Guild Wars 2

6 months after HoT I must say that I am disappointed by the way the game is going in terms or damage.
With change of traits, removing stats of them, moving those stats to base stats, and introducing new elite specialization it feels that damage is just too powerfull.

To get me right, MMORPG should never be about duration of fight in miliseconds. And that is current state of the game.
Most fights ends in 2 seconds, either you got oneshoted or you avoid the damage and oneshot enemy because he blew his cooldowns.

In PvE in old maps, there is no point going anything else than zerker and you can go rush in the middle of NPC group and kill them by one skill. On new maps its more difficult but once you learn attacks of the mobs you can do the same.

In PvP match turns quickly to “keep running back” because that is where you spend most of the time.

In WvW this high damage result in pirate ship. Melee in groups is mostly non existant and guild that keep insisting on melee train have problem to get to the enemy. Ranged groups wins 80% of the fights. And all fights ends very soon.
Even threeway fights in SM ends very quick, there are no longer 30 minutes or longer fights where you need to use some"tactics". Just range enemy,range enemy and more range the enemy.
With melee train disappearing we are also limited in group compositions as there is no melee train of enemy you need to counter with your melee train or build your melee train to be fast avoid enemy train and get to backline.
No there is currently just one group composition – casters.

Now seeing this makes me wonder why Anet changed the game into this direction.
Loosing to enemy player after 5 minute fight where you need to use all skills, enemy is almost dead several times, you are almost dead several times, its not so frustrating as current “press the key in miliseconds or you are dead”.

What i wanted to say is, why Anet not tune down damage lets say 15% to keep PvE damage on par with enemies, and allow PvP and WvW to be a game of skills again not game of miliseconds.

Hule.8794:

To get me right, MMORPG should never be about duration of fight in miliseconds. And that is current state of the game.
Most fights ends in 2 seconds, either you got oneshoted or you avoid the damage and oneshot enemy because he blew his cooldowns.

Eh, just don’t use zerker.
Or try raid (since it seems you’re skilled enough) where fight lasts for more than 5 minutes.

Hule.8794:

In PvE in old maps, there is no point going anything else than zerker and you can go rush in the middle of NPC group and kill them by one skill. On new maps its more difficult but once you learn attacks of the mobs you can do the same.

Well, zerker has been the meta ever since, what, a year after GW2 launch? So HoT has nothing to do with that. At least nowadays condition damage is a viable alternative.

Hule.8794:

In PvP match turns quickly to “keep running back” because that is where you spend most of the time.

What are you talking about?
1. Last PvP season people are angry because the meta is bunkering and super defensive.
2. If you’re winning the fight most of the time you don’t need to “run back”

Hule.8794:

In WvW this high damage result in pirate ship. Melee in groups is mostly non existant and guild that keep insisting on melee train have problem to get to the enemy. Ranged groups wins 80% of the fights. And all fights ends very soon.

Actually, the pirate ship meta is because of the change to stability instead of just damage. Anet has said that stability stuff is one of the things they’re going to fix soon for wvw.

They even nerfed berserker at one point and told us “it’s supposed to be the best stat for dealing damage but not by such a massive margin.” Well that effectively accomplished nothing because it’s obviously still the best damage dealing stat, outside of a very specific niche of some condi builds.

What’s the point of toughness and vit builds if instead of going (in percentage) 100 > 20 downed to 100 > 60 > 20 > downed? You can take one or maybe two more hits, but the likelyhood of you taking a hit means you probably didn’t dodge something and are going to be downed anyway. Instead you could kill the enemy twice as fast with zerker stats and have less of a timeframe which you can make mistakes and get downed.

Pre-HoT time maxing damage was about doing 10k damage. There were exceptions like killshot warrior and those exceptions were tuned down fast, in Anet time.
With HoT the damage overexceeded those magical 10k and its very common to see damage of 15k.

Pre-HoT also needed those classes that were able to do this insane damage to have specifical build for that damage. It required setup and skills usage. Most classes like thief relied on their own mechanics like stealth or adrenaline with warrior.
Sadly now you dont need to use those specific mechanics to be able to inflict this high ammount of damage.
Mesmers for example needed to do a combo with all their clones/phantasms and then needed to wait for cooldowns.
Now even if you avoid the first spike, with normal damage that is near 10k you are dead soon.

Bunkers were not so easy to kill because they focused on maximazing armor and health with using their abilities to keep those up. With current high level of damage bunkers now rely only on abilities, most of them on higher CD.

This “kill in second or two” is exactly what I am saying. Its just plain bad. Fight should be about minute or two. We are not playing FPS.

I think a lot of the problem was that many zerk pvers went to pvp and faced players who were not glass cannons and couldn’t kill them quick enough or at all. Thus they cry to anet who go and remove all the tanky amulets.

Result? Now instead of seeing smaller fights spread between all 3 caps you have 1 team steam roll the other at the beginning and then it’s all over.

Removing the tanky amulets, while increasing cond damage to the level it is now while also having classes that can spam aoe conds at max range just makes it a giant mess.

Tanking on point via strong builds/amulets and survivability has simply been replaced with tanking on spot with aoe spam/conds, traps, wells with the odd Ele healer for back up.

They said fightswere too boring with the old system because people took too long to die or just simply didn’t. Now it’s over too fast and then the game goes out the window for the most part. At least with the more tanky amulets some of us with bad pings had a fairer chance, even just that split second that it could keep you alive made a pretty big difference, well in my experience anyway. Now it’s either have a good ping to be up to par or play cheese of the month class like 80% of everyone else until it’s all fixed.