Guild Wars 2

(Beware! Wall of text following)

Many discussions are going on in these forums, and thx to those, confronting myself with other players, i have recently stopped a bit to think about what the game offers and how it could be improved to suit more for the “pro play”.
I personally hate QQs so i would like to open a constructive, QQ-free topic, where we can discuss about how to raise the pvp skillcap (thus improving effectiveness of teamwork in a teamfight) without making the game hard to learn for new players.

[Dont jump on me if you dont agree with what i’ll state later on, lets just try to point out something good, cause if Anet actually tells some truths, they do read and talk about good threads. ]

Taking out the holy trinity…

As was stated on other topics, GW2 took out the holy trinity, which was a good and brave step away from the usual formula. Some can dislike the idea or love it (i would love it), but seems like the holy trinity, and its innate teamwork factor didnt get its proper replacement.

By taking out a dedicated healer role, all professions needed some self-sustaining abilities, and the support role could spread on every profession rather than being focused on one or two of them; this could be really good, cause it could bring a great variety of setups in different teams. Any profession should be able to cover different
roles with different builds, thus increasing the variety of the encounters in a match.

Fact is that all this possible variety isnt happening, we mostly see same classes built and playing in the same way, specially at higher pvp levels. I was asking myself why ? Is it cause ppl lack of creativity ? I dont think so, at least I dont, in every game I step I always take my time for buildcrafting experiments.
In the time i spent in this game i tried every profession and a kittenload of builds, and not just the most used, i deeply explored many classes possbilities, untill (quite soon actually) tried out some full-support oriented builds.
Cause you know, if there can be full dps builds, tanky builds, why not full supportive builds ? Someone should be allowed to choose a support build for his team setup and his actions should actually be as decisive as a dps spec.

An interesting question to put is “When are you really decisive in the flow of a battle?” (not considering game mode for now, just a basic teamfight), probably the common answer would be, when i burst down my target (or stomp it).

…left us with tanks, busters and…. what about support?

Support doesnt feel to be such a decisive role, infact you dont see crowds of support builds running around, why ?
What i think should happen is: player X is getting focused -> call for help -> allies protect/heal/support him.
This just cant happen here for a simple reason, by the time you say “i’m – getting – focused”, unless you are a bunker you are probably down already. So here start the race to who burst more, focusing on the target, this leads to building bunkers that are able to survive against burst builds.

From what stated above seems like support can’t be effective for a matter of “low expected time to live”, <<dont bother healing allies, by the time you unleash your ‘powerfull’ heals they’ll be down already>>.
Yeah i know, lately i spoke like the only form of support is healing, yet its also preventing damage, cleansing conditions, applying boons; But many skills able to provide that kind of support has really a short effect compared to their cooldowns, or to say this better…. considering how quickly an ally can be downed, trading dps for support doesnt look a good choise.

Any solutions ?

Following this line gets me to think that overall damage needs a tone down in order for support role to be effective. Not just on that class or on that other one, but a global reduction (maybe on dmg clac formual) so that we dont have one class that risk to be nerfed more than others. Toning down damage equally on everything doesnt gives advantage to someone more than to someone else, just open some space support/heals.
Bursting someone down shouldnt be something that a single member can achieve….alone; i can see its right to happen when a team coordinates CC + boonstacking + spike damage.

Problem that might arise with such a change and why its not actually a problem

You might argue that with the reduced damage and chance to burst, there will be even more bunkers with new added healers sitting on every points and it would become impossible to take them out of there. Well, as many stated, its a problem of game mode, with some little changes that have been suggested already, the capture mode could shift more toward the teamfight and step a bit away from the “sit-on-the-point-mode”.
A team full of bunky healers wont be able to kill anyone in a well balanced team, and a full dps team would feel like they are missing something compared to a balanced team that can easily sustain the fight.

p.s.
I know lot of these things have been pointed out already, but maybe if we get more and more ppl into this we might get something good.

yes you are right on the money.
many people don’t want to hear this because they think “i don’t want my class nerfed” but that is the difference between a player and a person that thinks about the whole game.

there isn’t too much else to be said. each class needs to have a substantial weakness that another class can fill. they need to step away from trying to make each class viable at every role — this is a recipe for homogenization, not exciting pvp.

milo.6942:

they need to step away from trying to make each class viable at every role — this is a recipe for homogenization, not exciting pvp.

Actually i stated quite the opposite. But this wasnt the main point; the core was on how to improve the teamwork to an higher level and not just be a (focus dps → down → stomp → next target ) play.

cuge.5398:

milo.6942:

they need to step away from trying to make each class viable at every role — this is a recipe for homogenization, not exciting pvp.

Actually i stated quite the opposite. But this wasnt the main point; the core was on how to improve the teamwork to an higher level and not just be a (focus dps -> down -> stomp -> next target ) play.

i’m a big boy, i can make my own points.

Honestly, I think we don’t see people with support builds in PvP for the same reason we don’t see them in PvE: Support abilities are either too weak or are so readily availble that there’s no need to trait full support.

And really, it’s kinda sad. I think viable support builds would really improve the game a lot.

At this point, it would take a lot of changes to accomplish this, but if we could get to a place where there were very strong support abilities that required a clear sacrifice of dps or bunker ability, then we might be able to see this niche open.

cuge.5398:

Support doesnt feel to be such a decisive role, infact you dont see crowds of support builds running around, why ?
What i think should happen is: player X is getting focused → call for help → allies protect/heal/support him.
This just cant happen here for a simple reason, by the time you say “i’m – getting – focused”, unless you are a bunker you are probably down already. So here start the race to who burst more, focusing on the target, this leads to building bunkers that are able to survive against burst builds.

I am going to attempt to not sound like an elitist but it probably is going to sound somewhat like that.

The only way you will be dead by the time you say “i’m getting” is if you don’t know how to dodge. If you dodge properly you can evade most burst, and even then most classes have a way to get out of trouble.

The major problem that people have is they don’t know when to dodge. A mesmers burst is very easy to read, you listen for the leap and then you dodge, but most people won’t do that so they get caught in it then shattered.

That is only one half of the problem. The other problem is people sitting on 1v1 rotations when they are fighting team fights. If you know your teammate is going to get bursted, quite apparent usually because they start attacking him, you start giving them peels.

Usually the people peeling are your eles, and usually your support is your ele, so being there really isnt an issue.

TLDR: need to dodge properly, teams need to quit playing like its a 1v1 rotation.

Griffon.4716:

I am going to attempt to not sound like an elitist but it probably is going to sound somewhat like that.

Indeed, thats what it sounded like. Dont assume everyone who write here is a noob.
I know how to dodge in a 1v1, but i was talking about are teamfights, not duels.
When you are in a teamfight and you get focused by a coordinated team that times CC on you and then get you bursted, you can dodge one, then you’ll get caught by the second and trust me, you have no chance except for an invulnerability or a blink to save yourself, but that kind of tricks cant be always up and ready.

Griffon.4716:

cuge.5398:

Support doesnt feel to be such a decisive role, infact you dont see crowds of support builds running around, why ?
What i think should happen is: player X is getting focused -> call for help -> allies protect/heal/support him.
This just cant happen here for a simple reason, by the time you say “i’m – getting – focused”, unless you are a bunker you are probably down already. So here start the race to who burst more, focusing on the target, this leads to building bunkers that are able to survive against burst builds.

I am going to attempt to not sound like an elitist but it probably is going to sound somewhat like that.

The only way you will be dead by the time you say “i’m getting” is if you don’t know how to dodge. If you dodge properly you can evade most burst, and even then most classes have a way to get out of trouble.

The major problem that people have is they don’t know when to dodge. A mesmers burst is very easy to read, you listen for the leap and then you dodge, but most people won’t do that so they get caught in it then shattered.

That is only one half of the problem. The other problem is people sitting on 1v1 rotations when they are fighting team fights. If you know your teammate is going to get bursted, quite apparent usually because they start attacking him, you start giving them peels.

Usually the people peeling are your eles, and usually your support is your ele, so being there really isnt an issue.

TLDR: need to dodge properly, teams need to quit playing like its a 1v1 rotation.

Actually the problem is not who is good or bad at dodging.
Sure some people might be better than Others as in every other game.
What Cuge is trying to say is that in the current state of the game, support builds are under rated cos why having a support build when I can win easily with 3 bunkers\ 2 roamers dps?
At the moment the only support builds around are focused on stomping or preventing stomp\ressing ppl, because the downed state plays a very important part during a team fight.
I agree with Cuge and I also would like to see less bunker specs\ dps burster spec and more supportive builds, and this is coming from someone who mains a thief.
At the moment the meta game and the build crafting is so static that is getting old and boring, reason why many people are leaving the sPvP

There’s also another factor: There’s no reward for supporting.

Out of curiosity, I made a healing-focused staff Ele at one point, and up until then I hadn’t even known that a title like “Chaos Archangel, Combat Medic!” had even existed. It actually felt pretty good to be recognized for the heals I was dealing out, but at the same time my damage was ungodly dismal. The tradeoff barely felt worth it.

Its a lot easier in PvE where support falls under heals/boons/reflects/CC and other things that prevent damage. I’m making it much more difficult for mobs to hit my allies, much more difficult for my allies to fall, while simultaneously increasing their damage output. One way to look at it is that I’m making each ally atleast as effective as 1.5 people. My team of 5 is more or less as strong as a team of 6.5, assuming I manage to do no damage. Its rewarding and I can immediately see the effectiveness.

In PvP, this isnt as much the case. Each person is too important for one to sacrifice their damage output for higher levels of support and control. You do not gain points for healing, and people putting together teams are more likely to overlook you in favor of what’s predictable and tried-&-true.

I think a step in the right direction would be to increase the effective scaling of healing power while lowering the base restoration of self-heals this way Guardians, Warriors, Mesmer, Elementalists ect who focus on healing power and support play a more critical role. Neverwinter has an interesting system where the Clerics’ heals are 60% less effective on himself than allies, eliminating the redundancy of having 2 Clerics on a team.

Hey cuge, we talked about this in another thread, and I’m glad to see you’re so on board. I’m going to repost something very relavent that I wrote in a different thread.

Note: I will be making a lot of comparisons to GW1. Try not to let this sway you, I’m not trying to turn GW2 into GW1.

GW1’s “trinity” worked nothing like the traditional trinity of other games. By design, their system created an intricate level of teamwork beyond the usual tank being tanky, healers healing and DPSers, well, DPSing. This is largely because there were MORE roles than the traditional three, many more in fact, and each profession (for the most part) had a wide range of capabilities to spec for. The role of shutting down support (via interrupts, mana drains, etc.) is a beautiful example.

The problem with GW2 is that, while they did remove the trinity – a move that I don’t think is necessarily bad – they failed to replace it with anything. We are left with professions that support themselves while still being pigeonholed into specific roles of bunker or glass cannon. Essentially, we now have a holy duality with little extra flavor, and limiting support capabilities to self-support has only moved this game away from a competitive teamwork oriented MMO to something that resembles an FPS.

When people on these forums say GW2 takes more individual skill, it is because that is frankly all the majority of builds need to be responsible for. Teamwork in GW2 consists of occasional focus fire, possibly sharing a few boons or condi removals that you’ve cast for yourself, and, due to the single game mode we have, where to properly allocate team members to capture/hold points. Despite what you may think, this creates VERY little depth.

My suggestions would be to buff support roles in ALL classes (I.E. any class may spec for GROUP support that is ACTUALLY beneficial). My ele’s healing rain ticks for, say a few hundred HP at most. His little healing splash skill heals maybe for a 2k burst. This won’t help you’re teamate who is getting instagibbed by a the a their in the slightest. Additionally, mechanics should be added, again, to EACH profession that would allow for a spec for shutting down said support. In my opinion, damage should also be cut across the board in order to force greater team coordination, but this is not as essential.

Support and shut down are just two roles that could be easily added to the game using its current mechanisms, but there are also many other roles that could be added that would greatly improve the quality of teamplay (just look to GW1 for inspiration). While each profession should be able to assume any role – assuming this is properly implemented – each one would also bring its own unique flare to that role, creating vast opportunity for extensive teamcraft.

ANet really wanted to scrap the idea of the holy trinity for one reason: people were tired of every group requiring a certain profession assuming a certain role (LF 2 Monks anyone?) I think they went about fixing this all wrong.

With the way GW2 works now, each profession is running around trying to do the same thing (or one of two things, in this case), and the only difference between them are gimmicks, more or less. A specific profession will either excel as a self-supporting bunker spec or a self-supporting DPS spec. While the different professions go about these two roles in different ways, once you understand how each class works, the lack of variety becomes painfully obvious.

I believe that the anti-trinity mindset has led to the severe lack of roles and the ultimate denigration of true team play. Unfortunately, it seems everyone who hasn’t given up on Guild Wars PvP actually enjoys the FPS style of gaming – I assume because they’ve only experienced sub-par PvP as found in WoW and it’s 7823434 clones.

tl;dr: anti-trinity —> anti-roles —> anti-teamplay —> anti-PvP

Hi again, i’m getting more active into this topic cause some days ago i recovered some of my old “uncommon” builds i created months ago, when i still was a noobie about tpvp.
I had many ideas about full-support builds not just healing, but also boon sharing builds (mesmer) and a healing/ress/condition management build (necro) that i realized it would be freaking awesome to have such builds viable in a competitive scene.
If something like that could happen we’ll have back that role variety you are talking about. We wont see just bunkers and dpser, but also…. boonsharer, interrupt builds (based on hard CC like stun, stomp, launch and so on….), healers, ressers.
Even warriors could fill a support role, cause if you look at tactics traits atm you would think they suck, but if all this could become true warr could be some really worth tanky resser with good CC.
Atm i main a shatter mesmer in tpvp, but i would gladly give up that mind wrack burst if all damage was toned down to switch to my boonshare build.

What makes me hope and sad at same time is that really seems like devs were thinking about all this, cause there are already traits and skills that could be good for support role, but for some unknown reason then they got it all screwed by making all this tools not viable for how they built the rest of the pvp.

It wouldnt even require new coding to fix things, since everything is already there, just carefully think about how to change stuff and go into game database and adjust some numbers.
The problem is that they arent doing it cause they are afraid to screw things even more…. and i can understand that, but being more interactive with pvp community might help this. For example, setting up some test servers where some players are invited to test this kind of changes and provide a serious feedback.
Its not something unreal, they have done it already before the game was released.

Yea, I remember when I first rolled a ranger. I remember thinking that spirits were going to be so awesome, lol!

Muramasma.1570:

Hey cuge, we talked about this in another thread, and I’m glad to see you’re so on board. I’m going to repost something very relavent that I wrote in a different thread.

Note: I will be making a lot of comparisons to GW1. Try not to let this sway you, I’m not trying to turn GW2 into GW1.

GW1’s “trinity” worked nothing like the traditional trinity of other games. By design, their system created an intricate level of teamwork beyond the usual tank being tanky, healers healing and DPSers, well, DPSing. This is largely because there were MORE roles than the traditional three, many more in fact, and each profession (for the most part) had a wide range of capabilities to spec for. The role of shutting down support (via interrupts, mana drains, etc.) is a beautiful example.

The problem with GW2 is that, while they did remove the trinity – a move that I don’t think is necessarily bad – they failed to replace it with anything. We are left with professions that support themselves while still being pigeonholed into specific roles of bunker or glass cannon. Essentially, we now have a holy duality with little extra flavor, and limiting support capabilities to self-support has only moved this game away from a competitive teamwork oriented MMO to something that resembles an FPS.

When people on these forums say GW2 takes more individual skill, it is because that is frankly all the majority of builds need to be responsible for. Teamwork in GW2 consists of occasional focus fire, possibly sharing a few boons or condi removals that you’ve cast for yourself, and, due to the single game mode we have, where to properly allocate team members to capture/hold points. Despite what you may think, this creates VERY little depth.

My suggestions would be to buff support roles in ALL classes (I.E. any class may spec for GROUP support that is ACTUALLY beneficial). My ele’s healing rain ticks for, say a few hundred HP at most. His little healing splash skill heals maybe for a 2k burst. This won’t help you’re teamate who is getting instagibbed by a the a their in the slightest. Additionally, mechanics should be added, again, to EACH profession that would allow for a spec for shutting down said support. In my opinion, damage should also be cut across the board in order to force greater team coordination, but this is not as essential.

Support and shut down are just two roles that could be easily added to the game using its current mechanisms, but there are also many other roles that could be added that would greatly improve the quality of teamplay (just look to GW1 for inspiration). While each profession should be able to assume any role – assuming this is properly implemented – each one would also bring its own unique flare to that role, creating vast opportunity for extensive teamcraft.

ANet really wanted to scrap the idea of the holy trinity for one reason: people were tired of every group requiring a certain profession assuming a certain role (LF 2 Monks anyone?) I think they went about fixing this all wrong.

With the way GW2 works now, each profession is running around trying to do the same thing (or one of two things, in this case), and the only difference between them are gimmicks, more or less. A specific profession will either excel as a self-supporting bunker spec or a self-supporting DPS spec. While the different professions go about these two roles in different ways, once you understand how each class works, the lack of variety becomes painfully obvious.

I believe that the anti-trinity mindset has led to the severe lack of roles and the ultimate denigration of true team play. Unfortunately, it seems everyone who hasn’t given up on Guild Wars PvP actually enjoys the FPS style of gaming – I assume because they’ve only experienced sub-par PvP as found WoW and it’s 7823434 clones.

tl;dr: anti-trinity —> anti-roles —> anti-teamplay —> anti-PvP

I couldn’t have said it better
nothing more to add and I seriously hope A-Net will take a look at this topic and plan some future changes on this matter

@Dahkeus

Right??? Ranger’s spirits, warrior’s banners, ele’s water attunement, guardian’s freaking everything – the list goes on. The tools are right there. Aside from SOME of these creating options for self-preservation (basically, aside from bunker builds), these means of team support are laughably weak and not even worth considering. Instead, self-heals rain supreme, and team play suffers.

@cuge

You’re probably right in that they’re afraid to “mess it up more.” But what this game needs is something big like this. It would definitely spark the interest of the vast population that has left for these very reasons.

Kolly.9872:

I seriously hope A-Net will take a look at this topic and plan some future changes on this matter

garethh.3518:

Dunno if its too much work for the GW2 guys though or something.
>.<

This is the part that has me the most baffled. I’ve never participated in a game where major issues like this don’t even receive so much as a “we see your opinion” from the devs. Seriously, I’m sure they’re nice guys and all, but why oh why has a very large and vocal part of the population been ignored since launch?

sad face

The problem with comunication is that devs got told not to say a word about issues that the company still dont have a certain plan for.
So if you ask them about balance of a specific class they cant tell us anything cause then ppl would say "but that time you said …….. ".

Kolly.9872:

in the current state of the game, support builds are under rated cos why having a support build when I can win easily with 3 bunkers\ 2 roamers dps?
At the moment the only support builds around are focused on stomping or preventing stomp\ressing ppl, because the downed state plays a very important part during a team fight.

A little sidenote for you: Shout-Guard = Support-Bunker, BM-Ranger= only Bunker. Everything that provides heal, boons, condition cleanse for grp or knockbacks etc. is classified as support.
Ressing and stomping is a part of playing bunker, but definitely not everything. It’s like saying a mesmers job is to press his shatters.

So no, support builds are the most important in the current meta and definitely not underrated.

Given that the devs have recently replied to other threads, I seriously hope that they will reply to this one and acknowledge each frustration point by point. They said they wanted support to be viable. It isn’t. Best thing of all is it will be easy to fix.

Currently the damage output by any class is enough to kill any other class no problem. This is due to the move towards self heals, where each individual player is not totally dependent on a healer to survive, but yet still does not have enough sustain to play indefinitely unless you spec as a bunker as far as possible.

Generally, if people are playing well, then we can already see situations where 1v1 occurs and the battle lasts more than a few minutes and not necessarily just with bunkers. This is what should be the case. I know the devs want ‘fast paced’ play, believe me, the play is already too fast paced, a point I believe would be agreed upon by many people. Disregarding the problem of AoE spam and the particle effect spam, battles are over too quickly. The difference between living and dying is one backstab, or one auto attack and telegraphed attacks, the thing that should be battle finishing moves, are almost nowhere to be found.

I am not proposing that we systematically change damage. All I’m proposing is that we improve the sustain of each class (apart from the already adequate bunker builds) by say 20%. In addition, now here’s the important point, is making some support spells ally targeted.

Now, I don’t know what the line of thinking was when the devs decided to have no ally targeted skills in the game, but this is unacceptable for PvP. In PvE its fine because most of the time people will be balled up anyway and using AoE is the most convenient approach to support, even though support is rarely used even in PvE.
In PvP AoE heals are not only inefficient in terms of when you want to heal a particular person, but it is impractical when you have such a mobile combat system as GW2.

Getting to the point:

What we need is a measured, careful move towards changing some skills that are currently very small radius AoE heals towards targeted heals. In addition, the healing power scaling for such spells should be carefully looked at to ensure that it is indeed viable for skilled support play, rather than simply spamming boons on a guardian.

We need more sustain in general, except where it would turn already strong bunkers into unstoppable builds. We need more telegraphed moves, similar to the elementalists ‘Churning Earth’, where there are both primary effects on skill activation and secondary effects upon cast completion.

The goal here is to decrease the frequency of what are otherwise bad teams destroying teams that by all accounts shouldn’t lose, but did due to the low skill ceiling (I am not referring to the last tourny, I wanted to see TP lose ).

Empathetic Fighter.2065:

Kolly.9872:

in the current state of the game, support builds are under rated cos why having a support build when I can win easily with 3 bunkers\ 2 roamers dps?
At the moment the only support builds around are focused on stomping or preventing stomp\ressing ppl, because the downed state plays a very important part during a team fight.

A little sidenote for you: Shout-Guard = Support-Bunker, BM-Ranger= only Bunker. Everything that provides heal, boons, condition cleanse for grp or knockbacks etc. is classified as support.
Ressing and stomping is a part of playing bunker, but definitely not everything. It’s like saying a mesmers job is to press his shatters.

So no, support builds are the most important in the current meta and definitely not underrated.

If by ‘support’ you mean spamming shouts that the bunker would have had anyway in order to remove their own conditions, etc, then yes. It remains true that builds that are primarily concerned with the rest of the team are not viable.

I think you and I have a very different vision of ‘support’. They are not the most important part of the current meta either. Mesmers are far, far more valuable, period. If you said bunkers I might have agreed with you. I just don’t agree that bunkers who coincidentally use some ‘support’ boons that were in the first place meant for themselves are ‘support’ to any great degree. I don’t think it should be impossible for a ‘support’ build to outright prevent a burst death in GW2 without protection.

i want to jump in and remind everyone that what gw2 doesn’t have atm (and needs for team fights) is not really more heals, but protection from spike damage.

milo.6942:

i want to jump in and remind everyone that what gw2 doesn’t have atm (and needs for team fights) is not really more heals, but protection from spike damage.

I don’t agree. Most of the time there is no need to spike because people only ever hang on by a thread anyway, even in the top teams. Generally the only time people spike is just to take out bunkers at the start of the game and get a lead.

interesting reading…

but i think that another reason is that the game is too AOE oriented, when something is AOE oriented, it must have lesser effectivity to balance the AOE…

this makes support very poor, because there are no single target support skills, heals etc, only AOE spam… so even with support spec, you are too AOE oriented to be effective in lets say 2v2 where you are dps+sup vs 2x dps… you just cant support enough to keep your dps friend alive and if you are not a bunker support, you cant probably keep alive even yourself…

add a fact that we have conquest as a main mode, which supports small scale combat because when you fight 5v5 on 1 node, you are doing it wrong…

and thats a reason why support is not strong enough in SPvP and in WvW people cry about AOE boon stacking in zergs… they just messed the game orientation and main SPvP game mode, they are not compatible enough…

mode diversity could solve it a bit (only if mode would be random, so support would be better if you random e.g. team deathmatch or king of the hill but worse when you random CTF or conquest)…

another option is to add more strong single target support like longer duration protection, stability etc, just like some people already said, antispike, i think that monks did something like this in GW1, not sure, havent played it, with this someone could be real support with low ranged dmg, stay away from a fight and keep protection and stability on his dps mate fighting on the point, maybe some minor heals and regen etc

another idea how to fix it would be global AOE change, where AOE would become more effective when hitting less then 5 people, but this would need quite a lot of work and balancing…

Empathetic Fighter.2065:

Kolly.9872:

in the current state of the game, support builds are under rated cos why having a support build when I can win easily with 3 bunkers\ 2 roamers dps?
At the moment the only support builds around are focused on stomping or preventing stomp\ressing ppl, because the downed state plays a very important part during a team fight.

A little sidenote for you: Shout-Guard = Support-Bunker, BM-Ranger= only Bunker. Everything that provides heal, boons, condition cleanse for grp or knockbacks etc. is classified as support.
Ressing and stomping is a part of playing bunker, but definitely not everything. It’s like saying a mesmers job is to press his shatters.

So no, support builds are the most important in the current meta and definitely not underrated.

you missed my point mate.
I am not stating that in the current meta support builds don’t exist or cannot do properly their job but that in the current meta support builds are not totally worth it using upon bunkers\dpsser builds.
Bunkers that can Self Full Buff themselves are not support build of course.
At the moment the only real support some builds can provide to the team during a team fight is for preventing or doing faster a stomp.
That’s my opinion of course, but I have tested so many different team composition and in my opinion support builds are weaker than self sustain builds.

MaXi.3642:

another option is to add more strong single target support like longer duration protection, stability etc, just like some people already said, antispike, i think that monks did something like this in GW1, not sure, havent played it

Excellent point.

I’ll clarify in my earlier posts in a second, but yeah I should say that I don’t only advocate single player targeted heals, some strong protection skills would be great. I envision, for example, a single targeted utility skills that gives any ally (you can target yourself) 10 seconds of protection and has say a 30-35 second cooldown.

Shame on you for not playing GW1 (I’m just joking btw)

Here is a video of two top 10 guilds in old style GvG: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EFWvkitten1Uo

It involves the old spike metagame, basically where you’d have your entire team on vent / teamspeak and you’d countdown from 3 and on 1 simultaneously activate skills for really strong spikes that only specific skills could prevent. Just saying that in case the video doesn’t really make sense. When you see it slowdown and stuff, bear in mind most spikes happened in less than 0.5s, sometimes even < 0.25s for really good teams.

So yeah, the ‘spikes’ in GW2 aren’t really comparable to in GW1 (for better or worse). Also, notice the lack of particle clutter ( we don’t need to go back as far as in the video, but definitely less than now ).

You cant have traditional supports when everyone is forced into the same circle. There is no positioning there to keep them safe like there is in dota and lol and such. Ofcourse, with the absurd amount of teleports in this game, ‘lol@ grab bow, blink twice np’, positioning matters even less to begin with, so why wouldnt you grab crazy survivability or dmg instead?

There are no healers, so that kind of support is gone. What else is there? A CC spammer? I have found a surprising lack of ON DEMAND CC that people can trait for. Spirit Weapons are tied to the usual horribad AI pet system, my necro fear traits are all situational and passive on top of RNG with a 90 second cd. I guess one could make a good resser type character, but that still requires a lot of stability and CC, something not many classes have access too.

Getting actual support chars is going to take a lot of work. Even more so when no support will ever put out enough healing to overcome focus fire on either himself or an ally.

GankSinatra.2653:

There are no healers, so that kind of support is gone. […]

Getting actual support chars is going to take a lot of work. Even more so when no support will ever put out enough healing to overcome focus fire on either himself or an ally.

Actually many classes have different tools to heal and support the group, so its not gone; what i wanted to highlight is the fact that noone builds himself around those tools cause they would be totally uneffective considering the amount of dps that can be produced in a small timeframe.
I think Devs had a concept at the beginning, and they wanted every class to be able to support allies, and so they introduced those tools, then they worked on dps, and between a fix and a nerf during their internal tests they somehow lost track of the original idea and we got to the point where dps totally overcome support.

@cuge Well said. DPS in GW2 is more important than anything else. And from a marketing PoV it actually makes sense. Everyone loves to pew pew pew. And ANet said multiple times that they wanted to create an “action” game. And not a tactical game.

Because of this we ended up with certain classes who can burst on the one side and certain classes who can go bunker on the other side.

I wonder if the devs simply wanted to create a shooter but they were told to produce an MMO instead

I dont think they ever said they wanted a non-tactical game, action is ok, the ability to dodge and teleport, move quickly, makes the game way more dynamic, which is not necessarily bad, and we could have both tactic and quick action.

Teamwork = Play 1-2 matches to get the (now easier because they use the old system) dailies except the one for played matches.

Then join a 3rd match and stay afk and let your “team do the work”(=teamwork).

cuge.5398:

Actually many classes have different tools to heal and support the group, so its not gone; what i wanted to highlight is the fact that noone builds himself around those tools cause they would be totally uneffective considering the amount of dps that can be produced in a small timeframe.
I think Devs had a concept at the beginning, and they wanted every class to be able to support allies, and so they introduced those tools, then they worked on dps, and between a fix and a nerf during their internal tests they somehow lost track of the original idea and we got to the point where dps totally overcome support.

Yeah, no healers, as in you cant just spec healing and keep people safe against multiple people unless they time burst or CC. All of this strategy is also lost because of not really needing this layer of gameplay, not that i demand healers to come back in the game. Something better for this game would be a support focused on boon applications on allies. Certain abilities could have a lower cooldown when used on an ally instead of yourself just to name something.

I do think it was a conscious decision though. They’ve often dropped hints of ‘action game’ ‘more like a fps’. But i feel that most (MMO)RPG players want more depth than just a dps race. But im weird and i think that all classes should be nerfed to necro/warrior status, as these classes are only really weak because they cant do everything on their own, i.e they need good support from others, whereas others can much more easily survive and or apply their dmg on their own. There are multiple ways without really needing a healer. I’d love some good ol’ nerfs, might reduce some visual spam too.