Guild Wars 2

Incentivizing Build Diversity

“Play what you want, the way you want!”

This has always been Guild Wars 2 motto. And yes, that has been the truth since launch. This does not mean that there’s no trinity nor that everyone should be able to do everything at once. This is an awesome concept: Wanna play a Ranger? Do it. Don’t like ranged combat and still wanna play a Ranger? Grab a greatsword and have fun. Wanna deal high damage with a Ranger? You can do it, just get the right traits and equipments. Wanna soak up some damage but don’t wanna give up the Ranger? You can do it. Wanna support your team and you really can’t get enough of Ranger? Well, you have numerous ways to do it.
That is, at least in my opinion, the way ArenaNet wanted the game to be. Unfortunely that is only half true. As of the current state of the game you are given to much without sacrificing nearly anything. That cripples build diversity and actually endorses the berserker meta, since you can go full dps without having to worry too much about everything else. Solving this is really about finding the right balance between the strength of your base attributes and your overall efficiency while unspecialized vs. your efficiency while fully geared and built to a defined role (be it a soft one or a hard defined one). So these are my suggestions on what could be done to address some of those issues.

Healing power and Scaling

Every profession can heal themselves and their teammates, each one with its particular flavor and fashion. While a necro can share his vampiric characteristics with their allies a guardian would breathe healing flames onto their fellow mates. The problem is that healing is so powerful in this game that it becomes trivial. Your heal with be just as powerful whether you’ve built towards healing power or not. The scaling of this attribute is laughable and since is not something that will impact you in any way it becomes irrelevant. This is what I would suggest:

- Reduce all base healing currently in the game (including those coming from water fields) by anywhere between 35%-50%
- Increase the scaling factor of each skill to an amount between 0.5 – 4.0

Prayer to Dwayna, a human racial heal skill, currently heals for 6,520 with a scaling factor of 0.85 off of Healing Power. In full Cleric’s exotic equipment you have a total of 1138 HP (excluding runes, sigils, food or traits) resulting in roughly a 15% increase in the healing output ( 7,487 ). It doesn’t feel rewarding to spec into Healing Power since the difference is not that great and the base healing is already really good.

To illustrate my suggestion lets take the same skill and tweak it accordingly.

Prayer to Dwayna now heals for 4,300 (34% less efficiency) and has a scaling factor of 3.25. In the same Cleric’s gear, you would now heal for 7,998 (an 86% increase). Now suddenly makes a huge difference to have built for healing power, and you as a player feel rewarded for investing in it.
There is still no dedicated healer. Every profession can still heal…. if you spec for it.

Revisiting the Combat System

As it is now, the combat system relies a lot in active defenses such as dodges, skillful use of blocks, invuls and so on. That is not a bad design, but this should be a matter of timing and skill and the constant flood of this mechanics invalidate any other types of mitigation in combat. ArenaNet should try and avoid giving so much access to these types of mechanics so combat can feel more varied. At some point the combat should be so challenging and engaging that it would exhaust your active defenses so the other types of defense (healing and toughness) can have a place. Mobs should have some sort of weakness as well as strengths so that we could explore them and take advantage of it. Right now every mob is especially vulnerable to direct damage and THAT is why the Zerker Meta lives. As soon as we get more types of vulnerabilities on mobs we’ll see actual variety in builds and reasoning in building towards something.

Fortitude, a New Stat

“You don’t mitigate conditions, you outlive them!”

That is not entirely truth. We should have a more direct way of dealing with conditions other than cleansing and high vitality. My suggestion is the inclusion of a new stat, similar to Ferocity: Fortitude. At level 80, each 27 points of Fortitude represents a 1% reduction of incoming condition damage. I think that this could address some concerns about the recent changes with conditions, but of course in PvE that would mean that mobs should apply a lot more conditions for this to be even considered using (tying to the previous topic).

TL;DR;
- Less base healing; Increased healing power scaling
- Combat being more engaging in order to exhaust active defenses opening up a place for healing and toughness.
- Mobs being less vulnerable to direct damage and more susceptible to other forms of damage.

Well, these are my suggestions and what I think could improve the game for us!
Let me know what you guys think.

1) I agree with the healing power side of the question. But they better give us good healing power gear with that change. Right now, the healing power gear is limited and often expensive. Someone could want a mix of zerker and zealot for example, so he can do decent damage, but still have some boost on his healing skill. But zealot cost SO MUCH and you can’t have those on trinket. Same with a sinister build that would want some Condition, Precision, Healing Power gear that doesn’t exist. Without decent and accessible healing gear, there will always be a downside to taking some healing gear.

2) That doesn’t need ANY change in the current combat mechanic. The current content is just too easy and too old to push you to your limit. We still have a LOT of active defense unused in the current meta. Protection, Weakness, Vigor, etc All those are support that help active defense, but that we simply ignore because we don’t need them right now in the current content. Push people and they will use those. Push people even farther and we’ll need some toughness and vitality. But seriously, IMO toughness and vitality don’t bring anything to the gameplay. I much rather make active support more important. A bit like you healing power suggestion.

Make endurance regen less powerful, but make vigor more powerful. Push player to want to bring AoE Vigor in a build.

Make boons harder to get so you need some boon duration or more skills/trait to provide that boon. Right now it’s so easy to get 25 stack of might, perma fury, etc.

I feel like combat has to push players to the limit of their abilities. Thoughness and healing will only have a place as long as active defenses don’t cut it (imo they shouldn’t be the be-all-end-all) and self healing is toned down a lot.

Edit: Grammar hammer

they can’t boost healing stat without breaking combos because that is NOT AFFECTED by stat. this is why the base is fix and the stat doesn’t impact much, GW2 is not design to be a face tank game, if there is a need for tons of heal then either the player are not playing it right or the game is not design correctly.

i didn’t even use healing stat to keep my team up in raid, so long as they know what they are doing, i only need to buff them periodically. buffing pure heal build will break the game imo. there were already attempt to build facetanker in fotm. using the right skill should be rewarded more than spamming heals.

Daegony.3604:

I feel like combat has to push players to the limit of their abilities. Thoughness and healing will only have a place as long as active defenses don’t cut it (imo they shouldn’t be the be-all-end-all) and self healing is toned down a lot.

Edit: Grammar hammer

You are wrong there. There will always be a place where good player will be ok with their active defense, while the vast majority of player will need to rely on some more passive buff because their level of skills, reaction time, reflexes won’t cut it.

Just take a look at Fractal 50. How many people change their build a little in pugs to have a range weapon, or maybe take another heal than arcane brilliance on their ele, or change a trait or two? Hell, did you see the group that trio fractal with a healing guardian? Their run is faster and easier than most 5 man pug group I ever did. So there is a place right now for those thing (surviability and healing). Still, good players go full dps and melee everything. But fractal 50 is the only place where this begin to show. You don’t see that in 99% of the content so for most people it’s like it doesn’t exist.

@lagrangewei You’ve missed the point. Actually you proved mine. You said “[…]I didn’t even use healing stat to keep my team up in raid, so long as they know what they are doing[…]” If you are a support character that wants to pump out heals you should be using Healing Power. Everyone’s efficiency in a few areas of a build are too independant of said stat. So why not run Zerker if I can still heal my teammates to roughly the same as someone who has built his/her character around that. I’m not talking only about blasting water fields.

I agree that GW2 combat system is action based and therefore relies heavily in active defenses and not “face-tanking”. My point is combat should drive your skills to the limit, there should come a point where you run out of active defenses and fall back to some other traditional methods. Zerker should be your best set of gear for damage, but that’s it, you’re a good damage dealer. You shouldn’t be able to go full zerk and still keep your team alive, and still survive mostly everything, and still … you get the point.

At least that’s what I think.

healing power is 1 stat, condi or zerker build eat 3 stat, it obiviously not going to be moon and sun apart.

if you have healing being a big thing, people WILL be lazy, cause why not? from what I seen in the raid, the boss does a constant dmg and that is really what the healer deal with, for the dmg cause by failing to CC and missing AOE, player has to pop their personal heal and invurability.

nerfing healing power to make healing stat had a greater range will kind of make their personal heal meaningless and people will just be blaming healer for not healing enough, so…

Daegony.3604:

My point is combat should drive your skills to the limit, there should come a point where you run out of active defenses and fall back to some other traditional methods.

But why? Obviously active defense is far more fun then doing nothing because your gear have enough toughness to keep you alive passively. So why we should fall back to more traditional method. Why not giving us more active defense to deal with bigger problem. And tbh I’m putting healer in the active defense here. It’s active to heal you friend, it’s not to have a soldier gear and be able to get hit in the face several times.

Daegony.3604:

Zerker should be your best set of gear for damage, but that’s it, you’re a good damage dealer. You shouldn’t be able to go full zerk and still keep your team alive, and still survive mostly everything, and still … you get the point.

At least that’s what I think.

Well the reason you can keep your team alive in zerker is that there is only one stats that help you keep your team alive and it’s healing power. Since the content isn’t hard enough you don’t need healing, so that only leave us with zerker or sinister.

If the content is hard enough that we need healing and active defense, we would still only need zerker and some healing power. Boons, Reflect, Blind, Endurance, etc. All of those don’t need stats from gear.

lagrangewei.8516:

[…]nerfing healing power to make healing stat had a greater range will kind of make their personal heal meaningless and people will just be blaming healer for not healing enough, so…

I don’t think that it would become meaningless. It just becomes something that you can and imo should care about. If you’re a pure berserker you should think “I gotta be careful ’coz my heal is not as strong but oh look at dat damage!” and if you’re a cleric you should feel the damage being mitigated by your armor and actually see the difference in your healing capabilities. All stats should matter as opposed to what happens right now. Changing the healing power scale, and reducing the base effectiveness is a step in a good direction in my opinion.

Thaddeus.4891:

Well the reason you can keep your team alive in zerker is that there is only one stats that help you keep your team alive and it’s healing power. Since the content isn’t hard enough you don’t need healing, so that only leave us with zerker or sinister.

If the content is hard enough that we need healing and active defense, we would still only need zerker and some healing power. Boons, Reflect, Blind, Endurance, etc. All of those don’t need stats from gear.

I see your point. It’s a valid one and I agree with your first post. Boons should be rarer so they become meaningful and I still really believe Healing should be revamped (base toned down and scale factor increased). As for toughness and passive play I… yeah, I gotta agree with you but I do feel like the are way to many active defenses in game. So many that they are rarely a skilled play since some professions can spam invuls, blinds, evades/dodges, blocks, interrupts… and AI does hardly anything to keep up with the amount of counters to it. I hope I’m getting my point of view across ^^

Daegony.3604:

As for toughness and passive play I… yeah, I gotta agree with you but I do feel like the are way to many active defenses in game. So many that they are rarely a skilled play since some professions can spam invuls, blinds, evades/dodges, blocks, interrupts… and AI does hardly anything to keep up with the amount of counters to it. I hope I’m getting my point of view across ^^

Well it depend on what content you base yourself. When I fight in dungeon I have way too much active defence for what the dungeon is throwing at me. But do you feel you have too many active defense when fighting Archidiviner or Mossman at fractal 50? You can have enough if you burst them down and fight them in less than a minute, but that’s not the case in most pugs. That’s why you see people killing mossman underwater, using the rock at Archidiviner or doing these fight in range. Because they attack too hard, too often for most people to have enough active defense. You need a group with good dps and good coordination to be able to have enough active defense.

If Fractal 100 and Raids are harder than fractal 50, we should see that trend continue. Pusing pugs father tha they need to change their build for more surviability or bring a healer. While the best player would be able to figure out a way to burst down boss under a minute while using several active defense from the whole group.

Cut active defenses where appropriate and decrease peak damage on both players and mobs. Buffing players then buffing mobs gains nothing.

Include mobs where conditions cause more damage than direct.

Stop people bi-passing mobs by using exploits like invisibility.