Guild Wars 2

Coulter.2315:

But then they aren’t “healing” they are just a buff bot which kinda defeats the purpose because you aren’t giving people who enjoy healing a job (because they aren’t healing – they are just seeing green numbers instead of red). Healers like feeling like they saved someone or are critical to keeping the group up, your method of making it viable is based around them not needing to heal but just giving buffs.

Healing still has the possibility of saving someone from death, but since this is a game where people can save themselves it also has the possibility of providing buffs to people who don’t need saving.

Also you have to keep in mind that games are incredibly good at hitpoint modification. There are literally hundreds of different mechanics in the game for moving somethings life bar around, and because hitpoints are measured in thousands they have a very high level of granularity. That means that providing buffs to people via healing has a huge number of systems already in place to draw from. All the essential gameplay already exists, the only thing that’s missing is a good use for the green numbers for people who are good enough to not need them.

Aetrion.8295:

Narrrz.7532:

the inherent problem with the trinity system is that for people who don’t enjoy tanking or healing, a tank and/or healer is required for them to have fun. So they must find someone who would rather perform one of those roles or who is willing to sacrifice their own enjoyment to enable others to enjoy playing.

Yea, I want them to change the system so that you can do all the content without a tank or healer, but people who enjoy playing tanks or healers still get to enjoy the game too by changing their function from simply being mandatory to avoid death to helping people who like DPSing do more damage.

Simple example: If you had a support character in the party that did no damage, but raised everyone else’s damage by 25% then that person can play support and enjoy it without having to build the whole game around making you need that person.

Seera.5916:

So players are supposed to become overpowered?

It’s this thing called balance. You don’t want to make the game so easy that players who use the mechanism can just steamroll over everything.

How could you possibly know how the devs are going to balance it?

First you claim that somehow enemies have to do more damage if a new type of ability is added to the game, then you claim that this completely unspecified ability that hasn’t even been designed yet, but was merely discussed as a possibility is overpowered.

It sounds like you’re trying to argue against a general design idea by just making wild unfounded assertions about how it will be implemented.

If they add something to the game that lets players do more damage if they get X HP past full, then for it to even begin to be used in enough degree to be considered increasing the variety of builds accepted in meta PUG groups (the only groups that would really have any coordination to make your suggestion noticeable), it has to either:

1. Be more powerful than what’s already considered meta. People aren’t going to give up a trait or skill for something that’s not currently meta.
2. Be easy to maintain the highest DPS with it. If it’s hard to maintain the threshold amount of extra HP to keep the buff, people won’t waste time getting to it or keeping a slot for it.
3. Not take up a trait or skill slot. Then players aren’t giving up something to get it.

1. would HAVE to have things balanced accordingly. Everyone would have it and some players would hit that buff through passive regen abilities like the Elementalist’s soothing mist.

1. and #2, if it’s not hard and it’s powerful, then most everyone will choose it if it’s a choice anyway and you’ll have to balance accordingly. And that’s probably by hitting more often or hitting with more power behind it.

And if it is #1 or #2, then you’ve increased the wedge between the meta and non-meta groups. Because enemies have to hit harder to counter the damage buff, players who make more mistakes due to their lack of skill, are punished. And the meta players won’t want to risk it.

More experienced groups won’t need a healer to deal with the balancing. Less experienced groups would.

Who knows what it would do to open world play especially for the squishier classes.

What if it is equally powerful as what’s currently meta? The ultimate goal of game balance would be that people can bring whatever kind of character they like to a group and their success depends on how well they play their individual role, not on how mindlessly they copied the builds on metabattle.

Aetrion.8295:

What if it is equally powerful as what’s currently meta? The ultimate goal of game balance would be that people can bring whatever kind of character they like to a group and their success depends on how well they play their individual role, not on how mindlessly they copied the builds on metabattle.

Why should it be ?

There’s this thing out there called trade-off

You’re giving up damage, to do more healing. Why should you give up damage, to deal more damage than someone who has built for it ?

Aetrion.8295:

What if it is equally powerful as what’s currently meta? The ultimate goal of game balance would be that people can bring whatever kind of character they like to a group and their success depends on how well they play their individual role, not on how mindlessly they copied the builds on metabattle.

So it’s a trait or a skill then?

Then it would have to be easy to maintain (current meta of might stacks and what not are easy to maintain) and not require a whole new build. Because multiple gear sets are a pain and not every dungeon requires the same exact build.

Higher level Fractals would likely not be able to run with this as meta due to Agony as well as the instabilities. And if the gear required to make it meta level powerful is not the same as what they would need in Fractals, why would they choose a build that would require them to learn two builds and have two gear sets to maintain the ability to play with meta groups?

I view Hitpoints as ‘death chance’ or ‘chance of survival’. In real life, you have life or death. But for example, you were in a horrific accident, and your chance of survival is 20% says the doctor. In RPG terms that means you now only have 20% Hitpoints left. So, what does that 20% Hitpoints mean in RPG. It means that you are more likely to die on the next attack that hits you. So how come you have 20% Hitpoints, how come your chance of survival is now only 20%, how come you are more likely to die on the next attack? Perhaps you took an arrow to the knee, perhaps 20 arrows too much. j/k It means the circumstances are against you. The odds are against you that you will die soon. RPGs are just trying simulate real life in a fantasy situation, but simulations aren’t perfect, so we use estimates and numbers to represent and describe you (health, strength, dexterity, skill points, etc). Plus one of the cornerstones of RPGs are epic battles, so one shot one kill is a bummer, to hell with realism.

This is not the 20% Hitpoints I was thinking of mind you.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dhRUe-gz690

TexZero.7910:

You’re giving up damage, to do more healing. Why should you give up damage, to deal more damage than someone who has built for it ?

You don’t deal more damage, your party deals more damage by having you in it to make up for the damage they lose because you aren’t dealing as much.

It’s an interesting point, and you would be correct if direct damage was the only damage type in the game, but its not.

Conditions do damage over time, therefore you need a stat that can diminish over time like HP.

Sube Dai.8496:

It’s an interesting point, and you would be correct if direct damage was the only damage type in the game, but its not.

Conditions do damage over time, therefore you need a stat that can diminish over time like HP.

I don’t understand what you’re trying to say here. Why would hitpoints no longer be able to be affected by damage over time effects if there were positive effects to being overhealed just like there are negative effects to running out of HP, or if you could spend HP that you don’t need to survive on more damage?

I would have to disagree that “hitpoints” is the problem. The issue is more to do with the mechanics of the game and system. Here are a few things that’ll need to be overhauled if GW2 were to properly introduce ‘healers’.

• Targeting: Currently there is no allied targeting or single target cast heals. Heals (and buffs) in general are just AoE centric lowering its focal point.
• Down state: Healers is utilized to prevent a player dying at all cost. However even if players lose all their HP in GW2, they go into a downed state before dying. This effectively removes the importance of a dedicated healer if everyone can just revive each other.
• Out of combat reset: The out of combat free HP reset also denies the need for a HP recovery or battle down time.
• Low cooldown heals: Many of the self heals for professions still heal for a decent amount for their low cooldowns. Essentially this makes every player their own healer in sustaining fights.

Edit:
The spending of HP as a cost only works if HP recovery isn’t freely available. Else it wouldn’t be considered a trade off and the class with freely available regeneration would gain undesired advantages (ie ele/war).

There are also several “%threshold HP” bonuses for some professions. Elementalist, Engineers and Rangers are some examples that have traits which grant bonus damage for being above 90% hp. Similarly, the Scholar runes provide damage bonus for above HP threshold.

the hit point system is not a problem. healing is not a problem. The only problem is you being unable to adapt to different environments, usually a basic capacity of every human being.

like in gw1, where you would sacrifice health for abilities?

Coulter.2315:

But then they aren’t “healing” they are just a buff bot which kinda defeats the purpose because you aren’t giving people who enjoy healing a job (because they aren’t healing – they are just seeing green numbers instead of red). Healers like feeling like they saved someone or are critical to keeping the group up, your method of making it viable is based around them not needing to heal but just giving buffs.

Bad news for everyone enjoying healing role. They are playing wrong game.

Substance E.4852:

Harper.4173:

Content that makes you take damage you can’t avoid is simply absurd. There’s no reason to do it.

There’s plenty of reason to do it. It makes things like healing and defensive stats something people think about and rely on as much as dodges, not things reserved for bad players unversed in the latest exploit/cheese tactic. It also opens up new methods of play beyond dps with a side of dps.

If WvW and sPvP can be hard enough to force people to consider defense beyond the scope of dodge rolls and side stepping red rings, then so can pve.

Except when you’re building your game on the premises of " no forced or required roles" and “no trinity” it becomes evident that going 180 on your initial claims (which got you most of your player demographic) is a bad move.

Most non-trinity lovers have gathered to GW2. Why then turn it into a trinity forced role game? I mean you could do it – but why? – for the dozen or so people that keep spamming the forums with “give tank” and " I want to heal pls" ?

If WvW and sPvP can be hard enough to force people to consider defense beyond the scope of dodge rolls and side stepping red rings, then so can pve.

Yeah – nah.
People play WvW and PvP for different reasons than they play PvE.
People that play game modes with other players as opponents do it for the challenge and because they enjoy fighting other players.

Players that play PvE do it mostly for the farm – at least that’s what the majority of GW2’s PvE players are doing – farming. And you need to do a lot of it to get vanity items in this game.

Most players don’t care about being challenged – if I want a challenging fight I’ll go to PvP in a duel server – I’m not looking for challenge in AC P1 – I’m looking for 1.5 gold.

Also – players that play PvE don’t necessarily want to be challenged all the time – making PvE as hard as PvP is not really a good idea for the average GW2 player.

Making PvE harder for high-end players will make it impossible for average and new players.

If you make content that is so hard that players who’ve spent thousands of hours in game and know the content by heart still can’t beat it through dodges and active mitigation can you imagine how accessible this content will be for newbies and average gamers?

Aetrion.8295:

Yea, but remember, the whole point of this topic is that if hitpoints do more than kill you you can increase the demand for healing without forcing you to have a healer to survive.

For example, if you could spend half your hitpoints to activate a powerful ability then you would have a constant demand for hitpoints that a healer can fill even from people who never take damage from monsters, but nobody loses anything when they don’t have a healer.

I get your idea but it makes the game easier for parties that do have a healer.

Non-healer party has a total damage output of let’s say 10k. And a healing potential of let’s say 5k.

Healer party has a total damage output of 10k ( competitive so people will have a reason to play it) and a total healing potential of 8k.
In this set-up risky situations become less risky since you can more effectively cover your mistakes with the heals.

Akikaze.1307:

I

• Targeting: Currently there is no allied targeting or single target cast heals. Heals (and buffs) in general are just AoE centric lowering its focal point.

Finally someone that gets it. Allied targeting is number one factor that allows players to play the red bar mini game (healers) and since that’s not possible in GW2, there will never be actual healers in the game.

• Down state: Healers is utilized to prevent a player dying at all cost. However even if players lose all their HP in GW2, they go into a downed state before dying. This effectively removes the importance of a dedicated healer if everyone can just revive each other.

And this is also something the OP forgot, unless he only experienced the pre-downed state levels. Hit points in this game work in a very different way than in other games, it’s not a “if you have hit points you are alive, if you don’t, you die”, because there is a downed state between death and zero hit points. Everyone can help a downed player, usually by killing a mob so they can rally. And once a player rallies, they get healed by a great amount of health AND they get invulnerability for a sort duration.

Aetrion.8295:

What if it is equally powerful as what’s currently meta? The ultimate goal of game balance would be that people can bring whatever kind of character they like to a group and their success depends on how well they play their individual role, not on how mindlessly they copied the builds on metabattle.

Again – there are areas in High-end PVE where a tanky/healy guardian can be very effective in “tanking” making the encounter easier for the rest ( FOTM 50).
If this character also buffed his allies dps and basically made their damage equal to a 5 man zerk team what would be the reason to not have this tanky guardian.

In the current system there’s a trade-off : easier encounter BUT lower dps so it takes longer.
With your proposed system with a healer/tank you get the best of both worlds: easier encounter WITH comparable DPS to a full dps team.
So how is it not making the game easier for no reason ?

Akikaze.1307:

I would have to disagree that “hitpoints” is the problem. The issue is more to do with the mechanics of the game and system. Here are a few things that’ll need to be overhauled if GW2 were to properly introduce ‘healers’.

• Targeting: Currently there is no allied targeting or single target cast heals. Heals (and buffs) in general are just AoE centric lowering its focal point.
• Down state: Healers is utilized to prevent a player dying at all cost. However even if players lose all their HP in GW2, they go into a downed state before dying. This effectively removes the importance of a dedicated healer if everyone can just revive each other.
• Out of combat reset: The out of combat free HP reset also denies the need for a HP recovery or battle down time.
• Low cooldown heals: Many of the self heals for professions still heal for a decent amount for their low cooldowns. Essentially this makes every player their own healer in sustaining fights.

Edit:
The spending of HP as a cost only works if HP recovery isn’t freely available. Else it wouldn’t be considered a trade off and the class with freely available regeneration would gain undesired advantages (ie ele/war).

There are also several “%threshold HP” bonuses for some professions. Elementalist, Engineers and Rangers are some examples that have traits which grant bonus damage for being above 90% hp. Similarly, the Scholar runes provide damage bonus for above HP threshold.

Good post – these systems being put in the game pretty much prove the game was designed to not have healers or tanks.

Coulter.2315:

But then they aren’t “healing” they are just a buff bot which kinda defeats the purpose because you aren’t giving people who enjoy healing a job (because they aren’t healing – they are just seeing green numbers instead of red). Healers like feeling like they saved someone or are critical to keeping the group up, your method of making it viable is based around them not needing to heal but just giving buffs.

You can still have that feeling of a clutch save, of supporting your team, of dragging your friends from the brink of death to victory, but you can’t do that just by healing because it’s impossible to design for that level of healing without making it mandatory.

If you specifically want to see big green numbers all the time, there are other games designed with that in mind for you to play. Guild Wars 2 is trying to do something different.

Honestly, remove Healing Power and bring back the class stats. Those could actually be interesting:

• Brawn
• Courage
• (whatever Revenant would get)
• Ingenuity
• Empathy
• Cunning
• Intelligence
• Hunger
• Guile

This would give a less offence/defense centric stat in itself (since it depends on class).

Blaine Tog.8304:

Coulter.2315:

But then they aren’t “healing” they are just a buff bot which kinda defeats the purpose because you aren’t giving people who enjoy healing a job (because they aren’t healing – they are just seeing green numbers instead of red). Healers like feeling like they saved someone or are critical to keeping the group up, your method of making it viable is based around them not needing to heal but just giving buffs.

You can still have that feeling of a clutch save, of supporting your team, of dragging your friends from the brink of death to victory, but you can’t do that just by healing because it’s impossible to design for that level of healing without making it mandatory.

If you specifically want to see big green numbers all the time, there are other games designed with that in mind for you to play. Guild Wars 2 is trying to do something different.

I’d say getting in that clutch heal is more satisfying in GW2 because it’s so rare. It’s not a job.

Healing in every other MMO:
Blue bar goes down. Green bars go up.
Oh, the whiny DPS stood in the fire again.
Tank’s dead. All wipe.
Yay.

‘Healing’ in GW2:
Big attack coming, blind on cooldown, throw protection.
Aw crap, field condi barrage, throw cleanses.
Ally has too much hate, stun/KD mob for breathing room.
Green bar too tiny, regen up, CC for more breathing room, throw support heal.
Man down! Critical decision: Risk rezzing or beat on mob to coax it away and let self-heal sort it out. Throw the insta-rez if you got it.

Support in GW2 just feels so much better, because you have more tools for more situations, instead of micro-managing little bars and occasionally blowing a valuable cooldown.

All of which has little to do with the topic’s origin. XD
I’m led to believe that having HP-proportional benefits is rolled into trait options. Those breakpoints are useful in PvP, not so much in PvE. If PvE mobs made use of traits like “do more damage to injured foes” like players have, that would be enough for healing to be more of a consideration.

I like your second idea, that over healing could provide boons.

Kind of late to the party….. but lets summarize the problem.

The problems felt are mostly due to how the encounter design works in PvE. 90% of everything PvE revolves around “killing something”. In order to kill something, you need damage…. often a lot of damage because Mobs scaled mostly through HP and power. On the Flip side, mobs are inherently designed to defeat pure Tanks through attrition. This latter situation exists because we have to trade large amounts of our DPS potential for comparatively small gains through defensive stats. But compare that to active defenses, which mitigate, or avoid damage entirely…. but are completely unsustainable long term. So we can’t defend against attrition, and we can only survive against heavy pressure for short periods.

As a cumulative result of these factors, the optimal strategy in PvE is to kill mobs as quickly as possible. The best way to kill mobs is focus on DPS, which scales significantly better then our defensive stats. And if the mob is capable of ANY self healing ability, insufficient DPS results in a completely unbeatable fight.

So there are 2 options…. fix the encounter design, or break it further by adding unavoidable attrition. Fixing the encounter design would essentially require PvE to follow PvP build and engagement philosophy. Unfortunately, the only way to properly simulate tanks with the crappy AI, is by using selective vulnerability……. which in of itself is also a very iffy encounter design when you can’t control the number of players on the field.

They also need to completely reassess the Attrition baseline for attack and defense scaling, so we don’t have to sacrifice so much Offensive power just to reach marginally meaningful defense stats. Because bonuses are multiplicative, you get better results focus stacking then spreading them out. This is a huge contrast to GW1 attribute points, where you had diminishing returns due to progressively more expensive investments. Under that system, having 8 points instead of 10 on your main attrib line meant you could have 6 points in 2 other lines. The power growth was linear, but the cost effectiveness was reduced at the extremes. This is something GW2 sorely needs to consider given how our stat points work, coupled with the extremely limited ability to move those stats around (since they are tied to gear with uneven stat distributions).

is this related to blood magic?
using hp instead of mp?

Harper.4173:

I get your idea but it makes the game easier for parties that do have a healer.

So what? The game is currently also easier if your party has a Thief. I’m perfectly on the side of “You shouldn’t need a healer”, but I have no problem with it if a mixed party is potentially the most powerful as long as you can still play the game without it.

The efficiency argument simply doesn’t make any sense, because people who play meta already have enforced builds, enforced gear, enforced party composition, enforced stack spots, enforced spell rotations and even enforced bug abuse. If your party benefited from a healer they would simply enforce that too.

I also see no problem with it if someone who spends a lot of time collecting gear that isn’t as powerful for solo content because they want to be particularly useful in group combat gets to be a little more powerful in a group as a result.

Also the math you’re using doesn’t take into account that whenever the healing potential in the party is being taxed the damage the healer adds disappears when that damage is governed by overheals and spending health. That means, yes, there is more room for screwing up, but the damage potential is only there if everyone plays at their best regardless.

The issue seems to be that GW2 combat system is designed in a group or jack of all trades style whereas the HP system is the standard system that was designed around having some form of trinity. This has lead to stacking, zerk meta, limited use of healing power/passive def, condi vs direct balance, etc.

They created a more fluid and diverse combat system but kept a very static metric on how effective that system really is.

BrooksP.4318:

The issue seems to be that GW2 combat system is designed in a group or jack of all trades style whereas the HP system is the standard system that was designed around having some form of trinity.

I didn’t knew that the first Zelda game on NES was designed around having some form of trinity. Or maybe I misunderstood the concept of HP in that game.

stof.9341:

BrooksP.4318:

The issue seems to be that GW2 combat system is designed in a group or jack of all trades style whereas the HP system is the standard system that was designed around having some form of trinity.

I didn’t knew that the first Zelda game on NES was designed around having some form of trinity. Or maybe I misunderstood the concept of HP in that game.

huh?

Was unaware that Zelda on NES was a multiplayer game. I was also unaware of Zelda being a live action game that requires different control elements in regards to balancing.

Though I guess we can just continue raising HP pools while trying to reduce condi and direct damage and say it’s balanced, because why not, it worked with Zelda.

Well ok replace Zelda with Doom 1 or even the first Wolfenstein, the one that is older than Doom 1.

It’s just that you saying “the HP system is the standard system that was designed around having some form of trinity” is stupid. There has been HP in games for ages before a notion of trinity even got conceived.

Hitpoints don’t mean the same thing in every game.

Where they come from for the purpose of roleplaying games is stuff like D&D and other table top games. In those games their biggest function is not determining whether or not you die during a fight, but setting limits to how much adventuring you can do before you have to rest. These are also the games that give us the roleplay archetypes that people want to be able to play when they ask for tanks and healers. As a result of games like D&D measuring your progress not only by how quickly you can kill a monster, but by how many monsters you can take on before you have to make camp there is a significant emphasis on having party members that can extend your parties endurance throughout the adventure.

A lot of people say this is where the trinity comes from, and to an extent they are right, but they forget that pen & paper games very much adapt to the players. A good DM can create fun adventures for any party composition, and by simply adding an extra healing potion to the loot of every encounter you can keep a game rolling smoothly even if nobody plays a cleric. Just because you can play trinity in a P&P game doesn’t mean you have to. In a way it’s this ur-state of gaming that I personally really want to get back to. I want to be able to make a party of misfits and have an engaging adventure. To me it’s interesting to have characters with significant strengths and weaknesses that you have to work around rather than always just chasing some ideal configuration.

This kind of combat endurance system was tried in early MMOs, but people became very annoyed with the idea of not being able to keep adventuring without having to rest for extensive periods of time or drinking very expensive potions unless they knew a healer. That’s perfectly understandable of course, nobody wants to sit around for 5 minutes waiting for their health bar to refill.

So that’s how we got to the World of Warcraft model, where originally a bit of cheap food and drink would let you skip the downtime, and in the meanwhile you have to be doing non-stop dungeon combat to actually full on run out of mana on any class. Healers were already much less useful in WoW then they were in games like DAOC, but Blizzard gave healers the ability to deal some damage, and thereby made it so that healers were capable of doing the solo content in the game by themselves. Healers retained their importance in large group content like raids where you simply couldn’t survive for long enough to kill the boss without someone putting health back on you and with someone who loses as little health as possible in every hit standing at the front. That morphed hitpoints from being largely a counter of how much adventuring you get to do into a timer for how long you have to kill the monster, and healers turned into people who put more time on the clock.

The problem with the trinity is that for one, it bothers players to be forced to look for very specific people to fill their party, rather than just being able to go with whoever, and secondly, it’s also broken from a design standpoint, because if you’ve ever played WoW or similar games you know that even though healing is required in boss fights, the bosses all have mechanics that can kill you even if you are being healed. That’s because once you have a playerbase trained in running the trinity a boss is only dangerous if they can disrupt that gameplay.

So here comes guild wars 2, they simply said: Why bother with the trinity, the only thing that makes bosses dangerous in WoW is their mechanics, so we’re just going to do a game where bosses are all mechanics, no noise that you have to heal through. Generally a really good idea, but it left hitpoints in an awkward spot, because they still work the exact same way that they work in a WoW style MMO in the way they are gained and lost, but the game no longer has any primary mechanics that work around hitpoint modification.

Hence why I think the way to actually go forward with the genre is to make hitpoints do something meaningful again. Maybe we have to stop calling them hitpoints, maybe they should just be called “Strength” so that it’s easy to understand why running out kills you, but getting more makes you do awesome stuff.

I think the HP system should no longer just be a clock that counts down how long you have to kill the enemy, but should be more like the endurance of a boxer. In boxing when you get hit a lot you’ll quickly lack the strength to attack, but if you attack too recklessly you’ll also lose the strength to defend yourself.

Aetrion.8295:

Harper.4173:

I get your idea but it makes the game easier for parties that do have a healer.

So what? The game is currently also easier if your party has a Thief. I’m perfectly on the side of “You shouldn’t need a healer”, but I have no problem with it if a mixed party is potentially the most powerful as long as you can still play the game without it.

The efficiency argument simply doesn’t make any sense, because people who play meta already have enforced builds, enforced gear, enforced party composition, enforced stack spots, enforced spell rotations and even enforced bug abuse. If your party benefited from a healer they would simply enforce that too.

I also see no problem with it if someone who spends a lot of time collecting gear that isn’t as powerful for solo content because they want to be particularly useful in group combat gets to be a little more powerful in a group as a result.

Also the math you’re using doesn’t take into account that whenever the healing potential in the party is being taxed the damage the healer adds disappears when that damage is governed by overheals and spending health. That means, yes, there is more room for screwing up, but the damage potential is only there if everyone plays at their best regardless.

You can still play the game without 5 man zerker parties too. How is it you have a problem with them then?
You can play this game and succeed as any class with almost any set-up. The game is very easy as it is – making it even easier is absurd really.

I doubt that things like this would find their way in the game – I feel it would make for a fairly over complicated system which is the last thing we need.

Yea, but how do you know how easy it will be in Heart of Thorns?

And let’s not forget that the reason the game is so easy is because it has to cater to all DPS parties. It’s this insistence that you should not ever need a healer or tank that keeps the game from being decently challenging to people who play anything other than DPS.

Aetrion.8295:

So here comes guild wars 2, they simply said: Why bother with the trinity, the only thing that makes bosses dangerous in WoW is their mechanics, so we’re just going to do a game where bosses are all mechanics, no noise that you have to heal through. Generally a really good idea, but it left hitpoints in an awkward spot, because they still work the exact same way that they work in a WoW style MMO in the way they are gained and lost, but the game no longer has any primary mechanics that work around hitpoint modification.

Hence why I think the way to actually go forward with the genre is to make hitpoints do something meaningful again. Maybe we have to stop calling them hitpoints, maybe they should just be called “Strength” so that it’s easy to understand why running out kills you, but getting more makes you do awesome stuff.

I think the HP system should no longer just be a clock that counts down how long you have to kill the enemy, but should be more like the endurance of a boxer. In boxing when you get hit a lot you’ll quickly lack the strength to attack, but if you attack too recklessly you’ll also lose the strength to defend yourself.

The first paragraph pretty much explains what I was trying to get at, but much more eloquently.

As for everything else, I agree but think “endurance” should be separate but tied into HP through a regen. But really the system does need to be more fluid instead of just X – Y = Dead.

Aetrion.8295:

Hitpoints don’t mean the same thing in every game.

Where they come from for the purpose of roleplaying games is stuff like D&D and other table top games. In those games their biggest function is not determining whether or not you die during a fight, but setting limits to how much adventuring you can do before you have to rest. These are also the games that give us the roleplay archetypes that people want to be able to play when they ask for tanks and healers. As a result of games like D&D measuring your progress not only by how quickly you can kill a monster, but by how many monsters you can take on before you have to make camp there is a significant emphasis on having party members that can extend your parties endurance throughout the adventure.

……..

So here comes guild wars 2, they simply said: Why bother with the trinity, the only thing that makes bosses dangerous in WoW is their mechanics, so we’re just going to do a game where bosses are all mechanics, no noise that you have to heal through. Generally a really good idea, but it left hitpoints in an awkward spot, because they still work the exact same way that they work in a WoW style MMO in the way they are gained and lost, but the game no longer has any primary mechanics that work around hitpoint modification.

Hence why I think the way to actually go forward with the genre is to make hitpoints do something meaningful again. Maybe we have to stop calling them hitpoints, maybe they should just be called “Strength” so that it’s easy to understand why running out kills you, but getting more makes you do awesome stuff.

I think the HP system should no longer just be a clock that counts down how long you have to kill the enemy, but should be more like the endurance of a boxer. In boxing when you get hit a lot you’ll quickly lack the strength to attack, but if you attack too recklessly you’ll also lose the strength to defend yourself.

This is probably the best post discussing trinity that I’ve seen to date. +1 and I’m saving this link for use in other games.

Aetrion.8295:

Yea, but how do you know how easy it will be in Heart of Thorns?

And let’s not forget that the reason the game is so easy is because it has to cater to all DPS parties. It’s this insistence that you should not ever need a healer or tank that keeps the game from being decently challenging to people who play anything other than DPS.

And a LOT of players will leave this game if it needs a healer or a tank.

Just because it does not have a trinity doesn’t mean it can’t be decently challenging.

Do not try to get this game to turn into a trinity game. There are a ton of other trinity MMO’s out there. There aren’t that many that do not have a trinity. Stop trying to make the majority even larger.

This entire topic is about how to bring back the full range of RPG archetypes without enforcing trinity party compositions. I wouldn’t have to tell people we need to construct a whole new paradigm for how support works if I wanted it to go back to what it was.

In one word,no.
One thing that GW2 does well,with regards to it’s combat,
is that you don’t need a specific type of class/build to
complete it’s content,and that all encounters can be dealt with
by any possible class/build combination,to different degrees
of effectiveness and speed.
I don’t want to be needing a Healer or a Tank for anything.
I’m all in for Tanks and Healers,and I’m all in for Anet to provide
specializations and classes/builds even more focused to what
a traditional Tank and Healer would be,but not make them
essential for anything.
And if you ask,well then what’s the point of having them in the game?
The point is that some players,me included,like to play Healers and Tanks.
And that should be enough.
You already can build a quite good Heal oriented class and finish 100% of the
content with it.
The problem with PvE combat design in GW2 has nothing to do with the trinity,
but with the shallow and dull mechanics Anet implemented,especially in the
earlier game content.
They have improved a lot on that though,starting with Teq/CW Raid and then
continuing on with the LS s2 DT/SW encounters.
As for the rest of the game modes,do I have to point out how bad requiring
a dedicated Healer class,in order to be effective and competitive,would be for
sPvP and WvW?
Again,I’m not saying that such classes can’t be useful for a team,or fun to play,
but creating an absolute need for them would be a step back for GW2’s combat system,and worsen the game experience for the majority of players.

Aetrion.8295:

This entire topic is about how to bring back the full range of RPG archetypes without enforcing trinity party compositions. I wouldn’t have to tell people we need to construct a whole new paradigm for how support works if I wanted it to go back to what it was.

They already exist! Just because every archetype isn’t in the meta doesn’t mean that they don’t exist.

And the only way to put them in the meta is make them required. Because even in trinity games, DPS is king. They only take enough healers and enough tanks to maintain maximum DPS.

And just because one game does a hard trinity by doing it one way, doesn’t mean other ways to create a hard trinity.

Seera.5916:

And the only way to put them in the meta is make them required. Because even in trinity games, DPS is king. They only take enough healers and enough tanks to maintain maximum DPS.

That seems like another of your random assertions with no reasoning behind them. Even if we wholesale accept the premise that DPS is always king (there are fights in the game where it isn’t, like Mai Trin) it leaves plenty of opportunities for support characters that increase damage without being high damage themselves, and no reason why they would be required to run all content if they become accepted as being part of the fastest way to run content.

Well the idea would be for them to make Healers and Tanks more useful than they are now, but not make it necessary to have one.

One solution IMO would be to A) increase the effectiveness of gearing into healing, i.e. maybe increase the modifiers of healing abilities so that someone with healing gear would heal a lot more than someone without it, unlike how it is now, thus making someone in heal gear actually better at what they do. they could also add traits for classes geared towards healers, such as a trait that gives stacks of might for X seconds or some other buff, whenever you heal that player or something similar so that not only would you be healing them, you’d also be support and adding in stacks of might or something. C) they could also look into stackable levels of regen, which obviously would make abilities that give regen more useful (more stacks, more hp per tick).

Obviously, the biggest problem with really tweaking healing though is that while it would most likely not change a lot in PvE, outside of casual players being more successful if they choose to be a healer or tank in private parties etc., it would become very close to pushing a trinity in PvP. The moment healing can overcome DPS, teambased PvP will push for healers and eventually you’d see a trinity pop up there, IMO.

So not sure how much they’re really going to tweak healing in the game, but I guess it depends on how much it would change the balance.

The best way to make tank/healer builds viable in a setting where they aren’t needed is to make them able to do what a full dps would do almost as well as a dps would. This is the core of why i think healing power is a bad stat. The more of your stat budget you spend on non-dps stats, the worse your dps is going to be.

toughness and vitality both have their place, in that they increase survivability for anyone who takes them, but healing is not in the same boat. Engineers, guards & eles are the only profs that can really actually use healing power – others may have limited means to apply regeneration or situational heals to others, but even if healers were a thing in this game, those three classes would be the only healers. for healing power to be more useful as a stat than its present narrow niche, requires either a rework of how it interacts with skills or the introduction of new healing skills which can benefit others besides the caster. Neither of these things is necessary for the current game; ergo, healing power is not a good stat.

what i think would be a lot more useful is to introduce specific healing-focused traits or perhaps a new boon, accessible only to those classes that can actually heal others besides themselves. That way they can be effective healers without being ineffective at other roles.

Aetrion.8295:

Seera.5916:

And the only way to put them in the meta is make them required. Because even in trinity games, DPS is king. They only take enough healers and enough tanks to maintain maximum DPS.

That seems like another of your random assertions with no reasoning behind them. Even if we wholesale accept the premise that DPS is always king (there are fights in the game where it isn’t, like Mai Trin) it leaves plenty of opportunities for support characters that increase damage without being high damage themselves, and no reason why they would be required to run all content if they become accepted as being part of the fastest way to run content.

He is correct though, in WoW any Raid boss that doesn’t have a mechanic that forces 2 tanks is single tanked and you take the number of healers required for the content. The tank and healer setup is based around “what do I need to survive the encounter and win”, in GW2 there is no requirement for tanking or healing in any part of the game atm.

I have said many times trying to buff healing or fiddle with it is still pointless until they create encounters where you are best served by having tanky/healing players in the group. HoT may bring this about, need to wait and see.

Narrrz.7532:

The best way to make tank/healer builds viable in a setting where they aren’t needed is to make them able to do what a full dps would do almost as well as a dps would.

This already exists in the form of group aegis, blinds, reflects, stealth, invulns, interupts, dodges etc. A healer remains pointless if you set up your dps classes with these support abilities.

Coulter.2315:

Narrrz.7532:

The best way to make tank/healer builds viable in a setting where they aren’t needed is to make them able to do what a full dps would do almost as well as a dps would.

This already exists in the form of group aegis, blinds, reflects, stealth, invulns, interupts, dodges etc. A healer remains pointless if you set up your dps classes with these support abilities.

right, hence why i don’t want healing power to be a thing anymore.

Narrrz.7532:

The best way to make tank/healer builds viable in a setting where they aren’t needed is to make them able to do what a full dps would do almost as well as a dps would. This is the core of why i think healing power is a bad stat. The more of your stat budget you spend on non-dps stats, the worse your dps is going to be.

Yea, this is definitely true. The damage difference between a DPS geared character and a non-DPS geared character is so huge that it’s just not worth it giving that up. If you want to have healing as your primary stat you lose 80% of your damage, which simply isn’t in any way proportional to what you gain.

Coulter.2315:

This already exists in the form of group aegis, blinds, reflects, stealth, invulns, interupts, dodges etc. A healer remains pointless if you set up your dps classes with these support abilities.

Being able to slot a few abilities that make you provide support isn’t the same as actually being able to create a support character though. Besides, Guardian shouldn’t be the only class that ever gets to play the support role.

Aetrion.8295:

Seera.5916:

And the only way to put them in the meta is make them required. Because even in trinity games, DPS is king. They only take enough healers and enough tanks to maintain maximum DPS.

That seems like another of your random assertions with no reasoning behind them. Even if we wholesale accept the premise that DPS is always king (there are fights in the game where it isn’t, like Mai Trin) it leaves plenty of opportunities for support characters that increase damage without being high damage themselves, and no reason why they would be required to run all content if they become accepted as being part of the fastest way to run content.

Mai Trin is see how fast you can get the stacks of Defiance off of her so that you can increase your DPS against her. The focus may shift to more support or control, but only so much as to increase the DPS. If it wasn’t noticeably faster to reduce her stacks as opposed to just burn her DPS down as you any other other boss, players would likely just burn her DPS down like you would any other boss. Because keeping 5 players on a single stack so that the chances of the player she’s going toward being the one the stack removal shot goes to increases to 100% is easier said than done for a majority of PUGs.

Everything boils down to DPS because a majority of players want to have the most rewards as possible for a given time frame. And that’s something that ANet can’t change. ANet can’t change the players’ motivations for why they do what they do in game. They can’t. Blizzard can’t change it. Other MMO companies can’t change it. They can only choose to focus on the majority of players and be a big game or be a niche game. ANet has chosen GW2 to be a game for the majority of players. At this point, three years after launch, it would likely be suicide for ANet to change GW2 into a niche game.

1. They’ll lose the players who don’t want the niche.
2. The niche players may worry that they’ll cater to the majority players again. They’ve switched focus once, what’s to stop them from doing it again?

None of what you say adds up to an argument for why there can’t be dedicated support builds that exist to buff other people’s damage instead of inflicting damage themselves for the people who like to play that sort of thing.

Aetrion.8295:

None of what you say adds up to an argument for why there can’t be dedicated support builds that exist to buff other people’s damage instead of inflicting damage themselves for the people who like to play that sort of thing.

Because this game is not a hard trinity game. Therefore there is no need for dedicated support builds.

Because in this game you can support yourself and your group all while maintaining high DPS.

There are a ton of other games that players who enjoy playing pure support roles can play. Every MMO does not have to cater to players who prefer specific roles.

I fail to see the argument as to why this game has to change to support pure support players. And that’s what you have to do. I don’t have to argue to keep the status quo. You have to argue to change the status quo. The burden isn’t on me. It’s on you.

Aetrion.8295:

Where they come from for the purpose of roleplaying games is stuff like D&D and other table top games. In those games their biggest function is not determining whether or not you die during a fight, but setting limits to how much adventuring you can do before you have to rest. These are also the games that give us the roleplay archetypes that people want to be able to play when they ask for tanks and healers. As a result of games like D&D measuring your progress not only by how quickly you can kill a monster, but by how many monsters you can take on before you have to make camp there is a significant emphasis on having party members that can extend your parties endurance throughout the adventure.

Only in Pen & Paper RPGs there are NO Healer/Tank roleplay Archetypes. There is no “I want to play a Healer” in real RPGs. Unless we are talking about the DnD 4th Edition which tried to put the MMORPG trinity model in a pen & paper system and wasn’t liked at all by veteran players. It is the only PnP RPG I’ve played that tried to introduce a Tank and a Healer archetype (and it was dumb).

There IS no trinity in real RPGs, there are no Healers / Tanks either. A good game master won’t allow a character to “Tank”, it’s just a dumb, unrealistic and silly concept to have a guy with full heavy armor that deals little damage to “force” mobs on him. Same with Healers really, in traditional RPGs Healers can be the best damage dealers too (and without investing in different stats) It’s called versatility. You don’t have to spec for healing.

Healers / Tanks were created specifically for online video games and that happened for a simple reason:
Do not allow players to finish content by themselves and force players to form groups to give emphasis to the second M “Multiplayer”. In the end companies found out that healers and tanks had a hard time completing content on their own so they gave them some damage to do. But it wasn’t enough.

So we get to GW2 where they decided to remove Healers and Tanks completely and make a game closer to the roots of RPGs. I guess newer RPG players and especially MMORPG players can’t grasp this yet, but they still try to twist things around as if Healers and Tanks existed in some form before MMORPGs

maddoctor.2738:

Only in Pen & Paper RPGs there are NO Healer/Tank roleplay Archetypes. There is no “I want to play a Healer” in real RPGs. Unless we are talking about the DnD 4th Edition which tried to put the MMORPG trinity model in a pen & paper system and wasn’t liked at all by veteran players. It is the only PnP RPG I’ve played that tried to introduce a Tank and a Healer archetype (and it was dumb).

The party roles of Cleric/Fighter/‘Mage’ has been a staple of DnD since the very start.
Cleric has never been a pure “sit and spam heal magic” class but has always been a primarily support class. If it was a better melee’er than Fighter, Fighter would have no reason to exist. The same for Wizard/Sorcerer/Etc when it comes to offensive magic.

“This set introduced concepts which would become standard, including abilities (such as strength, intelligence, and dexterity); character classes (fighter, magic-user, cleric)”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dungeons_%26_Dragons_%281974%29