developers have to deal with in order to retain active players.
Common. Sense.
How do you know what changes were planned, or what they wanted to do before people complained.
…
The developers themselves post in their own forums on a semi-regular basis, often discussing player feedback. These changes make it into the game. They have a PTR where they encourage players to play and post their two cents about what’s being done right and what could be improved before the final version of the patch rolls out. And they love to brag that they listen to what their playerbase is saying, even if they are slowpokes in reality.
And, again, are we really arguing this? It’s common sense. If the community responds negatively to a feature en masse, it becomes something the developers have to deal with in order to retain active players.
Common. Sense.
Common sense is uncommon. Of COURSE devs are going to brag they listen to their fans. Why wouldn’t they? The problem is, you still don’t know how much stuff would have been done anyway. So of a company says, we listen to our fans because their fans said something they had in mind, why would they say otherwise.
Common sense includes not believing everything a company says. I don’t believe everything Anet says. Companies use spin. You should check out a television program called The Gruen Transfer and the sequel series Gruen Planet. It’s all about how companies use spin and PR to make themselves look awesome. They’re all businesses. They’re all out to sell copies of their game. They’re going to try to present themselves in the best light possible.
Note, Anet is a small company and pretty bad at this. lol
How do you know what changes were planned, or what they wanted to do before people complained.
…
The developers themselves post in their own forums on a semi-regular basis, often discussing player feedback. These changes make it into the game. They have a PTR where they encourage players to play and post their two cents about what’s being done right and what could be improved before the final version of the patch rolls out. And they love to brag that they listen to what their playerbase is saying, even if they are slowpokes in reality.
And, again, are we really arguing this? It’s common sense. If the community responds negatively to a feature en masse, it becomes something the developers have to deal with in order to retain active players.
Common. Sense.
Common sense is uncommon. Of COURSE devs are going to brag they listen to their fans. Why wouldn’t they? The problem is, you still don’t know how much stuff would have been done anyway. So of a company says, we listen to our fans because their fans said something they had in mind, why would they say otherwise.
Common sense includes not believing everything a company says. I don’t believe everything Anet says. Companies use spin. You should check out a television program called The Gruen Transfer and the sequel series Gruen Planet. It’s all about how companies use spin and PR to make themselves look awesome. They’re all businesses. They’re all out to sell copies of their game. They’re going to try to present themselves in the best light possible.
Note, Anet is a small company and pretty bad at this. lol
I don’t believe most of what Blizzard says either >_>
But I still find it completely ludicrous that anyone would think NOT discussing problems or what a percentage of the customers perceive as problems is a positive thing.
Anyway we are getting way offtopic here. It’s worth reiterating that I really like this game, and I only want to see it get better.
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