Guild Wars 2

Hi,

I’m big fan of Guild Wars and I’m playing since Guild Wars Prophecies. I was very excited about open world content for Guild Wars 2. Dynamic world, events instead of quests, players grouping naturally without a need for party, incentive to play with others etc. Unfortunately I was very dissapointed on release (and I’ll explain why below) and to this day I’m logging in from time to time and checking if maybe there were some patches or updates to remedy the issues. While there were some changes the issues remained. So I decided to make a list of problems how I see them and what possible solutions there might be. The reason I care is that I think that Guild Wars 2 has by far the best open-world experience from the mmos I played. It just misses the few important details…

[Combat]

• Movement. Players can move AND execute skills. Positioning is important. How creatures are dealing with it? Here are encounters with Melee monster and with Ranged monster:
  Carrion Devourer
  Tamini Archer
  As you can see the creatures have problems with hitting players. It was not hard to kill a Devourer using melee weapon without getting hit once. It is even easier to kite him with ranged weapon. This is the core problem with Guild Wars 2. No matter how much ArenaNet developers try to make the creature challenging, the players will be able to counter, by simply walking (which is easily done). Here is another video showing this extends to better designed and harder creatures:
  Risen Putrifier
  Here the creature was upgraded during the 3 years of game release. It has bigger range (or i was lagging.) This is poor solution to the problem as what you see is not what you get The skill animation should indicate what the range of the skill is. Additionally the creature got a ranged attack that puts an immobilize on you. Better, but I was still able to mitigate a lot of damage by walking.
• DPS and Health. I recorded a video where I have no armor and common-white rarity level 80 weapon. I stand still so that I can receive the damage the creatures are supposed to deal. I decided to only use auto attack. Also I have chosen Elementalist because he has lowest toughness and lowest health pool of any profession. It has also quite weak auto attacks compared to other professions. Anyway here are results:
  No equpment tests
  So… The results are that an average Guild Wars 2 creature is designed to be on equal level with most squishy profession in the game, given that player wears no equipment and uses only auto attack while standing still.
• Creature design. Creatures have very poor set of skills. Also the AI is very poor. Let’s take an examples from my videos:
  How creatures are designed:
  Carrion Devourer according to wiki it has 2 attacks that do knockdown. The problem here was that they do not work. Tail Swipe is executed while being still and works only against players that do not move (which is not very realistic.) Tunnel has the same problem. But even if the two skills were working there is not much the creature can do after it succesfully knocks player down. On this level it is a great opportunity to teach new players what is stability and what is Stun Break or evade. The problem is that new players will not even notice because the creature will either die before doing anything or will miss due to player accidentally moving away. Or when it knocks down it still will not do anything and the player will not feel the need to counter that in any way.
  How creatures could be designed:
  Continuing with the example of Carrion Devourer:
  Attack speed is too low.
  Remove Tail Swipe
  Slash should be executed while moving.
  Slash should be used when player is near. Since the creature is slow, when player moves to avoid the Slash damage the creature should use Tunnel.
  Tunnel -> creature should be faster when tunelling and should hit. The attack should be unblockable and should track the target. While evading will still be possible, now players will either evade or put stability. Otherwise they are knocked down. This skill should do small or 0 damage. The knock down should last 5 seconds. This is to give new players the opportunity to use Stun Breaker. New players might not notice the 1s knockdown or might not feel encouraged to use the stun break.
  Devour -> charged skill. Devourer should start charging it as soon as it knocks down player. The charge time should be about 3.5-4 seconds. So that when the knocked down player does nothing and nobody interrupts the creature, the creature hits. The hit should take about 50% of average player health and apply 2 stacks of bleed for enough time that the player is put near death if he does not remove the conditions. This way new player will actually learn the game mechanics.
  BTW: It would be MUCH easier if you knew that lvl 10 player will have x life and y toughness. Now when you design it in a way that warrior looses 50% of HP it is likely that the ability will one-shot an elementalist. Maybe in lower level PvE areas creatures could have certain attacks that are working like agony in fractals and takes a % of health instead of just dealing damage. Devour could be such a skill. The number of bleeds could also be dependent on player HP.
  Anyway, the idea is that every player is still able to beat the creature 1vs1. Even on first attempt. After all it is level 10 creature. But experience makes player dealing with that particular creature better. Finally the player will not loose much hp in this fight but will be forced to actually counter the creature mechanics in some way.

Possible Solution:
1) Upgrading the engine so that creatures in pve better chase players and execute skills while moving that actually hit them. Strafing projectiles should not be possible in PvE. Or creatures should also strafe
2) Introduce the system that increases the raw stats of the creatures the farther they are from “inhabitable” places and patrolled roads. Introduce creature groups in some places of the map. Compose the groups so that they combo with each other. Introduce more healers and rezzers. Introduce chests in such places.
3) Design creatures and group of creatures so that they require reactive play.
4) Overally increase the stats of all creatures in the open-world pve because introducing the ascended gear and new trait system made players more powerfull and accidentally obsoleted the entire game content. Even before ascended the stats were much too lower.

Why it is important:
Because in the long term, the PvE open-world is boring. It has everything it needs to be interesting. The environment is dynamic due to event chains, the area tells some story through it. There are hidden stuff on the maps that give rewards when found. There are jumping puzzles and the maps are amazing looking and quite interesting on themselves. But… my character build is irrelevant. My profession is irrelevant. Creature I’m fighting with is irrelevant. My Gear does not matter much. Because creatures in this game do not fight back. The encounters are boring, and you do not make any interesting choices while fighting nor you have to react to anything. The game became what it was promised it will not be.
Here is the quote from GW2 Manifesto (That can be accessed Here)

Finally, since combat is such a core part of the gameplay of any MMO, we’ve put a lot of emphasis into rethinking combat. So much of traditional MMO combat is rote and repetitive. You execute the same strategy over and over again, just augmented over time with better and better gear. After a while it starts to feel like you’re playing a spreadsheet. Combat needs to be about making creative choices, and it needs to feel immediate, active, and visceral. So we’ve put a huge focus on strengthening our combat, giving the player limitless choices, and providing the thrill and joy of being in combat.

Well it is not true for open-world PvE.

[Dynamic Events]

I know that Arena Net experiments with event system and new maps added in Living Story and HoT maps are different then core maps. However I’m a big fan of the idea that I can visit any place in the game and have fun, not just the “newest map”.

• Updates – Event system is easily expandable. It was advertised that the maps could change in the future. New content could be added to them. It happened for some maps, allright. But the amount of new events over the course of 3 years is disappointing.
• Quality – Most of the events on most of maps look like they were added quickly due to “OMG release is next month? We have no events yet, let’s add them quickly. Copy-Paste, Copy-Paste, Copy-Paste.” As you remember most of them were not working anyway. It was a big disappointment but I waited hoping for a fix after the release. I’m afraid that I’m still waiting. Recent HoT beta was not encouraging, having the same event problems that the core game had 3 years ago.
• Amount of events – it is too low. For the size of the maps the amount of things that could be happening is large. Also in order for the events to not be repeatable the events should be on a longer timer. This means more events to fill the time-gaps.
• Lore-breaking events – events repeat. Sometimes this makes sense lore-wise (event to gather food-> food is eaten so you need to gather it again) But more often than not it makes no sense.
• Event chains depending on player success. – I liked that the world might go “darker” when players fail events, however due to extremely easy events this leads to most of the content never displaying.
• Event difficulty and scaling – Since there is reward even when players fail an event it should happen sometimes. Also I hoped that scaling problem will be solved now that we are 3 years after the game has released. While there were some updates to end-game events, the rest of the events were not touched.

Possible Solutions

• One of the teams working on balancing and updating the old content. Finishing the unfinished events lore-wise. I understand this is not priority but the quality of content delivered was not exactly on the level it should be at release. Sorry…
• When the event has some effect on the world (and it always should) it should never just “reset” if it does not makes sense lore-wise. Instead some other events should lead to the situation repeating itself. The ‘reset’ should be done gradually. For example if ice statue of Norn in the Grawl cave near Hoelbrak starting area melts, it should be visible gradually. It shouldn’t just dissapear.
• When event ends, there should be an indication to players that finished it (that could be turned off via options menu) where player can go to experience the follow-up. (multiple in case of many follow-ups)
• Add new events to old zones. They don’t have to have something in common with some living story. These can be a simple events or a development of a map’s lore. In queensdale, bandits could discover more ways to disrupt villagers. The swamp is quite empty during the “waiting for Behemoth” period. When centaurs are under control, there is also not much going on around Beetletun. Maybe the lady that recovers destroyed grape vines could finally convince Caduceus to rebuild the vineyard? Or maybe waterworks might want to clean the pipes of slime creatures? What about the asura that has his lab on the hill?
• As for difficulty it depends on creatures and if the issues for them are solved then the difficulty of events could be adjusted. Also some fixes in game mechanics are needed first, like making sure that players power does not increase exponentially while they are standing in same spot. (Due to combo fields, aoe limit and insta-stand-ups).
• Redesign core game champions to use the same mechanics as HoT champions

[PvE Balance]

In this section I intend to post videos of skills or profession mechanics that are both powerfull and easy to pull off. The tricks that make otherwise hard or impossible encounters very easy. While these skills might be balanced in PvP it is something entirely different in PvE where opponents have serious limitations. It might not mean that skill or profession is broken. Maybe the fault is in the encounter design. Anyway I’m posting this here because I still hope that there will be a time when Guild Wars 2 will have meaningful PvE over entire game content, not just the newest zone.

[Thief]

• Pistol 5: Black Powder. – What I do not like here is that it doesn’t require reactive play. My plan for the encounter was: 5555555555 and it worked. Notice how in first encounter I completely ignored what the creature did. I could have interrupted the healing signet but I didn’t have to. Notice how in second encounter I also ignored what the creature did. Actually blind disabled the healing for the Monk. I did not have trait for the skill, but I can imagine a Thief that specializes in perma blind is even better. I’m sure the skill can be used to turn off many more encounters throughout the game.
  SOLUTION: Split for PvE, change functionality of the skill or improve AI so that creatures step out from the cloud.
  SEVERITY: Very High. The fact that it was not fixed 1 day after the game release is for me very disturbing.

Stop talking about the manifesto like it applies to this game. It doesn’t. It’s not a thing anymore.

Humm besides control mechanics and artwork, actually gw2 lacks by alot, its ment to be a bland casual game that catters players that only cares about graphics.

The game that entered in beta, 3 years after release.. cof cof cof.

Also what Guhracie.3419 said…

Guhracie.3419:

Stop talking about the manifesto like it applies to this game. It doesn’t. It’s not a thing anymore.

Well, I still hope after 3 years that it is just due to NCSoft forcing GW2 to be released too early and then team having to deal with more urgent matters ignoring the less important… maybe it is stupid… but there are some updates to the game that indicate that the manifesto was intended to be true. Especially that the first zone in HoT was considerably better than what we have now. Far from perfect still… but… who knows…

Also I have nothing against casual games. Let the Guild Wars 2 be a game for everyone. What we have currently is not casual, it is broken. If the intention of designers was to make creatures non-existing they could have removed them. There is no point in their existence now. They serve no purpose but only hinder “casual” players that would like to admire the view.

I agree that GW2 needs a MASSIVE A.I. overhaul.

+1 Much like to this thread.

At the moment my favorite PvE is taking objectives in WvW, they at least fight back.

My favorite NPC’s in the game is the NPC test dummies in Heart of the Mist, because they actually hit you a bit, uses decent skills, and if you don’t pay attention can kill you.

I used to try to solo champions in PvE to get some sort of challenge, that stoped being fun 1-2 years ago.

Agree with OP pretty much across the board. Better AI and increased PRESSURE from PvE enemies would also potentially help to make pure glass cannon builds less attractive. It’s one of the reasons I think the attack rate of NPC enemies could be basically doubled, and I agree that any of the charged attacks should be something that actually matter enough to evade. I remember starting out that those huge windup animations were really scary, and I was always super careful to say, get out of the way of Etin power bashes, etc. Then I realized just how little it mattered if they actually connected, and it was just sort of meh, auto attack cruise control.