One of the most touted and talked about features of GW2 has been its moving away from the classical model of tank, DPS, and healing (the “holy trinity”) roles in MMO gaming. In theory this could allow for more dynamic and exciting game-play, as players are required to adapt the tool-set they bring as situations demand, thinking more about group synergy and less about individual class or role responsibilities, and reacting to a broader set of stimulus.
To a certain extent I feel it has done impressively well at this, however there is still a need for some further “tweaking” to establish a lasting and enjoyable balance on the PvE side of things. The problem I have had thus far is the content seems to demand a level of flexibility that often isn’t practical with the level of UI information and in-combat extensibility currently available to players, with available information being the biggest concern.
Let’s consider some of the primary limitations:
1) Weapon swapping: You can only switch between two “sets” or profiles of weapons during combat, and cannot change these sets during combat. Also, an additional cooldown is triggered when swapping weapon sets during combat, preventing you from freely switching back and forth without adding additional cooldowns to your cooldowns. You are also unable to track the status of your alt-weapon cooldowns while using the other set.
2) Skill abilities: Only a handful of these (in addition to weapon abilities) can be added to your bar at a time, and you cannot change what abilities you have assigned to your bar while in combat, or while any of them are on cooldown, making that aspect of adaptability highly ineffective. You either know what abilities you will need for the entire encounter until you leave combat to swap them out, or you are stuck with what you had set up when something pulled you into combat.
3) No Team UI: This is perhaps the biggest problem. There is simply no effective in-game UI to coordinate group abilities, combos, and cooldowns, and yet combat is highly reliant on such coordination to effectively offset the loss of the trinity. Relying on visual effects is only practical in smaller groups as this quickly becomes a “particle fountain” of indistinguishable chaos in any larger-scale encounter. This implies reliance on third-party voice-chat solutions most players simply do not wish to use, especially in a role-play game where hearing a bunch of real-life voices and Leeroy Jenkins jokes in Vent might tend to disrupt any semblance of immersion.
Possible solutions:
One possible improvement would be to display two tool-bars at all times, one for each weapon set (one active and one grayed but visible above it depending on what set you had equipped), and remove the in-combat cooldown for swapping weapons. This would allow us to use any of our configured abilities when they are available, and keep better track of them, rather than having to rely on two cooldowns during situational combat.
Another possible improvement would be to allow skill swaps during combat so long as that specific skill slot wasn’t presently on cooldown. Template swapping would also be very helpful, perhaps a five-ability favorites pop-out for each ability button, allowing abilities to be assigned to the favorites bar of multiple slots, making it easier to set up a dynamic strategy with minimal downtime.
It would also seem critical to establish a more team-oriented UI. One extremely helpful and easily implemented improvement would be to simply highlight certain personal abilities when a combo field is down (and you are in it), perhaps color-coding the highlight effect based on field type. Also, even though aggro is much more random in this game than other MMO’s, some way for the group to track who actually has aggro at present would also be very helpful in attempting to coordinate group reactions. A simply target-of-target option in the UI could handle this.
Generally I feel that GW2 has done a very good job balancing their unique strategy of role-independent combat. With a little additional tweaking, it has the potential to truly “click” without limiting the potential complexity of encounter mechanics, or requiring too much of players to experience certain content.
Strange Aeons – Anvil Rock