Guild Wars 2

I don’t understand the idea behind this design. Seems like a borrowed idea turned into an industry standard.

You could take a ballista shot to the face 3000 yards away for half your health and 1 second later your health goes back up to full in an instant. A mosquito bites you in the face and you start running slower until the mosquito stops chasing you then you start running faster.

This is so weird. Makes no sense to me.

I’d like to hear your thoughts on this. Average people tend to not care much about game design systems. If any of you would like to take a seat and pretend your a game designer for a moment; I’d like to hear your logic.

From a design standpoint, having slower movement in combat versus out of combat creates an environment where players are encouraged to engage in the fight versus rush past everything.

Also, by limiting the speed of movement, areas designated as high combat zones (pvp maps) can be smaller while still giving the feel of distance to objectives, which creates map control.

Lastly, by creating an incombat/out of combat dynamic you create a mechanic that will cause atrophy to a large zerg group to lose numbers over time in a mobile environment where you want to weaken or delay the combat force that is marching to an objective (wvw).

The downside to these mechanics is that while you may be in combat, others may not be in combat, and they are running at full speed. This makes it feels impossible to ever run away if you have one person tagging, then the rest can catch up with ease.

Also, game play slows down making it feel sluggish as a side effect. This is good and bad, because slower combat should result in more room to make decisions for a broader demographic of people.

Is this the only mechanic that can generate these things? No, and I don’t think it is “needed” per say. I understand why they use it, but I’m sure there are better ways around it.

Many MMO’s require the player to rest between fights to recharge mana, energy, or health. I’m not a fan of this type of system. I’m not a fan of the combat slow down either, but I like to be able to heal by going out of combat.

CMF.5461:

The downside to these mechanics is that while you may be in combat, others may not be in combat, and they are running at full speed. This makes it feels impossible to ever run away if you have one person tagging, then the rest can catch up with ease.

This is probably the biggest gripe I have with this system; in a PVP environment. In a PVE environment I can see NPC’s change their behavior when in or out of combat. Combat systems are probably very deep in the layers of code in an MMO. This probably explains its existence in PVP.

Even in PVE; this “in and out of combat” system makes very little sense to me. NPC’s should be given tools to prevent players from running away if the design intent is to “force” combat.

An invisible force that effects movement speed and health regeneration is hilarious.

The system is in place for developer “control” over the pace of combat in short.

Health regeneration out of combat is a benefit that allows us to be ready to fight quickly instead of having to sit and eat/meditate like in other games, as Odinsfury has mentioned.

If you ever played the original Everquest, back in the day, you might remember having to sit down to heal. If you stood up you healed more slowly, so after every fight everyone would quickly plop to the floor to heal up as fast as possible.

Also mana came back faster if casters had their spell book open. This worked in combat too. So if you played a caster early in that game, you spent 90% of combat in your book trying to keep mana up and then you stand up to cast a spell or two when it was ready to cast again.

If we healed as fast in combat, as we do out of combat, then the damage would have to happen in bigger chunks making it more bursty and harder for the players, or more quickly, making the hits smaller but more frequent, causing a flury of attacks which just seems like an endless stream of damage and hard to manage again.

Slow health gives slower pace of combat, giving players and developers, more control.

Slower movement does exactly the same as the slower health. If you played older Nintendo games on “turbo” mode, the speed on some of the games become ridiculous.

The developers felt that the pace of movement in combat is the determined pace for the feel they were trying to achieve.

Our out of combat speed is simply there to make walking around in general not seem so tedious. So if anything, the nice things they give us (faster run speed and faster health regen) make the real core of the game (combat) seem tedious.

What they were trying to make not so tedious shadows the other side and flips our opinions.

It’s a balance of quality of life and control of the game, with some hitches (ganking by large groups).

This is just me playing devil’s advocate though, I would not mind a different mechanic or faster movement in general. Still I recognize and understand that the faster we move the smaller the world becomes, so they have to factor in just how fast they “want” us to move as well.

I wouldn’t disagree that these features provides convenience.

Out of combat health regeneration seems out of place with the existence of a healing ability with infinite use on cool down. Would players not engage if their health was less than 100%? What if the reason their health was less than 100% is because they made too many mistakes?

This ideology behind removing punishment for making mistakes is too convenient. This convenience would probably have a significant pampering effect on players.

I disagree with the idea that the pace of combat is to be controlled. If the pace of combat is to be controlled then there should be no need for different movement speeds. Running faster out of combat is “convenient”; nothing else. It’s interesting too me that this would be the case because what it tells me is that the player wants to “skip” content. In turn the developer facilitates their player base to skip content.

Movement speed buffs in combat are there to accelerate positioning and gain an upper hand (either offensive or defensive). They are typically intended to be short duration bursts of speed, but some mechanics allow some professions to prolong that movement speed advantage.

These cases of increased speed in combat create a diversity, but typically that diversity is in the tune of balance. In respect to slower more “tankier” professions, and faster more “fragile”.

The paradigm is usually that slow and tanky results in low damage while fast and fragile results in someone who has high damage.

I don’t know where that started but it stands true for a lot of the games today.

So diversity in movement plays into the fast/slow roles of types of combat.

If everyone ran at the same speed as out of combat, then some people have more or less convenience out of combat as well as in combat.

By slowing down combat movement, you allow some professions to maintain a higher rate of movement in combat than others.

Outside of combat, the playing field is more consistent with a few exceptions in reapplication of swiftness, or no built in movement speed traits or signets.

Skipping content on the other hand is another issue. We have been given plenty of tools to skip content and we do regularly. Also a lot of content seems filler and we are given wide leeway to avoid engaging in combat to just rush to the end.

I don’t know exactly where the developers stand on skipping content. We can if we want, and are given the option to.

Every class moves at the same speed in and out of combat. There are traits and skills that effect movement speed but; I’m particularly interested in out of combat movement.

I don’t think the intent was to have the game slow down in combat. I think in combat movement speed is the default speed. Out of combat speed buff is a convenience feature to allow the player to cover distance in shorter time.

Remember when Thieves had out of combat movement speed when entering stealth? Aside from balance issues this caused; think of the massive convenience Thieves had in PVE where they could reset aggro tables and move at super fast speeds just by stealthing.

I agree that in combat is the default speed and out of combat is the convenience speed.

That said, I look back to my earlier posts about slow movement allows for smaller maps and closer objectives while keeping mobility low and extending possible strategies by players to impact opposing teams movement via “removing convenience”.

In PvE that convenience allows for skipping content and rushing past mobs. If you get hit, then you are slowed and have the option to turn and fight…potentially training yourself with a huge group of mobs, or to keep running and hope to distance yourself.

Most of the time the answer is to keep running, as PvE is easy enough to run through, as is seen in dungeon runs all the time today.

I still think out of combat health regeneration and movement speed have no place in PVP. Silly convenience PVE features finding their way in PVP in every single MMO. Every single time.

Downed state and rally systems is another example.

I don’t believe for a second that a PVP developer came up with that one.

I see a lot of issues with the downed state and rally system in pvp, but it does create a lot of unique interactions.

Holding a point while downed, making players decide if its better to try to stomp or if they should just continue to do damage. Being able to save someone creates community effort, which is what the developers want.

There is a lot more they could have done with downed state and rally to make it better though.

I think the biggest issue are the “on kill” type mechanics that will not trigger until a stomp or full death occurs. Being downed will not trigger those effects.

I am still not sure if I care for downed state yet. I am “used” to it and I don’t hate it, but I don’t know if I like it either.

Health regen out of combat is a convenience to hasten the frequency of combat as much as movement speed is, to encourage more combat to happen.

If we could all out run each other and never worry about our health, then why would we risk our lives to fight?

If you think we shouldn’t have any health regen increase, then I again point you to older games where you would have to wait to heal. We do not have the type of spamable heals that other games have, so this hastens the wait time to fight again.

There is a small window before it starts, so if you make too many mistakes you will be low on life for a short duration and stay vulnerable to attack and death.

CMF.5461:

If you think we shouldn’t have any health regen increase, then I again point you to older games where you would have to wait to heal. We do not have the type of spamable heals that other games have, so this hastens the wait time to fight again.

There is a small window before it starts, so if you make too many mistakes you will be low on life for a short duration and stay vulnerable to attack and death.

That’s part of the risk of combat.

It seems that out of combat regeneration treats every encounter separately. There is less risk engaging in combat; knowing that I will regenerate back to full if I win.

In the absence of regeneration; engaging in combat comes at a cost. Even if I win I am weakened. If I choose to re-engage with less than 100% health I do so at a greater risk.

I believe when risk is part of design; the experience becomes more intense. The more risk you remove from the game; the more convenient you design your world; the less impact it has on the player and the less memorable the experience becomes.