Guild Wars 2

First of all, let me begin by saying that GW2 combat does have good depth – in general. What I mean by the title is specifically referring to the ‘physical combat’ in GW2 and how major core mechanical issues exists there, which I’ll get into detail listing/explaining them below. Since the whole theory-crafting traits / ‘playing with the stats’ part of GW2’s combat is legitimately sound, let’s give credit to where credit is due before I begin analyzing all the bad parts; GW2’s combat system absolutely works. Although, it’s the physical mechanics in combat that needs some major polishes (and depth).

The following issues are what I find to lower my game-play experience in GW2:

1) Having to see my character dodge before the mob’s projectile hits me and STILL gets hit (this happens to me with 70MS, or 70 ping).

2) Waiting for skills to delay for 1-2 seconds before casting them is terrible on some skills, like on the warrior skill “Rifle Butt”. It’s ridiculous the fact that I can’t knock a player instantly back, instead having to wait sometime before actually performing the skill. Plus, it’s not like butting someone backward needs preparation realistically… *and in all seriousness though I’d prefer having a longer CD on these type of ‘clutch’ skills rather than having them delay before each casts.

3) Not having an “organized system” that determines definitely: what skills can be dodged by simply moving skillfully out of its way, and what skills have projectile trackers that’ll “DIVERT ITS PATH” in midair to hit its opponents anyways (ie. not avoidable without actually pressing dodge). I get confused a lot by how a mob hits/miss me in this game (different from point 1. ) in a sense that I have no idea as to when a mob will just miss me out of the blue with a range attack and when sometimes the projectile will ‘curve at the last min’ to hit me.

TL:DR – If GW2 combat is about reacting based on what you see on screen then there better be more pattern stuffs that we can work with and not random ‘glitches’ everywhere (forget about fixing the broken traits even, “having visual correctness at all times” should be at the first and foremost).

And Bah Da Way: I have an ASUS RT n66U Router with a $100 Internet plan and runs the game at about 45 FPS constant in most areas.

I think the combat needs less spamming of 1,1,1,1,1 and a lot more things like stuns, fears, etc that are longer…right now…it just seems very zergy in PvP especially. Melee is very much all over the place…I think Range definitely has an advantage in this game.

Ryth.6518:

I think the combat needs less spamming of 1,1,1,1,1 and a lot more things like stuns, fears, etc that are longer…right now…it just seems very zergy in PvP especially. Melee is very much all over the place…I think Range definitely has an advantage in this game.

Yes lets increase/add more disables so that pvp becomes a stunlock/fear chain fest

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Combo

RoRo.8270:

Ryth.6518:

I think the combat needs less spamming of 1,1,1,1,1 and a lot more things like stuns, fears, etc that are longer…right now…it just seems very zergy in PvP especially. Melee is very much all over the place…I think Range definitely has an advantage in this game.

Yes lets increase/add more disables so that pvp becomes a stunlock/fear chain fest

I get what you’re saying (the sarcasm), but let’s not forget that stun-locking and fear is not OP if the duration is kept balanced. In addition, I believe what the dude (Ryth) was trying to say is that this game needs more “displacement skills”. Plain stun is the worst… but other displacement skills like fear, knock-backs, knock-downs, swap places, putting a wall that makes your opponent think about approaching you, etc… are what makes a fight interesting (if again the effect durations are properly balanced).

The key component in any PVP battle has always been about displacement and situational tactics, the ability to just crap on somebody with 1-2 skill repetitively in too many situations is probably the “worst depth” that any skill-based game can have (and in GW2… it’s pretty obvious that for example – if you want to kill somebody with range burst instantly as a ‘warrior’ the ONLY way to do so is to use a rifle and specifically spam ‘volley’ with stacked crit). IMO, even though GW2 could use more displacement skills, what is actually needed is in terms of skills is the full ability for every class to accomplish the ‘same role’. IE – If a Mesmer wants to take on support, there should be a trait that allows you to grant a clone of your ally and the clone will split damage with the ally if he/she takes damage. Or if a guardian wants to be a single target range dpser (which it can’t be atm), then maybe add a new weapon to guardian that allows him to do so, but in exchange that all his aegis doesn’t block an attack for 100% of the damage, but blocks a single attack for 30% of the damage only.

Melee Skills especially since its on a very short range.
Most Melee skills still continue doing the full action even when target is already out of range.
It should be, when target is out of reach, the skill either stop or it cannot be activated cause we keep hitting thin air aka Miss. And the skill will go on recharge

Jabronee.9465:

Melee Skills especially since its on a very short range.
Most Melee skills still continue doing the full action even when target is already out of range.
It should be, when target is out of reach, the skill either stop or it cannot be activated cause we keep hitting thin air aka Miss. And the skill will go on recharge

It’s either that or we need some kind of crosshair… but I prefer your idea! :P

I agree with Rith, the combat is spam one and keep other 4 wep skills on cool down most of the time. Id like to see a few more skills but will never happen the idea to limit skills to 9 and 1 ulti was a cool theory but i think 10 is too little 15 give or take seems like a better idea. Totally my opinion tho

Yah I think we need more bags of ’trick’s as you call it with our characters for PvP and the spam 1 auto attack needs to go. In other games, auto attack does no damage…in here..it does a ton.

I’d like to see more abilities and choices to use certain things at certain times, along with our main skills.

I dont see that combat is dumbed down, its just more strategic and less button and skill happy. I do agree there needs to be more to do in fights, I think this could be done by lowering cool downs though and adding new weapons. Not every class should be able to do everything, there should be some variety..however the same end goal..ie killing someone in 2-3 seconds or outlasting your enemy..should be there and right now its not. Invulnerability is the same thing as a 100% evade, two different skills..same outcome, we need more of those do balance the pvp and lighter cool downs to make it more dynamic.

I think a lot of the skills were very early development abilities. They sound a lot like GW1 skills, but without the one or two extra effects. The impression I got during development was that all the skills would affect the environment in some way, and would focus a lot on positioning and changing what the skills do based on where you are, how you built yourself, and so on. The combat system ended up being very simple-minded compared to that; a lot of abilities are no better than anything you’d find in any other game, and have no depth outside of their recharge.

I think the limited skill selection wouldn’t be so bad if the skills themselves had more depth. Most do not. Hopefully now that a lot of us have 300-400 hours of gameplay under our belt we can say that without it being immediately excused as just not understanding the system yet.

I am one of those that are very disappointed with GW2’s combat system. The lack of builds, weapon or class skills and customization is very big problem for me, personally.
But back to the OP … I think that physical combat suffers because they put so much emphasis on the positioning. Sometimes I think dodge is the foundation on which they built their entire combat. That brought an increased amount of skill required from the player when it comes to positioning. But then they added auto-attack and auto-targeting.

Let’s say that every fight consists of damage, positioning and control. They improved positioning. It’s probably the best there is on the MMO market. But … what about those other two factors?
We only have 1 or 2 weapon skills and maybe 1 or 2 utility skills for damage. The rest are more of a control or support type of skills. Maybe that’s enough to demand some skill from a player. But one of those skills is auto-attack.
And not only that. Auto attack sometimes does more than half of the damage you do in entire fight. You damage you foe without even really trying very hard. Where is the skill in that? They actually dumbed down the “art” of doing damage. One thing that many of us enjoy so much.

This game is also focused on control/support more than many other games. But control is many times so meaningless (in PVE especially) with .5 sec of something or 1 sec of something else that it just doesn’t add anything to the fight so we don’t use it. In those cases I remember all those that are against adding more skills as “we don’t want 30 skills and than use just 5 of them”. Well something similar is happening here as well. Add to that this plethora of graphical effects during the fight that only distracts you from knowing what is going on and those short durations are even more useless.

Auto-targeting. Many of our skills are AOE in a way. We don’t need to face our foe in order to fight it. We just have to be close to them and hit our skill and our auto-attack will damage 3 opponents that are standing around us.That also doesn’t take skill. Or arrow flying behind us. What the f…? Where is the skill in that?

In my opinion they dumbed down physical combat by focusing to heavily on positioning. Which they improved. How about having both parts of the fight demanding and something that requires skill? I don’t think they can improve something about that as It would require too much of a change of their basic concepts. But I could be wrong. At least I hope I am.

All I want is to be able to jump and cast. You can cast then jump but not the other way around. Almost every single MMO I have played (more than I could list) allowed you to do this, but not so in GW2.

Still can’t stop myself from jumping like a loon…8+ years of doing it in many other MMOs is hard to repress. All in all it makes combat feel a lot more clunky. I can’t dive off a wall and shoot for instance, you have have feet planted firmly on the ground….

Suppose there’s pros and cons. Many don’t like bunny hopping/jump shotting, but I do.

edit. had few friends actually agree with me that this is one of the most annoying things about GW2 combat compared to other graphical MMOs of it’s type.

I don’t get the posts going like “the combat is about using your CDs and spamming 1”.
Do you guys know we can swap weapons right?
I hardly ever use autoattack.

You use the same weapon skills at level 3 that you use at 80. If you don’t like the weapon skills on a weapon then it becomes obsolete.

I’d like to use staffs but hate the skills on them. Warhorns too, hate the skills so never going to use.

I think we need more weapon skills or the ability to play around with them or something. I don’t want to keep harping on about GW1 but imagine in that game using your starting skills for the whole game. There is having everyone on the same page (no creativity with skills or overpowered builds) and then there is downright “whats the point of continuing? I’m only a clone.”

Please don’t add more disables/stun/fear/kb, etc. Man I HATE those, you just sit there for several seconds staring at your screen, and especially in pvp there are times you get constantly disabled, much quicker than your stunbreaker/condition breaker cooldowns. I’ve always felt that stuns and such disables were just lazy programming and kind of a “combat sink” where it extended combat but at the expense of boredom and frustration.

I liked GW1 system of hexes and enchantments better that i like most games full on player CCs

I agree with the projectiles lock and don’t lock-on point… even as playing a ranged character. I can understand why you may want more lock-on mechanics in a PvP setting, but it seems unnecessary for PvE.

Also, is there an enable cast-time feature? I thought this was one of the best things WoW introduced so I could see what ability the targetted enemy was trying to do and when he’d almost be done casting it; which at the melee range lets you know when to dodge immediately or try to pull of an interrupt, for ranged it’s more like knowing that the projectile is on it’s way (assuming you didn’t pull of an interrupt).

A way better idea. Remove the Auto aim system and let the player side step to avoid the attack instead of the roll/dodge feature.

Dont understand why all mmos goes with the stupid auto aim lock on target crap.

You will get a much better competitive players in pvp and more people wanting to pvp or pve for that matter because they dont have to use the only 2 skils to dodge an attack then eat all the rest of the damage until they can roll away or find objects to LOS the attacks.

Only reason why i dont even bother with pvp matchs. As is i find it tough for me to even want to do wvw cause i know im just going to die from the zerg fest.

Coming from WOW, the combat in GW2 appears more visceral on the surface, but in the end, its just not as good, from a feedback perspective. Everything in WOW from your button clicks registering to how the UI reacts to a spell/skill, was so fast in response time. The spell fired, you saw the spell, it hit the target, you see their HPs drop and your mana/energy, ect. It’s in perfect sync. You just don’t get that in GW2. There’s a delay in all your actions except possibly rolling. Its the same feeling I got when I started playing WAR. Everything just felt so delayed and slow, regardless of how much “stuff” is happening.

For example, you cast a heal and you watch the animation, THEN you see your health build and its all delayed. Its not instant like it should be. I’ve had to spam the heal skill in PvP because I simply can’t trust its going to go off with a single press. That’s bad.

Too many spell effects as well that conceal valuable on screen information that you need in order to properly react. Its fine in solo PvE. But in PvP with 5 players blasting away, you lose it. Forget about WvW or DEs with 10+ players surrounding a Champion.

WoW has TOO many abilities. When you have to macro and have ridiculous bindings (Warrior in WoW), then the design is broken.

I think GW2 has a tad too little. I think I’d like to see around 12-15 honestly.

I feel like in WoW, there was just too much macro’ing in general, but I think I liked having ‘situational’ abilities here and there that might be used every so often depending on foe, etc.

Yah there is something ‘missing in PvP’….I agree with Josher…BUT WoW PvP was not at a good place to start…from spell effects and other things like information, etc.
There definitely seems to be some ‘lag’ in GW2 PvP…and right now, melee is not in a good place in terms of feeling ‘weird’

I feel pointless talking about such things cause no matter how much we talk some of these fundamental structures like combat will never change.

I think all #1 abilities should be exciting and interesting in terms of animations/effects if they are going to be on spam mode.
Let me explain with some examples:
-Guardian scepter #1→ incredibly boring repeating the same action over and over again. It becomes mind numbing after a while. You could make it more interesting by adding variation in the way it swings the weapon at least.
-Mesmer staff #1 → again he just performs the same boring animation over and over. This one however at least gives different boons and conditions randomly so it helps to keep my interest, but still the animation could be more dynamic.
-Elementalists scepter (all atunements) – they all keep doing the same thing constantly. At least changing from atunements alleviates the soporific inducing repetition.

In my opinion adding more dynamic animations helps reduce the feeling of mindless spam.

OP didn’t get his final points across very well, but i understand what you’re getting it. I assume these comments are fairly PvE focused, but some of it does translate over to PvP.

GW2’s main departure from ‘regular’ MMO combat is the shift towards reactive counters. The dodge is incredibly important for every class, and the rest of the combat is clearly built around it – key abilities have long cast times and obvious animations because they are supposed to be dodgable on reaction. PvE content works the same way with mobs having clear tells and reactive dodging being a requirement.

In this sense, it nudges slightly into the domain of TERA. Except it isn’t TERA, and the technology behind GW2 will never be able to do this type of solid reactive combat as well as TERA’s engine does. What it lacks is the tight link between the visuals of an attack, and what that attack actually does in game terms.

In TERA damage is modelled in a fashion similar to fighting games, with moving ‘hitboxes’ for individual attacks that closely match the size and shape of the weapon animation. When you’re standing infront of a 20 foot monster who swings a big scythe down at you, and the weapon lands 2 foot to the side of you because you were strafing, that attack does not hit you. Because the damage is modelled by a hitbox that extends out along the length of the weapon and only connects with things that are actually in the path of the attack.

In GW2 however, i can’t count the number of times i’ve been standing a good distance behind a humanoid sized mob who swings a hammer towards someone else – which proceeds to knock me over and take away half of my life despite me being 10 times the mob’s reach away in the opposite direction. If we’re supposed to react to the visuals of an attack and dodge out of the way of it, it doesn’t help when there is no natural correlation between what you’re looking at and what is actually happening.

For people who haven’t experienced anything outside of standard MMO combat, you might feel that it’s normal for you to constantly take damage in a group fight from things that you can’t actually see connecting. To expect to lose health all the time and to browse through combat logs in order to see what you actually died to in a messy battle. But in TERA, you don’t need to do that, you know what’s hitting you because you can see it physically connecting with your player model, everything that deals damage to you is very clearly shown in a way that’s instinctively obvious.

This is why everyone comments that TERA combat ‘feels’ so good, because you have a connection to the fight with doesn’t exist in other systems. When you hit something, you are actually hitting it. When something hits you, it is actually hitting you, in the face with a big axe that very clearly connects with your player model. The dodging and blocking feels so very different in the two games because TERA manages to trigger a natural reactive response. When you see an attack actually coming towards your character and the visuals clearly show how it threatens you, trying to dodge is an instinct.

Using dodge against a little hammer swing 10 meters away from you because you know from experience that it hits everything within a 15 meter radius of the mob in all directions just doesn’t feel the same.