Guild Wars 2

Waiting years between substantial profession updates, and doing mostly trait number tweaks, has caused a lot of stagnation. This needs to be addressed, and not just for spvp, but for the entire game…

1. Add elites, with new weapons and slot skills, way more frequently to greatly boost diversity and replayability.

2. Reduce many weapon and slot skill cool downs, because long timers are really anti-fast paced and twitch play. These simple changes would also be the answer to improving core professions.

Skills need longer cooldowns, not shorter ones. The short cooldowns are what makes the game feel spammy and skill-less.

Part of the appeal to combat in gw2 is the fast paced nature of it, and long cooldowns on skills are counter productive to that.

Swagger.1459:

Part of the appeal to combat in gw2 is the fast paced nature of it, and long cooldowns on skills are counter productive to that.

Well what kind of cds are you even talking about? Class? Weapons? Skills? Imo weapon cds around 10-20s are ok, anything lower is spammy. For skills, up that to 20-30s. 30s+ on either is where I start thinking its boring (elites at 100s+ being most obvious examples, I’d rather have “weaker” versions).

Your post make no sense without specifics.

I mean sure, I’d also like blowtorch on 1s cd so I agree with everything you said.

HoT made skills more powerful and more accessible. PvP is pretty much dead now. There might be some causation there…

Because most professions in GW2 do not have a resource system for skills, the only limiter is cooldowns. If the cooldowns are too short, you no longer need to choose between using a skill or saving it for a better moment later.

Dawdler.8521:

Swagger.1459:

Part of the appeal to combat in gw2 is the fast paced nature of it, and long cooldowns on skills are counter productive to that.

Well what kind of cds are you even talking about? Class? Weapons? Skills? Imo weapon cds around 10-20s are ok, anything lower is spammy. For skills, up that to 20-30s. 30s+ on either is where I start thinking its boring (elites at 100s+ being most obvious examples, I’d rather have “weaker” versions).

Your post make no sense without specifics.

I mean sure, I’d also like blowtorch on 1s cd so I agree with everything you said.

But I already specified… “Reduce many weapon and slot skill cool downs”… https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Skill_bar#Slot_skills

The general idea was a good enough explanation, and it’s pretty safe to identify (like you just did) the skills that have unnecessarily long cool downs.

It’s fast paced regardless of the cooldowns. Low cooldowns just make it spammy and a massive mess.

OlrunTheBlade.1486:

Skills need longer cooldowns, not shorter ones. The short cooldowns are what makes the game feel spammy and skill-less.

I agree with with olrun 100%

You want certain skills and abilities to have meaningful effects. Longer CD for potentially stronger skills and lower cds for abilites that wont have as much impact.

For instance the warrior who has a full adrenaline bar goes into beserk mode. Hits F1 misses but its ok because they are using beserker stance. In 3 sec trys to F1 again lands and then uses head butt then F1 again.

The most damage a warrior can do is be in beserk mode landing spammable attacks.

Before you had to make a choice, be OP in juggernaut for 20 or less sec. Be team support with a banner or have a really good passive signet for a elite that allowed for better regen.

People hate thieves because staff 5 with dodge is straight spam. Mesmer goes back in time to recast skills it straight spam.

If they rework traits they need to rebalance them and make items like engy 5 hammer skill have a long cool down since a stun should force players to use a utility which has a longer CD then the hammer weapon if they dont have stability.

PLayers should have to dodge a hammer 5 from a warrior instead of sitting on perma boons.

Fast game play isnt the goal (even though its already fast) competitive meaningful game play with build diversity and the ability to run unique team comps is.

kdaddy.5431:

OlrunTheBlade.1486:

Skills need longer cooldowns, not shorter ones. The short cooldowns are what makes the game feel spammy and skill-less.

I agree with with olrun 100%

You want certain skills and abilities to have meaningful effects. Longer CD for potentially stronger skills and lower cds for abilites that wont have as much impact.

For instance the warrior who has a full adrenaline bar goes into beserk mode. Hits F1 misses but its ok because they are using beserker stance. In 3 sec trys to F1 again lands and then uses head butt then F1 again.

The most damage a warrior can do is be in beserk mode landing spammable attacks.

Before you had to make a choice, be OP in juggernaut for 20 or less sec. Be team support with a banner or have a really good passive signet for a elite that allowed for better regen.

People hate thieves because staff 5 with dodge is straight spam. Mesmer goes back in time to recast skills it straight spam.

If they rework traits they need to rebalance them and make items like engy 5 hammer skill have a long cool down since a stun should force players to use a utility which has a longer CD then the hammer weapon if they dont have stability.

PLayers should have to dodge a hammer 5 from a warrior instead of sitting on perma boons.

Fast game play isnt the goal (even though its already fast) competitive meaningful game play with build diversity and the ability to run unique team comps is.

Yes, let’s increase skill cool downs and make this a completely awful combat system, and push even more players off to other games…

… reevaluating skill effectiveness would be a given if cool downs were decreased.

OlrunTheBlade.1486:

Skills need longer cooldowns, not shorter ones. The short cooldowns are what makes the game feel spammy and skill-less.

Exactly this! In my opinion an energy/mana system is needed to prevent people from spell spamming. The amount of stuns each class has access to, should be reduced. Add longer cast duration of spells to have more counterplay. The combat is that fast paced, even experienced players can’t completely follow, so how should inexperienced players manage to follow combat?

OlrunTheBlade.1486:

Skills need longer cooldowns, not shorter ones. The short cooldowns are what makes the game feel spammy and skill-less.

Wow.. I find myself agreeing with an ESL player.

MatthiasL.5346:

OlrunTheBlade.1486:

Skills need longer cooldowns, not shorter ones. The short cooldowns are what makes the game feel spammy and skill-less.

Exactly this! In my opinion an energy/mana system is needed to prevent people from spell spamming. The amount of stuns each class has access to, should be reduced. Add longer cast duration of spells to have more counterplay. The combat is that fast paced, even experienced players can’t completely follow, so how should inexperienced players manage to follow combat?

Being able to “follow combat” has nothing to do with cool downs, that has to do with skill animation and telegraphs… You can thank the old revamped gw1 engine for that.

Swagger.1459:

MatthiasL.5346:

OlrunTheBlade.1486:

Skills need longer cooldowns, not shorter ones. The short cooldowns are what makes the game feel spammy and skill-less.

Exactly this! In my opinion an energy/mana system is needed to prevent people from spell spamming. The amount of stuns each class has access to, should be reduced. Add longer cast duration of spells to have more counterplay. The combat is that fast paced, even experienced players can’t completely follow, so how should inexperienced players manage to follow combat?

Being able to “follow combat” has nothing to do with cool downs, that has to do with skill animation and telegraphs… You can thank the old revamped gw1 engine for that.

recently got a 1070 and can now play on ultra at like 160-180 fps in pvp at least and i can actually see through all the sparkles and stuff now its quite amazing how much i can see now. Now im not saying everyone should need 1070 specs to play this game because they shouldnt and im also aware that this game is heavily CPU relient. BUT it is possible to see everything perfectly if you have the right equipment.

OlrunTheBlade.1486:

Skills need longer cooldowns, not shorter ones. The short cooldowns are what makes the game feel spammy and skill-less.

Why?

How does spending all your time waiting for cds make the game “more skilled?”

When you opponent is always capable of hurting you, the game is much more intense.

The entire reason I quit SWTOR for this game was because I got tired of SWTOR’s “you can only kill someone every 22 seconds when your cell burst is up, and so help you if you don’t crit.” which was almost as bad as the “I see a enemy player setting up their burst, but I can’t do anything about it b/c 60sec cds”

There is a reason that fighter games (which are generally considered the quintessential high-skill genre) don’t even have cooldowns period.

Just look at the necromancer class. Very few high level players main it, and the reason is because it’s a class with minimal tools and long cds, and no high level player likes not having tools available when they need them.

Swagger.1459:

MatthiasL.5346:

OlrunTheBlade.1486:

Skills need longer cooldowns, not shorter ones. The short cooldowns are what makes the game feel spammy and skill-less.

Exactly this! In my opinion an energy/mana system is needed to prevent people from spell spamming. The amount of stuns each class has access to, should be reduced. Add longer cast duration of spells to have more counterplay. The combat is that fast paced, even experienced players can’t completely follow, so how should inexperienced players manage to follow combat?

Being able to “follow combat” has nothing to do with cool downs, that has to do with skill animation and telegraphs… You can thank the old revamped gw1 engine for that.

Of course it has. You can’t tell me spamming spells isn’t a problem here. You never know all cds of the enemy in combat (4v4 or even 3v3)

OlrunTheBlade.1486:

Skills need longer cooldowns, not shorter ones. The short cooldowns are what makes the game feel spammy and skill-less.

Disagree. As it is a lot of utility skills (even more so for elite skills) are not good enough to justify their CDs as it is. Yes, ~20 seconds on a utility skill is too short imo. But anything higher than ~35 seconds is starting to get too high barring highly situational skills like portal (which, coincidentally, happens to be a very strong utility skill if used correctly).

the more skills a class have the longer the cds should be. the less skills the shorter the cds. also more powerful skills should have longer cd and less powerful shorter cds ofc. I feel like the speed in this game is fine right now, however a lot of that got lopsided with HoT.

In general, I’d prefer underused utilities got functionality buffs rather than cooldown reductions.

I say merge NA & EU regions for pvp …
Get rid of the petty elitism bs that EU players get them selves off with every night.
In terms of ping, there’s really not that much of a difference between playing on an NA server or EU server… It would increase the visual presence of the lobby. It would give that psychological trick that there is always someone playing by forcing more people into view then separating them by regions. This is established with the basic example, that a person is more willing to stop at a store if there are cars parked up front (even if they are employee cars) then a store that is empty up front…

Careful what you wish for. As annoying as skill spam is its better than ANet going to the other extreme, with utility skills being really powerful, but on 45+ sec CDs so who wins a fight is determined more based on which of your utilities are on CD when it starts, and not your individual skill.

MatthiasL.5346:

Swagger.1459:

MatthiasL.5346:

OlrunTheBlade.1486:

Skills need longer cooldowns, not shorter ones. The short cooldowns are what makes the game feel spammy and skill-less.

Exactly this! In my opinion an energy/mana system is needed to prevent people from spell spamming. The amount of stuns each class has access to, should be reduced. Add longer cast duration of spells to have more counterplay. The combat is that fast paced, even experienced players can’t completely follow, so how should inexperienced players manage to follow combat?

Being able to “follow combat” has nothing to do with cool downs, that has to do with skill animation and telegraphs… You can thank the old revamped gw1 engine for that.

Of course it has. You can’t tell me spamming spells isn’t a problem here. You never know all cds of the enemy in combat (4v4 or even 3v3)

Timers on skills have NOTHING to do with the low quality skill animations and effects. GW2 has an engine that can’t handle super animations and effects, that’s why the devs go with the minimalist approach in this area.

I played city of heroes for a long time and I knew most of the time what skill was being fired and used, but not here. I can look at a ton of other games and their skills are easily identifiable because of the clear visuals, so you know what is going on, but not here… That’s a big part of the reason why gameplay in gw2 is mostly reactive in wvw and spvp, as opposed to proactive.

No to shorter CDs, unless the skills are reduced in effectiveness as well, which won’t happen because then they’ll feel weaker and nobody wants that.

How about this.

1) Increase the TTK in spvp. Lower Condition durations, make it so condi builds have to WORK to keep condis on players. Negate burst, no one should be dieing within 5 seconds.

2) Get rid of CC. This game clearly has to much. Give players a small amount of immunity after they have been hit by CC. This prevents stacking.

3) Tweak soft CC.
Blind → Only able to be applied from the front in close range quarters.
Cripple → Keep it as is
Chill → Same as well, reduce duration and effectiveness.
Slow → Get rid of it
Daze → Lower the duration of this

4) Defensive skills:
Blocks → Lower the amount a class has, make it so you cant block and attack at the same time as well.
Invulnerable → If you attack it goes away, plain and simple.
Cloak → Remains as is

Without any critical analysis my gut says I’d be up for shorter cooldowns if we had longer, and more animated cast times. Mostly because I don’t know how something like Signet of humility every 30 seconds is fair otherwise.

That being said, it wouldn’t be a bad place to calculate balance from the perspective of if we presume every class almost always has every option at their disposal available, it would make some match ups more fair, and could possibly punish sustain builds designed to last through a round of cooldowns before punishing. But who knows it could overly buff other sustain builds. Engie and ele can already cycle cooldowns and kite to great effectiveness.

If we’re giving up on E-sports views isn’t a big deal, but the game is already an incomprehensible mess to anyone not already involved, and shorter cooldowns wouldn’t help.

The thing I like most about the concept is that you could virtually react to anything which is better for a team based game, as opposed to forcing the game into majority anticipation territory.

While I agree there is too much CC, negating burst and increasing TTK would only result in a boring bunker meta.

OlrunTheBlade.1486:

While I agree there is too much CC, negating burst and increasing TTK would only result in a boring bunker meta.

Also conquest is so much better with a low TTK, that’s why it thrives much better in other games, especially shooters.

Which is why you tweak healing numbers and duration as well. In order to have a major uptime of boons in pvp, it should require teamplay.

OlrunTheBlade.1486:

While I agree there is too much CC, negating burst and increasing TTK would only result in a boring bunker meta.

It depends how you see it. In hero battles in guild wars 1, you had top builds being only based on capping, and alternatively builds being based only on damage with no form of healing. The same appeared in Gw2 around the beginning, it was much more tactical and you could run a lot of builds.

If you get matchs with 5 DPS with no defense against 5 bunkers with no damage( that’s an extreme case, but you get the point), it could be really interesting

I agree strongly with the first one. very strongly.

the second one makes sense for certain skills. examples:
war elite signet
death shroud 4-5
ele glyphs

Swagger.1459:

2. Reduce many weapon and slot skill cool downs, because long timers are really anti-fast paced and twitch play. These simple changes would also be the answer to improving core professions.

Shorter cooldowns are generally more interesting game play but unfortunately GW2 has far too many cooldowns to make that happen.

In an ideal world you have far fewer skills and traits, all of them are high impact, and playing around their (shortish) cooldowns is where you get play. But in GW2 everyone has kittentons of skills and what often feels like an endless supply of cooldowns to burn through before you can accomplish anything. If you’re going to kill a dragonhunter you aren’t counting dodges like you could in the old days, you’re popping the traps, counting the blocks, waiting out the F3, waiting for it to refresh then waiting it out again, then maybe you can actually do something if you’ve put out enough pressure to get those all out before they start refreshing naturally.

You have just endless streams of nonsense to stay alive, but if you don’t have that or make use of it well you just pop from passive ticking AoEs and cleave that’s being puked out.

I’d like to have a conversation about cooldowns, but it just isn’t relevant in the current state of the game. There’s just too much of everything.

It sounds like you’d like more instant effects instead of skills that have an effect over time. But the number of skills has more or less stayed the same in GW2 over the years, and its certainly far less than a lot of other games have.

I think both sides here are right in some cases. We need longer cds, but we need shorter cds as well. For example, I would be totally fine with True Shot having a 10 or more seconds of cd if it still did what it used to do. And that’s deal damage. On the other hand you have Signet of Courage with its ridiculously long cd.