Guild Wars 2

Ranger OP confirmed

xDudisx.5914:

Continue to live in your fantasy world where gw2 has ’’cc’’ and ‘’build diversity’’. Repeating lies wont make them truth.

Repeat a lie a thousand times and it becomes the truth. – dr JG

Ok i Found it

FenrirSlakt.3692:

Remember to always place your trust in the Holy Trinity of DPS.

• May Power, the Father grant you His Might to rain death in the form of large numbers on top of your enemies.
• May Precision, the Son, with His Fury guide your blades into the flimsiest of their armor.
• Though fallen, may Ferocity, the Holy Spirit, imbue you and magnify the virtues of both, the Father and the Son, so that your blows may fall heavy on your foes taking on the shape of more hard-hitting crits.

Spared and blessed be the followers of the Assassin that, though slightly bent on their ways, share our vision of smooth and efficient speedruns.

May you never degenerate and fall and be led astray to the misguided ways of the Rampager, or the nefarious path of the Soldier, or the wretched lanes of the Rabid.

May your faith in the Berserker never falter, your Fury never quenched, and your Might always stacked to 25.
For Great Justice!
Amen.

Praise the Lord!

xDudisx.5914:

Continue to live in your fantasy world where gw2 has ’’cc’’ and ‘’build diversity’’. Repeating lies wont make them truth.

That’s rich coming from you.

“We need a gear grind, we need a holy trinity. Because that will make more interesting game play”

You keep saying it’s a lie that we have build diversity and suggesting people are just perpetrating a lie, yet provide no evidence for the contrary. Nor do you provide any evidence that a holy trinity is better other than “well.. duh, I mean… obviously”. Who’s been munching on the blue pills now?

It was games with a holy trinity that coined the phrase “Tank n Spank” as well as “Gearcheck”. With the average complexity of “stay out of the fire, don’t go over the agro of tank, roll face”. If you think fights are not interesting enough that’s not a result of lacking a holy trinity, that’s a lack of interesting fights.
It was games with a holy trinity where entire talent trees were considered redundant and pointless because they didn’t fulfill that class’ role in the trinity.

Not to mention your absurd notion we need a gear grind. You call it progression but progressing is a lie. The world or the relevant content simply gets scaled up, everyone as a result falls behind, and needs to acquire gear with higher numbers to be back on equal footing.
That’s not progression that’s regression. Not to mention how this would leave content that didn’t get scaled up obsolete. Anyone who changed the appearance of their gear to constantly spend more and more transmutation charges.

This is the way GW2 is, and fortunately that’s how it will remain. No holy trinity, no gear treadmill.

I’m guessing the OP never played the game prior to Heroes being introduced.

Until Heroes were put in (so you could build your own HEALBOTS), a healer/protection class was absolutely needed in many missions (especially if you were going for MASTER).

The fact that I NEVER have to think about begging for a Healer/Prot class in chat makes GW2 WORLDS better. I can actually PLAY the game rather than wait for a party (that may just suck if the player is not up to it). Heroes were brain dead, but they were good at using the skills I gave them….

Commenting on the non-required trinity of City of Heroes (support, control and damage). Technically, you wanted all 3 but the styles of each Archetype often augmented a leg of the trinity to sort of supplement for the lack of one of the others not too mention the styles each archetype mashed differently with other’s playstyle. For example:

Tankers and Brutes- the bruiser archetype. Primarily built to grab and control aggro and make aoe easier by keeping mobs grouped. They can also maximize their damage through aoe as well as brute doing more damage with more mobs around. They bring control and damage. Because brute could do more damage with more mobs, they stand in for the need of a dedicated dps guy and because Tankers had the best survival options as well as decent aggro control, they nullify the need for support as the can keep a group alive as well as themselves.

Defender/Corruptor- the support archetypes. Primarily built to buff/debuff/heal as well as provide dps from range. They maximize dps by increasing the team performance and making foes into wet noodles. Because Corruptor can do more damage to foes past half dead, they can do good damage to hard targets and augment the need for dedicated dps and defender’s buffs and debuffs were so effective they could pretty much make scrappers out of tankers and blasters out of themselves. It plays with the damage and support legs of the trinity.

Controller and Dominator- the crowd control archetype. Primarily built to prohibit actions from the foes and keep them huddled to maximize damage. With focused application, they turned groups into statutes. Because Dominator had a secondary of Damage while controller had one for support, each could help fill two legs of the trinity not too mention, if the enemies are mostly incapacitated, you don’t desperately need dedicated support at all to fight well.

Sylent.3165:

I’m kinda curious why gw1 worked so much better. We had a healer, warriors could tank very well. Paragon had amazing support. Other classes had great dps/support.

Some people would call that the holy trinity.

Everyone would call it that. ArenaNet was fully invested in the trinity back then. The difference was that you could bring along heroes and/or henchmen to fill the gaps in your trinity. I levelled my monk completely as a healer using henchmen. I never felt obligated to DPS.

Sylent.3165:

Truth though is in gw1 never once did I run into a party while doing a mission or pvp were monk or tank was required. That’s what made it different from other games. The was no “you must have one tank, 1 healer, 2 dps to run this” requirements.

I find that very hard to believe. You must have been running a special mesmer build with some serious condition and/or hex removal. I could believe that you were missing one or the other, but I don’t know how you could get by with pure DPS.

Sylent.3165:

Many people say the holy trinity shouldn’t be in this game and I do 10000% agree with that. BUT gw1 didn’t have one either while making the standard tank/healer/dps system. It just wasn’t noticed as strongly because it was never required to have them all in a party.

In some places you could come up with gimmicky builds that effectively made your character a one-man trinity (smite monking the start of underworld comes to mind). However, the trinity was always there. I think the real difference was that you could always fill in gaps with heroes/henchmen. They weren’t always the best healers/tanks, but they were usually adequate.

Sylent.3165:

Why was gw2 not designed with this same method? A game were basically if your not going full out dps your not very helpful. They stated they wanted it to be kinda like gw1 in the aspects were everyone could do everything but they actually went the opposite direction and made it worse then a regular trinity system because everyone needs full zerker and dps.

Thoughts?

No one needs full zerker and DPS, just like you didn’t always need the trinity in GW1. Players just prefer it because it’s faster. The key is that in GW2 you are forced to do group content with a group of real players. For example, in GW1 my wife and I could 2-man just about every mission in the game (even the hard-mode ones) with just us and henchmen. That is not the case here. If I want to do a dungeon I need to /lfg, and 90% of the groups on there advertise for full zerker/DPS because they want to get their chore done as quickly as possible. That limits those of us who want to enjoy a leisurely dungeon run where we puzzle out and overcome mechanics. In GW1 I was able to hero/henchmen my way through gradually on my first run-through, and then when I grouped with others I was able to meaningfully contribute because I had learned and improved at my own pace. Now on my first few run throughs I basically get carried through the dungeon and often spend half the fights dead. Sometimes I even die enroute to the bosses, and I’m pretty much left behind until the fight is over. As a result, my rate of learning is severely hampered. Part of this is a consequence of being late to the game, but the fact remains that with the old hero/henchmen system this wouldn’t have mattered nearly as much. I am getting better at instances, but the learning curve is now months rather than days.

Let me start off by saying I love this game, so take everything that I say with that in mind.

The problem has very little to do with the “trinity” system, and everything to do with the content not matching the class design, and general lack of difficulty. The classes are designed quite well for the most part, with each class being able to fulfill every roll in some respect. However, the tasks that the game asks us to perform don’t really require a particularly nuanced or multi-faceted approach. With the exception of “stop skritt from stealing X” events, crowd control is almost completely unnecessary in PvE. The “support” role ends up being just stacking buffs, and as numerous people have said, at the end of the day damage takes the field. What we need is encounters where control of the battlefield is ABSOLUTELY necessary, and where the wrong buffs (or poorly timed ones) result in failure. And healing becomes irrelevant because no matter how many points you put into it, you can never be particularly effective compared to the damage done by powerful enemies, and more importantly, that damage is incredibly easy to avoid just by being on your toes as a player. (i.e. You don’t need to heal damage you don’t take) However, I maintain that what we really need back is the wipe. It’s SO difficult to fail in Guild Wars 2. Even if you’re playing with inexperienced, poorly equipped people, a dungeon encounter can be kittened up numerous times until you get the hang of it, because you respawn 8 feet from where you just died with an imperceptible amount of armor damage. And don’t even get me started at the mindlessness of the personal story encounters. Sure, you can fail at Tequatl or jungle worm, but there are no consequences. You say “oh well, there went 20 minutes,” and go about your way. Moreover, the solution to every problem is overwhelming force, because the imposed challenge is always time. The epic scale of events is cool, so I’m not saying get rid of all the people, just find a way to mitigate our numbers, so that the solution isn’t always “need more people at red!!” That for me has always been the worst part of this game. Combat in PvE just isn’t terribly interesting because it’s so easy. It’s nice to be on the edge of your seat every once in a while. Now there are ways to manufacture a challenge to make use of your non-zerker gear, like soloing fractals. But this often ends up just being LONGER, not MORE DIFFICULT, and the rewards are less, not more. So yes, you don’t need zerker gear, but if you don’t have it, you’re basically just making killing monsters more time-consuming for yourself with no payoff.

Akhana.5728:

Let me start off by saying I love this game, so take everything that I say with that in mind.

The problem has very little to do with the “trinity” system, and everything to do with the content not matching the class design, and general lack of difficulty. The classes are designed quite well for the most part, with each class being able to fulfill every roll in some respect. However, the tasks that the game asks us to perform don’t really require a particularly nuanced or multi-faceted approach. With the exception of “stop skritt from stealing X” events, crowd control is almost completely unnecessary in PvE. The “support” role ends up being just stacking buffs, and as numerous people have said, at the end of the day damage takes the field. What we need is encounters where control of the battlefield is ABSOLUTELY necessary, and where the wrong buffs (or poorly timed ones) result in failure. And healing becomes irrelevant because no matter how many points you put into it, you can never be particularly effective compared to the damage done by powerful enemies, and more importantly, that damage is incredibly easy to avoid just by being on your toes as a player. (i.e. You don’t need to heal damage you don’t take) However, I maintain that what we really need back is the wipe. It’s SO difficult to fail in Guild Wars 2. Even if you’re playing with inexperienced, poorly equipped people, a dungeon encounter can be kittened up numerous times until you get the hang of it, because you respawn 8 feet from where you just died with an imperceptible amount of armor damage. And don’t even get me started at the mindlessness of the personal story encounters. Sure, you can fail at Tequatl or jungle worm, but there are no consequences. You say “oh well, there went 20 minutes,” and go about your way. Moreover, the solution to every problem is overwhelming force, because the imposed challenge is always time. The epic scale of events is cool, so I’m not saying get rid of all the people, just find a way to mitigate our numbers, so that the solution isn’t always “need more people at red!!” That for me has always been the worst part of this game. Combat in PvE just isn’t terribly interesting because it’s so easy. It’s nice to be on the edge of your seat every once in a while. Now there are ways to manufacture a challenge to make use of your non-zerker gear, like soloing fractals. But this often ends up just being LONGER, not MORE DIFFICULT, and the rewards are less, not more. So yes, you don’t need zerker gear, but if you don’t have it, you’re basically just making killing monsters more time-consuming for yourself with no payoff.

Recent enemies and bosses in this game has been realy improved for boonplay, cc and damage, It isn’t just stack up that much anymore. Sure we still stack in masses but some monsters do insane damage to stacked masses and it is realy bad to stack but alot of players havent realized this yet so they stay to the old mentality and stack and a full group dies at the same time. And some bosses force you to stack atleast for a moment. Since the Season 2 in my opinion fights have started to be more interesting and not just zerg and kill. Just becouse most players does this still doesn’t mean it is the best way anymore.

And on to topic, trinity or not… I have played alot of MMOrpg’s and they all have had trinity and with GW2 I am so happy that I can play exactly how I want now I even have an armor set for my guardian to give support and healing if I want to do that.

And oh, btw this healer guardian of mine is wonderfull I can keep a 4-DPS party alive even if they are bad at dodging.

xDudisx.5914:

1. Gw2 is a great game but its 2 main problems are the lack of trinity and no real gear progression.

2. The first step would be create a aggro generating mechanic that is control by the player. Could be a sigil or rune set that increases aggro, maybe a trait or signet. With no aggro there is no tank.

1. I don’t see these as problems. For me personally, they were big selling points.

2. ‘Tank’ isn’t a role; Control is the role, and there are quite a few mechanics that could be used as Control mechanics if the encounters were designed in certain ways:

• Soft CC – Cripple, Immobilize, Chill
• Hard CC – Stun, Daze, Knockdown, Knockback, Fear
• Damage Denial – Interrupts, Blind, Weakness
• Heal Denial – Poison
• Boon Denial – Boon Stripping / Conversion / Thieving

So, for example, a boss has a mechanic that every melee attack that hits a player (doesn’t have to deal damage) they boss generates a stack of Might (so hitting 5 players would generate 5 stacks of Might). At certain points the boss will also gain benefits based on the amount of Might they have (increased resistance to damage, attacks strip boons, attacks penetrate blocks etc).

Here players have a number of options:

• Stay ranged and used hard and soft CC to kite the boss.
• Use Damage Denial in order to get some burst in in melee / reduce the damage of the bosses attacks.
• Use Boon Denial to prevent the stacks getting too high.

These are all Control elements that players can either a) choose one or two people to be dedicated to or b) share the responsibility and rotate who does what at certain times.

You don’t need dedicated aggro generation skills to have a Control role.

IMHO, GW2 doesn’t need the Trinity or pre-defined dedicated roles. What it needs is:

• Newton’s Third Law. – For every mechanic and tactic in the game, there should be an equal and opposing mechanic / tactic that counters it. For example, a boss might have a skill that has an increased effect if it hits more people, as well as a skill that increases damage if it only hits a single player.

• Encounters that have a variety of mechanics that happen at the same time. For example, imagine the Effigy in CoF if smashing down the crystals a) was a mechanic you had to take notice of and b) destroying crystals conferred some sort of debuff that made it so players needed to swap in and out of that role (think carrying the hammer in Cliffside Fractal). This allows for flexible roles to be created unique to that encounter.

• Mobs and Bosses need to be equal to players. For example, a current boss may have auto-attack and 3 unique skills. Not much when you compare that to all of the tools a group of players have (skills, weapon swap, traits, runes, sigils, combo fields, dodge etc). Retooling mobs and bosses to have the equivalent of what one player has, as well as some unique mechanics and skills allows the devs to reduce the overall damage done by each mechanic / skill of the boss, and also places more importance on proper control and support.

A New Way of Looking at Healing and Death

While it may not completely answer the OP’s questions, Jon Peters’ article does explain much of the thinking that went into the current GW2 combat system.

Also, I like this…