Assessing "Passive Play"
Passive playing builds are ones that require comparatively little input from the player to be successful. So not A, D, or E ever, and very often not the others.
Builds that do center around passive play tend to rely heavily on autoattacking, passive effects and AI over dodging, positioning, timing, and cooldown management.
It’s not necessarily any one of these things, because shatter mesmers can be very skillful and not cheesy, while PU phantasm mesmers can be very passive.
In the end, it all comes down to player interaction. If you don’t have to think very much or are letting AI do the brunt of the work for you, that is passive play. If you have to frequently work hard to position yourself, work out combos, and generally have to perform well for your build to work, that is active play.
It’s fine to have lots of health, as long as you have to work to maintain it and use c/c skillfully to help your team and deny the other team.
It’s fine to have AI helping you, as long as the vast majority of your play does not involve waiting for them to deal damage.
So to answer your questions, no, yes, yes, it’s very real.
Passive play lets you concentrate on defense which is especially good for a bunker build. Example is my warrior bunker build which is basically as passive as it gets: completely passive heal, no weapon synergy, no active defenses which I need to activate. Pretty much just plop down the banner then roll around and spam skills.
Apparently spirit ranger and minion mancer is also pretty passive. But I don’t know if it can get more passive than a war bunker build??!?
As was previously stated- certainly not A, D, or E. F probably wouldn’t apply either.
The way I’d define it is this: as the amount of damage dealt by a player to enemies either directly or indirectly who is away from his or her keyboard and/or just using the auto attack increases, the more passive his or her play is. Furthermore, the longer that a player can survive combat while being away from his or her keyboard and/or just using the auto attack, the more passive his or her play is. I’m pretty happy with the first part of the definition, not so much the second part… But I’d say it’s a good start.
I’d say passive play is “effectiveness in respect to effort put in by player”.
So stuff like Spirit Ranger, MM Necro, Condi Necro, PU Mesmer, Phantasm Mesmer.
GW2 is one of the least mechanically demanding games out there. Hell even jungling in LoL requires as much mechanical skill as GW2 does, and heaven forbid you compare it to something like SC2.
The skill of being good at GW2 is knowing when to do something, and having the good reactions to accomplish that. But the vast majority of the game is based on knowledge, not skill.
Hate to break it to you, but if you want a game with crazy skill caps and high APM requirements, this isn’t the game for you.
Passivity is a relative term when it comes to playstyles. In my opinion, the best way to measure passivity is in the frequency and the importance of the decisions made by the player. Playstyles which require more frequent and important decisions to be played effectively are more active then playstyles that require fewer or irrelevant decisions. Please note that this measurement avoids terms such as “effort” and “mechanical skill”; it deals entirely in player-made decision. Even if a playstyle requires a specific series of buttons to be pressed really, really quickly in an extravagant and inconvenient way, if pressing that series of buttons is always the player’s best move, then the playstyle is passive. Conversely, even if a playstyle involves only two buttons, if the player must frequently and consistently determine the right button to press in order to be effective, then the playstyle would be more active.
Relative effectiveness does not influence passivity. It does not matter whether a player rolling their face on the keyboard dies instantly or stomps faces; the playstyle remains passive. Players merely notice effective passive playstyles more than ineffective passive playstyles because they are more frustrating to lose to. As such, we tend to demand changes to effective passive playstyles while ignoring ineffective passive playstyles. Instead, we should protest all passive gameplay, effective or otherwise.
Mechanics do not inherently make a playstyle passive; only the ways in which these mechanics are implemented within the game can affect passivity. If an action is always the best action to take (or if the action takes itself), then the decision to take that action is made for the player rather than by the player and therefore contributes to a passive playstyle. In guild wars 2, the only drawback to most abilities is their cooldown; this means that the only consideration taken when using an ability is opportunity-cost. However, opportunity-cost is only relevant when an ability A is markedly more effective in some instances compared to others and B possesses a sufficiently large drawback such that the player is punished if the ability is used at the incorrect time.
continued
Currently, many mechanics and abilities are implemented in such a way that they fail to reward or punish the player for timed use. It is almost always beneficial to attack an opponent with one’s minions or pets. Many abilities deal flat damage regardless of enemy state or position. Most boons and conditions possess universally harmful/beneficial effects or are applied with such frequency/duration that timed use becomes irrelevant. Stealth, if permanent, is not punished if applied at the incorrect time. A lack of cast-bars and difficult or impossible to read animations reduce the reactionary potential of interrupts, making them far less situational. In all of these instances, the mechanics themselves (minions, conditions, stealth, autoattacks, etc.) are not inherently passive. Minions such as flesh worm force the player to make critical decisions: where to place the worm and when to sacrifice it exchanging passive damage for regained positioning. Short-duration stealth forces a player to decide whether to use it early to gain first strike or later to make an escape or interrupt a cc chain. Short yet powerful utility boons or conditions force a player to time their use in conjunction with their opponent’s actions. Auto-attacks can force a player to sacrifice time or positioning in order to be used effectively. All of these mechanics can be tweaked and refined in order to encourage active play, and there is nothing inherent in their design that forces them to be passive.
Active decision making is necessary to make a game competitive and fun. When gameplay is passive, even slight differences between the overall power of builds become magnified, and mathematically superior builds form fotm-fueled metas. It is freedom of choice that separates exciting battles between people from predetermined interactions between sets of statistics, and only when players are given more control over their actions and more liberty to make their own decisions can skill and quick-thinking begin to trump builds and balance.
Passive play is quite descriptive and having an elaborate debate about it seems inappropriate.
Passive play is when abilities, traits or skills do thing automatically without player input. This is especially problematic in a game like GW2 that has comparatively few skills, further reducing the skill-cap of the game.
Spirit Rangers, Minion Necros and Healing Signet are probably the best examples of passive-play.