Guild Wars 2

I would kill – literally end someone’s life (not really) – to replace the guardian’s supportive Shield of Absorption with the defensive Shield of Wrath. I have seen more than a few players express an interest in outfitting their character in a lighter armor than is normally allowed by their profession. But these kinds of customizations, the long windups on our skills, the slow speed of our projectiles, they’re all disallowed because of the impact they would have on PvP.

It’s that desire to make GW2’s PvP into an e-sport that limits PvE, in my humble opinion. Those long windups on our skills are necessary so a skilled PvP opponent can interrupt them before their executed. Those slow projective speeds are necessary so a skilled PvP player can dodge the attack before it strikes home. The lack of weapon skill customization or liberties in choosing a lighter armor for aesthetic reasons are so the knowledgeable PvP player can see and immediately recognize what his opponent is capable of doing.

As is, these restraints are necessary. However, if ANet were to abandon their e-sport dreams (or simply recognize that balancing PvP without restricting PvE is impossible) they really give themselves a lot of room to play around with some interesting game mechanics.

If this game is to run for a long time (and I hope you’re all with me when I say I hope it will), what we’ve got is eventually going to get old. Imagine using the same five weapon skills you’ve been using for another two or three years. There’s only so much you can do with five weapon skills and 70 trait points before you grow bored. A hard separation between PvP and PvE – something ANet originally wanted to avoid, if I’m not mistaken – I think is the first step to a deeper PvE experience.

Thoughts?

You might have missed it, but they are starting to split skills between PvE-WvW-PvP with todays update.

lordkrall.7241:

You might have missed it, but they are starting to split skills between PvE-WvW-PvP with todays update.

Honestly cant wait. To the OP i think both pve and pvp hold each other back….unless they are seperated.

What you didn t read is they will just change numeric values (see confusion)

So despite they admitted themselves that PvE wariors and guardians are extremely over the top (i would say OP to the point of breaking the game) it will happen almost certainly that average and weak professions will get PvE NERFS while Warriors will become even stronger.

lordkrall.7241:

You might have missed it, but they are starting to split skills between PvE-WvW-PvP with todays update.

OP I would say yes, it is killing it has been since launch. there’s way too much broken on engineers now to consider anything else other then a complete rework of the entire class.

and to the reply, they were supposed to have separate pvp pve skill behaviors at launch, one out of a long list of things they failed to deliver from their own promises.

lordkrall.7241:

You might have missed it, but they are starting to split skills between PvE-WvW-PvP with todays update.

About time…balancing in PvP has had a huge negative impact on PvE and WvW…

Only about 10% of GW2 players play PvP, the vast majority play PvE & WvW, so balancing the game around PvP was always a BAD idea…

tigirius.9014:

and to the reply, they were supposed to have separate pvp pve skill behaviors at launch, one out of a long list of things they failed to deliver from their own promises.

Actually I am rather sure that they stated that they DIDN’T want to split it at launch and wanted to keep it the same as long as possible. Might be mistaken so feel free to link the “promise” about split-skills.

They wanted to keep the three aspects together as far as I remember. That is gone now so we will see what happens.

lordkrall.7241:

tigirius.9014:

and to the reply, they were supposed to have separate pvp pve skill behaviors at launch, one out of a long list of things they failed to deliver from their own promises.

Actually I am rather sure that they stated that they DIDN’T want to split it at launch and wanted to keep it the same as long as possible. Might be mistaken so feel free to link the “promise” about split-skills.

lordkrall.7241:

tigirius.9014:

and to the reply, they were supposed to have separate pvp pve skill behaviors at launch, one out of a long list of things they failed to deliver from their own promises.

Actually I am rather sure that they stated that they DIDN’T want to split it at launch and wanted to keep it the same as long as possible. Might be mistaken so feel free to link the “promise” about split-skills.

You are right lordkrall, they never said they want to split any skills, in fact they stated, and still do, see the latest SotG of a few days ago, that they want the skills to feel the same in all aspects of the game. They want a player that has experience in PvE to jump in PvP and have the same familiarity with how his character plays.

And of course they never actually “promised” anything like that so they didn’t fail to deliver on that.

It remains to be seen whether they will take advantage of the split or will continue to stubbornly crowbar PvP changes into PvE. I’m pretty skeptical based on past events.

As for the question, PvP balance is undoubtedly holding PvE back. It’s one of the biggest issues this game faces. Along with temporary content, it is far and away the main source of animosity among my member capped guild.

Vargs.6234:

It remains to be seen whether they will take advantage of the split or will continue to stubbornly crowbar PvP changes into PvE. I’m pretty skeptical based on past events.

As for the question, PvP balance is undoubtedly holding PvE back. It’s one of the biggest issues this game faces. Along with temporary content, it is far and away the main source of animosity among my member capped guild.

Well going by GW1 they did manage to do it quite well after the split.

daver.8324:

lordkrall.7241:

You might have missed it, but they are starting to split skills between PvE-WvW-PvP with todays update.

Honestly cant wait. To the OP i think both pve and pvp hold each other back….unless they are seperated.

Agreed. A lot of skills/builds that work in PvE simply don’t work (or are Overpowered) in PvP, and vice versa. Skills/traits should be seperated because as long pvp and pve share skills/traits we will never have balance.

is PvP holding PvE back?
Yes and the best example was the quickness nerf.
It made sense in PvP when people have between 12k and +22k hp, the burst was OP.
It didn’t make sens in PvE when bosses clearly have +1,000k hp like in Arah and even the lvl 80-84 dungeon trash mobs could endure 1 or 2 timewarp without dying…

When reading through this, I can’t get over this point you seem to be making:

I want to look pretty in my heavy armour, gosh darn-it. Let me look pretty NOW!

I wouldn’t want an “across the board” change to allow those in sPvP to be able to change their armour skins to those of another type, but it would be kinda nice to have an option for PvE only…except WvW will rear it’s big ugly head and bellow “what about meeee”. Expanding the town clothes idea would be nice though.

It is. And Anet have no excuse for it at all, they should have learnt this from GW1.

I remember playing ritualist in gw1, it was ok, I guess comparable to the engineer for a long time, pretty underused not really desired for anything in pve. Then they started splitting pve/pvp skills and actually made the ritualist FUN. Summoning tons of spirits with SoS, teleporting them about with summon spirits. That was fun, it was powerful too. But the point of pve, in my view the point of any video game, is to have fun. You shouldn’t be kitten in pve just because of some other game mode you might not even play.

And then there were all the pve only skills. GW2s racial skills are crap in comparison, when they should be fun. Look at the golem suit asura skill, it’s garbage, it actually makes you weaker. Compare that to GW1 pve only skills, like pain inverter, summon ruby djinn or vanguard assassin support, those were fun skills to use, powerful but I don’t think they were completely unbalanced.

In GW2, my only hope for each new patch is that the class I play (engineer) hasn’t been nerfed again. These aren’t nerfs because the engi is op in pve, in pve the engi is pretty kitten useless, most other classes can do things better. These are nerfs because of pvp, a game mode I have no interest in at all. Sure, pvp should be balanced too, but these are very separate game modes and need to be treated as such.

In GW1, putting pain inverter in pvp would have been insane, but why is it any less insane the other way around, nerfing pve just because of some build designed for pvp?

Yea, it definitely seems like a common sense move to split the 3 zones appropriately. What I’m most glad with is that WvW isn’t just lumped into PvE. When they first announced it would be like that last November, I thought “that is the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard of”. Luckily, it seems they changed their minds and WvW will get its own skill set. So yay Arenanet for being smarties! =D

PvPers are smallest, yet most vocal minority in the game (i.e., crying the most). They shouldn’t get that much attention and all balancing approaches should be strictly separate for PvP.

Sarie.1630:

When reading through this, I can’t get over this point you seem to be making:

I want to look pretty in my heavy armour, gosh darn-it. Let me look pretty NOW!

I wouldn’t want an “across the board” change to allow those in sPvP to be able to change their armour skins to those of another type, but it would be kinda nice to have an option for PvE only… except WvW will rear it’s big ugly head and bellow "what about meeee". Expanding the town clothes idea would be nice though.

There is an option now in WvW to see “generic” armor on opponents, so that seems to be no longer a problem.