But there are meaningful roles.
To offer you basic examples. You can have mesmers providing mob pulls and quickness, warriors providing banners, guardians putting up projectile reflects, engineers stacking vulnerability.
And you can do all of this while playing DPS.
Even in WvW you have players with roles even if they tend to be grouped in to them most of the time.
It’s a win/win.
With the exception of the reflects, none of those are examples of unique roles. They are just different ways to do damage.
Why would there have to be unique roles?
Look at FFXIV, they had craptastic launch, servers were full 24/7 and DPS STILL had very long waits for dungeon finder.
Devs were begging players to play more healers/tanks, and they admitted why only one class has “special mount” – its healer class and special mount is bribe to get more people to play it.
And trinity has been done to death, design limitations on trinity are too narrow, the only way to “spice it up” is to add non trinity related stuff at which point its better to throw trinity out of the window and get rid of the problems.
And design problems are design problems, has it ever occured to you ANet doesnt really want more complex/harder design? Oh yes, encounters can be much more complex and harder without trinity, but for whom exactly would they make those encounters? 5% of playerbase?
(edited by MikaHR.1978)
Games with a trinity have players setting things up so people can do more damage. It’s exactly the same here.
Just because ANet doesn’t want people to just be healbots that fall asleep until a red bar falls too low or the tank to fall asleep until the boss gets bored doesn’t mean that they should change what is currently a great combat system.
All of those “set ups” are trivial and easily replaceable by anything else. There is nothing viable that has a unique role besides Damage Per Second.
I wonder how many people in this thread actally run in zerker groups, find content easy and know why it’s easy, and how many just run trash builds and think “zerker group” is five warriors doing nothing besides smash hundred blades and everything dies.
Content in this game is easy but it does actually involve co-ordination, and people knowing their
wait for it
wait
ROLES.
The difference is, these roles aren’t predetermined but can be set on the fly and in some cases a player of a different class can take the same role (e.g. guardians can push bosses to a wall like a mesmer can)
I’m weird in that I don’t think the game needs dodge or a trinity. Remove dodge, stomp and autoattacking and you’ll have a solid combat system beneath it all.
Let me be more clear. By “role” I intend to mean a distinct playstyle that a group of players might seek out to do a specific and dedicated task that contributes to the group’s success. CCing enemies that go for your healers and keep them still for your warriors might be considered a role if it was an important job that was often requested. “Pushing bosses” is not a role, it is an action that may help but is not really needed.
Combo fields and finishers were suppose to fulfill the roles. Harder content needs to revolve around the proper timing and use of these except it is nearly impossible without use of a voip.
Combo fields and finishers were suppose to fulfill the roles. Harder content needs to revolve around the proper timing and use of these except it is nearly impossible without use of a voip.
It doesn’t help that the fields override one another. Be neat if combo fields could actually combo for stronger effects and if encounters were designed to take this into consideration.
personally i think the game would have more depth with roles….at the very least resource management with more meaningful, yet more expensive moves. But hey, some people like to just spam whatever and roll so whatever floats your boat. Either way its too late for them to ever consider the trinity so hopefully they’ll figure out a way to add more depth without the teamwork that the trinity provides.
It’s weird seeing so much hate for designated healing classes. Healing/Protting in GW1 was a challenge in a lot of the content and was largely, really rewarding over the years. Saying it’s “OMGSOEASY2HEELPPL” is rather ignorant if you’ve never mained a Monk or to a lesser extent, a Rit.
And that’s in reference to PUGS and organized PvE/PvP.
I have played exactly one mmo with a trinity. In that game is just dps classes mashing the button that does highest dps, heal classing mashing the button that does most efficient heals and tanks auto attacks and occasionally use a taunt skill. Do I think timing dodges and doing max dps rotation is a bit better? Yeah in my opinion I find it a bit more engaging.
I understand what Anet was trying to do with the game, but I can’t help but wonder if this is the best execution of getting rid of the trinity.
Of course it isn’t, it needed to be accompanied by good encounter design and for the most part it wasn’t.
I’ll preface this by saying that I wasn’t around in vanilla WoW, but I know many people who were, and I obsessively read forums and news while I was active. My information isn’t from experience as much as from research and anecdotal evidence, so if I’m off base, tell me and I’ll back down.
Let me help you out there. “if you had a druid or paladin and weren’t healing, you were considered an idiot”. I played a pally tank and a Druid tank/dps in the beginning stages of WoW’s early life and I can honestly say that I was better than most people that were actually specced for it.
I don’t know how you played, so I can’t judge much. However, if you were considered an idiot for being a non-healer, maybe there was a reason? Individuals are not as good for measuring class balance as whole populations are, since individuals can have extreme amounts (or lacks) of skill. The WoW population held DPS and Tanking pallies and druids with contempt, likely for a good reason.
Let me help you out again. “There were small balance issues that were fixed almost immediately and there were almost no exploitable mechanics”. I really don’t understand your sentence there at all, because the classes were pretty well balanced, (Moreso than in GW2 at least)
Correct me if I’m wrong, but didn’t all classes get major reworks within the first year? I particularly remember looking up what the “bus shock” was when someone mentioned it in the forums, and it arose out of developers not listening to the shaman community regarding a major rework. Generally, major reworks come about due to balance issues.
, and please enlighten me to the exploitable mechanics you’re talking about. Because I played WoW for years upon years and haven’t experienced a single exploited mechanic. Even so, the “exploited mechanic” you’re talking about couldn’t be nearly as bad as champ farming is now.
A couple come to mind. Rogues stunlocking without DR, Pally Reckoning one-shots (Though that got an immediate hotfix), Warlocks using fear/curse of recklessness to keep mobs permanently running back and forth without pulling packs.
I wasn’t referring to exploited mechanic as in economy, I was referring to exploited mechanics as in OP combat abilities. I apologize if I wasn’t clear.
WoW was pretty near its peak amazingness akittens 1-year mark,
To each their own. There are a lot of people who would say that mid-end BC was the greatest, there are people that loved WotLK, there are people that loved Cata, and there are people that love MoP (Though probably not as many as the others). Everyone has their own tastes. I personally felt like WoW was getting stale for me late-Cata and early-MoP, and never actually managed to get to 90 due to a lack of motivation. GW2 feels fresh and fun to me in its current state, and the living story is helping it maintain that feeling.
but I feel like Guild Wars 2 is trying to crawl its way back up the popularity ladder by adding ascended gear and raids.
Maybe. You have a valid point here. However, if something is fun (Raiding), why are so many people bashing on GW2 for saying they’ll include it? They never said they wouldn’t, it’s an activity many people enjoy, and quite a few people think it can’t come soon enough. I don’t see the point in trying to say “GW2 is jumping on a bandwagon” or some such. Just enjoy it!
For the ascended gear, I like it. It gives me something to work for that isn’t as far out as a Legendary. I know that not everyone shares my view, but I know that there also are people that do.
EDIT: On topic, I like the lack of trinities. It means we aren’t all waiting on one person who can competently heal or tank. It means that solo-queue PvP doesn’t boil down to which team has a healer and which doesn’t. It means that I’m not expected to heal stupid. It means that the whole weight of the party isn’t carried by one person. It means that people have to demonstrate some responsibility for themselves. In other games, it’s really common for someone to screw up and blame it on the healer or the tank or the support or whatnot. I don’t see that here, because it isn’t required that we have a healer, tank or support. I liked being needed by my group when I was a tank or healer in WoW, but I like even more that one isn’t necessary to progress here.
I doubt Anet could really put in a trinity, but if they did, it would significantly put me off. One of the largest draws of this game was that any party could succeed in a dungeon, not just a 1/1/3 like every other game out there.
(edited by Sylentir.8913)
I wonder how many people in this thread actally run in zerker groups, find content easy and know why it’s easy, and how many just run trash builds and think “zerker group” is five warriors doing nothing besides smash hundred blades and everything dies.
Content in this game is easy but it does actually involve co-ordination, and people knowing their
wait for it
wait
ROLES.
The difference is, these roles aren’t predetermined but can be set on the fly and in some cases a player of a different class can take the same role (e.g. guardians can push bosses to a wall like a mesmer can)
The meta has become somewhat roles based. And, it is anchor guardian, dps warrior, and util/support mesmer. The roles actually are predetermined, largely, though there is adaptation from fight to fight. This is as close as we get to meaningful roles and it is nothing really supported by game design. The anchor guardian can grab aggro and position mobs but he can’t really tank, the mesmer is largely utility and nothing really satisfying in terms of combat specific role. The warrior as straight DPS is the closest we get to a meaningfully complete combat role.
So yeah, people are being creative with the stuff they find lying around on the ground. This is humans being humans and looking for meaningful roles to fill. What is the level of support in terms of what the game provides towards this end?
if we look at wow and its trinaty its a tank pulling some mobs and if he needs a smoke he just rolls one as he tanks. healer is able to do the same to a bigger degree if you take the gear treadmill out it just gets broken bad within 1-3 months where gw2’s pve is not the best yet but it has the potential to get beter where wow or trinaty just have tank’n spank maybe with a little twist of some kind
if we look at wow and its trinaty its a tank pulling some mobs and if he needs a smoke he just rolls one as he tanks. healer is able to do the same to a bigger degree if you take the gear treadmill out it just gets broken bad within 1-3 months where gw2’s pve is not the best yet but it has the potential to get beter where wow or trinaty just have tank’n spank maybe with a little twist of some kind
We don’t need to look at wow, we can just look at Guild Wars 1. Quite a better experience.
There’s a clear lack of challenge outside of dodging and spamming attacks. Outside of stability and reflects there’s not much to support in PvE (and this is why the dungeon meta favors Guardians.) and why control when you can spam even more DPS to bring down enemies even faster?
I hate bringing this up again, but I think action games like Vindi have the right of it when there are no specified roles. The challenge in those types of games needs to come from actually executing attacks and dodging attacks rather than manipulating HP/resource bars.
If there needs to be roles, then give all professions the ability to swap between them to some degree like in GW1. Or better yet, get rid of professions and let players create their own roles to suit the situation.
Here’s an example of current tier trinity raiding since I expect GW2 fan boys to make assumptions and trakitten. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u_3nIwwkfEk
if we look at wow and its trinaty its a tank pulling some mobs and if he needs a smoke he just rolls one as he tanks. healer is able to do the same to a bigger degree
Um, yeah, no. Not even slightly. Tanks and Healers in most MMORPGs that have them have to concentrate 100% on the job at hand. The slightest mistake by either can cause a wipe just as easily as DPSes not watching where they’re stepping.
The problem isn’t the lack of trinity the problem is the predictable nature of PvE. With a trinity it kind of works as you’re still fulfilling your predesignated role but here it just becomes a matter of maximising your damage and timing your dodges and not much else.
The solution is simple although difficult to impliment. Bosses need to be far less predictable. If this can be achieved then build diversity in PvE will increase and then Anet can move away from one shot mechanics and the ever dull “pull boss here to remove shield”
As someone who was obsessed with tanking in other games i do prefer not being able to. Being abve to soak up damage is a pretty ridiculous concept. Atleast now i have to try to avoid damage.
(edited by sinzer.4018)
if we look at wow and its trinaty its a tank pulling some mobs and if he needs a smoke he just rolls one as he tanks. healer is able to do the same to a bigger degree
Um, yeah, no. Not even slightly. Tanks and Healers in most MMORPGs that have them have to concentrate 100% on the job at hand. The slightest mistake by either can cause a wipe just as easily as DPSes not watching where they’re stepping.
Honestly, anyone who says that they can just taunt and walk away as a tank is just plain wrong. Maybe a highly geared tank who can spam AoE and is doing casual mode content could get away with it, but this ideology doesn’t even come close to representing anything on the hardest difficulty settings.
if we look at wow and its trinaty its a tank pulling some mobs and if he needs a smoke he just rolls one as he tanks. healer is able to do the same to a bigger degree
Um, yeah, no. Not even slightly. Tanks and Healers in most MMORPGs that have them have to concentrate 100% on the job at hand. The slightest mistake by either can cause a wipe just as easily as DPSes not watching where they’re stepping.
That’s pretty much how I feel, as someone who played a Monk ( alt ) for nearly 7 years through PvP and PvE.
If people haven’t had a primary character that was full support in any game, they shouldn’t be posting in this thread. Trivialize the roles if you wish, but it’s ( often times ) a lot more engaging than spamming all your DPS skills.
if we look at wow and its trinaty its a tank pulling some mobs and if he needs a smoke he just rolls one as he tanks. healer is able to do the same to a bigger degree
Um, yeah, no. Not even slightly. Tanks and Healers in most MMORPGs that have them have to concentrate 100% on the job at hand. The slightest mistake by either can cause a wipe just as easily as DPSes not watching where they’re stepping.
Um, not always. It really depends on the game and balance/tuning in question. There are some games where healing is playing whack-a-mole because the bars drop so fast, in which little thought but lots of action are required. There are some games where healing is very slow and methodical, and while the healer has to think somewhat in order to press the right buttons, as long as they play the pattern they’re fine. While sometimes it hits that fine balance, healing is usually either a stressfest or is trivial.
Likewise with tanking. If you have to manage adds and defensive skills, watch out for grey hairs. If aggro is trivial, tanking becomes much simpler. Heck, there at one point was an effective (read: used by hardcore raiders) paladin tanking rotation based on alternating 6-second and 9-second cooldowns.
Only thing removing the trinity ever did was not having to go out of your way to search for a tank or healer.
Yeah I guess that’s kind of the point really. If you want to take a general glance at the classes compared to other games, there’s not too much that makes them unique outside of the pet classes being useless(if using pets).
I disagree with that !
I’m a MM necro ( mastered the build ) , I find my self one of the strongest classes ( if not the best )
Games with a trinity have players setting things up so people can do more damage. It’s exactly the same here.
Just because ANet doesn’t want people to just be healbots that fall asleep until a red bar falls too low or the tank to fall asleep until the boss gets bored doesn’t mean that they should change what is currently a great combat system.
Except you dont stand there half asleep.
Thats just the thing. In WoW you had to be moving out of aoe rings and stuff just like in gw2 or you would die. The tank had to constantly position the boss in new areas depending on the phase of the fight. Dps had to know when to dps where to dps and when to take adds.
There were so many things going on in WoW fights that it became standard to create a addon to let you know when phases were coming and what was going to happen lol.
Never did a tank just stand in one spot in a raid and go afk or sleep. Same with a healer or dps because the moment they do afk or sleep as you put it they would probably be dead from a red ring of death or new phase.
And it did add alot of dynamic to fights. In GW2 there is no dynamic its just run around and spam one of your 5 combat skills as fast as you can.
90% of GW2 content involves literally stacking and standing in one spot and spamming a skill. The other 10% involves hitting some dragons foot for 1 to 5 minutes -.-.
(edited by Namu.5712)
I’m weird in that I don’t think the game needs dodge or a trinity. Remove dodge, stomp and autoattacking and you’ll have a solid combat system beneath it all.
I’d agree with you if it wasn’t for the high amount of powerful (but avoidable) attacks and CC. As a quadturret engineer, unless you have lots of stability or you are very good at using stealth, you need to dodge certain attacks on demand to avoid me stunlocking you. That isn’t to say my build is overpowered, it just means that you have to use a particular mechanic against it.
And removing AA would do nothing. People would just start spamming their 1 key, and if you want to know how unpleasant that is just ask any grenades engineer.
Games with a trinity have players setting things up so people can do more damage. It’s exactly the same here.
Just because ANet doesn’t want people to just be healbots that fall asleep until a red bar falls too low or the tank to fall asleep until the boss gets bored doesn’t mean that they should change what is currently a great combat system.
Except you dont stand there half asleep.
Thats just the thing. In WoW you had to be moving out of aoe rings and stuff just like in gw2 or you would die. The tank had to constantly position the boss in new areas depending on the phase of the fight. Dps had to know when to dps where to dps and when to take adds.
There were so many things going on in WoW fights that it became standard to create a addon to let you know when phases were coming and what was going to happen lol.
Never did a tank just stand in one spot in a raid and go afk or sleep. Same with a healer or dps because the moment they do afk or sleep as you put it they would probably be dead from a red ring of death or new phase.
And it did add alot of dynamic to fights. In GW2 there is no dynamic its just run around and spam one of your 5 combat skills as fast as you can.
90% of GW2 content involves literally stacking and standing in one spot and spamming a skill. The other 10% involves hitting some dragons foot for 1 to 5 minutes -.-.
Um, maybe 90% of open world combat. Some fractals address that, all have unique mechanics, and raids are on their way. WoW’s open world non-boss mobs didn’t have nearly the complexity of GW2’s open world non-boss mobs do, because WoW players didn’t have a dodge mechanic to avoid telegraphed hits. I can’t really comment on WoW open world bosses, but I thought that they weren’t commonly done.
WoW Dungeon ~= GW2 dungeon. Both have some elements of tank-n-spank and actual interesting mechanics. Fractals are halfway between raids and dungeons. The problem is that GW2 doesn’t yet have a raiding equivalent for the hardcore playerbase, and they are working to fix that.
@Sylentir
First off, let me apologize for the way I worded things in my previous post. I was in a hurry and didn’t have time to re-read and make things sound a little more eloquent. I in no way meant to berate you for your opinions of WoW.
You’re not too far off base, by the way. But WoW’s forums are famous for being negative and full of pointless exaggerations. All of the people that are enjoying the game are currently in the game, not on the forums. I played WoW since its beginning, so I have a ton of experience with bugs and such.
Also, let me clarify this part. I put “considered” in the sentence because people immediately assumed that a class was instantly bad if they deviated from the normal healing spec, tanking spec, or dps spec that was associated with their class. They, and only they considered my class bad because I deviated from the norm. Yet I proved them wrong time and time again, and ultimately, it led to other people experimenting with certain aspects of their class, such as a tanking Druid.
As for the exploitable mechanics, I thought you meant economic exploitations and not class exploitations. Yes, there were and still are plenty of those, but I haven’t really experienced much of those. I mean, the Warlock fear was the only one I experienced, but other people complained about some of those a lot.
Later on in your post you mentioned how all classes got a rework done. If I’m not mistaken, that rework was nearly at the end of year one. When I say that the classes were almost perfectly balanced, my statement is taking place right after that patch, and in my opinion, they’ve done a pretty dang good job keeping up the balancing.
Alright: Now for ascended gear. I’m not against ascended gear or raids at all, and it wasn’t my intention to imply that at all. I really like that they’ve added ascended weapons, are going to add armor, and they’re going to add raids as well. My point was to show that GW2 is trying to become like other mmos, or at least they’re implementing some popular ideas from those mmos.
I don’t know, I actually really like the idea of a trinity in GW2, except for the fact that there is no healing class. It kind of makes me question the point of having a bunch of different classes if we’re all dps. Sure, there are different playstyles, but we’re all doing dps and not much else. I get that people like to play differently, like I prefer to play magical classes, and others might prefer melee classes, but it just feels strange to not be healing people when their health is low. It also feels strange when I get on my support Elementalist, because I’m pretty much not needed, and my dps takes a massive skydive because of my support stats. That’s just my opinion anyway.
When I heard that GW2 would have no trinity, It sounded amazing, but when I actually started to play it, it had more problems then trinity had to me personally. I was a healer and in say WoW, I felt like I had a role, I was crucial to a PvP group, a dungeon group and a raid group. In GW2 I feel like I’m a mindless zerger like everyone else. That brings me to the gear, if you’re not in full zerker gear, I’m sorry but you’re doing it wrong because in GW2 everything relies on killing something quickly. I’d prefer 3 roles then none, because in GW2 as someone mentioned earlier it IS every man for themselves, but I thought this was an MMO?
As others have said, I don’t think removing the trinity is what caused a more simplistic encounter style. I think that’s pretty squarely on the designers who make the encounters themselves. Heck, they could put specific parameters on encounters as they are to enforce a pseudo trinity system for an individual encounter if they really wanted. The problem is that the encounters to this point have largely been designed to accomodate and accentuate nothing but DPS.
As someone who spends a lot of time soloing, though, the less class/role specific design definitely makes my experience better. No more playing a tanky class and struggling to kill standard enemies in less than 10 minutes because that’s just not what my class is designed to do.
It has the potential to be, but GW2 doesn’t really showcase that. Most dungeons feel like 5 solo players running at the same time. There is really little synergy beyond increasing DPS or providing a tiny bit of support (at the cost of said DPS). The lack of healers also means that fights have to be designed that the average player can do them at the cost of interesting fight mechanics.
I dunno. I like the concept, but not as much as I did when I started playing. Looking back, I think it would have been better to allow players to fulfill any role they wanted on the fly. As it stands now, the lack of build diversity, the focus on all-out DPS and the lack of team synergy and support (aside from combo fields and the occasional utility) gets old fast.
@Galtrix:
What if, instead of making a pure “healing” class, they boosted the ability to support? I do recognize that healing others should be a good bit more powerful than it currently is, but there shouldn’t need to be a dedicated healer. Having a dedicated healer puts a hard check on the ability of a group to progress. No healer, no boss.
I realize that these would all require large balance changes, I’m just trying to brainstorm ways to make support more effective.
-Improve combos. Add more, give them different effects, make them more meaningful. As it is, I see them used primarily for might stacking and healing. Maybe a support character would be able to create fields more, so that allies could finish them? I think this could be improved, I’m just not sure how.
-Give classes more powerful abilities that help allies, but not themselves. For example, a Guardian could have an ability that temporarily redirects 50% of incoming damage on nearby allies to themselves. This could be used proactively to give a survivable class a chance to mitigate the damage taken by allies.
-Make CC more effective on bosses. This is a tricky one, since a chainstunned boss often negates some mechanics. However, as it stands, the “control” role doesn’t actually work since bosses are immune. One way of doing it would be by making bosses somewhat like Liadri: Some of the mechanics are caused by the boss themself, while others are environmental effects. That way, CC doesn’t have to be quite so limited, but a group of engineers together can’t trivialize the boss with their juggling.
-Have bosses use conditions more liberally. One of the largest aspects of support available is condition management. Some professions remove them, some professions convert them, some professions transfer them. However, almost every profession has some ability to help an ally mitigate conditions. A boss might deal damage with bleeds instead of white damage, and players have to cure their allies from time to time.
-Make player “support conditions” more powerful. Give a boss heals that we have to poison. Give a boss spike damage we have to apply weakness to counter. Give a boss abilities with cooldowns effected by chill, and give us reason for that to matter.
-Have a boss that makes dodging much less available. Making it impossible would probably hurt some builds far more than others, so don’t remove it completely. Maybe you have to pick up / walk over an item to get dodge charges? Perhaps dodge regenerates at half rate? Dodge trivialized some mechanics, but because it was partially taken into account in design, getting rid of it would be more trouble than is worth.
Also, for the record, while it isn’t optimal it can be fun to play as support. I’ve got a full set of cleric’s gear to run on my engie, and while it isn’t playing a dedicated healer by any means, the healing is often appreciated by my allies. I particularly like it when running content with inexperienced members, as I can save their butts while not doing everything for them.
As others have said, I don’t think removing the trinity is what caused a more simplistic encounter style. I think that’s pretty squarely on the designers who make the encounters themselves. Heck, they could put specific parameters on encounters as they are to enforce a pseudo trinity system for an individual encounter if they really wanted. The problem is that the encounters to this point have largely been designed to accomodate and accentuate nothing but DPS.
As someone who spends a lot of time soloing, though, the less class/role specific design definitely makes my experience better. No more playing a tanky class and struggling to kill standard enemies in less than 10 minutes because that’s just not what my class is designed to do.
Bolded for emphasis. I think that the gauntlet bosses showed that the devs are moving in the right direction, they just need time to work. They are revamping world bosses, have 3 new fractals in development, and have raids on the radar. Don’t just sit there and wait for them to arrive, but don’t forget that they are coming and hopefully will bring more engaging fights.
@Galtrix:
What if, instead of making a pure “healing” class, they boosted the ability to support? I do recognize that healing others should be a good bit more powerful than it currently is, but there shouldn’t need to be a dedicated healer. Having a dedicated healer puts a hard check on the ability of a group to progress. No healer, no boss.
I realize that these would all require large balance changes, I’m just trying to brainstorm ways to make support more effective.
-Improve combos. Add more, give them different effects, make them more meaningful. As it is, I see them used primarily for might stacking and healing. Maybe a support character would be able to create fields more, so that allies could finish them? I think this could be improved, I’m just not sure how.
-Give classes more powerful abilities that help allies, but not themselves. For example, a Guardian could have an ability that temporarily redirects 50% of incoming damage on nearby allies to themselves. This could be used proactively to give a survivable class a chance to mitigate the damage taken by allies.
-Make CC more effective on bosses. This is a tricky one, since a chainstunned boss often negates some mechanics. However, as it stands, the “control” role doesn’t actually work since bosses are immune. One way of doing it would be by making bosses somewhat like Liadri: Some of the mechanics are caused by the boss themself, while others are environmental effects. That way, CC doesn’t have to be quite so limited, but a group of engineers together can’t trivialize the boss with their juggling.-Have bosses use conditions more liberally. One of the largest aspects of support available is condition management. Some professions remove them, some professions convert them, some professions transfer them. However, almost every profession has some ability to help an ally mitigate conditions. A boss might deal damage with bleeds instead of white damage, and players have to cure their allies from time to time.
-Make player “support conditions” more powerful. Give a boss heals that we have to poison. Give a boss spike damage we have to apply weakness to counter. Give a boss abilities with cooldowns effected by chill, and give us reason for that to matter.
-Have a boss that makes dodging much less available. Making it impossible would probably hurt some builds far more than others, so don’t remove it completely. Maybe you have to pick up / walk over an item to get dodge charges? Perhaps dodge regenerates at half rate? Dodge trivialized some mechanics, but because it was partially taken into account in design, getting rid of it would be more trouble than is worth.
Also, for the record, while it isn’t optimal it can be fun to play as support. I’ve got a full set of cleric’s gear to run on my engie, and while it isn’t playing a dedicated healer by any means, the healing is often appreciated by my allies. I particularly like it when running content with inexperienced members, as I can save their butts while not doing everything for them.
I agree with all of that 100%. In fact, I suggested the idea that bosses could do condition damage and target people with various conditions every few seconds so people would be inclined to bring a support player or switch to support themselves. I suggested that in the suggestions section of the forum about 4 times, but haven’t gotten a single reply from a dev. I’ve gotten lots of happy comments that supported the idea, but not a single view from a dev.
But yes, making support more viable would make me happy
Only thing removing the trinity ever did was not having to go out of your way to search for a tank or healer.
As an old-time tank with a relatively stable group back then, I only find there are way too many kids like to see BIG NUMBERZ more than helping the group in this game.
Trinity is good. Removing it can be good, but it also produces this guardian-warrior-mesmer problem.
Trinity is good. Removing it can be good, but it also produces this guardian-warrior-mesmer problem.
It’s not like it’s a difficult ‘problem’ to solve. This ‘problem’ only exists at a PUG level, but if ANet wanted other classes to be more competitive they could simply buff them. ANet have done a good job of avoiding PvE balance for an entire year, though.
Anyway, currently Warriors/Guardians/Thieves/Elementalists/Mesmers are the flavor classes by good groups (not PUGs). Engineer is good on paper, but from my experience it’s kind of lackluster. Only class which won’t be considered as a competitive class for PvE is Necro. I’m now going to leave this thread before I get barraged by people defending their class.
(edited by The Mexican Cookie.3690)
What the removal of the trinity opens up, in my opinion, is the capability of going way beyond the box of tank-n-spank. I know in most MMOs I’ve played, I’ve always boiled down encounters to tank-n-spank with a funky gimmick tossed into it just to make it “interesting”.
Instead of those three simplistic roles, you could be lumped into encounter-specific roles. For instance, you may be asked to utilize environmental weapons, NPC interactions, or even control some sort of remote device.
You are right…..the potential is there for opening up for this type of play. But it’s not being introduced. Most of the new gameplay is reduced to zerging, where your class, gear, skills don’t matter in the slightest.
Currently, all it does is prevent class hunting for certain tasks like tank, healer, whatever. However, the potential could be there to open up in other ways besides a zerg, as you say.
My only issue with the traditional trinity is, i don’t like every content need a tank and a healer in order to proceed. I am perfectly fine if some people like being tank, someone likes to be healer. I don’t want to be stuck in progression when there are no tank or healer around. I love having random class, random players in a party to do contents, the experience is far better than a tank healer dps setup.
Is GW2 better than trinity? Yes to someone like me, who love more skill and reaction oriented combat. No to someone like tank and healer style. And isn’t it obvious that GW2 isn’t a game for trinity lover? Pls do us a favor, move along, thank you!
As others have said, I don’t think removing the trinity is what caused a more simplistic encounter style. I think that’s pretty squarely on the designers who make the encounters themselves. Heck, they could put specific parameters on encounters as they are to enforce a pseudo trinity system for an individual encounter if they really wanted. The problem is that the encounters to this point have largely been designed to accomodate and accentuate nothing but DPS.
As someone who spends a lot of time soloing, though, the less class/role specific design definitely makes my experience better. No more playing a tanky class and struggling to kill standard enemies in less than 10 minutes because that’s just not what my class is designed to do.
Bolded for emphasis. I think that the gauntlet bosses showed that the devs are moving in the right direction, they just need time to work. They are revamping world bosses, have 3 new fractals in development, and have raids on the radar. Don’t just sit there and wait for them to arrive, but don’t forget that they are coming and hopefully will bring more engaging fights.
A few of the more interesting boss fights like the Iron Forgeman in SE story, the fight against Zhaitan’s champions in Arah story, and the Ice Elemental/Golem fight at the end of the Dredge fractal all present team-based elements outside of straight DPS. The problem is that they are rarely if ever experienced by the vast majority of the player base so we have people assuming that fights are simple dodge and damage encounters.
I wonder if the issue is lack of effective specialization on the non-DPS side that is hurting.
Take boons for instance. 2/3 of them are duration only stacking, and a couple of them go away at first attack that hits you.
This means that there is little noticeable difference between a build that relies on supplying boons and one that do so mostly to support their own DPS.
Part of this is because how ANet designed their boon/condition stacking, resulting in server overload as it has to track a multitude of timers at sub-second precision.
This means that you can’t have boons that have a meaningful difference depending on the builds being played. They are virtually all fire and forget.
Never mind that while SPVP has to avoid unkillable bunkers holding points, in PVE you are the point and every mob within aggro range is trying to take it.
I don’t mind about not having a trinity at all-even having used a Monk extensively on GW1. But if it’s too much of an action game where only one build/gear set “counts” (in the eyes of many, that is-I am pretty sure any decent build could be made to work with skill), it’s annoying to say the least-especially given all the gear stat variety around.
And BTW, some people actually like being so-called “special snowflakes”, because it’s in their personality. Has nothing to do with arrogance or going against the grain for its own sake. Respect these people’s wishes to play as they like, because that’s what they want and how they will be more effective, regardless math and spreadsheets (a “happier” player-more comfortable utilizing his/her preferred playstyle-plays better.)
There’s zero evidence that ANet wanted only one gear set to be used on PvE, as much as this philosophy is thrown around as infallible truth. At least, I doubt that was the intention, whatever players have made of the combat system on the long run.
Berserker’s stats are fine, though. The problem is that many see no use in using any other set, which is a shame, and ANet is partly to blame-but this has nothing to do with the game not having a “trinity”, but the way the combat system currently works in practice, favoring DPS over everything else.
I still strongly believe that max DPS wasn’t the way GW2 PvE was intended to be played (at least, I don’t think it was something to be forced on all players), even if that’s what it has come to in many circles.
Games with a trinity have players setting things up so people can do more damage. It’s exactly the same here.
Just because ANet doesn’t want people to just be healbots that fall asleep until a red bar falls too low or the tank to fall asleep until the boss gets bored doesn’t mean that they should change what is currently a great combat system.
Except you dont stand there half asleep.
Thats just the thing. In WoW you had to be moving out of aoe rings and stuff just like in gw2 or you would die. The tank had to constantly position the boss in new areas depending on the phase of the fight. Dps had to know when to dps where to dps and when to take adds.
There were so many things going on in WoW fights that it became standard to create a addon to let you know when phases were coming and what was going to happen lol.
Never did a tank just stand in one spot in a raid and go afk or sleep. Same with a healer or dps because the moment they do afk or sleep as you put it they would probably be dead from a red ring of death or new phase.
And it did add alot of dynamic to fights. In GW2 there is no dynamic its just run around and spam one of your 5 combat skills as fast as you can.
90% of GW2 content involves literally stacking and standing in one spot and spamming a skill. The other 10% involves hitting some dragons foot for 1 to 5 minutes -.-.
Um, maybe 90% of open world combat. Some fractals address that, all have unique mechanics, and raids are on their way. WoW’s open world non-boss mobs didn’t have nearly the complexity of GW2’s open world non-boss mobs do, because WoW players didn’t have a dodge mechanic to avoid telegraphed hits. I can’t really comment on WoW open world bosses, but I thought that they weren’t commonly done.
WoW Dungeon ~= GW2 dungeon. Both have some elements of tank-n-spank and actual interesting mechanics. Fractals are halfway between raids and dungeons. The problem is that GW2 doesn’t yet have a raiding equivalent for the hardcore playerbase, and they are working to fix that.
Right, I was more directing my post at the WoW hate with trinity and saying oh well you can sleep through trinity games and just spam keys when you need to. When thats not really the case.
I find it irritating that most content in GW2 is trivialized by stacking or just plain dpsing so fast that you don’t even see the mechanics lol.
Some fractals are the exception. As well as a few dungeons.
I find the idea of the trinity to be stupid and a lazy design. You get the enemy to attack a group right where it is dumbest to attack it while ignoring everything else, and then some guy sits back and spams heals so everyone else won’t die to bad guy breaking wind. The only game I’ve played that had a system like this was City of Heroes, and they had 4: Ranged + Melee (DPS and tank), support, control. Support and control were strongest of the two.
If you are standing around pressing 1 and dodging, you aren’t doing it right. Maybe it is just because I main an engineer, but I find combat to be like playing Mozart on my keyboard. I’m constantly cycling kits and abilities to change up how I engage the enemy, attack the enemy, which combo fields I lay, which combo fields I finish in, how I defend myself, and also which might stacking abilities I can use in that moment. The end result? 25 stacks of might, 2700 power 52% chance to crit, 1900 condition damage, Water fields + AoE heals, Perma Vigor, Perma swiftness, and maintaining 20 stacks of bleeding + perma poison + perma burn on 5 enemies in an AoE at 1500 range while reflecting their projectiles.
I am not getting anywhere near that by just pressing 1. Not even close. Maybe you haven’t tried to solo a difficult champion yet, or maybe you’re letting yourself be carried by a zerg, or maybe you just play an axe/axe + rifle signet warrior. Whatever the cause, there is so much more you can do by actually playing the game, no matter which class you choose.
Trinity is good. Removing it can be good, but it also produces this guardian-warrior-mesmer problem.
Trinity is bad.
Guardian-warrior-mesmer problem is produced by horrible AI and boss mechanics.
After subbing to FF14 i gotta say i much prefer Trinity based games, say what you will but its a lot more fun and productive than “Zerg DPS for the win” style mechanics that is for sure..
After subbing to FF14 i gotta say i much prefer Trinity based games, say what you will but its a lot more fun and productive than “Zerg DPS for the win” style mechanics that is for sure..
i dont think a good example of gw2 combat is in zergs. Dungeons are a better example and although i have to admit pugs usually have no coordination, when you get into a good pug or are organized you truly see the power and fun of gw2 combat.
I have a role. I am the hero. When everything goes wrong I will be there to finish it up.
After subbing to FF14 i gotta say i much prefer Trinity based games, say what you will but its a lot more fun and productive than “Zerg DPS for the win” style mechanics that is for sure..
How’s that game? I’ve been thinking about trying it out. As much as I loved GW1, I’m starting to think GW2 isn’t going to turn out the way I had hoped it would.
Zerging works because it’s just adding more bodies to deal damage until the target dies. But what people don’t know is that it’s highly inefficient as compared to organized parties, which can deal more DPS than the zerg can do at a certain amount of time.
I do wish that ANet designed encounters which required large groups of players to split up (like objectives having to be done in x amount of time). That way a large mass of zerg balling up inefficiently can’t finish the events in the encounter.
The current dungeon meta of GW2 is heavily leaning into what GW1 players would have called a healing ball. Currently, combos are so terrifyingly efficient when five players stack that all you need is a corner to stand in so knockbacks are canceled by the geometry.
Maybe some players will find that more orderly than the headless chicken battle royale, in the end it is just the same.
I do wish that ANet designed encounters which required large groups of players to split up (like objectives having to be done in x amount of time). That way a large mass of zerg balling up inefficiently can’t finish the events in the encounter.
Judging from the newest and upcoming content (liadri / tequatl / scarlet invasions) anet are definitely figuring out how to make good complex content without needing trinity.
Trinity is a decent system, but I think gw2’s is way better and more fun, it just needs the content to match it. At launch it’s evident the devs didn’t know anything but trinity combat design.
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