Guild Wars 2

“Tank vs spike vs physical DPS vs condie DPS. We want to keep making balance changes that allow all classes to have various builds they can use. We don’t want tanks dominating the game, and we don’t want spike builds dominating. It’s healthy to have multiple types of builds in the meta, so we’ll be improving the balance to facilitate a healthy meta.”

Now with specific regard to bringing your design philosophy into PvE:

1) Is the distinction meaningful between the 3 flavours of dps in PvE – and does this mean that support roles don’t exist as far as game balance is considered?

2) If we simplify all 3 flavours of dps into 1, would you say that rather than a holy trinity, ArenaNet has just created a holy duality?

The idea is to merge all previous inconsistencies and form one wholesome channel, I suppose their idea is to make everything solo-style. However, it is probably not impossible to bring back and incorporate the Holy Trinity as well with the current solo-style. A Holy Duality would imply reliance on one other character in your context or the reliance of having to have to resort to one other factor besides dps which is support.

Solo-style is great and all, but it depends if they want to incorporate variety in the future too such as mixing in the Holy Trinity back, it’s not impossible. But I guess their view is that independence is key.

The problem here is that GW2’s PvP balance changes ultimately end up affecting PvE.

Saying that they want to normalise damage roles runs contrary to asking for individuality in roles. Damage is damage, the only factors that change are speed of delivery (and the fact that condition damage stacks to a limit and ignores armour). Although this has a point in PvP, it’s usually irrelevant in PvE due to the drawn-out nature of fights. As a result, sustained damage is king except in situations where short time windows are given to do damage (which harms condition builds that are already suffering from lower desirability more). The other problem is that spike damage and sustained damage are buffed in almost exactly the same way, meaning that they are not necessarily mutually exclusive (see: Warrior).

The point here is that whichever class you are using, you always have a choice of what kind of strategy to use depending on how you see fit for any situation. In PvE, you have at least two sets of weapon to change from in combat, and change any equipment prior to combat.

This is no longer a discussion of duality, trinity or quadrinity or whatever. In fact, most of the content is polarized to either solo-able tasks and ones that require at least 10 or more people, in which differences in specialization (and gears for that matter) have insignificant effects, much less team dynamics. Claw of Jormag, for example, can easily kill a “tank” guardian just as quickly as the supposedly squishy ranger. Or difference in survivability is so little (2-3 hits) that its almost negligible. The only thing that matters is the number of people contributing whatever kind of damage and however much.

More importantly, I think the focus in the combat system is towards forcing the player to acquire the skill to do the right thing at the right time for the right task. Obviously, one can no longer just stand toe to toe with a boss and be a damage sponge forever and ever, even if one’s build is supposedly a tank.

I cant count how many have I been reminded that dodging at the right time is the difference between dying and an easy kill. Similarly, if you stringed your skills right for the right mob, you might just prevent it from disabling you while you are able to optimize your damage. Most of the time its a fraction of a second difference.

I like how it is more player-skill based now than just specialization and gears.

End question is if this is supposed to be a action game or not…

It’s not as simple as speed of delivery, you could have armor mitigating spike damage, while the same damage wouldn’t be mitigated with condition. The thing is, condition damage can also be mitigated by armor, and then that would be a different story altogether. Spike damage would do 5 damage per blast for example, but condition would do 2 per tick over time. This might even result in odd #’s rather than even ones.

Then there is the issue of dynamics, so balance is much harder to achieve than you imagine and it isn’t as simple an issue as round #’s.

So it isn’t as simple as you think as move and counter-move, and there’s entire obstacles behind it depth-wise, and it might also be abstract and distal.

It’s supposed to not only be an action game but also a depth-planning game combined with moderate health bars, and I hope they achieve that. Currently, the health bars are a bit too twitchy and it can go from 100-0 in one shot, or some other weird way. They need to stabilize the health bars, so that it’s even all-around. This isn’t to say it has to be like Everquest where at lvl 1 it takes forever to kill a mob and then at lvl 80 it also takes the same amount of time. That’s a poor way to look at stabilization, and that’s a very 2-dimensional way to look at it. You have to factor in dynamics, and in the end it’s an issue of balance.

For example, at lvl 1 you one-shot things. But at max lvl 100, as an ele for example you get hit and your hp drops to 3/4, but you have mistform and then that acts as a barrier for the 2nd hit, before the 3rd hit kills you. Because the ele can quickly teleport out, this isn’t a problem, and this balances out with dynamics well, even if the #’s and hp pools between the Ele and the gigantic soloable raid boss differ widely. This is pretty much an obvious example anyone can figure out. And through horizontal progressive balance and depth-development and upon achieving perfection, the game will entail a whole new state. This state might not necessarily be one of extreme dynamics, but rather the essential quality will have changed.

The term meta-game describes the entrance-way into horizontal progression in reality, and it’s something noone has gone past before.

Totally read “Unholy Quagginity”

I read what the company wrote about each class and to be brutally honest i’m not seeing most of it in game, as classes go they do not fit what Anet wrote and so just don’t even play similarly to me.

I wondered if those summaries were for patches to come as well, maybe, maybe not, but most classes are pretty lackluster in most modes wvw and PvE, i never tPvP or sPvP so i may have missed something there…

I’m sorry, what measure of player skill are we talking about here if you’re saying that content just requires any old classes? Do people run dungeons with 5 thieves?

For a complete elimination of roles, 5 glass cannon berserker dps roles would have to be perfectly viable in PvE. The instant your party starts looking for someone to soak damage or someone who prioritises buffing the team over dps, you’ve created class roles. The entire point is that support and tanking are mutually exclusive with high dps.

And since when has condition damage’s armour-ignoring been a significant factor in PvE? Serious question. I haven’t come across the armour-monster that takes really low damage from any power build.

projectcedric.6951:

I like how it is more player-skill based now than just specialization and gears.

It is only more skill based if you compare it to certain faceroll classes (simplistic DPS, tanks which are easy to tank with, etc), however compared to many classes/builds (Chlorodom in Rift for PvP, Loremaster in LOTRO, etc) the GW2 classes require signifcantly less awareness, much less multitasking, less thought in general.

Furthermore in regard to movement, that only goes for PvE (and again goes for some games more than others), if you stand still in most games in PvP you are dead (and terrible).

I think that some of the disparity is fundamentally mechanical. Condition specs have little desirability in PvE because of stacking issues and the fact that conditions plain don’t work on many monsters which are bleed or burn immune – there’s even instances in dungeons where you have to destroy barricades or environmental objects which are unsurprisingly immune to all conditions (you’d think a ballista would burn).

GW2’s class roles do exist in the meta – I’ve never seen a ranger, ele or thief offer to tank, and tanking is often necessary in dungeons where ranged enemies 2-3 shot moderately geared light armour classes (CM Story mode comes to mind). I’d also be happier if Arenanet acknowledged that they’d be trying to balance support roles, so that perhaps +healing power might actually be a desirable stat some day.