Hello,
Every time a MMO comes out, I always play PvP. It is something I enjoy immensely. Here are just a few things that I personally don’t like about the PvP in this game. I could be wrong, they are not the views of many people. Just my own.
1. Meta of Skills. Right now taking a stunbreaker is a must for every class. There is a wide spread amount of stuns/CC as a whole. This makes skills such as stunbreakers a must for every class and if you don’t you’re at a huge disadvantage. IN fights greater than 5v5, especially in WvW, a player can get stunlocked for ages and just die while stunlocked.
2. Conditions and their availability. I think that classes ahve way too much access to conditions and that conditions don’t really matter much. They are just side things that some classes apply and some classes spam. Most classes run with condition cleansing heals or some kind of condi cleanse because of the widespread amount of spamming conditions. I hardly ever see necromancers running without feast of conditions, rangers without their condi removal spring, engineers love to run with healing turret (though some run with medkit/elixirs, its a lot worse with that class). I think if you make conditions a little more…important in battles and then make their ability to eb spammed less, it would make for a lot better battles.
3. CC in the game. There is so much CC in the game, it seems to be spammed all the time. Immobilize, stun, daze, knockbacks, knockdowns, fear, chill, cripple, it is just too much. WIth the access to these CCs and then large amount of battles, sometimes event 5v5 (though its not as bad in those) you are just constantly getting CCed. The meta quickly becomes CC the heck out of one target and burst him down. This is especially evident in roaming in WvW.
4. Burst Damage. I feel that the overall burst damage of some classes in the game is way too high. Some classes do insane amounts of burst damage and have little forgiveness. For example, mesmers #3 on sword. If you dotn dodge or negate that immobilize, you have 2 choices. Pop a block/invurnabliity to negate the damage or die. Thieves too. If you dotn dodge their out of stealth attacks, they can hit you for a lot very very quickly. The problem with this setup is that when watching or in fights, you don’t get invested a lot. Battles between players go by so quickly it doesn’t make for a good thing to watch.
5. Animations. You already know about this.
6. Lack of cast times. Again, this just leads to a game that feels very very spammy in how it is played.
7. Roles in PvP. I find that the most common roles in the game are Bunkers and Glass cannons. Bunkers exist to help counter glass cannons and glass cannons exist to counter bunkers. What ends up happening is a holy trinity forms where the class that does the most damage without negating a ton of surviveabliity takes the glass cannon side and the class that can best counter that burst damage takes the bunker side. This is why we see classes such as engineers, guardians, and eles take bunker. It is not their stats that make them hard to kill, it is their skills. It is why we see thieves and mesmers take the glass cannon side because with the clone system, stealthing system, teleports, invurnabilities, evades, etc they can dish out a ton of damage while still having some good surviveability via their skills. It is tough to say what else to add to the roles because of the way the game is setup, these are pretty much the only things you need.
8. Interaction with boons and conditions. There is not enough of this in the game. Some of the most fun fights I’ve had have been with my necromancer. It is not simply because I can dish out some great condi pressure, but because of the boon stripping and corrupting setups. It adds soo much to the depth of gameplay.
So in short I feel reducing the availability of conditions while increasing their importance in battles, reducing the high burst damage, perhaps reducing the amount of non counterable survivability skills, and boon/condi interaction could result in more depth, interesting, and fun to watch gameplay. Again these are just opinions, I’m not a game designer so I could be wrong.
(edited by Deified.7520)