Guild Wars 2

Pick any MMO on the market. Some of them are horrible grind-fest, others have horrible story, no game is perfect, but here’s something that works and has been proven to work: the holy trinity. Stay with me, this is not another one of those post.

ArenaNet has verbally attacked the holy trinity system in their manifesto video and in interviews. They believe they have a better solution. Perhaps they do, but most people complaining about lack of small group strategic play are really upset because dungeons are the only place where the game was really designed for this.

In all other parts of the game there isn’t much a good zerg rush can’t knock out. In most MMOs (even the bad grindy ones) a party that’s grouped up will be fighting hard and working together playing their team role. The whole group will feel the impact if they arent pulling their weight.

The ability to configure many professions for support instead of having a dedicated healer vastly complicates the party-up system. People don’t talk about it, they bring whatever build playstyle they want and most people keep their mouth shut to keep from looking like a poor sport. What’s worse however is that the non-dungeon content has been designed to be easy enough for just about any party configuration to hit with DPS and win.

It’s the strategic team play struggles that create the long term fun. Players should not have to commit to a 2-3 hour dungeon run in order to get this experience. In GW2 that is currently the only place it lives.

This the biggest weakness of the game.

I agree. It’s what is missing from the game for me. Even though they have made it so there is no drawback to playing with others in the open world pve there is also not any reason to really play WITH others either, only alongside them.

For some unknown reason I’ve built myself as a support elementalist who clears conditions, hands out boons, and provides a good burst heal every now and then— but there doesn’t really seem to be a place for that in the open world.

My suggestion to fix this is to create a hard mode for the game that allows small parties to enter instanced areas in the open world. I’ll leave it up to them how to implement, but I think something a long those lines would solve it. It’s certainly a solvable problem.

I think there are some parts of open-world that do require strategy for small groups. For example, today my son and I played lowbies in Brisban. We 2-manned some events that were higher level than we, took on a champ, and I felt the challenge was comparable to what we find in dungeons.

The difference is, in open world if you add one or two more players, bring in an auto-scaled 80, and the encounter isn’t a challenge anymore. It’s only because lowbie zones like Brisban are almost empty that we kept these events for 2-manning.

With a big group, it doesn’t matter how it’s programmed, enough attackers means the boss is permanently blinded, weakened, crippled, confused, etc., so a win is inevitable.

You’ve completely missed the reason why careful strategy isn’t needed outside of dungeons. It has nothing to do with the lack of group dynamics. You even admit yourself that dungeons do require a great deal of coordination.

In the open world, explicit grouping isn’t required. You share credit with everyone taking part. If you used this system in any other game, even those with strongly typed classes, you’d have the same sort of zerg fest you have here.

You either get antisocial behavior like kill-stealing (which causes players to avoid each other) or you lose the need for strategic team play (a result of causing players to come together). You can’t have them both.

Events, atleast in areas that are supposed to be hard (orr), need to be challenging and require some strategy and teamwork.

At the same time, they REALLY, REALLY, REALLY, REALLY need to fix this broken tagging system. EVERYONE’S focus and priority should be succeeding at events, not tag as many mobs that spawn as possible.

Which means changing how rewards are given. Then make them difficult and failable if people don’t cooperate.

I’ve never played a game where mobs were especially difficult or smart in normal “quests” compared to dungeons or raids. You really expect every event to be a challenge like dungeons?… if you take them for what they are, a replacement for quests, then isn’t it kind of far fetched to expect that much of them?

Don’t get me wrong.

I’d love for them to be more intricate and non zergy but this is how every MMO has ever been. Well, except for the part where in other MMO’s you usually hate seeing someone else near your mob and rarely do you party or work with them because EXP and loot is either not shared or it is penalized.

What yo guys are asking for would probably alienate a lot of the playerbase. Most people don’t want that kind of challenge in the ‘normal’ pve world.. that’s just what dungeons are for, I’m afraid. Maybe ANet could pull it off, who knows.

For those saying it’s like this in every MMO. If you had a large group running a zerg they would win, etc… Perhaps that is true the difference a holy trinity brings is that it gives you a defined purpose in team play. Those other MMOs are designed to require small group play in many (perhaps most higher level) open world situations.

The end result of that is bad in that you are often waiting for a group, the very positive side of that is that when you’re in a group you know your role and the team knows the roll/purpose you serve. The team needs you, you need the team and you obviously picked your profession/class based on what roll you wanted to play.

The holy trinity design is pro-strategic team play. This is why it’s very difficult to find a good replacement for that system. What ArenaNet has done is make so all professions can be configured a few different ways. Guardian, Necro, Ele are better at support than some, Guardian and Warrior better at DPS than some, etc… But since the roles aren’t defined it’s up to the teams to put forth effort to really work out what each person is going to be doing. People simply aren’t doing that.

So while in other MMOs with holy trinity it would be technically possible to create a zerg rush to deal with bosses, doing that is frowned upon. People don’t play these type of games to button mash. Unfortunately what the majority are doing dictates a lot of the play experience for others. If you go into a zone and most of the population is un-groupd zerg rushing an event (to be very honest this is happening at every event in this game when you have a large number of players).

When you end up in a situation where you have a smaller number of players trying to tackle and event then real strategic team play does happen int he open world, but that is rarely the case. The population is concentrated in certain zones often creating scenarios where either your choice is either become part of the zerg or call on people in your guild/friends list to help you knock an event out because there are not enough on your map to help with it.

A hardmode for the open world that implements some kind of optional instancing would solve the zerg rush problem by giving the small group a choice to keep the experience to themselves. That’s one approach to fixing this I’m sure there are others

The bottom line is without it the open world game play becomes very stale and frankly very lonely compared to other MMOs. If I really wanted a single player experience I would be playing another game. Don’t say the first GW was like this, because the first GW1 had a very different system. The ability to repeat cooperative missions and bring a team made GW1 a lot of team-strategy focused and frankly a lot more fun.

I agree. I actually paid for this game under the assumption that this is what it was. To be frank, the game play so far seems exactly like SWTOR. I left that game because it bored me, it bored me for all the reasons you mentioned. What happened to team play, classes that compliment one another? What happened to team members actually having to work together and coordinate their abilities? Where an MMO actually took some skill instead of just spamming DPS which so far, guild wars just seems to be. No skill, no hate control, it is all meaningless. No technique required just mash buttons.

Most of the MMOs I have played in the last year lack the kind of team play that I so loved about Final Fantasy XI. Granted, certain people complained about this aspect, but I loved it. The point of an MMO as far as I am concerned is to interact with other players, otherwise, why play an MMO? SWTOR plays like a single player console game, coincidentally other people are running around but it has no bearing or really any affect on what you are doing. In SWTOR, and so far guildwars, no real team play and certainly no incentives to doing so. Far as I can tell, the classes aren’t really designed around each other. They all seem to be their own entity.

Yes, I know the level grind has always sucked. However, you got in good groups and got some good items. Exciting. You and your guild or shell or whatever would take on supreme bosses that took like 50 people to kill. You had to have a plan and coordinate an attack, everyone had a roll, and had to know their role. One cog in the machine fell out, and everyone died. It was tough but it was fun and what kept me coming back. This mindless game play is tedious at best.

In the end, I am early in guildwars and haven’t gotten far. I hope it has more to offer than what I have seen so far. Otherwise, this is a SWTOR clone and so far, equally as disappointing. EVE was the last decent MMO I have played and kept me enthralled for over a year. Bring back the co-op and social MMO, PLEASE!!! No online games with 1000 solo players running around. Nothing against the single player game, I love them too from time to time, but not what an MMO is for.