Guild Wars 2

In my opinion…

The Good:
Importance of Positioning
Effectiveness of Movement (including dodge, evade effect on skills)
Control Effects (push, pull, launch, etc.)

The Bad:
There are too many passive combat effects that rely on stacking to be effective
RNG
Absence of a ‘target skill monitor bar’ to aid reactive game play

Ouroboros.5076:

Such a blatant lack of understanding of this game’s mechanics does not give much credibility to this thread.

It’s even more sad coming from a GW1 player where each class used to use maximum 20 skills in Vanilla, where attributes had no influence at all on the gameplay, and where you could not swap skills on the fly. On a single Fractal run I may use up to 30 different skills with my Mesmer, depending on the ennemies, my group needs, and the situation.

This game’s mechanics are much, much deeper than GW1, so complex in fact that it’s hard to really understand them all.

Why are you comparing vanilla GW1 to GW2 when this was their second MMO and they had 5 years to develop and flesh out the combat, this game is years behind GW1 today.

Yeah, GW had its problems but they released templates and attributes did affect combat not sure where you get that idea that they didn’t. They just costed money at first and were made free to change after a bit.

My point is, GW2 shouldn’t be so brain dead as the OP points out when they should have learned from their GW1 mistakes.

Oh and 20 skills? Yeah, you’re wayyyyyyy off. You MUST be talking about pre-searing, which was only a very very very tiny part of vanilla GW.

I think the game needs better enemy AI and tougher encounters. The skills seem fine. At least from my PvE perspective.

Redfeather.6401:

In my opinion…

The Good:
Importance of Positioning
Effectiveness of Movement (including dodge, evade effect on skills)
Control Effects (push, pull, launch, etc.)

The Bad:
There are too many passive combat effects that rely on stacking to be effective
RNG
Absence of a ‘target skill monitor bar’ to aid reactive game play

Honestly i feel there is too much focus on positioning and movement. i wish I could opt for sustained block rather than dodge. And at least in PVE the CC is pure junk. They are not CC at all, they are combo breakers designed to interrupt that big spike being telegraphed.

Combat in GW2 is ridiculously awesome!

The weakness of the game is actually a lack a combat specialization and build specialization diversity. GW1 was the master of that because it had like a thousand skills.

I JUST WANT TO SAY…. (even though I may be looked upon as ignorant for skipping through 2 pages of posts)…. THAT I AGREE WITH YOU OP.

Look here, I’m a nice guy typically, except when I get into the topic of “GW2 Combat”. People need to understand that selling players who’ve quit on the same combat they saw during launch won’t bring anyone back.

Players can analyze GW2 combat all they want; but at the end of the day _ it is what it is. Putting it nicely/ or bringing the urgency of the issue down will only result in more confusion for the devs. (and thus slowing everything down because they aren’t certain what is wrong).

Look here Anet: The lack of viable skill builds for each class, inbalance of AoE dmgs, conflict of builds between PvE and PvP <- everything that I just mentioned are considered combat issues.

Listen fellow players: How do you ‘combat’ enemys in GW2? Does it not require skill builds, AoEs, and playing according to the the goals of which environment you’re in (PvE & PvP)? :: Are they not all part of combat?

And Anet, stop sitting there just listening, please start to actually try stuffs… you can sit there listen to our ideas for 6 months or you can try the method of test- fail- test -fail -test -succeed! <- that’s the only way you’ll ever innovate anything, stop day dreaming about not making mistakes…. in the past it seems the more you guys try not to kitten up the more it happened.

And cmon… if you guys don’t have any solid information to give on Interviews… just stop doing them. We like you as people… but that don’t mean we’ll like your game more because of it; it’s not what you say it’s what you do.

It’s like the dev team don’t know anything about GW1, so they just catered the game towards the carebear WoW/Rift community.

GW2 is an order of magnitude simpler and dare i say dumbed-down compared to GW1, it’s not even close. GW2 traits are supposed to be where the complexity comes back in, but in practise, it just doesn’t work, the traits are straight out of the WOW design book and by and large don’t have much of an effect and more importantly, don’t interact much with other traits or skills.

In general, GW2 combat is just too simple. Dodging out of a red circle or exploiting a combo field is not complexity – and despite combo fields being perhaps the only real innovative aspect of GW2 combat, the effect of exploiting a combo field is pretty minimal (water fields being a notable exception).

The fundamental reason that GW2 is too shallow though is simply that the attack surface is too small – there is only health pool and DPS.

GW1 skills costed energy, and managing/denying energy was a major facet of the game. In addition there were enchantments, hexes, as well as conditions, and many more conditional effects based around them – entire builds could be based around conditional effects, eg: prot monks.

Moreover, there’s a severe lack of choice in GW2, again because traits are largely ineffectual, and the fixed nature of weapon skills. It’s pretty boring. At a minimum, traits need major buffs across the board, and a lot more conditional effects added, and we really need to be able to choose our weapon skills, the fixed weapon skill system is a total fail.

Water, smoke, light and maybe etheral may be the most game impacting fields right now. The rest simply stack on even more boons and conditions of the same kind that the various attacks produce.

Tho part of the problem there may be the non-stacking nature of most of the boons and non-damaging conditions. This non-stacking nature also makes it hard to notice the difference between having a support focused build around or not, unless they bring unique boons or conditions to the field.

LieutenantGoogle.7326:

I don’t think the combat is the games weakest point, but I honestly thought Anet was joking when they said they were planning to make Gw2 a E-Sport :/
Honestly can’t see it happening with how the classes are right now.

Games that are in E-sports are run by teams that specifically focus on balancing classes/characters/items and etc…. But gw2 is a MMO it’s design team will be and should be focusing on content updates, it also has a massive amount of RNG in it’s combat system (which really pulls the string on the E-sport potential to be honest).

Yeah, combat isn’t this game’s weakest point – it’s not that bad.

And yeah, something happened between development and where we are now to the design philosophy behind this game, if you are going to market a game as an esport it should have deep combat and/or teamplay, lots of polish, be easy to pick up but hard to master as well as competitive PvP with spectator value.

This game has arguably none of these aspects.

Ouroboros.5076:

This game’s mechanics are much, much deeper than GW1, so complex in fact that it’s hard to really understand them all.

I’m not sure I agree with the OP much but this is simply not at all true. GW1 is still the most deep combat system ever conceived for an MMO. GW2 is certainly deeper than most MMO’s but that’s not saying much. Moreover, GW1 worked. GW2 has nothing on it considering that roughly 30-40% of the traits and skills are in some small or large way bugged (or improperly described). At some point they may be fixed, but even then GW1 will remain king of the strategic MMO’s.

LHound.8964:

Well i’m sorry to break up to you but the combat mechanics aren’t that bad. Any every other game, there are classes that can set auto-attack features and be afk while others can do the job. By this i mean if healer and tank are doing they job, DPS’ers can slack a lot. In this game, you can’t do that. Everyone is responsible for his own life, dps and survival. True that everyone should also be responsible for others as well, and this is the downside of this system ain’t it?

This shows a completely misunderstanding of ‘Trinity’-based systems. It is not even remotely true. Let’s take the biggest example that is constantly demonized here: World of Warcraft.

In World of Warcraft, your end-game content are the raids. With the ‘Trinity’ system, as you claim, they should be having a tank or two hold the aggro, healers keeping them up, and the DPS can simply auto-attack the enemies to death.

I’m sorry, but the group would wipe. Plain and simple. Most major encounters have dps-race mechanics where if the boss does not die within X-amount of time, it enrages and slays everyone. Not only that, but most encounters have all sorts of things that the entire group needs to do together. Even one person screwing it up can mean a complete wipe.

For instance: There was an old raid boss who would cast something called ‘polarity shift’ on the raid. This gave everyone either a positive or negative buff. The raid quickly(read: VERY quickly) had to get into 2 groups: one of positive charges and one of negative charges. Every 10 seconds or so, he’d cast it again and people had to change which group they were in based on their buff. However, if they took even 2-3 seconds to notice, react, and change groups, they would cause massive damage to everyone not their polarity and wipe the group.

That’s how you create interesting encounters that require EVERYONE to pull their weight. As it stands in GW2, the fights are almost all a straight up “Tank and spank”. You simply go into the room, do your thing(whether it be melee, ranged, buffs, debuffs, etc) until the boss dies. Occasionally, we have encounters like Alpha in path 2 that has semi-interesting mechanics…but with a guardian you just stack on him and win.

The encounters are generally boring because every class has to be able to keep themselves alive with little help from others. It’s turned my thief into the best ‘Rezzer’ in the game because of stealth utility. And then we have the waypoint death-zerging because of the idiocy of the design. I mean…the simply FACT that they made a lot of encounters ridiculously difficult to combat the complete lack of complexity in their system should say more than anyone else can.

I’ve been reading threads similar to this one quite a bit lately. There is a large amount of people who claim having “only” 10 skills is one of the main reasons the combat system is shallow in their opinion. As a long-time League of Legends player I have to disagree.

In LoL, every playable champion has 1 passive skill, 4 normal skills and 2 switchable summoner spells. Despite having so little spells for every champion, LoL is the most succesful e-sport at the moment. You can search for a League tournament match with good shoutcasting and try to figure out if the combat system there is shallow or not.

LoL isn’t an MMO, GW2 is.

LoL isn’t designed like an MMO.

LoL doesn’t even allow you to create your own character.

LoL doesn’t have the same platform for depth that GW2 has because they are not the same game types.

The combat depth has nothing to do with the amount of skills available, so all the people that think others just want WoW hotbars…you should really not say stuff like that.

GW1 had an even smaller skill-bar than GW2, in which:

-You were not pigeon-holed into taking a garbage elite if you didn’t want to (doesn’t really matter in GW2 since they’re all mostly trash, on ridiculous cooldowns, and don’t synergize well with other skills and builds. They are like a big finisher arcade type attack)
- GW1 didn’t make you have a self heal skill, but was far more role-structured and encouraged bar specialization.
- GW1 skills weren’t segmented into 5 static weapon skills and 3 utilities with marginal effectiveness and imbalanced (or rather, foolishly balanced for all game modes around PvP) cooldowns.
- GW1 skills actually mattered to your build, your team composition, etc. Neither traits nor skills are deciding factors in most cases in GW2 because there are no roles and a lack of specialization.

(No there are not roles. Everyone is their own self-sufficient class with their own heals, anyone can revive, etc. Speccing into full healing gimps you as healing is ineffective, especially how it is designed in this game. There are no pure CC roles. Everyone is a homogenized arcade fighter. It doesn’t really matter if you spec a certain way or not. There is a lack of deep inter-class synergy with skills and combo fields are a shallow, contrived attempt to feign the depth that is lost in transition between the GW1 and GW2 skill systems.)

I was doing a group event last night in Harathi Hinterlands.

The Centaur King Ulgoth…players just swarmed him and DPS’d him down, you can’t see anything, just skill animations. No depth to that fight at all. A trinity system would be a step up from this, allowing the dev team to actually design interesting encounters. This would encourage people to party so that the healer could see who he is healing and their interface. Then they could build skills more tightly and then have boss / encounter mechanics that are even deeper and more challenging. That way, you still have these huge overworld battles, but they are more structured and less brain-dead. I know some players don’t like this idea, but this is the threshold of the lack of depth in this game. The devs have shown they don’t have a clue how to balance or design around their current combat system, why not try something more familiar?There is no tangible aggro system in those types of fights and players just drop at random because there is so many. Suffice to say, i don’t think anyone there thought the combat was fun. They were just doing it to farm EXP and rewards. You literally just sit there and spam your skills with no mechanics to even force you to think about what you do. No skill system depth. No mechanical depth from the boss. This is all across the game. It’s braindead.

This is why, i feel, that GW2’s weakest, and probably most worrisome issue is the depth, engagement, and variety in the combat.

At least in GW1, my Mesmer was responsible for certain hexes that were vital to put on mobs, my Necromancer vital to groups because of minion meat shields. My warrior important in PvP as a DPS to backline for the monk and assist team spikes. My monk important and fun because i was given a variety of choices to support my team. Elementalist because it WAS THE BEST AoE damage class.

These are distinctions. These are roles that make the classes depend on each other. Roles that give players satisfaction in an MMO combat system. It encourages players to play together in groups, not only because of arbitrary mob difficulty and health bars to feign content complexity, but real mechanical depth that is lacking in this game.

Well I played GW1 since it released and I find GW2 much more enjoyable with the combat. Only thing I’d like to see would be to give us a few more skills to choose from for the weapons and allow us to switch those weapon skills (say there are 10 skills per weapon, allow us to customize our skill bar for 5 of those skills). Otherwise, I much prefer GW2’s combat.

They need more skills, in my opinion. You have five weapon skills and for some professions weapons sets you end up spamming one the majority of the time, in group events at least. Solo could be a different story.

lothefallen.7081:

LoL isn’t an MMO, GW2 is.

The Centaur King Ulgoth…players just swarmed him and DPS’d him down, you can’t see anything, just skill animations. No depth to that fight at all. A trinity system would be a step up from this, allowing the dev team to actually design interesting encounters. This would encourage people to party so that the healer could see who he is healing and their interface. Then they could build skills more tightly and then have boss / encounter mechanics that are even deeper and more challenging. That way, you still have these huge overworld battles, but they are more structured and less brain-dead. I know some players don’t like this idea, but this is the threshold of the lack of depth in this game. The devs have shown they don’t have a clue how to balance or design around their current combat system, why not try something more familiar?There is no tangible aggro system in those types of fights and players just drop at random because there is so many. Suffice to say, i don’t think anyone there thought the combat was fun. They were just doing it to farm EXP and rewards. You literally just sit there and spam your skills with no mechanics to even force you to think about what you do. No skill system depth. No mechanical depth from the boss. This is all across the game. It’s braindead.

This is why, i feel, that GW2’s weakest, and probably most worrisome issue is the depth, engagement, and variety in the combat.

At least in GW1, my Mesmer was responsible for certain hexes that were vital to put on mobs, my Necromancer vital to groups because of minion meat shields. My warrior important in PvP as a DPS to backline for the monk and assist team spikes. My monk important and fun because i was given a variety of choices to support my team. Elementalist because it WAS THE BEST AoE damage class.

The type of game you want to create is a lot more limited, as soon as you create predefined roles, and start building fights where you require X to play, you lose true diversity, because you dont really have choices, in GW1 a lot of the choices were lies, because you were essentially required to have X Y or Z. take your mesmer for example, out of the 100s of skills available, your entire focus and purpose is to maintain a few hexes? This is deep play? this is real customisation?

As for your example about the centaur, it was zerg not because of roles, it was a zerg because it was a zerg. All people can participate, and all people do. It really has nothing to do with a trinity. Zergs exist in trinity games as well, the main thing stopping it is people not getting rewards

As someone said before, GW is a fairly deep system, but most pve doesnt require you to use it, because the AI is designed simply, as are the encounters designed in a very basic way.

The designers simply add mobs, and/or tough monsters to encounters. They should be grouping healers, warriors, making more champions spawn, adding new mechanics, or conditions when scaling up. it really has little do with trinity.

The other problem is while i want more engaging combat, many people want to win through time spent. The open world, essentially, is made to appeal to people who want to win through time spent. Nothing in the open world is designed to be that difficult if you have enough people. personally i think they should change this idea, and add some difficult and dangerous areas, with a higher skill cap for the events there, and of course better rewards.

Anyhow, i seriously hope they never introduce trinity to this game, it would really ruin it, im not saying everything is perfect. (they definately could use slottable weapon skills, even if only a few more per weapon) But the answer is to keep going down the path they are on, and refine that, not to try a totally different path.

And really i can make my mesmer play completely different with different gear, skills and traits, I mean, the difference is night and day. i can be a 1 on 1 duelist, a DOT, i can counter and cause chaos among enemies, i can be a tank.

Its a lot deeper than you think, and whether or not something matters has more to do with the encounters than the mechanics, I think when beta went live, a lot of people thought the game was too hard, i think the

@ phys

You are thinking about it negatively, likely with a lot of preconceived notions about trinity. The simple reality is, that those changes in build / trait / gear setup you can make are very marginal to the actual game play. No class or specialization is actually needed, no true balance will ever be achieved. It will always be a flavor of the month scenario with the class that has the most desirable mechanics for a certain mode of play until it’s nerfed into the ground. Have you actually stopped to realize that you can do most content in PvE without traits? My guardian can solo a few champions without even wearing gear.

Sure, some of the problems fall on how simply the encounters are designed, but if you take a hard look, there’s really no structure to the combat. People don’t group up because they would fare better with a certain class helping them, they just mob up with no rhyme or reason. They can’t design around something that doesn’t exist (balance, class definition [only flavor truly exists in the current system], and roles in a group environment..they do not exist). I’m asserting that this type of structure is pivotal to introducing more depth into the system. Anything else will just be a weak attempt, pleasing no one but the casual players who don’t want to group up, who don’t want deep synergy and tactics in playing with other people.

The game doesn’t encourage you to TRULY PLAY with other players in a meaningful way.

The builds / skills / traits / attributes / number values…are all poorly thought out, they are very homogenized and hard to decipher.

What little customization exists in this game is so marginal, borderline unnecessary to the social cohesion, group integrity…that it just lacks longevity. It doesn’t matter how i spec my Guardian…maybe i take a few hits more on one spec than another. I’m still throwing out a bunch of side-effect buffs, dealing DPS just like i would on any other class.

In this sense, the roles are too indistinct and intangible to actually matter to what you’re doing in the game. That’s where the mob design comes in, it doesn’t help, it only shows off how shallow the rest truly is. There is no matter of difficulty or skill, it boils down to a numbers game, a huge zerg.

While you are half right, the lack of group structure, class integrity and specialization…plays a far bigger role than the mob design. Mob design feeling awful is just a side-effect, but when addressed, won’t fix the inherent problems with the system and how volatile it is to an MMO game. (Customization not mattering, skill builds all being the same, pigeon-holing skill system, no reason to actually group with other players, impossible to spec full support or healing playstyle.)

The game is designed like an arcade game.

i remember back in days when people was actually praising the combat system

Theres nothing innovative about this combat other than dodge.

Overall, theres really nothing to master. There are no combo systems in place that require precision and timing to execute. The skills are very boring and uninspiring.

Take the Ranger longbow for example.

SKill 1 – autoattack shoot an arrow
Skill 2 – faster version of skill 1 on a cooldown
Skill 3 – shoot an arrow and inflict vulnerability
Skill 4 – pushback shot
SKill 5 – ground targeted AoE

What is there for me to master in this?
What kind of skills can I perfect here?
What is there for me to practice exactly?

It’s almost as brain dead as a first person shooter. Here’s your gun sir, just point and shoot.

The major lack that i’m seeing in most professions is trait and ability synergy.

It scares me that ANet is “watching” D/D 0/10/0/30/30 eles because this build’s synergy should not be “watched”, it should be “emulated”. If there were more builds with this level of synergy, and more utilities or weapon skills which were designed specifically to counter those synergies, it would be much better gameplay.

The things that were done right in terms of ability synergy:
D/D elementalists (self-comboing and abilities dependent on the secondary effects of other abilities).

Greatsword BEFORE the SoW nerf when SoW was part of the aoe rotation.
(It provided skills which synergized with traits to make greatsword highly versatile for many builds – hence why it was universally used before this nerf).

Things which suck:
third-combo-attacks on weapons — they’re simply not worth it and require it connect with a target to produce it, which makes them completely undependable.

most “+ x damage or y effect” utility skills.
Those should be shifted to traits, and utilities focused on countering synergies in other professions.

Interesting opinion OP. I’m of the opinion that combat was the weakest part of GW1. It was slow, there were less buttons to press, and despite there being more skills to choose from, the act of controlling your character was extremely simplistic. The most challenging maneuver to execute in that game was quarterknocking, and I find that about as challenging as dodging.

GW1 was high in strategy and low in tactics. Since GW2 is the exact opposite, it’s only natural that some of the GW1 fans would be alienated by it. My only problem with GW2 right now is that it only has apparent complexity instead of actual complexity since the content is too easy. The combat system is full of a LOT of nuance, but none of it is needed to be successful in combat.

The problem that faces the devs is that you’re expected to play pretty well in order to enjoy the complexity, but the average gamer has neither the skill nor the inclination to do so, and the current lack of challenge is a result of catering to that attitude. I guess when you get down to it, that’s the one BIG thing that I miss about GW1: they weren’t afraid to throw content at you that was designed to challenge — even if the final product was a little bit broken, and even though they eventually made everything easy enough that it can be soloed with henchies.

Calae.1738:

Theres nothing innovative about this combat other than dodge.

Overall, theres really nothing to master. There are no combo systems in place that require precision and timing to execute. The skills are very boring and uninspiring.

Take the Ranger longbow for example.

SKill 1 – autoattack shoot an arrow
Skill 2 – faster version of skill 1 on a cooldown
Skill 3 – shoot an arrow and inflict vulnerability
Skill 4 – pushback shot
SKill 5 – ground targeted AoE

What is there for me to master in this?
What kind of skills can I perfect here?
What is there for me to practice exactly?

It’s almost as brain dead as a first person shooter. Here’s your gun sir, just point and shoot.

I actually dont find dodge to be particularly innovative either. It has been a staple in ARPG games for quite some time.

I think that the limitations that many are putting on the skill system is personally inflicted in many ways though. I do not have as much time as some invested into this game, but I am at ~800 hours with four lvl 80s (ele, necro, engie, thief). My main is the ele. I mostly play wvw.

About 100 hours ago, I thought I had really started to understand the full spectrum of the combat system. I was utilizing combo fields actively, doing guerilla style action and changing weapons and utilities in the middle of a battle, and practicing teamwork and timing with others attacks. I was also doing my builds specifically to the skills and playstyle I intended to use, with as much synergy as possible (ideally balanced to others strengths/weaknesses in the group).

At that point, I felt I had pretty much explored the potential of the combat in the game. However, I was wrong about that. I started to mess around with siege usage in common battles (not just defense/choke point), different strategies to guide the enemy where you want them on the battlefield (wvw obviously), different attack formations when charging into battle (say, d/d eles flank far to the right before engaging, out of FOV, and come up from the right-rear flank), and different ideas to try to harness the chaotic power that is the zerg.

So, at this point, I feel quite differently. I feel like I am just scratching the surface of the creativity and choice that are available to us as players. Even with the weapon sets, I continue to explore ways to use them more creatively. Obviously, that is just my personal preference. I am the type of person to use skills and builds that might not be the most effective just because I find it fun to try out as many options as I can. It stretches my creativity and ability.

Personal experience and opinion will differ from one to another, but for me, combat in this game is extremely enjoyable and continues to test my creativity.

As a Ranger, I don’t know how you’re going to be able to use the longbow more creatively. That’s my biggest beef about the weapon skills. Some professions are given a useful set of tools that are useful in many situations but, for some others you have to wonder; who were they targeting? The mentally challenged?

I agree with TC about the points he made.
Those are the truths.

I don’t agree that combat is the weakest part of this game.
This game weakest point, is the longetivity/addictive element.

What I meant by longetivity, is not the lifespan of the game.
I meant by how long can players last before they’re burnt out.

I’m sure the developers knows very well about this weak part of this game. This is why they’re putting in lots of effort in improving that part of the content these few months.

On the second posts after TC.. something about making combat like e-sport?

With that mentality… this is why I mentioned in few threads that GW2 is becoming more of like an adventure-action/arcade game instead of a mmorpg. GW2 is heading towards a genre unlike mmorpg. I don’t see it being innovative but just removing RPG-genre elements and replaced it with adventure-genre elements.

We’ve seen since 1990s console games.
RPG: Vertical
Adventure: Horizontal
Action: Horizontal

This was why there’s lots of backlashes from real RPG gamers after weeks of gameplay. There’re some missing elements that makes up a mmorpg. These missing elements are the cause that made the “pulling element” weaker than all other mmorpgs.

Let’s take this as an example.
There’s a mmorpg called “Ragnarok Online 2”. RO2 has much weaker combat gameplay, graphics, lesser content and inferior to GW2 in alot of aspects. Yet, I’m playing RO2 alot more than GW2. I’m having alot more fun in RO2. I feel like logging in everyday more than GW2. I feel so anticipated to play it.

Why is that? That is for the GW2 developers to solve. There’s something very vital that traditional mmorpgs has, but GW2 has discarded because the devs misperceived it as “bad”. Think about it, solve it and GW2 online concurrency will be improved tenfolds.

Well, most MMORPGs longevity comes not from their crappy combat system but from the addictive grind designed to keep you around playing for a long time. This doesn’t need to be the norm, GW2 could be the one to change that.

Too bad combat in PvE so far is bad. The only part that works is solo PvE because it’s designed to be easy and doable by anybody. But group content? Most dungeon encounters are plain bad. Chaotic unstructured messes that only work through lack of trinity either because you can roflstomp DPS the mobs with warriors or you got a guardian or two around to allow you to survive long enough.

Fact : GW2 combat still has the holy trinity around. It’s just that guardian is both tank and healer in a single package and the rest are DPS, some good (Warrior), others bad (the rest)

stof.9341:

Well, most MMORPGs longevity comes not from their crappy combat system but from the addictive grind designed to keep you around playing for a long time. This doesn’t need to be the norm, GW2 could be the one to change that.

Too bad combat in PvE so far is bad. The only part that works is solo PvE because it’s designed to be easy and doable by anybody. But group content? Most dungeon encounters are plain bad. Chaotic unstructured messes that only work through lack of trinity either because you can roflstomp DPS the mobs with warriors or you got a guardian or two around to allow you to survive long enough.

Fact : GW2 combat still has the holy trinity around. It’s just that guardian is both tank and healer in a single package and the rest are DPS, some good (Warrior), others bad (the rest)

I played mesmer support by shutting down ranged, stripping boons, and perma-crippling melee.

Preventing damage is better than any guardian or elementalist’s regeneration.

Perma-crippling melee only matters when your whole group isn’t melee either. Also, any boss fight that can be beaten by that “tactic” is bound to be a boring badly designed encounter anyway.

Stripping boons? Which fight does it matter that much? I can only think of a couple places where Protection can be removed. Most encounters with annoying boons, those are reapplied every 2s by some turret or add anyway.

Shutting down ranged. Except it doesn’t protect your melee teammates often, and except the mobs that have attacks that ignore reflect barriers in the first place. But yeah, projectile protection is one of the few real services some classes have in a group outside of applying Protection, Aegis and healing. Btw, guardians can stop projectiles too.

stof.9341:

Perma-crippling melee only matters when your whole group isn’t melee either. Also, any boss fight that can be beaten by that “tactic” is bound to be a boring badly designed encounter anyway.

Melee can juke in-and-out of melee if a foe is crippled so they always have endurence when in an enemy unit’s attack range.

Stripping boons? Which fight does it matter that much? I can only think of a couple places where Protection can be removed. Most encounters with annoying boons, those are reapplied every 2s by some turret or add anyway.

between sword clones and shatter, boon stripping is a mesmer-only specialty. The sword clones do a full rotation, which means a boon stripped every 3 seconds per clone. The dueling trait for shatter means mesmers can spam boon removal pretty much at will. Turret or not, when a mesmer is traited for it, those boons stay DOWN.

Shutting down ranged. Except it doesn’t protect your melee teammates often, and except the mobs that have attacks that ignore reflect barriers in the first place. But yeah, projectile protection is one of the few real services some classes have in a group outside of applying Protection, Aegis and healing. Btw, guardians can stop projectiles too.

Anyone who has a reflect knows you can drop it right on the feet of ranged and they will shoot themselves even when targeting a thief that’s in their face.

Calae.1738:

As a Ranger, I don’t know how you’re going to be able to use the longbow more creatively. That’s my biggest beef about the weapon skills. Some professions are given a useful set of tools that are useful in many situations but, for some others you have to wonder; who were they targeting? The mentally challenged?

I cant honestly give feedback on the ranger. Got one to lvl 10, but thats it. So, forgive my ignorance as far as that goes.

I assume you have access to a second weapon set, as well as utility skills and pet commands. There is likely the “best” rotation as far as damage goes, but situationally is when you start to see the other skills come into play. You also dont have to do the best rotation every time. All you have to do to change your utility skills/weapon is get out of combat. This action alone opens up enormous amounts of versatility (you have access to ALL of your skills this way, not just the three selected for in-combat).

If you are only looking at the skills for one weapon, and dont include all of the other options that are constantly available, it kind of seems like a self-fulfilling prophecy. Even so, if we just look at those five skills, and say take a five press rotation (five attacks), we get a large amount of different possibilities. It becomes much more restrictive when you start introducing variables, but for any given situation, there will be several different rotations one can use to successfully handle it. Sometimes it may not be so pretty, haha, but its there nonetheless.

This all is negated somewhat by a single attack that simply outperforms the other options. To what degree this happens determines how effective you can still be without using the “best” rotation. The problem is this is handled and balanced on Anet’s end, so we can only play within the system. As far as this is concerned, I think Anet has done an “ok” job, but there is certainly room for improvement to increase rotation versatility.

In the end though, its about victory! And you can attain that without using the single best rotation every time. This allows us as players to approach any given situation with a number of options limited mainly by our own skill and imagination. Some times this makes combat much more complex, interesting, and most of all, dangerous.

This is why I made my ele to be a heavy crit build, though with some survivability. My crit chance isnt that special (~60% with fury and full signet of precision), but my crit damage is almost 80% (if I remember right..). This means that sometimes I am a train of pain running through everything in my path, but just as often, I dont crit at all and have to REALLY adapt quickly or die. My build essentially forces me to think on my feet creatively. Sometimes that big hitting attack might not crit, and will do much less damage than a lesser attack when it does crit. Kind of fun But I know I am wierd, so who knows how much any of this applies to someone else.

@Calae
Just to add, I basically try to get better constantly. Thats not to say I am necessarily “good,” just that that is my goal. I have found myself constantly growing within the confines of the games system, but I also actively seek it out. I guess it is entirely possible that I am one of the “mentally challenged” that you say this system targets, but I find a great deal of depth here especially when you start including group strategies, combo fields, wvw defense/capture strategies, etc. Sparkly things do please me..

I will sometimes go into fights with a specific “practice” agenda too. As in, only offense, only defense, only CC, etc. With something like practicing defensive or CC, I do expect to die, but by using self imposed limits I find I have to really use the skills I have to much greater effect. When it is all brought together, it ideally results in well-rounded gameplay. They are completely different ways to approach each individual fight though.

edit: One thing I think needs a lot of improvement are trait synergies as a whole. Some builds have this great synergy between everything, but most dont. Most professions have just a couple builds that are heads and shoulders above anything else you can do. Improving this would also allow for greater diversity in combat.

A friendly/non-disrespectful question:
Why cannot Arenanet just come out and confirm that they’re working on some new playable pvp modes?

Aeranima.2853:

A friendly/non-disrespectful question:
Why cannot Arenanet just come out and confirm that they’re working on some new playable pvp modes?

Because they’re not.

Here’s a good video explaining depth and complexity in video games:

http://www.penny-arcade.com/patv/episode/depth-vs.-complexity

GW2 combat = mash every key and keep your enemy in front of you. Dodge if you’re on all cooldowns. Dodge and run if you happen to notice you’re about to die. I could pvp in this game with one finger moving around, four fingers spamming keys and a thumb on the F key spamming for when someone drops that I can finish.

Mindless. Yes. Visually POSSIBLE to see important combat events that can be reacted against? No. WOW may have gotten old but at least I got my 100,000+ pvp honorable kills by thinking about what I was doing in combat. And at least not thinking in combat got me killed.

GW2=awesome looking game that I wish was fun to play.

Where do you people find these threads?