Professions need cool new skills like NPCs

Professions need cool new skills like NPCs

in Guild Wars 2 Discussion

Posted by: OriOri.8724

OriOri.8724

I actually think the WM clerics are overdone and need nerfing. They aren’t hard to kill, just extremely annoying. Its not fun to just be forced to wait around for 3 seconds if my unblockable attacks are on CD and I’m fighting a cleric. That doesn’t make for an interesting encounter, nor does it make for a challenging encounter. It just makes for an annoying one that I purposefully avoid from thereon out

Professions need cool new skills like NPCs

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Posted by: starlinvf.1358

starlinvf.1358

Don’t get me wrong : I’m not against challenges. And I’m not losing against Ro Venombite. Actually, when I see her shatter two or three times, and come back at 100%, I just sigh and move on. She doesn’t really harm me anyway with her skills.

I’m pointing her as a caricature example of what I think is bad design. Here is what I’m seeing with my pessimistic eyes. Draconis is a high level map, and players there are expected to come with high level gear and skills, so devs are doing power creeps in NPC’s in order to provide “challenge”. Hence, white mantle, perma-frozen Bitterfrost, CC all around, and now, On-steroids Mesmers.

Designing content for “players” inevitably results in “bad design”…… players never fight fair, not even against NPCs. To make matters worse… players tend to lose when put on a level playing field against AI; which is 90% of the reason modern game AI has the strategic complexity of potatos. This goes double for MMOs, because theres an expectation that NPCs “must” behave a certain way, or we can’t “counter play” them correctly.
In GW1, they had added a routine to AI that makes them leave an AOE damage zone….. and immediately every class that had access to AOE but didn’t think to load CCs cried foul. When GW2 was in early beta, the AI also had this same behavior, and it made for some really dynamic fights due to all the movement….. but players hated it because they scattered too easy, making it hard to AOE bomb them. You’ll also quickly notice that all single target skills are effectively worthless in open world, because its too inefficient, and gives NPCs (with their now typical Oceans of HP and “Hit like a truck” damage) too much room to counter attack the player. And given the huge disparity with the damage coefficients, zerks meta was invented on the fact that faster TTKs are safer then defense against attrition.

And to add irony to insult, the Devs double backed on this kittenty encounter design for HOT…. and immediately suffered unbelievable backlash from playing complaining about how everything is “too hard to fight”. Pre-HOT mordem were an exercise in cheap CCs to fake difficulty… But Post-HOT when normal mobs got break bars, actually provided a good design, because there was ample counter play if managed your skills correctly. Mordem elite also used a lot of skills that were very similar to players; only with wider AOE and longer projections, so positioning mattered in a fight. Players were so poorly trained for these conditions, that they utterly decimated until the CC portions of Elite specs were available (which wasn’t on release due to how the point cost was set up).
But HOT would eventually fall victim to the same potato AI in central Tyria….. because those mobs lose all difficulty once you learn what their counters are. So again… the only enemies which still dangerous are the ones which can 1-shot you with little warning. But if you increase the power the AI, and have them employ even simple tactics against the player….. the player gets frustrated with an enemy thats unpredictable. Which brings us to why RAIDS follow the WoW design model of environmental hazards and DPS racing, relying on classic trinity and house of cards team comp; rather then an AI based encounter design, where the enemies move intelligently to be a threat, and the challenge is in corralling them in the right places. Players just outright despise group content where even minor uncertainty exists, just as much as they hate content where route memorization isn’t the primary path to victory.

If you haven’t realized it yet…. players will often say they want one thing, mean something else, and will chastise you for giving them what they asked for, but not what they were thinking. But the problems run even deeper still…..and it has to do with Ranked sPvP…. the thing which all Class design is balanced around, no matter how not like sPvP the content is. Its why WvW has always been a mess, why older in Class designs none of the CC skills made any sense until HOT pushed them over the top, and why any half way worthwhile skill gets nerfed into the ground.
Most of the design choices aren’t fundamentally bad…. but their almost always kitten or abandoned on their first implementation because players are incapable of thinking beyond their myopic world view of their preferred game mode. I actually like WvW as much as I like open world… but I despise sPvP and Raids because players started turning it into an elitist kittenfest. And before they were abandoned to push Raids… dungeons had the same problem with speed run sub-community. But they also got that way, because Dungeons were the most efficient gold farms due to Diminishing returns in the Loot system.

Professions need cool new skills like NPCs

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Posted by: starlinvf.1358

starlinvf.1358

This whole situation about why something is the way it is can’t be boiled down to a single disparity in encounter design. There is a massive web of design relationships in every MMORPG, as its built on several layers of abstraction to which players are opnely encouraged to exploit. GW2 wanted to break the mold created by WoW, and is based on a game that not only had more cohesive rules, but uses in-line force multiplication are its core. WoW maintains tight controls on Team comp with its house of cards Trinity setup…. but in GW2’s design, groups scale substantially for every player in proximity of each other (a trait the Modrem also have in many HOT events, but don’t leverage the same way we do). You can easily see this in why Raids force parties to split up, or why HOT’s major events involve Siege and defense archetypes.

There is so much going on, that simply saying “mobs having different skills from players is bad design” is an unacceptable level of ignorance to how systemic the issue really is, or how were Players are largely responsible for creating this problem in the first place.

Professions need cool new skills like NPCs

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Posted by: Psientist.6437

Psientist.6437

I spent about five minutes thinking about scenarios where this wouldn’t be true and I already thought of one. Having mobs that are limited to what the player has could be a strong design choice for teaching the player about how their class works and what its limitations are. You make the players face themselves and they will get sparks of ideas from how the NPC plays and what strategies they use.

So that is already one design reason out of the “none” that you say exist.

You describe a genuine advantage of using conformist builds for NPCs and there are many conformist NPCs. This advantage shrinks as a player becomes more proficient.

Nonconformist builds offer a similar challenge or opportunity to learn. Nonconformist builds do offer the unexpected.

I don’t think the arguments for either is stronger then the one for both.

The person I was responding to said, “there is no design reason to restrict mobs from having non-player skills.” I gave a design reason why it might be beneficial in some circumstances. That was the point of what I said.

As for the tangent you’re going in, you’re missing the point of the point I was making. My point was, the player can potentially learn about their own class through seeing an NPC use it. Learning from an NPC that is much different from them is not the same kind of learning opportunity, even if it can be a learning opportunity.

Offering a challenge is something different. That requires more ongoing variety, sure. But the octovine isn’t exactly changing his mechanics each time either. So it’s not as though having unique abilities means the player will be presented with a unique challenge each time they fight the same mob. It just means there’ll be more mobs in the game that have unique mechanics.

I took your point to be mostly an opportunity to give yourself unearned applause. I won’t dwell on that point because if you really believe that conformist builds are “beneficial in some circumstances” then you also must believe “there is no design reason to restrict mobs from having non-player skills”, and we are in agreement. Do you need to make a point about the definition of ‘restrict’?

Your argument about the Octavine or any other NPC that doesn’t change its build or mechanics is a straw man. Failure to deliver on every possible way to make NPC encounters challenging is not an argument for the studio to restrict themselves to one way.

“No! You can’t eat the ones that talk!
They’re special! They got aspirations.”
Finn the human

Professions need cool new skills like NPCs

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Posted by: Labjax.2465

Labjax.2465

I spent about five minutes thinking about scenarios where this wouldn’t be true and I already thought of one. Having mobs that are limited to what the player has could be a strong design choice for teaching the player about how their class works and what its limitations are. You make the players face themselves and they will get sparks of ideas from how the NPC plays and what strategies they use.

So that is already one design reason out of the “none” that you say exist.

You describe a genuine advantage of using conformist builds for NPCs and there are many conformist NPCs. This advantage shrinks as a player becomes more proficient.

Nonconformist builds offer a similar challenge or opportunity to learn. Nonconformist builds do offer the unexpected.

I don’t think the arguments for either is stronger then the one for both.

The person I was responding to said, “there is no design reason to restrict mobs from having non-player skills.” I gave a design reason why it might be beneficial in some circumstances. That was the point of what I said.

As for the tangent you’re going in, you’re missing the point of the point I was making. My point was, the player can potentially learn about their own class through seeing an NPC use it. Learning from an NPC that is much different from them is not the same kind of learning opportunity, even if it can be a learning opportunity.

Offering a challenge is something different. That requires more ongoing variety, sure. But the octovine isn’t exactly changing his mechanics each time either. So it’s not as though having unique abilities means the player will be presented with a unique challenge each time they fight the same mob. It just means there’ll be more mobs in the game that have unique mechanics.

I took your point to be mostly an opportunity to give yourself unearned applause. I won’t dwell on that point because if you really believe that conformist builds are “beneficial in some circumstances” then you also must believe “there is no design reason to restrict mobs from having non-player skills”, and we are in agreement. Do you need to make a point about the definition of ‘restrict’?

Your argument about the Octavine or any other NPC that doesn’t change its build or mechanics is a straw man. Failure to deliver on every possible way to make NPC encounters challenging is not an argument for the studio to restrict themselves to one way.

What are you talking about? Is there something in the tangle of negatives that is “there is no design reason to restrict mobs from having non-player skills" where we are comprehending it differently?

That statement, to my eyes, is essentially saying that there is no design reason why you would create mobs that only have player skills, abilities, etc. I’m saying that, no, there can be a design reason why you would do that. That it might be a beneficial approach in some circumstances.

As for the Octovine, the point of me saying that is that just because a mob has unique abilities doesn’t necessarily mean it’s an ongoing source of challenge or variety. That it’s the aggregate adding of new types of NPCs over time that helps create an ongoing source of challenge and variety, not the adding of unique abilities itself.

Consider that in the case of the Octovine, the variety lies more in the mechanics for removing its shield than any abilities it might have. So it’s not as if giving NPCs unique abilities is the only way to create new scenarios for the player.

Or words to that effect.

Professions need cool new skills like NPCs

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Posted by: Psientist.6437

Psientist.6437

I spent about five minutes thinking about scenarios where this wouldn’t be true and I already thought of one. Having mobs that are limited to what the player has could be a strong design choice for teaching the player about how their class works and what its limitations are. You make the players face themselves and they will get sparks of ideas from how the NPC plays and what strategies they use.

So that is already one design reason out of the “none” that you say exist.

You describe a genuine advantage of using conformist builds for NPCs and there are many conformist NPCs. This advantage shrinks as a player becomes more proficient.

Nonconformist builds offer a similar challenge or opportunity to learn. Nonconformist builds do offer the unexpected.

I don’t think the arguments for either is stronger then the one for both.

The person I was responding to said, “there is no design reason to restrict mobs from having non-player skills.” I gave a design reason why it might be beneficial in some circumstances. That was the point of what I said.

As for the tangent you’re going in, you’re missing the point of the point I was making. My point was, the player can potentially learn about their own class through seeing an NPC use it. Learning from an NPC that is much different from them is not the same kind of learning opportunity, even if it can be a learning opportunity.

Offering a challenge is something different. That requires more ongoing variety, sure. But the octovine isn’t exactly changing his mechanics each time either. So it’s not as though having unique abilities means the player will be presented with a unique challenge each time they fight the same mob. It just means there’ll be more mobs in the game that have unique mechanics.

I took your point to be mostly an opportunity to give yourself unearned applause. I won’t dwell on that point because if you really believe that conformist builds are “beneficial in some circumstances” then you also must believe “there is no design reason to restrict mobs from having non-player skills”, and we are in agreement. Do you need to make a point about the definition of ‘restrict’?

Your argument about the Octavine or any other NPC that doesn’t change its build or mechanics is a straw man. Failure to deliver on every possible way to make NPC encounters challenging is not an argument for the studio to restrict themselves to one way.

What are you talking about? Is there something in the tangle of negatives that is “there is no design reason to restrict mobs from having non-player skills" where we are comprehending it differently?

That statement, to my eyes, is essentially saying that there is no design reason why you would create mobs that only have player skills, abilities, etc. I’m saying that, no, there can be a design reason why you would do that. That it might be a beneficial approach in some circumstances.

As for the Octovine, the point of me saying that is that just because a mob has unique abilities doesn’t necessarily mean it’s an ongoing source of challenge or variety. That it’s the aggregate adding of new types of NPCs over time that helps create an ongoing source of challenge and variety, not the adding of unique abilities itself.

Consider that in the case of the Octovine, the variety lies more in the mechanics for removing its shield than any abilities it might have. So it’s not as if giving NPCs unique abilities is the only way to create new scenarios for the player.

That is a unique way to understand that statement, especially in the context of this thread, which is about restricting, in general, NPCs to conformist builds. I think you may have read it that way because your reading is easier to argue against.

Let’s change the topic but use the same language.

There is no “transportation” design reason to restrict automotive production to pickup trucks. Would you understand that to mean I don’t think pickup trucks should be produced?

No one on the pro-nonconformist side is arguing that conformist builds have no advantages or a place in GW2, just that NPC don’t need to be restricted to them. Are you arguing that NPCs should be restricted to conformist builds?

“No! You can’t eat the ones that talk!
They’re special! They got aspirations.”
Finn the human