Guild Wars 2

I’m a PVE player, and I don’t have a problem with active defense, I have a problem with the fact that only one stat set (assassins is just a variation of the same stats) is viable at the top level. It just makes builds kind of stale, it’s been a very very long time since I’ve seen a new PVE build that was better than the ones made a year ago. It would be cool if healing, toughness, and condition damage meant something in dungeons, but for now they just don’t. And not being able to switch up your build is just not fun. Broken? No. Could vital improvements be made? Definitely.

Capitol City.4856:

It just makes builds kind of stale, it’s been a very very long time since I’ve seen a new PVE build that was better than the ones made a year ago.

Gear =/= Build. Each time they did good change to trait and skill they can create new build. Phalanx is a great example of that.

Capitol City.4856:

. It would be cool if healing, toughness, and condition damage meant something in dungeons, but for now they just don’t.

Condition Damage definitively. Toughness no way. Healing maybe, but not really.

Capitol City.4856:

And not being able to switch up your build is just not fun.

That’s on you. I use a lot of different optimal build for each situation like all the record and speed run community.

Thaddeus.4891:

Capitol City.4856:

It just makes builds kind of stale, it’s been a very very long time since I’ve seen a new PVE build that was better than the ones made a year ago.

Gear =/= Build. Each time they did good change to trait and skill they can create new build. Phalanx is a great example of that.

Capitol City.4856:

. It would be cool if healing, toughness, and condition damage meant something in dungeons, but for now they just don’t.

Condition Damage definitively. Toughness no way. Healing maybe, but not really.

Capitol City.4856:

And not being able to switch up your build is just not fun.

That’s on you. I use a lot of different optimal build for each situation like all the record and speed run community.

I’m aware that gear doesn’t equal build, but neither is really changing. We change builds based on situation, not on whether we want to change our style of play. That’s the real problem, if I was playing CoF and now I want to do Arah, I’ll switch things like time warp to mass invis and whatnot, but that’s not really a build change. That’s just changing abilities to fit a situation. What I’m saying is, I’m not changing what I do, just how I do it. If I’m playing a guardian and I said “I don’t really feel like running this damage build, I want to make a support build to help my team stay alive”… well too bad :P I mean I could, but strictly speaking I’m disabling my team as long as their skilled enough. I can either make a build to max out my dps, or make any skilled party perform worse because I didn’t do so. And once again, I still like PVE, this isn’t the worst thing in the world for me, I just find it unfortunate.

PaxTheGreatOne.9472:

hybrid.5027:

Yes, PvE is horribly broken. Right now, even the least skilled player in the game can put on full Nomads gear and kill (eventually) every boss in the game without having to use a single dodge. Nomads gear is horribly overpowered unkillable godmode and completely invalidates the active combat in the game by eliminating all risk of failure and removing the reward for understanding mechanics.

Nomads just asks a bit more time, full nomads is about 1226 power… with food ~1450.. which takes the fight for the avg boss kill take about 3- 4 times as much time compared to fully buffed zerk. if you accept this it allows you to play the game. In effect the stat combinations are difficulty levels.

With this as an eye opener:

I’ll be frank. I have people in my guild who have (visual) disabilities , ppl who miss eyesight or a functional limb and they play as well. A player with the slightly impaired vision (40% remaining out of 200%) plays a LB ranger in WvW
We build a more survivable build for her: being a soldiers armor and brawler runes, axe/warhorn as alternate set and all the other gear full zerk. She is very good at surviving. she runs a 2500 armor with a potential 3300 power when fully buffed. She is lethal…. She was silver before me…

I also had a player with only 1 functional hand in one of my guilds , noiwadays he runs a nomads/clerics commander build on guardian. He has the dodges, all his utilities and autoattack bound to his mouse…. He stay alive where most die. The only thing he has a problem with is porting out of a fight. He used to run soldiers/clerics before, but likes this better.

Not everybody has 20/20 vision and 10 fingers. And the armors cater for all. So do not say well ppl can faceroll it, you are not a valid person to verify this…

I’d really want to see you to do lupi or t1 zerg WvW with 1 hand tied to your back and a blindfold with 2 pinholes. When done pls come back.

The difficulty level of the game should not be balanced around people with literally one arm, or poor eyesight. That’s great that those few people can have a video game that they can play (I know I’d still want to play video games even if I was in a similar situation), however Anet refuses to provide higher difficulty content for able bodied players without physical or mental disabilities (which I would wager is the majority).

The PvE is largely broken due to the incredibly dumbed down AI, and incredibly simplistic encounter designs. Guild Wars 2’s AI was even far more advanced back during Beta, and many of the non-yawnfest PvE content is restricted to Story Mode Dungeons and Fractals of the Mist for some reason. These two areas see hardly any play compared to Explorable Mode dungeons, since the rewards for the yawnfest Explorable Mode dungeons is far, far, FAR higher than other dungeon content.

Capitol City.4856:

Thaddeus.4891:

Capitol City.4856:

It just makes builds kind of stale, it’s been a very very long time since I’ve seen a new PVE build that was better than the ones made a year ago.

Gear =/= Build. Each time they did good change to trait and skill they can create new build. Phalanx is a great example of that.

Capitol City.4856:

. It would be cool if healing, toughness, and condition damage meant something in dungeons, but for now they just don’t.

Condition Damage definitively. Toughness no way. Healing maybe, but not really.

Capitol City.4856:

And not being able to switch up your build is just not fun.

That’s on you. I use a lot of different optimal build for each situation like all the record and speed run community.

I’m aware that gear doesn’t equal build, but neither is really changing. We change builds based on situation, not on whether we want to change our style of play. That’s the real problem, if I was playing CoF and now I want to do Arah, I’ll switch things like time warp to mass invis and whatnot, but that’s not really a build change. That’s just changing abilities to fit a situation. What I’m saying is, I’m not changing what I do, just how I do it. If I’m playing a guardian and I said “I don’t really feel like running this damage build, I want to make a support build to help my team stay alive”… well too bad :P I mean I could, but strictly speaking I’m disabling my team as long as their skilled enough. I can either make a build to max out my dps, or make any skilled party perform worse because I didn’t do so. And once again, I still like PVE, this isn’t the worst thing in the world for me, I just find it unfortunate.

So someone who enjoys Play style A has to change up their play style because you hate that play style? People don’t change play styles. They change their builds to match their play style. And there are way too many play styles to count and there’s probably a unique one for every player.

Has it ever occurred to you that no matter what they do to change up the game, that there will always be just one or two builds for each class that are considered optimal? That the speed run groups in dungeons on the LFG will just ask for that new meta. Because their goal is to get through the dungeon as fast as possible. To go through as fast as possible requires optimal conditions, which in turn requires optimal builds.

And if a different gear set and/or a radically different trait set up is required for each and every dungeon, then you’ll have people only doing a handful of them. Because there’s too much in this game to memorize and no one wants to carry around or store several different sets of gear. Or be forced to play certain classes if they want to do X content because they split up the gear. Or the community will find one or two builds that does each aspect well enough for decent times and that becomes the meta.

I would say it is indeed broken. As now, a good player has no reason to use anything but zerk gear unless the game forcefully make some of those stats useless (see: uncrittable world bosses). Skills depend only upon an handful of stats, mostly the offensive ones. Healing Power is used by very few skills and building on it requires to find a lot of non-native sources to just be able to use said stat (be it traits, runes, sigils or foods) and even then, they just end up being passive processings, so no skill involved.
Boon Duration gear (aka: giver) is a bad joke, thus raising boon duration heavily impact upon upgrade slots and food that could be spent better in other ways.
And defensive stats aren’t tied to any active skill at all. Unlike offensive skills, defensive skills are the same whether you use zerk or soldier gear. Thus a good player that wants to don defensive gear has no way to make use of the stats his gears provides, while being made inefficent due of the stats his gear lacks.

Basically, the more you get good as a player, the more are restricted by gear to make use of your skill.

Seera.5916:

Capitol City.4856:

Thaddeus.4891:

Capitol City.4856:

It just makes builds kind of stale, it’s been a very very long time since I’ve seen a new PVE build that was better than the ones made a year ago.

Gear =/= Build. Each time they did good change to trait and skill they can create new build. Phalanx is a great example of that.

Capitol City.4856:

. It would be cool if healing, toughness, and condition damage meant something in dungeons, but for now they just don’t.

Condition Damage definitively. Toughness no way. Healing maybe, but not really.

Capitol City.4856:

And not being able to switch up your build is just not fun.

That’s on you. I use a lot of different optimal build for each situation like all the record and speed run community.

I’m aware that gear doesn’t equal build, but neither is really changing. We change builds based on situation, not on whether we want to change our style of play. That’s the real problem, if I was playing CoF and now I want to do Arah, I’ll switch things like time warp to mass invis and whatnot, but that’s not really a build change. That’s just changing abilities to fit a situation. What I’m saying is, I’m not changing what I do, just how I do it. If I’m playing a guardian and I said “I don’t really feel like running this damage build, I want to make a support build to help my team stay alive”… well too bad :P I mean I could, but strictly speaking I’m disabling my team as long as their skilled enough. I can either make a build to max out my dps, or make any skilled party perform worse because I didn’t do so. And once again, I still like PVE, this isn’t the worst thing in the world for me, I just find it unfortunate.

So someone who enjoys Play style A has to change up their play style because you hate that play style? People don’t change play styles. They change their builds to match their play style. And there are way too many play styles to count and there’s probably a unique one for every player.

Has it ever occurred to you that no matter what they do to change up the game, that there will always be just one or two builds for each class that are considered optimal? That the speed run groups in dungeons on the LFG will just ask for that new meta. Because their goal is to get through the dungeon as fast as possible. To go through as fast as possible requires optimal conditions, which in turn requires optimal builds.

And if a different gear set and/or a radically different trait set up is required for each and every dungeon, then you’ll have people only doing a handful of them. Because there’s too much in this game to memorize and no one wants to carry around or store several different sets of gear. Or be forced to play certain classes if they want to do X content because they split up the gear. Or the community will find one or two builds that does each aspect well enough for decent times and that becomes the meta.

Okay, for starters I’m not sure what you’re talking about with this play style A thing. I said if I want to change up my build to fit a different play style, that’s really too bad. And yes, I understand that there will always be only one or two viable builds per class, but right now all of those builds revolve around a single play style. I don’t like using WoW as an example because I really didn’t like a lot of the gameplay, but they did something very right imo. If you’re a warrior in WoW, and you want to play dps, there’s only 1 or 2 different builds for dps. But if you play tank, now there’s 1 or 2 MORE viable builds that still exist within the meta of maxing out dps. In Guild Wars 2, there’s only 1 or 2 builds, but only 1 role, so there’s no switching at all. If you play a class, you’re going to play that class one of two ways, and that’s it. And that gets boring after a while.
I’m not asking for hard roles. I like how I don’t have to dig for a healer every time a make a dungeon group, and as long as you’re not a necro you can jump in to any dungeon group you want to at this point. But is it actually impossible for Anet to make it so there are build variations outside of the one or two that have perpetually been there? I want to switch up my play style without being a detriment to my team, but that’s not possible right now.

Manuhell.2759:

I would say it is indeed broken. As now, a good player has no reason to use anything but zerk gear unless the game forcefully make some of those stats useless (see: uncrittable world bosses). Skills depend only upon an handful of stats, mostly the offensive ones. Healing Power is used by very few skills and building on it requires to find a lot of non-native sources to just be able to use said stat (be it traits, runes, sigils or foods) and even then, they just end up being passive processings, so no skill involved.
Boon Duration gear (aka: giver) is a bad joke, thus raising boon duration heavily impact upon upgrade slots and food that could be spent better in other ways.
And defensive stats aren’t tied to any active skill at all. Unlike offensive skills, defensive skills are the same whether you use zerk or soldier gear. Thus a good player that wants to don defensive gear has no way to make use of the stats his gears provides, while being made inefficent due of the stats his gear lacks.

Basically, the more you get good as a player, the more are restricted by gear to make use of your skill.

Good player donning defensive gear in an action game doesn’t compute. Check dark souls and count the amount of good players playing defensively.

rotten.9753:

Manuhell.2759:

I would say it is indeed broken. As now, a good player has no reason to use anything but zerk gear unless the game forcefully make some of those stats useless (see: uncrittable world bosses). Skills depend only upon an handful of stats, mostly the offensive ones. Healing Power is used by very few skills and building on it requires to find a lot of non-native sources to just be able to use said stat (be it traits, runes, sigils or foods) and even then, they just end up being passive processings, so no skill involved.
Boon Duration gear (aka: giver) is a bad joke, thus raising boon duration heavily impact upon upgrade slots and food that could be spent better in other ways.
And defensive stats aren’t tied to any active skill at all. Unlike offensive skills, defensive skills are the same whether you use zerk or soldier gear. Thus a good player that wants to don defensive gear has no way to make use of the stats his gears provides, while being made inefficent due of the stats his gear lacks.

Basically, the more you get good as a player, the more are restricted by gear to make use of your skill.

Good player donning defensive gear in an action game doesn’t compute. Check dark souls and count the amount of good players playing defensively.

Even Trinity games tanks/healers will drop any superfluous defenses to pump out some damage. It’s called min/maxing and pushing for perfection. Doesn’t always have to happen, but it’s fun to do sometimes. Personally all the professions I play are generally in more defensive/supportive builds but with zerk gear.

Stats as they exist now should just be removed entirely.

-this is an action game with active defences, therefore defensive stats are useless
-the only thing offensive stats do is invalidate skills that use the wrong stats (direct damage skills don’t use condi damage stat, condi skills don’t use direct damage stats)

Guild Wars 1 didn’t use stats like GW2 does, and it worked just fine (many would say it worked far better than GW2).

Is PvE broken? Well I suppose that could be a matter of opinion. Personally I would say that it is indeed broken. But alas the game continues to be played by the masses — much like a dog that plays with a busted water bottle… Its not a toy… Its not whole… but some kicks are still to be had, apparently, before its thrown out.

Capitol City.4856:

Okay, for starters I’m not sure what you’re talking about with this play style A thing. I said if I want to change up my build to fit a different play style, that’s really too bad. And yes, I understand that there will always be only one or two viable builds per class, but right now all of those builds revolve around a single play style. I don’t like using WoW as an example because I really didn’t like a lot of the gameplay, but they did something very right imo. If you’re a warrior in WoW, and you want to play dps, there’s only 1 or 2 different builds for dps. But if you play tank, now there’s 1 or 2 MORE viable builds that still exist within the meta of maxing out dps. In Guild Wars 2, there’s only 1 or 2 builds, but only 1 role, so there’s no switching at all. If you play a class, you’re going to play that class one of two ways, and that’s it. And that gets boring after a while.
I’m not asking for hard roles. I like how I don’t have to dig for a healer every time a make a dungeon group, and as long as you’re not a necro you can jump in to any dungeon group you want to at this point. But is it actually impossible for Anet to make it so there are build variations outside of the one or two that have perpetually been there? I want to switch up my play style without being a detriment to my team, but that’s not possible right now.

Play style A is a placeholder for whatever play style a person has.

And no it’s not possible for there to not be a meta that includes just a few builds. Because there will ALWAYS be one build (or a few builds) that just does a specific thing better than other builds. It’s the nature of MMO’s. The only way to do it is to get rid of every class except one, remove all weapon sets but one, remove all utility, heal, elite skills, to 1 heal, 3 utility, and 1 elite, and remove traits. But who wants to play a game where everyone can do literally the exact same thing and there is absolutely no variety. It can’t be better than other builds because there are no other builds.

And if you don’t like playing the meta, then don’t play the meta. Don’t ask for the meta to change just because you don’t like the meta.

Make your own groups and state that anyone is welcome regardless of build choice.

I know I don’t play the meta. I don’t have the skills for it and no real desire to get them.

Like so many threads in this forum, this entire argument is based around the semantics of the word “broken”….. There is no “yes” or “no” answer when nobody 100% agrees on what “broken” actually means.

I will 100% agree that PvE (and GW2 in general) is “imperfect”, but I avoid using absolute terms like “broken” or “fail” just because they are popular on the “interwebs”…..

Bottom line is that we should all be aware of that saying about what opinions are like….

rotten.9753:

Good player donning defensive gear in an action game doesn’t compute.

Because they have no reason to do so, if all that defensive gear does is passively reducing damage you’re already blocking in some other way if you’re good enough to do so(be it dodging, blinding or blocking).
Give them other, active uses, and good players will have some reasons to use them.

Seera.5916:

Capitol City.4856:

Okay, for starters I’m not sure what you’re talking about with this play style A thing. I said if I want to change up my build to fit a different play style, that’s really too bad. And yes, I understand that there will always be only one or two viable builds per class, but right now all of those builds revolve around a single play style. I don’t like using WoW as an example because I really didn’t like a lot of the gameplay, but they did something very right imo. If you’re a warrior in WoW, and you want to play dps, there’s only 1 or 2 different builds for dps. But if you play tank, now there’s 1 or 2 MORE viable builds that still exist within the meta of maxing out dps. In Guild Wars 2, there’s only 1 or 2 builds, but only 1 role, so there’s no switching at all. If you play a class, you’re going to play that class one of two ways, and that’s it. And that gets boring after a while.
I’m not asking for hard roles. I like how I don’t have to dig for a healer every time a make a dungeon group, and as long as you’re not a necro you can jump in to any dungeon group you want to at this point. But is it actually impossible for Anet to make it so there are build variations outside of the one or two that have perpetually been there? I want to switch up my play style without being a detriment to my team, but that’s not possible right now.

Play style A is a placeholder for whatever play style a person has.

And no it’s not possible for there to not be a meta that includes just a few builds. Because there will ALWAYS be one build (or a few builds) that just does a specific thing better than other builds. It’s the nature of MMO’s. The only way to do it is to get rid of every class except one, remove all weapon sets but one, remove all utility, heal, elite skills, to 1 heal, 3 utility, and 1 elite, and remove traits. But who wants to play a game where everyone can do literally the exact same thing and there is absolutely no variety. It can’t be better than other builds because there are no other builds.

And if you don’t like playing the meta, then don’t play the meta. Don’t ask for the meta to change just because you don’t like the meta.

Make your own groups and state that anyone is welcome regardless of build choice.

I know I don’t play the meta. I don’t have the skills for it and no real desire to get them.

Well as I said, other MMO’s have build variety. This is specific to Guild Wars 2, otherwise it never would have become a complaint in the first place. I’m asking if there’s a way to have build variety without roles, which is what Anet tried and failed to do.

Fighting bots is for furballs.

Capitol City.4856:

Well as I said, other MMO’s have build variety. This is specific to Guild Wars 2, otherwise it never would have become a complaint in the first place. I’m asking if there’s a way to have build variety without roles, which is what Anet tried and failed to do.

And as it has been said before: this game doesn’t work like other MMOs. The Dark Souls comparison is much better than any other given MMO. Though we’re obviously talking about a harder game, the core reasons why defensive gear wouldn’t be used in speed running (which is practically the entire meta here for dungeons) here are the exact same reasons that you wouldn’t use them for speed running Dark Souls: they’re just slower.

There’s absolutely nothing stopping you from tanking just about everything in the game. There’s nothing stopping you from playing the trinity from other games, where you have a tank + healer + dps. However, in all games people will always gravitate towards the most efficient way to win and, in a game where player skill is nearly 100% of the meta, people will always go towards the fastest way to win. And when the bar is lowered for all of the relevant content (ie. lower skill-level dungeons are the most efficient way to make raw gold regardless of skill level) the glass cannon route is the obvious choice.

Roles are still there, guarded off by class (such as how Elementalists/Thieves are the two highest dps classes and have radically different support options, Guardians have absolutely great defensive boons, etc.), and they’re still an extremely desirable thing. But when you’re talking about a game where player skill is the determining factor, even if the requirements are low enough as to allow everyone access to basically every drop of content, there will never be a hard requirement for every single role to be present.

Manuhell.2759:

Because they have no reason to do so, if all that defensive gear does is passively reducing damage you’re already blocking in some other way if you’re good enough to do so(be it dodging, blinding or blocking).
Give them other, active uses, and good players will have some reasons to use them.

What’s the point? Gear diversity for the sake of gear diversity?

Capitol City.4856:

Well as I said, other MMO’s have build variety. This is specific to Guild Wars 2, otherwise it never would have become a complaint in the first place. I’m asking if there’s a way to have build variety without roles, which is what Anet tried and failed to do.

That’s just an illusion. In all MMO there is always 1 optimal build for each situation.

In SWOTOR for exemple you have the optimal Mercenary healer build. You can do different things with your mercenary. You can do a dps build with it, but that’s not the strength of the build and you ain’t gonna be the best dps out there. Even if you are healer. You can have different build, but there will be a most optimal build. Same with Juggernaut. My friend use to play a dps Juggernaut. It worked, but it always bugged me because it wasn’t a great dps.

There is as much build diversity in other game as GW2, it’s disguise. Again for SWOTOR. You had 4 different stats for damage. Aim, Cunning, Willpower and Strenght. But each of the 4 profession concentrate on only 1 of those. All Bounty Hunter take Aim, all Imperial Agent want cunning, etc, etc. How is that more diversity.

Could GW2 have more build diversity? Yes of course and it should.
- Make condition in PvE competitive over power build.
- Make more difficult content to push our build more into support. Content that make us need more Vigor, more Protection, more reflect, more weakness, etc
- Make more unique trait like Phalanx, Fresh Air, Persisting Flames or Writ of Persistence. Trait that we can create build around.

Skoigoth.9238:

Are you implying that, generally speaking, Warriors do more damage than Eles?

Read my post and try to understand it this time.

Skoigoth.9238:

Or even worse, that Warrior is harder to play than Ele? =P

I played both elementalist and warrior (I also played engineer, necromancer, ranger, thief, and guardian), and yes, it actually is harder generally to play elementalist. My experience in dungeon runs confirm this – eles fall much more than warriors. Where as warrior you can eat 2-3 boss attacks as ele you will sometimes go down even from one. If you do think that warrior is harder than ele – well, i think you have some problems here.

maha.7902:

Are you implying that, generally speaking, Warriors do more damage than Eles? Or even worse, that Warrior is harder to play than Ele? =P

don’t kid yourself in to thinking camping fire attunement and pressing 2 and 5 off of cooldown is any more challenging than a warrior rotation.

Yes, certainly. By “harder” I wasn´t necessarily referring to complexity of skill rotations, but rather to the fact that Ele is naturally less forgiving than Warrior, because it comes with less inbuilt defensive capability (aka you can´t take a kick to the face and walk away with ~50% health).

Surbrus.6942:

Stats as they exist now should just be removed entirely

^ This would be great imo, but sadly I also think that it is very unlikely that something along those lines will ever happen in GW2.
And I´m pretty sure all the people crying and kittening about the way things are now would find something else to cry and kitten about rather quickly, so it wouldn´t solve my biggest concern in this matter anyways

CutePicsHunter.7430:

I played both elementalist and warrior (I also played engineer, necromancer, ranger, thief, and guardian), and yes, it actually is harder generally to play elementalist. My experience in dungeon runs confirm this – eles fall much more than warriors. Where as warrior you can eat 2-3 boss attacks as ele you will sometimes go down even from one. If you do think that warrior is harder than ele – well, i think you have some problems here.

Eeehm, I´m not sure if we understand each other correctly tbh. You basically just said the opposite of what you said in the post I was originally referring to and now repeated what I was trying to convey with my post. So I think either you got something mixed up in your other post, or I misunderstood something about it

Eeehm, I´m not sure if we understand each other correctly tbh. You basically just said the opposite of what you said in the post I was originally referring to

I said that elementalist is more unforgiving and hard than warrior. I said that elementalists damage is not that bigger than warriors, you can understand it if you will read this again:

Is the damage difference between these two classes high enough to make it worthy to have, say, 2 times less health?

You then came with this:

Are you implying that, generally speaking, Warriors do more damage than Eles? Or even worse, that Warrior is harder to play than Ele? =P

So, with this you basically

repeated what I was trying to convey with my post

I wasn’t expecting that so I read it wrong, meh.

I misunderstood something about it

This, i guess. Not that my english is very good, so that is pretty much my fault too.

PVE is not broken.