Guild Wars 2

First of all, I’m aware not everyone may agree, and I ask that you remain polite and level-headed in your posts, and please stay on topic. This is just my own opinion on how PvE may be improved.

Guild Wars 1 had great AI. It had its faults, like heroes standing in AoEs for instance, but overall, I felt it was very good and fun to fight against. From what I understand, the AI in Guild Wars was designed to think and act like a player and for the most part they did. Enemies worked in tandem to take down the player; Ritualists would cast Splinter weapon on their Barrage allies or Warrior allies to spread massive damage, Monk enemies would remove conditions and hexes from their allies, Paragon enemies would buff their allies with shouts, etc, etc.

In Guild Wars 2 we don’t, or very rarely, see this. The enemy AI in this game is mostly…well, stupid. In open world PvE, most mobs are barely even an annoyance. But in dungeons, and with bosses, they have ludicrous amounts of health, CC, ridiculous damage or have a bunch of one shots or AoEs, or 1 shot AoEs. Or all of the above. It doesn’t feel like there is much strategy involved in PvE. This has led to the current zerker meta; most other gears sets are irrelevant. Defensive gear especially, because it seems no matter how defensive you build, you still take ridiculous amounts of damage, or still get 1-shotted. So there is very little point to running defensive gear.

Having played Guild Wars 1 for 7 years, this feels incredibly cheap, since 1-shots were not all that common in Guild Wars 1. They weren’t really needed. This is what Guild Wars 2 lacks; intelligent AI. AI that thinks and acts like a player, that works with its allies to take down opponents instead of acting like mindless, zerging zombies.

One major step toward improving PvE in this game lies in improving AI, both enemy and ally. We’ve seen a bit of this with the toxic alliance; you down an enemy sylvari and most often times their allies may come to their defense. That’s good, I like seeing that. But on the whole, the AI is still just so bad. If you improve the AI to Guild Wars 1 standards, you can scale back the damage and 1-shots in this game, and make it feel more strategic and less cheap. As a further consequence, other gear sets beyond Zerker and Assassin’s becomes more viable. Improving the AI would also discourage players from mindlessly face rolling everything in their path with zerker gear, because each encounter would require just a little more thought than “LEROY JENKINS! 11111111”.

Naturally, there are some other small improvements that can be made. Like weakness and resistance like Guild Wars 1 had. This would indirectly improve the elementalist. In Guild Wars 1, ice and undead enemies would be weak to fire, water enemies would be weak to air damage, etc. Or having the higher elevation buffed ranged damage, and the reverse, you’d deal less ranged damage. These are just some little things that I feel would add a more in-depth strategical element to the game.

Lastly, one thing that I’ve discussed with other players in-game, would be to add Hard Mode to the game. Creating Hard Mode maps and dungeons with all enemies scaled up to level 80+ would be great. This was done in Guild Wars 1, and I felt it was a great and fun challenge (when not running gimmicks like Discordway and Sabyway >_> ). Or even adding Elite Areas and/or Elite Missions, like Tombs of the Primeval Kings, the Underworld, or Fissure of Woe.

I realize that Guild Wars 1 and Guild Wars 2 are completely different games. However, it is my belief that there are still many things from Guild Wars 1 that could vastly improve Guild Wars 2, such as the aforementioned changes. I also realize these improvements would take A LOT of work, but I think it’d definitely be worth it. It would improve PvE overall, both Open World and Dungeons.

ADDED: Thanks to Hendo for reminding me, indirectly. Events should take party support, control, etc into account for rewarding players. They also encourage zerker and assassin’s because most events only count the damage you deal. Adding in a system to events that take support, control, and healing into account would be a major improvement as well, for people who enjoy tanking, supporting and controlling instead of mindlessly DPSing.

As always, please remain respectful in your responses and please stay on topic. Thanks.

I remember when Alesia was your only choice, and, boy!, did she seem ‘stupid’. As the years went by, the AI improved. Maybe the same thing will happen in GW2. =)

I agree, I love the game play of guild wars 1, and miss a lot of the AI. I can recall while vanquishing. I’d do everything in my power to avoid some bosses till it was the last possible thing. If love to see vanquishing an option. Like a mode you click on to stop the respawn of enemies and it must be done in a full party. It won’t happen but would be cool. Hard mode story only off they added more story. Sure we kill the dragon, return destinys edge….

Then what? I just ran around chasing Scarlett? That’s all I did?

“little point to running defensive gear”?

Do you understand that full cleric parties can quite literally smash random keys and things will eventually die with zero intelligent input from them? Do you understand that you can clear Arah path 2 in full defensive setups without using a single dodge? If you don’t believe me, I can dig up the video links.

There is plenty of value in defensive gear, it’s for people who don’t feel comfortable enough in being able to dodge major sources of damage, or for those who wish to roleplay tankier characters. For people who become comfortable with fights they can slot out defensive gear and go more offensive since they’re familiar with the encounters and know how to mitigate the major sources of damage.

If anything, it’s PVT and Cleric gear that is too strong in this game, it allows you to soak up tons of hits and quite literally afk your game, go back 10 minutes later to a dead boss and loot chest.

hendo.1940:

“little point to running defensive gear”?

Do you understand that full cleric parties can quite literally smash random keys and things will eventually die with zero intelligent input from them? Do you understand that you can clear Arah path 2 in full defensive setups without using a single dodge? If you don’t believe me, I can dig up the video links.

There is plenty of value in defensive gear, it’s for people who don’t feel comfortable enough in being able to dodge major sources of damage, or for those who wish to roleplay tankier characters. For people who become comfortable with fights they can slot out defensive gear and go more offensive since they’re familiar with the encounters and know how to mitigate the major sources of damage.

If anything, it’s PVT and Cleric gear that is too strong in this game, it allows you to soak up tons of hits and quite literally afk your game, go back 10 minutes later to a dead boss and loot chest.

I’m aware. That comment was a minor misstep on my part. There IS a point to running defensive gear, but currently, zerker and assassin’s gear is more effective in most cases, because the AI is inept. I say more effective, in that it’s faster, and obviously more desirable. What you described is clearly a gimmick; every game has them. You noticed I mentioned Sabway and Discordway from Guild Wars 1? Sure, defensive gear has its place. I never said it didn’t. If it fits their play style, then they’re likely to build defensive. But zerker is more effective, BECAUSE the AI is stupid. Just as the gimmick you mentioned is effective because the AI is stupid. This is why I mentioned AI improvement as one such improvement to PvE overall. So people have to put actual thought into an encounter instead of button mashing, or in the case you mentioned “soak up tons of hits and quite literally afk your game”

These are problems you very rarely, if ever, encountered in Guild Wars 1, because the AI was smarter than a tube of toothpaste. Not counting Stupid Form (Shadow Form), 55 Monk, and 600 Monk ofc. More lame gimmcks.

What you and countless other people seem to ignore, is that the move towards offensive gear is a completely natural progression of the metagame. The more comfortable you become with encounter mechanics, the less passive defenses you need. Dragon Age is a good example of this, you might have just used a stock tank/healer/2 DPS group, but when people realised you could use fireball or storm of the century to just flat out obliterate everything, people went from that trinity setup to an offensive dual or even triple (if the player was a mage) DPS spellcaster setup because they knew how the fights worked, and that as long as you could keep up CC you could just destroy everything with offensive spells.

As far as I know, the GW2 dungeon meta started off as “bring PVT”, and the Giganticus Lupicus guide on the GW2 wiki still says to bring defensive gear. However with all of the knowledge we have now, we can give up defensive stats and move towards full offense. This is an entirely natural progression, and it’s something which promotes experience and skillful play. Know the fight well enough? Go full DPS. Don’t know it? Maybe stick some knights gear on. Making defensive stats basically a requirement is basically gear gating content and basically turns it in to the way agony resist currently is – don’t have the AR? Well I guess you can’t do it. Don’t have enough PVT? Well I guess you can’t do this dungeon.

The option to go full offensive is great in this game, because if you’re incompetent in full berserker, you’ll most likely either faceplant. If you don’t and you’re bad with berserker, most likely you’re getting carried. The fact that you can complete all content with offensive setups is the very thing that makes speed clearing content in this game a matter of skill and not just passing gear checks.

The AI in a game is always going to seem stupid after over a year of the game being out because most tactics to deal with it are going to be common knowledge, it’s almost as if you want us to just be at the early days where people were clueless and running around kiting mobs, ranging and using weak builds and gear because that would somehow be more interesting.

I do agree that enemy teams in dungeons seem a lot less coordinated than what we encountered in (even not so high end) guild was 1 maps (where everything was an instance). I remember not interrupting certain skills or heals, or leaving certain key enemies alive could result in losing a lot of time or even wiping. Having more of that here would be fun, though reworking AI requires a lot of effort and time.

What effect better AI would have on the DPS meta remains to be seen. I suspect it would raise the risk in the risk vs reward equation, but that would just boil down to a higher basic skill requirement for speedclears, not a complete meta change. Unless they go really far in directions I cannot guess at.

hendo.1940:

What you and countless other people seem to ignore, is that the move towards offensive gear is a completely natural progression of the metagame. The more comfortable you become with encounter mechanics, the less passive defenses you need. Dragon Age is a good example of this, you might have just used a stock tank/healer/2 DPS group, but when people realized you could use fireball or storm of the century to just flat out obliterate everything, people went from that trinity setup to an offensive dual or even triple (if the player was a mage) DPS spellcaster setup because they knew how the fights worked, and that as long as you could keep up CC you could just destroy everything with offensive spells.

As far as I know, the GW2 dungeon meta started off as “bring PVT”, and the Giganticus Lupicus guide on the GW2 wiki still says to bring defensive gear. However with all of the knowledge we have now, we can give up defensive stats and move towards full offense. This is an entirely natural progression, and it’s something which promotes experience and skillful play. Know the fight well enough? Go full DPS. Don’t know it? Maybe stick some knights gear on. Making defensive stats basically a requirement is basically gear gating content and basically turns it in to the way agony resist currently is – don’t have the AR? Well I guess you can’t do it. Don’t have enough PVT? Well I guess you can’t do this dungeon.

The option to go full offensive is great in this game, because if you’re incompetent in full berserker, you’ll most likely either faceplant. If you don’t and you’re bad with berserker, most likely you’re getting carried. The fact that you can complete all content with offensive setups is the very thing that makes speed clearing content in this game a matter of skill and not just passing gear checks.

The AI in a game is always going to seem stupid after over a year of the game being out because most tactics to deal with it are going to be common knowledge, it’s almost as if you want us to just be at the early days where people were clueless and running around kiting mobs, ranging and using weak builds and gear because that would somehow be more interesting.

And what you seem to be ignoring is that the AI really is pretty stupid. I can only assume you haven’t played Guild Wars 1, because if you compare the AI of that game to the AI in this game, you’d see that GW1 AI is far superior. Increasing the intelligence of the AI would requires zerker teams to put a little more thought into combat, or perhaps consider bringing a support character, or a control character instead of slotting 5 DPS. Is adding more strategy and more tactical thinking to the game really such a bad thing? Even doing something as making mobs dodge would be a nice improvement.

And what of the other small changes I mentioned? Do you have nothing to say on those? Adding elemental weakness and resistance, physical weakness and resistance (i.e. blunt damage/piercing damage/slashing damage) to further increase strategical play? Or for ranged damage, adding an elevation factor into calculating damage as it was with Guild Wars 1. Kiting is another thing; you had to carefully choose when to flee and when to fight, because if you chose to kite, melee enemies could and would deal more damage to you while you fled, and vice versa.

You raise some good points, I’m not too proud to ignore that, but you’re not considering ALL sides of my arguments. Adding more strategy, more tactical thinking to the game is NOT a bad thing. If anything, it would improve PvE as a whole.

PvE is just so mind numbingly easy at the moment. Are you saying you’re okay with that? Okay with just rushing around and HULK SMASHING everything?

I’m not so sure this is an AI issue. Of course AI is such a horribly broad term. For the most part I think the range and variety of abilities that enemies have is the problem. Most open world enemies have perhaps 1 stun (if at all) on a long cool down and then some dps abilities. There’s not a lot they can do with that other than attack you and occasionally throw a stun your way.

CureForLiving.5360:

I’m not so sure this is an AI issue. Of course AI is such a horribly broad term. For the most part I think the range and variety of abilities that enemies have is the problem. Most open world enemies have perhaps 1 stun (if at all) on a long cool down and then some dps abilities. There’s not a lot they can do with that other than attack you and occasionally throw a stun your way.

Yeah, this was something I’d forgotten to consider. That’s another part of the problem that I think needs to be worked on. Better AI won’t help much of enemy skill bars are terrible.

Keitaro Dragonheart.9047:

And what you seem to be ignoring is that the AI really is pretty stupid. I can only assume you haven’t played Guild Wars 1, because if you compare the AI of that game to the AI in this game, you’d see that GW1 AI is far superior. Increasing the intelligence of the AI would requires zerker teams to put a little more thought into combat, or perhaps consider bringing a support character, or a control character instead of slotting 5 DPS. Is adding more strategy and more tactical thinking to the game really such a bad thing? Even doing something as making mobs dodge would be a nice improvement.

Except coordinated teams do bring CC and support. Unless stuns, pulls, reflects, protection and a lot more are not your idea of CC and support or you want dedicated roles.

And what you seem to be ignoring is that the AI really is pretty stupid. I can only assume you haven’t played Guild Wars 1, because if you compare the AI of that game to the AI in this game, you’d see that GW1 AI is far superior. Increasing the intelligence of the AI would requires zerker teams to put a little more thought into combat, or perhaps consider bringing a support character, or a control character instead of slotting 5 DPS.

If I recall correctly, in GW1 you could ball up giant groups of enemies and then spike them down. Which is … exactly what happens in GW2. And I agree, more thought should be required when it comes to dungeons – they were advertised as instanced content for organised groups, but any old randoms can do it. Sure, our DnT guild runs will wipe the floor with your pug, but we’re only completing it faster (though in all fairness, getting a daily ~16 minute Arah p2 run beats 1.5hr pug “zerk only speed clear” runs) – our tactics aren’t a strict requirement for completion.

The problem with the “you should have to bring a support/control character” argument is that all support and control is built in to our weapon and utility skills. Here is the best example of control which we did recently:

Support comes in the form of might and fury stacking, banners, passive buffs (empower allies, spotter, frost spirit, etc.), protection, aegis, reflection, condition cleanse and so forth. The way things are now is good. You can apply all of these boons without having to completely demolish your own DPS by running a “support” build. GW2 is an active game which means you won’t have a passive healbot, boonbot, debuffbot or a tank who sits there and spams a taunt rotation while the healer just spams heals. You don’t have a control player who just spams all of their skills to lock down a boss or mobs. If you want CC you actually need to co-ordinate it, and when you do co-ordinate it, it’s extremely powerful. You can stop the Shoggroth from burrowing underground, you can stop the boon golem in COE from spinning or firing projectiles (this is crucial in reflect-light group compositions) and constant chill and cripple enables you to backpedal on Mossman while the rest of your team wails on him behind him with all of their melee DPS.

Is adding more strategy and more tactical thinking to the game really such a bad thing? Even doing something as making mobs dodge would be a nice improvement.

It’s not at all. The problem is your perception of what strategy and tactical thinking is. Boonbots, “support” players and “control” layers are not even close to strategy and tactics. If you add those in, you no longer need to co-ordinate to stop the Shoggroth or the golem’s heavy attacks, your CC player just spams whatever skill they have. You don’t have to alert your party that your long CD CC is on cooldown so that the next guy has to do it, the CC guy just does everything. It ends up in having parties where you have everyone doing their own thing rather than working together. This still happens in GW2, but it cripples your efficiency so heavily you’re better off just working together.

And what of the other small changes I mentioned? Do you have nothing to say on those? Adding elemental weakness and resistance, physical weakness and resistance (i.e. blunt damage/piercing damage/slashing damage) to further increase strategical play?

This just means annoying mechanics like at the wurm where if you weren’t a condi, you might as well just gtfo from killing husks because you’re just a dead weight there. Or since golems are made of a mixture of metal and magitech, it means blunt weapons like axes and maces become deadlier but then a guardian’s current main DPS weapons (sword and GS) become blanks … because they’re slashing weapons not blunt trauma weapons. I don’t know, it could work. Just no “direct damage sucks here” or “condi damage sucks here” (ANet please fix PvE condition damage).

PvE is just so mind numbingly easy at the moment. Are you saying you’re okay with that? Okay with just rushing around and HULK SMASHING everything?

People keep saying this, but every day I see “at Lupicus” lfgs on Arah to which I join, solo him down and then just drop party. PvE is mind numbingly easy if you do the mind numbingly easy content. If more people did Arah or high level fractals they would realise there actually is challenging content in this game, they just choose to ignore it because they’d rather do AC or COF.