Guild Wars 2

The resource in this game is cooldowns. Someone who uses all his skills wisely is invariably better than someone who merely spams #1. And while #1spam can get you through all content, playing good will get you more and faster. It’s the nintendo system where even the biggest leotard can complete the game yet it takes skill and endurance to complete it 100%.

Varonth.5830:

Well, energy based system allow for more finetuning of abilities. If you consider a combo of abilities too strong, you can only increase the cooldown, so that this combo doesn’t occure that often, or change skills in strength/functionality.
With energy you could also just make the combo itself more costly, and spread the bonus energy needed across all skills in the combination. That way each individual skill wouldn’t get alot worse, but the actual combination could become impossible to perform.

And then you introduce energy-management skills, and all the calculations suddenly have to make sense both in default state, and with changed energy regen. Balancing, instead of easier, becomes several times as hard as with cooldowns alone.

^But then you would have to sacrifice another skill to add in energy-management skills. And some professions would naturally have better energy management skills than others.

This is the GW1 way. It might be a bit harder to balance, and I’m not saying GW2 should have it, but GW1’s energy system was mostly brilliant. No mana potions, no inventory clutter, no gold sinking, more building diversity (well… not always), and added strategical depth. It was also pretty good at setting up the pace of combat, but that wouldn’t probably work well with GW2’s combat.

Outside of any mana system, I think GW2’s combat system is still not as deep as GW1’s, but for different reasons. GW2 has a lot of tools that are being wasted. Support builds are either almost non-existent, very vague, or simply pointless for most of pve, and support is supposed to be part of GW2’s trinity (damage, control, support). Control builds aren’t even allowed to exist in GW2’s pve where it matters, because of defiance. Condition builds are crippled by the stack limit in pve. Etc. In my opinion, those are the real problems with GW2’s combat. The way pve works, and even the way the only mode for pvp works, simplifies the gameplay’s diversity and depth to only a few several points.

Mana is never handled properly even in games with them so no. Also, some of the cooldowns they have really aren’t where they should be on some skills, some minor skills are way too long while other more important skills are really quick so they need to work on the cooldowns anyway. So much to fix.

Onshidesigns.1069:

Mana/Potions is a old outdated mechanic.
*wastes bag space
*slows combat
*Removes some skill from the game. Player who buys most mana/potions has the advantage.
*Unneeded gold sink!
*opening bag during combat. uses more GUI space.

Add new types of team buffs instead.

I will proceed to kill myself now.

pullnointer.1476:

Onshidesigns.1069:

Mana/Potions is a old outdated mechanic.
*wastes bag space
*slows combat
*Removes some skill from the game. Player who buys most mana/potions has the advantage.
*Unneeded gold sink!
*opening bag during combat. uses more GUI space.

Add new types of team buffs instead.

I will proceed to kill myself now.

Truth hurts, I know.

runeblade.7514:

pullnointer.1476:

Onshidesigns.1069:

Mana/Potions is a old outdated mechanic.
*wastes bag space
*slows combat
*Removes some skill from the game. Player who buys most mana/potions has the advantage.
*Unneeded gold sink!
*opening bag during combat. uses more GUI space.

Add new types of team buffs instead.

I will proceed to kill myself now.

Truth hurts, I know.

:D I laughed, I must admit xD

kokiman.2364:

pullnointer.1476:

Phira.3970:

^ Actually GW2 is more balanced than in GW1. But that shows you that balancing isn’t everything if the basic combat mechanics are boring.

you had more build variety in gw1 tbh…

No

yes.

pullnointer.1476:

kokiman.2364:

pullnointer.1476:

Phira.3970:

^ Actually GW2 is more balanced than in GW1. But that shows you that balancing isn’t everything if the basic combat mechanics are boring.

you had more build variety in gw1 tbh…

No

yes.

Maybe.

pullnointer.1476:

Katai.6240:

So, strategically, what does this give us? Basically, if all the skills stay the way they are, you would fight until you run out of mana, then be forced to disengage. You can’t keep fighting because you can’t use skills anymore. This turns into a “whoever runs out of mana first wins” sort of deal, essentially. Resource management becomes the metagame.

no.

Energy (gw1’s mana) management was just another concept that had to be considered while fighting. Not all skills needed energy, some needed adrenaline, some where free, others gave back energy. However, running out of mana doesn’t mean losing. It just means you can’t use energy consuming abilities for a while and had to wait a kite seconds for it to restore itself or use some non energy ability. You had to find a balance between your healing, defensive skills, dps/burst, interruptions and energy management in your build. In actual combat there was also kiting, positioning, timing and coordinating attacks. It wasn’t just better energy management=win. If a build had the best energy management in the game, then the build probably sucked. It didn’t become resource management wins, resource management was just another factor of the game you had to think about.

And yes, gw1 did have more build variety. Each class usually had a few distinct strong meta builds at any moment*, compared to only having 1 or 2 atm in gw2.

*Excluding paragons.

Navzar.2938:

If a build had the best energy management in the game, then the build probably sucked.

Ah yes, that’s why there was so many primary Necro builds…