Guild Wars 2

Crazy idea, imagine if there was no such thing as a “DPS” or full DPS build.

Meaning, you couldn’t focus 100% of your stat budget to pure damage. Everyone would have the same dmg potential from stats as everyone else no matter what.

For example, every piece of gear would have 1 dmg stat, either Condition Dmg or a merged version of Power/Crit stats, then you’d have your choice of stats that would ultimately modify your playstyle.

You could choose from : Healing, Support, Control, Defense.

So in the end, everyone would have the same damage gear wise, and you would differ on which secondary “role” you choose. You could just go defense, or give up some defense for healing, or support, or control. Support would be buffing power, as opposed to Healing.

This is just hypothetical, and even if did happen the content would still need to be changed or else the best builds would probably be either support or defense.

But it got me thinking of how this game was supposed to eliminate the Holy Trinity, and everyone is supposed to “dps” while having a secondary role of their choosing, I think it would’ve made things more interesting to have the stats actually reflect that. Right now you have the DPS from the trinity, the Tanks from the trinity, and sort of healer/tanks from the trinity in this game, but the last 2 aren’t needed, and thus just aren’t relevant, the stats make this happen.

The same thing would probably be better for pvp as well, there would be no glass cannon vs glass cannon that makes the game a ridiculously small TTK twitch based crapshoot, or 2 low dmg bunker specs unable to kill each other. In this case, it would also seperate the sustain (healing) and defense (tankiness/high TTK) builds.

I like that idea, they’ll never do it though. If you give players a way to min/max their damage they will do that 99% of the time, then talk down to anyone who would rather play more defensive or support. This game is getting ridiculous in the ‘zerker gear or gtfo’ mentality these days, I’m sure that’s not at all what the devs had in mind but I’m not sure what they can do about it now without drastic changes to healing power/toughness =/

They need to have more encounters that disadvantage pure dps.

For example, enemies that reflect damage but can be one-shotted by an attack under the right situation.

Or enemies that you need to constantly attack to make a time limit tick down until they self destruct.

These sorts of mechanics means that parties that focus on damage won’t perform as effectively in these encounters as other kinda of builds.

Once they introduced the dodge mechanic, it was inevitable player would go full offense. I mean, are you suggesting an encounter where dodge is useless so you would have to soak the damage? There is no skill in that, just a gear check.

The best idea i’ve seen in these forums was something along the lines of “no pure offensive gear” for pve, meaning we’d have valk and cavalier, but no zerker and assassins. If they did that to defensive gear as well at least we would have a bit more variety in item choices. But then again, i’m fine with my zerk gear.
Also, @Rieselle
These mechanics sounds easly exploitable (and by exploitable i mean really exploitable, think ACP1 stairs), if anet do some kind of content that is really hard for people in zerk, most players wouldn’t be able to complete it anyways (and not because of their gear choice).

Oxxy.7068:

The best idea i’ve seen in these forums was something along the lines of “no pure offensive gear” for pve, meaning we’d have valk and cavalier, but no zerker and assassins.

Then we have valk trinkets rampager armor or gtfo bad idea.

Rampager is full ofensive. Anet could implement power, crit, healing power gear, for example, so people would at lease choose between healing power, vitality or toughness, maybe power, precision, and x defensive stat, while mixing some critical on trinkets and what not. If “variety” is the problem, i’m yet to hear a better idea.

Yenn.9185:

Once they introduced the dodge mechanic, it was inevitable player would go full offense. I mean, are you suggesting an encounter where dodge is useless so you would have to soak the damage? There is no skill in that, just a gear check.

Well there are some encounters that just spam so much dmg that you can’t just dodge everything.

Also in my “idea” where everyone is dps but with a secondary role, things like healing power could boost rezzing speed somewhat, and tanky stats could contribute to downed state survivability somewhat as well. Then create more attrition fights.

I guess ideally as it is now you could try to create fights that let tankier people stay to maintain dps longer to make up for the lack of dmg, while squishier people would need to hold off to recover health before getting back in (which then extra heals would help with boosting dps in a way). Then maybe looking at the aggro mechanics and having a way for certain actions to cause extra threat.

It would be nice if defiance was reworked to allow more control options. Like say if blind could stack to a certain number it would stick for one attack (which would scale based on the number of people). Weakness/vulnerability duration reduction could be reworked to scale on the number of people as well.

Immobilize could be changed to only last up to 2 seconds on bosses (and not stack again), which could be used at the right times to prevent certain attacks like a whirlwind or charge or w/e. Chill/Cripple could get similar treatment to prevent perma snaring, and become more meaningful in controlling defiant mobs/bosses.

Chill could last up to 3-4 seconds and hinder certain boss attack cooldowns or something. Just brainstorming.

Question is, what would be a point?

Yep, that’s also what I have been suggesting. Remove/reduce pure DPS gear and DPS stats, make all class/weapon DPS ‘flat’. Make every build a ‘support’ build, just with a different flavour. Improve team play by buffing combo fields, for example.

Of course, its not that simple… the dungeon encounters should be probably redesigned as well…

Seems like what quite a few have been asking (tho mistakenly labeling it trinity), have meaningful non-dps builds. That is, stat lines that actually make a noticeable difference when not boosting damage output.

There are two reasons for why we do not have that today, SPVP balance and mob design.

The first is that boosting non-damage will result in a stagnant SPVP play style, where people use builds that enable them to sit on points all day with the other team going all out on them.

the second is that mobs outperform characters in both health and damage output. This makes non-damage builds futile as they just increase how long the players need to concentrate on the fight rather than reduce the players workload.

Given that, what is needed to change is not the PVE build options but the mob design. They need to attack more often, but do less damage pr hit. And they need to have less health and instead make more use of boons and heals.

This put them more in line with SPVP builds, allowing players to use more of their profession’s toolbox of skills against the mobs (boon strippers/converters, interrupts, and so on).

Btw, at least two of the big bads in the labyrinth are prime examples of bad design. The big elemental is basically a overly long trick fight (stand in randomly located puddles, but do not stand too long, to defend against massive andy corn barrages). And the Lich can simply be dogpiled.

I sometimes find amusing the very own definition of DPS, and the effort players makes to get the highest DPS. In this game i believe players should be looking at a Dp10s instead of DPS. It’s funny how some Berserker players (mostly Warriors) bursts in the first 5 seconds and stays downed in the following 5s…

I would rather have the game bring in the holy trinity than leave the game in the garbage Noobzerkers speed runs we have no.

add AI that tells mobs to go after the weakest of the group, basically a gear check. you fight a boss and if someone in your group has less than 1300 toughness or Vitality or both … the boss just attacks them. also let the boss drain endurance from the enemy they are agro’d on.

get these noobs out of their zerker gear by force … stop dumbing down the game.

generalraccoon.3857:

DPS focus builds on my opinion should reflect a high risk high reward concept

I agree, but only one class actually reflects that now, and everybody know which one it is

Khallis.5708:

I would rather have the game bring in the holy trinity than leave the game in the garbage Noobzerkers speed runs we have no.

add AI that tells mobs to go after the weakest of the group, basically a gear check. you fight a boss and if someone in your group has less than 1300 toughness or Vitality or both … the boss just attacks them. also let the boss drain endurance from the enemy they are agro’d on.

get these noobs out of their zerker gear by force … stop dumbing down the game.

Completely agree, noobs should not play with zerker gear.

Op – in the interest of time I’ll have to be brief – I’ll have to say no to your idea.
It doesn’t really add anything in terms of variety – people will still be playing predefined roles. The lack of build variety in this game is not a gameplay issue but a community one.

There will always be a build that works better than others ( at least for a specific encounter) – and that will always be required ( at least for that specific encounter).

@Oxxy – the idea of no pure offensive gear for PVE is – well a bad one.
Why would you even do that? If you take out Assasin’s and Zerker’s from PVE people will just play Valk or Knight. This doesn’t promote variety – it just switches one " King to rule all sets in PVE " with another. It isn’t a solution and never will be.

@green plum – that’s what you want -a support oriented game but that’s not what other players ( myself included ) want. If I had to give it more 2 cents I’d go " give us more pure dps options – so i can nuke everything " .

@Khallis – people in zerker gear are not noobs. To run full zerker is a high risk high reward choice.
If you’re bad at it it will wreck you – but if you are a fast reactive player you will be rewarded with finishing content faster – which is exactly how it should be.
You rarely see full zerkers in the game because it isn’t easy to play – but I doubt you know that judging from your tone.
And another thing – if we’re talking about dumbing down the game – I think that’s what people saying " buff defensive stats" and " nerf zerker " are trying to do.
A zerker replaces lack of defense with his own skill at dodging and positioning right.
What you are asking is to make it that he gets rewarded less for those things and that people using defensive gear are rewarded more. For what? Standing still ?

You’re basically saying you want this game to give you a choice to tank through the damage rather than avoid it. Because you can’t be bothered to improve yourself – right?

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again – there are a few people who are unhappy with these things you’ve mentioned in this post. They are a minority – the majority of the players are in the game and not even minding the forums.
If you want GW2 to be more like that generic MMO you were playing before this so much – then perhaps it’s time to ask yourselves if you’re playing the right game.

digiowl.9620:

Seems like what quite a few have been asking (tho mistakenly labeling it trinity), have meaningful non-dps builds. That is, stat lines that actually make a noticeable difference when not boosting damage output.

There are two reasons for why we do not have that today, SPVP balance and mob design.

The first is that boosting non-damage will result in a stagnant SPVP play style, where people use builds that enable them to sit on points all day with the other team going all out on them.

the second is that mobs outperform characters in both health and damage output. This makes non-damage builds futile as they just increase how long the players need to concentrate on the fight rather than reduce the players workload.

Given that, what is needed to change is not the PVE build options but the mob design. They need to attack more often, but do less damage pr hit. And they need to have less health and instead make more use of boons and heals.

This put them more in line with SPVP builds, allowing players to use more of their profession’s toolbox of skills against the mobs (boon strippers/converters, interrupts, and so on).

Btw, at least two of the big bads in the labyrinth are prime examples of bad design. The big elemental is basically a overly long trick fight (stand in randomly located puddles, but do not stand too long, to defend against massive andy corn barrages). And the Lich can simply be dogpiled.

I would actually be interested in this more. There are plenty of mobs that use one skill (skales and their regen, basilisks and their daze breath) but it would be interesting to see some mobs use several skills.

Knote.2904:

Crazy idea, imagine if there was no such thing as a “DPS” or full DPS build.

Meaning, you couldn’t focus 100% of your stat budget to pure damage. Everyone would have the same dmg potential from stats as everyone else no matter what.

For example, every piece of gear would have 1 dmg stat, either Condition Dmg or a merged version of Power/Crit stats, then you’d have your choice of stats that would ultimately modify your playstyle.

You could choose from : Healing, Support, Control, Defense.

So in the end, everyone would have the same damage gear wise, and you would differ on which secondary “role” you choose. You could just go defense, or give up some defense for healing, or support, or control. Support would be buffing power, as opposed to Healing.

This is just hypothetical, and even if did happen the content would still need to be changed or else the best builds would probably be either support or defense.

But it got me thinking of how this game was supposed to eliminate the Holy Trinity, and everyone is supposed to “dps” while having a secondary role of their choosing, I think it would’ve made things more interesting to have the stats actually reflect that. Right now you have the DPS from the trinity, the Tanks from the trinity, and sort of healer/tanks from the trinity in this game, but the last 2 aren’t needed, and thus just aren’t relevant, the stats make this happen.

The same thing would probably be better for pvp as well, there would be no glass cannon vs glass cannon that makes the game a ridiculously small TTK twitch based crapshoot, or 2 low dmg bunker specs unable to kill each other. In this case, it would also seperate the sustain (healing) and defense (tankiness/high TTK) builds.

Sounds boring. And a little like you’re trying to tell others how they should be playing.

Harper.4173:

@Oxxy – the idea of no pure offensive gear for PVE is – well a bad one.
Why would you even do that? If you take out Assasin’s and Zerker’s from PVE people will just play Valk or Knight. This doesn’t promote variety – it just switches one " King to rule all sets in PVE " with another. It isn’t a solution and never will be.

Nope, guardians would run Power, crit, healing gear instead of valk or knight, thieves on the other hand could benefit from both valks and knight (and they have to take into account if they want power and precision, power and crit, precision and crit on their trinkets, and so on), etc. Also, i don’t think there’s a solution, mostly because there is no problem to begin with.
Edit: also, most people theory crafting and brainstorming about this should just buy another game to be honest, not because “i don’t want’em on my game!” or nothing like that, but mostly because they seem to want a completely different game from what we have right now.

When you have classes with 12.000 effective HP doing the same content as classes with 50.000 effective HP you rely on one-shot mechanics or the Necros are just going to “yawn”.

And the difference between a glass-cannon Thief and one with well-rounded stats is only 3000-4000 HP. Significant yes, but not crucial and it doesn’t make a huge difference in most content.

If classes had more comparable survivability then you could create more nuanced encounters that didn’t either one-shot the glassy classes or bored the tanks.

Personally, I think the stat allocations are “wrong”.

Instead of gear having 3 stats (1 major and 2 minor) they should have made gear have 2 stats (that are equal).

One stat will always be offensive (Condition, Power, Precision) while the other will always be defensive (Healing Power, Vitality, Toughness).

Each piece of gear would be given 2 upgrade slots (one for Runes/Sigils and one for the nuggets/gems/stones/medallions/etc.). Runes would be entirely based around % gains to things that are not offensive or defensive stats above (like Crit Damage) or other special effects while the nuggets/gems/stones/etc. would give a small bonus to one stat (offensive or defensive).

This would keep customization as a factor while narrowing the gap between a full defense and full offense gear set.

Ideally, your main increase to offensive or defensive stats should always be coming from your build, not from your gear.

Wow…it’s the simplest solution ever. Just get rid of all full-dps stat sets. Being forced into taking support/healing/survivability stats would mean a forced diversity. Of course, not being able to spec assassin/zerk/rampager would mean dealing less damage and taking less damage. Meaning numbers would have to be tweaked. Damage modifiers, scaling, enemy skills.

Currently, there is little in the way of opportunity cost for choosing an all-in offense build in PvE. That’s providing you know your defensive tools, mob moves and can time your dodge/inv/block/etc. properly. That also assumes that, in dungeons, you’re grouping with skilled players with similar builds. The pay-off outweighs the drawbacks.

I’ve never seen another MMO that allowed players to attain 100% critical chance beyond skills like, “Your next x attacks are crits.” I’ve also never seen another MMO where critical damage scales to 2.5x base damage and beyond. I’ve only seen one MMO where all-in offense plus >50% crit chance plus approaching 2x base damage can be combined with excellent survivability, and that game is reviled for being ridiculously easy.

I used to think that: (1) damage should be shifted so that it came more from weapon strength and skill coefficient, with less emphasis on power; and (2) that critical chance and damage percentage should be soft-capped (at 50% chance and +50% damage). However, (1) would probably make defensive builds too strong in PvP — which means this would never be implemented. As to (2), since WvW and PvE seem to be joined at the hip, I’m not sure that taking something away from all-out offense would be a balanced, responsible decision in that game mode.

This left me with the thought that PvE mobs should behave more like the profession practice mobs in the Mists. That is, behave closer to the way players behave, using mitigation skills, movement and dodge. However, this would require reprogramming most of the mobs in PvE. It looks to me like this process was begun on a few mobs (Tamini archers kite, a couple of the bandit mobs evade). Reprogramming the rest would probably be a massive undertaking, which I don’t see happening.

tl:dr: While the opportunity cost for all-in offense in PvE is too low, I don’t see this changing without a fundamental change in how the game works.

This sadly would never happen. Only way I can really see a fix to the zerker nature of people is to either eliminate the zerker armor (never gonna happen), or give the mobs undodgeable attacks that scale with that particular player’s Power and Precision, with Toughness and Vitality preventing the brunt of the attack. Full zerker spec? Grats, you’ll be downed in 1-2 hits. Tank spec? It’ll take 7-8 hits.

This too will probably never happen though. But we do need something to fix the zerker mindset. Nothing short of giving mobs some undodgeable attacks or nerfing the zerker builds will do this, I’m afraid.

RyuDragnier.9476:

This sadly would never happen. Only way I can really see a fix to the zerker nature of people is to either eliminate the zerker armor (never gonna happen), or give the mobs undodgeable attacks that scale with that particular player’s Power and Precision, with Toughness and Vitality preventing the brunt of the attack. Full zerker spec? Grats, you’ll be downed in 1-2 hits. Tank spec? It’ll take 7-8 hits.

This too will probably never happen though. But we do need something to fix the zerker mindset. Nothing short of giving mobs some undodgeable attacks or nerfing the zerker builds will do this, I’m afraid.

And none of this should ever happen.

Why would your opinions on how it should be played be more important than zerker peoples opinions? We’re basically trading an optional playstyle for a FORCED PLAYSTYLE.

You’re trying to dictate how zerker players play worse than zerker players dictate to others – because at least the zerk people aren’t trying to design you out of the game.

RyuDragnier.9476:

This sadly would never happen. Only way I can really see a fix to the zerker nature of people is to either eliminate the zerker armor (never gonna happen), or give the mobs undodgeable attacks that scale with that particular player’s Power and Precision, with Toughness and Vitality preventing the brunt of the attack. Full zerker spec? Grats, you’ll be downed in 1-2 hits. Tank spec? It’ll take 7-8 hits.

This too will probably never happen though. But we do need something to fix the zerker mindset. Nothing short of giving mobs some undodgeable attacks or nerfing the zerker builds will do this, I’m afraid.

Oxxy.7068:

Edit: also, most people theory crafting and brainstorming about this should just buy another game to be honest, not because “i don’t want’em on my game!” or nothing like that, but mostly because they want a completely different game from what we have right now.

Seriously, undodgeable attacks is just an item check, and every other mmo out there already has item checks. GW2, for once, has a skill check (even if it’s a “low” one).

the reason why some players insist on berserker setups with a focus on direct damage is because it’s proven to be very effective. this is especially true if you consider the dodge and block mechanics that the game offers.

I would welcome a change to this model but until then i’m going to bring the best damage i can to the fight while still being able to survive the majority of the encounters. if a particular situation warrants it I will break out my PVT armor but this rarely comes up.

a good example of this was the aether retreat final boss. I loved it from start to finish. you had to factor in survivability due to the fact that as you wore down the bosses health pool there was an increment of time in which the boss could not take damage and you had to survive cannon fire. all zerking did was speed up how fast the cannon fire would start up again.

My zerker friends died every time where as i was in a more survivable build because i had previously done it and knew what to expect.

and a lot of players did not like that excellent boss fight sadly….

Before anything can be done, stacking needs to be destroyed. It should be considered an exploit. No matter how much interesting mechanics you could suggest, it will all be destroyed by stacking.

There is a way, watch how enemy spvp players deal with a 1 guardian/3 warriors/1 mesmer stacking. Watch how enemy melee players do it. That is the kind of AI we need.

Oxxy.7068:

RyuDragnier.9476:

This sadly would never happen. Only way I can really see a fix to the zerker nature of people is to either eliminate the zerker armor (never gonna happen), or give the mobs undodgeable attacks that scale with that particular player’s Power and Precision, with Toughness and Vitality preventing the brunt of the attack. Full zerker spec? Grats, you’ll be downed in 1-2 hits. Tank spec? It’ll take 7-8 hits.

This too will probably never happen though. But we do need something to fix the zerker mindset. Nothing short of giving mobs some undodgeable attacks or nerfing the zerker builds will do this, I’m afraid.

Oxxy.7068:

Edit: also, most people theory crafting and brainstorming about this should just buy another game to be honest, not because “i don’t want’em on my game!” or nothing like that, but mostly because they want a completely different game from what we have right now.

Seriously, undodgeable attacks is just an item check, and every other mmo out there already has item checks. GW2, for once, has a skill check (even if it’s a “low” one).

Sadly skill means nothing if you can kill a boss faster than it can use its abilities. There’s no skill to pulling that off, anybody can do it easily.

Ahlen.7591:

And none of this should ever happen.

Why would your opinions on how it should be played be more important than zerker peoples opinions? We’re basically trading an optional playstyle for a FORCED PLAYSTYLE.

You’re trying to dictate how zerker players play worse than zerker players dictate to others – because at least the zerk people aren’t trying to design you out of the game.

I’m giving suggestions so everybody isn’t so enticed to play zerker all the time. I love playing condition build, I prefer it over zerker just because it feels right to me. But let’s face it, zerking takes no real skill and makes everything faceroll easy and boring. It even encourages elitism and makes everything else look pointless to use. Easiest way to fix it so the board is even? You gotta make zerker builds less enticing.

RyuDragnier.9476:

This sadly would never happen. Only way I can really see a fix to the zerker nature of people is to either eliminate the zerker armor (never gonna happen), or give the mobs undodgeable attacks that scale with that particular player’s Power and Precision, with Toughness and Vitality preventing the brunt of the attack. Full zerker spec? Grats, you’ll be downed in 1-2 hits. Tank spec? It’ll take 7-8 hits.

This too will probably never happen though. But we do need something to fix the zerker mindset. Nothing short of giving mobs some undodgeable attacks or nerfing the zerker builds will do this, I’m afraid.

It’s people like you that I can’t understand.
Why are you constantly so offensive against " people with the zerker mindset" ?
It has nothing to do with the stats – people with this mindset are MIN/MAXERS.
If you nerf zerker into the ground – or just remove it from the game – people who used to run it will just run the NEXT BEST THING. Nothing about their mindset will change.

They will not diversify their builds – they will simply play the build that is next in line as efficiency goes.
They will not be nicer – they’ll still have the elitist " i want to get this done fast – do it fast or get out of my way " attitude.

Ahlen is right – you’re trying to outdesign players out of the game where a zerker player will AT WORST not play with you and ignore you and your armor of choice.

It’s getting old seeing people like you – angry and upset by the fact that others can clear content faster and play better.
It angers you that you that they won’t have you when you want to play with them so much that you want their play style destroyed – that’ll teach them.

Grow up.
“The zerker natureof people " is exactly that a nature- a mindset – it’s not a set of gear.
You will never change/ conquer it. Learn to live and let live.

Also realize that the game will not be changed because a few people complain in a thread.

RyuDragnier.9476:

Oxxy.7068:

RyuDragnier.9476:

This sadly would never happen. Only way I can really see a fix to the zerker nature of people is to either eliminate the zerker armor (never gonna happen), or give the mobs undodgeable attacks that scale with that particular player’s Power and Precision, with Toughness and Vitality preventing the brunt of the attack. Full zerker spec? Grats, you’ll be downed in 1-2 hits. Tank spec? It’ll take 7-8 hits.

This too will probably never happen though. But we do need something to fix the zerker mindset. Nothing short of giving mobs some undodgeable attacks or nerfing the zerker builds will do this, I’m afraid.

Oxxy.7068:

Edit: also, most people theory crafting and brainstorming about this should just buy another game to be honest, not because “i don’t want’em on my game!” or nothing like that, but mostly because they want a completely different game from what we have right now.

Seriously, undodgeable attacks is just an item check, and every other mmo out there already has item checks. GW2, for once, has a skill check (even if it’s a “low” one).

Sadly skill means nothing if you can kill a boss faster than it can use its abilities. There’s no skill to pulling that off, anybody can do it easily.

Ahlen.7591:

And none of this should ever happen.

Why would your opinions on how it should be played be more important than zerker peoples opinions? We’re basically trading an optional playstyle for a FORCED PLAYSTYLE.

You’re trying to dictate how zerker players play worse than zerker players dictate to others – because at least the zerk people aren’t trying to design you out of the game.

I’m giving suggestions so everybody isn’t so enticed to play zerker all the time. I love playing condition build, I prefer it over zerker just because it feels right to me. But let’s face it, zerking takes no real skill and makes everything faceroll easy and boring. It even encourages elitism and makes everything else look pointless to use. Easiest way to fix it so the board is even? You gotta make zerker builds less enticing.

Why ? because you like something else?
Play zerker – let me know how " faceroll easy " it is to clear content with it.
The system is not broken to begin with – your mindset is.
People will play whatever they want to play – and most players want to play what is most effective – that will never change.

@runeblade
Stacking on bosses is a valid strategy – the fact that you want to consider it an exploit doesn’t make it one.

This game could have avoided some of the issues IF the mobs in the game had PROPER AI modeled after sPVP player game styles – like we had in GW1. Sadly that is not and will never be the case.

If there were no DPS stat then everyone would flock to the next most important stat – defense/armor/vitality.

Then we’d be starting all over.

I played through the new TA path, all of the AC paths, CM, and all of several other dungeons using zerker on my ranger. I rarely got downed, rarely died, I killed things fast enough to where I rarely got hit on normal mobs (survived bosses due to the group killing them too fast), and overall I found it pretty boring as one. The ability to kill things too fast makes most games a cakewalk, especially MMOs. List any game where you can kill the enemy fast, and you encounter the problem with zerker builds, they trivialize the content and make things too easy.

Also, I have no problems with zerkers whatsoever, I run dungeons with multiple guildies who love to zerk. But if you guys really want the game to be balanced or the content to be harder, you have to admit, it’s time for the zerker to not be as effective for certain areas or places. Whether that means nerfing it (rather not for the people who use it), making it less effective through boss tactics (Aetherblade Retreat’s Mai Lin was infamous for this), or just buffing all other builds plus the mobs to make it the same as everything else.

You didn’t understand a word I said. Or chose to ignore it.

I don’t know where you got the " want content to be harder " . I don’t want that – there are VERY few people in the game who want content to be harder – and they usually do level 60+fractals.

The only way I would want harder content is if it came with BETTER rewards. And rewards that are properly scaled with the difficulty of the content.
Say a " hard mode " for dungeons that give twice the bonus gold at the end. That would be nice.
Harder content with no reward means I wouldn’t even bother.

The game IS balanced as it is.

Bad player + tanky gear = success.
Good player + zerker gear = success.
Bad player + zerker gear = dead.

Zerker and clearing faster is the reward you get for learning how to dodge, where and when to be in a fight, how to avoid damage and so on.
If you can’t do those things the game penalizes you by making you have to get tankier gear and taking longer in a run.
It’s all fair and square.

Harper.4173:

You didn’t understand a word I said. Or chose to ignore it.

I don’t know where you got the " want content to be harder " . I don’t want that – there are VERY few people in the game who want content to be harder – and they usually do level 60+fractals.

The only way I would want harder content is if it came with BETTER rewards. And rewards that are properly scaled with the difficulty of the content.
Say a " hard mode " for dungeons that give twice the bonus gold at the end. That would be nice.
Harder content with no reward means I wouldn’t even bother.

The game IS balanced as it is.

Bad player + tanky gear = success.
Good player + zerker gear = success.
Bad player + zerker gear = dead.

Zerker and clearing faster is the reward you get for learning how to dodge, where and when to be in a fight, how to avoid damage and so on.
If you can’t do those things the game penalizes you by making you have to get tankier gear and taking longer in a run.
It’s all fair and square.

You got that wrong.

Bad player + Any build = dead
Good player + any build = success

I say this because I’ve seen far too many bad players with tanky setups die faster than good players with any other setup. The game penalizes you PERIOD if you don’t know how to play well, especially at endgame. This isn’t like the normal MMOs like WoW where even a bad player can do well with good gear, if you can’t play well at all in this game, you will die 90% of the time.

Also I did read what you said. I did play zerker and it was faceroll easy for me. My mindset isn’t really a problem considering I’ve blown off the zerker mentality for the longest time, and pretty much don’t care if they play zerker or not. And I agree that most players will play what is most effective.

What I’m asking for here is either a complete change in meta by something else being the highpoint for a while (I’d rather not have it this way if I could help it), or making it so that the differences between certain build performances is so minimal that other builds have a chance to shine (I’d prefer this).

Harper.4173:

@runeblade
Stacking on bosses is a valid strategy – the fact that you want to consider it an exploit doesn’t make it one.

This game could have avoided some of the issues IF the mobs in the game had PROPER AI modeled after sPVP player game styles – like we had in GW1. Sadly that is not and will never be the case.

Stacking on bosses is a mindless strategy. It uses zero skill, zero teamwork, and zero effort to do. It destroys mechanics that dev wants to place for players to defeat the boss. It destroys ranged weapons because it has weaker dps. It destroys the need for control because all mobs are never going to move. I rather have stacking to be invalid so that other tactics can be used.

Ever fought Colossus Rumblus? Players stack under the column to negate the rocks falling. What is the point of having Grast putting up shields if players can just exploit using stacking.

Another example, Destroyer of worlds. What is the point of having Red AoE circles everywhere if no one is going to step on them?

The Spider Queen AoE poison is removed by everyone in the party moving into melee range. Trivializing the encounter completely.

Stacking should be considered an exploit for the overall health of the dungeons. Keep stacking in, and the hard work that developers uses to make boss fight interesting will be negated due to stacking. We can either have dungeons that requires thought and strategy or we can have punching bag mobs that requires only pressing 1 1 1 1 1.

If you want that fixed runeblade, you’re going to have to ask for collision detection so multiple players cannot touch the same spots.

There is a difference between stacking and using exploits. Stacking in melee is used for two reasons: support/buffs — offensive, healing, and defensive — have very short range. If you don’t stack, you don’t get others’ buffs and they don’t get yours; and melee does more damage than ranged, so if you’re going to stack to gain benefits, you might as well be doing more damage. One only needs to look at two facts to see that stacking was intended in dungeons. One, buffs are short range. Two, dungeons were originally aimed at coordinated groups of skilled players. If you don’t use those short range group performance enhancements, you’re not being coordinated.

RyuDragnier.9476:

I say this because I’ve seen far too many bad players with tanky setups die faster than good players with any other setup. The game penalizes you PERIOD if you don’t know how to play well, especially at endgame. This isn’t like the normal MMOs like WoW where even a bad player can do well with good gear, if you can’t play well at all in this game, you will die 90% of the time.

This is exactly why this game is awesome.
Because in GW2 Skill STILL matters more than gear. Less than it was in GW1 but still – it is here. That’s the whole point of the GW game franchise – a place where if you suck as a player you will keep sucking no matter how good your gear is.

That aside – I’ve seen PLENTY of runs done with tanky gear by people who had NO idea what they were doing but would just tank/heal through it ( with 2-3 guardians).

Why change the meta so we can replace zerker with knight’s or valk? There’s no point.
Players will still be elistit, and will still play the optimal gear.

Also – regarding “making it so that the differences between certain build performances is so minimal that other builds have a chance to shine (I’d prefer this).”

That’s basically asking that the builds that require more skill be rewarded less so that the builds that require less skill are rewarded more in comparison.
You’re asking to take stuff ( the ability to clear content faster and get more rewards) away from the good players because the bad players are having a tough day. How about no.

If you’re playing a bad/ suboptimal build then you should take longer and get less rewards. If you NEED more healing/toughness stats to stay alive you should take longer to get rewards. The game already has handouts in the form of PVE zerging where gear doesn’t even matter.

If the differences were made insignificant then what’s the point of having builds? or different types of gear?

The whole idea is that if you can handle higher risk/reward gear then you should be able to do it – and it should provide advantages. It creates incentive and motivation for players to get better.
If any build was " just as good " why would players even need to improve or learn new stuff?

runeblade.7514:

Harper.4173:

@runeblade
Stacking on bosses is a valid strategy – the fact that you want to consider it an exploit doesn’t make it one.

This game could have avoided some of the issues IF the mobs in the game had PROPER AI modeled after sPVP player game styles – like we had in GW1. Sadly that is not and will never be the case.

Stacking on bosses is a mindless strategy. It uses zero skill, zero teamwork, and zero effort to do. It destroys mechanics that dev wants to place for players to defeat the boss. It destroys ranged weapons because it has weaker dps. It destroys the need for control because all mobs are never going to move. I rather have stacking to be invalid so that other tactics can be used.

Ever fought Colossus Rumblus? Players stack under the column to negate the rocks falling. What is the point of having Grast putting up shields if players can just exploit using stacking.

Another example, Destroyer of worlds. What is the point of having Red AoE circles everywhere if no one is going to step on them?

The Spider Queen AoE poison is removed by everyone in the party moving into melee range. Trivializing the encounter completely.

Stacking should be considered an exploit for the overall health of the dungeons. Keep stacking in, and the hard work that developers uses to make boss fight interesting will be negated due to stacking. We can either have dungeons that requires thought and strategy or we can have punching bag mobs that requires only pressing 1 1 1 1 1.

What you fail to see is that these mechanics are trivialized through stacking because players do not enjoy the content.
Nobody likes the spider queen fight, the Colossus Rumblus for the heck of it. People trivialize it through stacking in various spots because they want to get it done quickly.
If you want a group that doesn’t – find like minded individuals.

This should not be something that surprises you – GW1 had a lot of this.
Look up FoWSC, UWSC – and other speed clear runs – all designed to minimalize/ trivialize content in order to get rewards faster.

Or Red Resign – that was another example of what the players truly want -rewards – usually with minimal effort.

If stacking was removed so too would be a lot of the team play associated with combo fields and aoe support skills.
Also – the amount of backlash would be huge.

The fact of the matter is that the fact itself that the content is being “trivialized” is a testimony to the fact that the players don’t want to play through it “properly” but fast and effective.
If Anet wanted to fix these they would have done it by now – same way they fixed Dredge boss pull in the FOTM dredge fractal.

I believe their philosophy atm is live and let live.
If you want to do the boss as intended – fine. You want to stack and speed clear – also fine.

If these mechanics were changed – dungeons would be significantly harder – and what you’d see then is a LOT of the players dropping them in favor of the champ zerg farm trains. ( which is what I did for example – there’s simply no reason to do any other dungeon other than CoF P1).

In a counter intuitive way – stacking is keeping dungeons alive – without it I doubt they’d see much activity since the difficulty would be increased severely.
And then what would happen with the overall health of the dungeons and the hard work the devs would put in? It’d go to complete waste – with dungeons becoming ghost towns.

Harper.4173:

RyuDragnier.9476:

I say this because I’ve seen far too many bad players with tanky setups die faster than good players with any other setup. The game penalizes you PERIOD if you don’t know how to play well, especially at endgame. This isn’t like the normal MMOs like WoW where even a bad player can do well with good gear, if you can’t play well at all in this game, you will die 90% of the time.

This is exactly why this game is awesome.
Because in GW2 Skill STILL matters more than gear. Less than it was in GW1 but still – it is here. That’s the whole point of the GW game franchise – a place where if you suck as a player you will keep sucking no matter how good your gear is.

That aside – I’ve seen PLENTY of runs done with tanky gear by people who had NO idea what they were doing but would just tank/heal through it ( with 2-3 guardians).

Why change the meta so we can replace zerker with knight’s or valk? There’s no point.
Players will still be elistit, and will still play the optimal gear.

Also – regarding “making it so that the differences between certain build performances is so minimal that other builds have a chance to shine (I’d prefer this).”

That’s basically asking that the builds that require more skill be rewarded less so that the builds that require less skill are rewarded more in comparison.
You’re asking to take stuff ( the ability to clear content faster and get more rewards) away from the good players because the bad players are having a tough day. How about no.

If you’re playing a bad/ suboptimal build then you should take longer and get less rewards. If you NEED more healing/toughness stats to stay alive you should take longer to get rewards. The game already has handouts in the form of PVE zerging where gear doesn’t even matter.

If the differences were made insignificant then what’s the point of having builds? or different types of gear?

The whole idea is that if you can handle higher risk/reward gear then you should be able to do it – and it should provide advantages. It creates incentive and motivation for players to get better.
If any build was " just as good " why would players even need to improve or learn new stuff?

The certain build performances, which I really should have clarified on and gone into specifics with since they change the interpretation of what I said from the beginning (sorry I spaced on specifics here people), I meant to be the varying optimal setup builds for conditions and zerker. How is it that zerker does majorly more damage than condition builds, when if you’re really spec’d that far into conditions, you should be doing equal damage from that spectrum?

It’s one of the things that really irritates me about this game, how conditions have almost always been weaker than direct damage. The times you have conditions being better than direct damage is few and far inbetween (see Aetherblade Retreat’s Frizz for an example of a battle where conditions were useful). Nobody denies that tanks should be doing less damage, as are people spec’d completely into just survival. My problem here is how the zerker just outshines conditions to the point where conditions just feel so kitten useless.

We need a change to this, again whether by changing the mobs, nerfing the zerker stats (again, not an option to me), or changing how powerful the conditions themselves are. In my opinion, if a full optimal zerker setup does 12K in 5 seconds (guess here, not sure how much a zerker can actually pull in that time), a full optimal condition build should be able to pull off that same amount of damage in 8 seconds. I know, this doesn’t sound like much of a change at all, zerkers would still technically be top, but it brings conditions close enough to where they’re not so kitten useless.

Unfortunately, I see it as requiring a pretty big change to how conditions are handled by the system. Maybe a complete removal of the condition cap for dungeons, or changing it in some way to where it’s easier for conditions to pull off that same kind of crazy damage. I’d prefer this for PvE only, btw, conditions already rule in PvP and WvW.

i think they need to put diminishing returns on stats or if they have that implemented already then bump it up to the next level.

Because conditions are broken atm.
But guess what – why are we not focusing on how to buff condition damage instead of breaking zerker?
My question to you is WHY can’t we have a positive outlook on things?
Why instead of " nerf x – it’s too good " can’t we have " buff y, so it won’t be useless compared to x".

Anet is already aware of conditions – if they can be fixed they will be fixed.
I think that a lot of players express their anger and frustration at various aspects of the game they dislike – and take it out on the zerkers, the elitists , and other such topics that have become the go to problem if people are mad.

To me, the answer is two fold:

1) I don’t necessarily mind the one-hit kill mechanics regardless of your build. It forces you to be alert and conscious of your own position at all times. That’s a GOOD thing, believe it or not.

2) But ADD a smaller, faster, steadier stream of damage… something that won’t outright KILL a zerker geared player, but something that makes his conscious of having to step back to range, heal, and have to slow down their own damage… this would also give the option of tough and vit builds being able to stay in melee range longer (and the higher damage that inherently comes with it).

Those two mechanics combined would give people some options and variety. Would there be a “better” one? Sure. There always will be, but there’s room to tweak fights so that EVERY boss and trash encounter isn’t best done by a single stat type.

Khallis.5708:

i think they need to put diminishing returns on stats or if they have that implemented already then bump it up to the next level.

What purpose would that serve?

Vol.5241:

If there were no DPS stat then everyone would flock to the next most important stat – defense/armor/vitality.

Then we’d be starting all over.

I mentioned that in my post…

And before everyone freaks out, this is just hypothetical. I’m not demanding changes… this would be a massive rework so…. yeah, not gonna happen.

Just a discussion.

LHound.8964:

I sometimes find amusing the very own definition of DPS, and the effort players makes to get the highest DPS. In this game i believe players should be looking at a Dp10s instead of DPS. It’s funny how some Berserker players (mostly Warriors) bursts in the first 5 seconds and stays downed in the following 5s…

amusing indeed, but I’m glad I haven’t met too much of them

chemiclord.3978:

To me, the answer is two fold:

1) I don’t necessarily mind the one-hit kill mechanics regardless of your build. It forces you to be alert and conscious of your own position at all times. That’s a GOOD thing, believe it or not.

2) But ADD a smaller, faster, steadier stream of damage… something that won’t outright KILL a zerker geared player, but something that makes his conscious of having to step back to range, heal, and have to slow down their own damage… this would also give the option of tough and vit builds being able to stay in melee range longer (and the higher damage that inherently comes with it).

Those two mechanics combined would give people some options and variety. Would there be a “better” one? Sure. There always will be, but there’s room to tweak fights so that EVERY boss and trash encounter isn’t best done by a single stat type.

This…is the best suggestion I’ve ever heard for this problem. Bravo good sir/madam. Bravo.

RyuDragnier.9476:

chemiclord.3978:

To me, the answer is two fold:

1) I don’t necessarily mind the one-hit kill mechanics regardless of your build. It forces you to be alert and conscious of your own position at all times. That’s a GOOD thing, believe it or not.

2) But ADD a smaller, faster, steadier stream of damage… something that won’t outright KILL a zerker geared player, but something that makes his conscious of having to step back to range, heal, and have to slow down their own damage… this would also give the option of tough and vit builds being able to stay in melee range longer (and the higher damage that inherently comes with it).

Those two mechanics combined would give people some options and variety. Would there be a “better” one? Sure. There always will be, but there’s room to tweak fights so that EVERY boss and trash encounter isn’t best done by a single stat type.

This…is the best suggestion I’ve ever heard for this problem. Bravo good sir/madam. Bravo.

You haven’t been paying attention, then. This suggestion has been made many times, some of them in this thread, by suggesting that mobs behave more like players.