Guild Wars 2

JonPeters.5630:

Snip

Personally the not fun part of it I find falls into having to deal with random dodges. To me that is the much larger issue. The combat itself necessitates keeping track of endurance due to the potential it has in changing the outcome of a fight. People will naturally allocate their skill to what will create the best outcome. If they are unable to do so at a high level then they just get matched up against people at a similar skill. Now as a designer if you are finding dodging taking too large of a focus while not contributing well enough to the enjoyment of the game you need to take some emphasis away from it. This is not saying dodging should remain a hidden mechanic though.

I also am not clear on your point on keeping track of hidden stuff, its no longer hidden at that point. I am going to guess your referring to modifiers for endurance regen? Now personally I think if the game evolves competitively there needs to be a loading screen or picking phase that does a better job at highlighting what players are bringing to the table. Also a number of these modifiers I see as unnecessary in the first place and are the larger culprit to this complaint. Boons are in the game for a reason, to standardize, keep things concise and visible. They can be made better use of when it comes to endurance.

Now to me endurance is one of the highest priority mechanics to be shown. This is because currently dodging is a one way interaction. The only way for it to become two-ways is to be able to keep track of an opponents dodge resource. Now comparatively to skill usage, it is much easier to keep track of what has been used and skills generally offer two way interaction with a delay in their effects.

Also the execution of how endurance would be displayed does not have to be done in the same meter fashion. If I were designing the ui it would instead just be a counter system only displaying full integers. Gw2 combat is very fast passed that the need to keep track of fractions is less important and adds more clutter and system load.

Cat Has Ducks.1982:

Doesn’t that mean we should see all their cooldowns too

That, in the end, teaches players to play the game…
That’s good.
It draws people into the flow of combat and puts more focus on how you play your class, not ‘getting used to the GW2 engine.’

Chaith.8256:

Ryan.9387:

Darnis.4056:

Hi Jon!
I’ll have to agree with 5G;
It’s hilarious to talk about Clutter when minionmancers/spiritrangers/Phantasms mesmers see play. PETTING ZOO META!

It would not be clutter if you could only see the endurance bar of one guy that you have targeted. Still I would much rather see Casting bars; or both.

Could just watch and internalize the evade bar.

" He dodged, he dodged again, no more endurance. SPIKE NOW"

The problem with this is the fact that Energy Sigils exist, endurance levels are very transient and no, it’s not reliable information to count dodges or see the endurance bar atm until that’s changed.

You also can internalize his weapon swap and sigils. It may be hard but it is high skill cap.

Good arguments thank you.

P.S. Moba’s do show Ult cooldowns on the UI, some sort of information about enemies can easily play a big part in competitive matches without dumbing anything down as it just becomes another strategy element, you dont hear anyone crying in moba’s that ppl can see that you used your ult.

Not saying we need that here but talking more general-like.

JonPeters.5630:

I’m not sure how you interpreted my saying clutter is currently ok?

I did re-read your original post and I see you were saying you feel there was a success in keeping a de-cluttered UI, not a de-cluttered PvP landscape in general, like how I interpreted it. My apologies.

I think the minimalistic quote “Less is More” should be applied here.

One of the problems with GW2’s combat, to which the issues raised in this topic are tied to, is that there’s too much information at the same time. This is the result of many things, like animation cluttering, abudance of conditions/ boons, lack of punishment for spamming, way too many passive effects (up to 14 traits, runes and sigils), coupled with fights that can end in three seconds. This makes GW2’s combat not fully utilize its depth, and revolve mostly around basic instinct, and more straightforward builds that can kill as fast as possible, or maintain as much healing/ blocks/ protection as possible.

I think to fix some of those issues, Anet will need to have “a lot of courage” (by Einsten’s words, quoted by Izzy in the WvW thread) to rethink some of their core mechanics and how they work, because ultimately, such approach would be more effective than changing each skill or each effect one by one. I’m talking about reducing the number of non-skill effects (for a creative example: fusing the skill and trait systems into one, so that traiting involves less passive effects and more active skills), or reconsidering the idea of a mana system (to control with ease the combat’s pace, to add an easy way for risk/ reward without adding long casting times or auto-stun effects to every single skill in existence, etc).

For dodging in particular, I do feel the issue can be fixed simply by tweaking each effect one by one. Anet has said that they have a plan to tone down dodge spamming. We know that vigor traits are going to be toned down, some next patch, others sometime after. Maybe sigil of energy can get a nerf from 50% to ~30% (or a higher cooldown). With those changes, players wouldn’t need an “enemy endurance bar”, because dodging would become more valuable and endurance harder to refill.

Of course, if a global energy system were ever to exist, and in place of the current endurance bar, dodging would come at the cost of skill usage, which would create very interesting and exciting risk/ reward scenarios, so there’s that to consider too.

One of my main points with this post is, the designers should strive for more combat clarity by removing what is too much instead of adding even more. This would include entire systems being fused/ included into others, or even expanded.

GW2’s combat also shows how valuable a global energy system is to any designer, player and spectator. If we think about it, it gives to developers/ designers the tools to easily modify the combat’s pace, spammability and reward/ risk ratio simply by upping or toning down a number on a skill-per-skill basis, and that in turn controls the amount of information displayed at the same time to the player and the spectator, giving the time for the players to create more elaborate tactics and dedicate themselves to more elaborate combos and playstyles, and giving the time to spectators to properly appreciate what is happening in combat. Why was an energy system never added to this game? For the sake of simplicity? Well, now we all know its acchieving the opposite. For the sake of originality? Not everything that is different is better, but if that’s so important, then Anet should try to design an alternative to easily control some of those core combat issues. If Anet is simply planning to magically fix them by changing each skill and each effect one by one, it’ll never happen, first because it’ll take forever, and second because the powerlevel of a skill can simply prevent that from happening.

What is funnier or more strategical to this game, the current Mist Form that allows you to react to a burst, but doesn’t even allows you to heal anymore for the sake of balance, or an energy-heavy Mist Form that gives you the option to spend even more energy to heal yourself, allowing you to reset your health and safety in exchange of most of your energy? Or a dodge button that can be used anytime, versus a dodge that saves you regardless of your build, at the cost of global energy and thus delaying your burst, your healing spike, or whatever, by a few precious seconds?

I probably went a bit off-topic for half of my post, but I feel that this thread’s issue is part of a greater problem.

“Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius — and a lot of courage — to move in the opposite direction.” -Albert Einstein

Chaith.8256:

The problem with this is the fact that Energy Sigils exist, endurance levels are very transient and no, it’s not reliable information to count dodges or see the endurance bar atm until that’s changed.

With shown endurance bars, you can know.
You can see the energy sigil pop on weapon swap and know to watch out for it from that guy on that weapon swap.
It’s part of learning your enemy.

Without actually seeing the endurance bar (especially on a class like the ranger where they have a constant half-vigor) you can’t be sure, you have to be counting dodges perfectly and taking into acount vigor/exc. to a T… without that you can never really be sure if it was the bonus endurance regens or the actual bump from an item.

DiogoSilva.7089:

For dodging in particular, I do feel the issue can be fixed simply by tweaking each effect one by one. Anet has said that they have a plan to tone down dodge spamming. We know that vigor traits are going to be toned down, some next patch, others sometime after. Maybe sigil of energy can get a nerf from 50% to ~30% (or a higher cooldown). With those changes, players wouldn’t need an “enemy endurance bar”, because dodging would become more valuable and endurance harder to refill.

If these devs had the capability to sit down and rework skills and come up with strong, consistent, beneficial changes…

The condi meta never would have happened.
CC-lock warriors never would have happened.
Flanking strike spam theives, heartseaker spam theives, backstab spam thieves, stealth spam thieves never would have happened.

But they did.

At best these devs seem like they can spam random abilities and random changes until they hit gold, they don’t seem like the kind of guys who can take a strict control over something and iron out good results. The latter only seems to end in snails paced consistently mediocre if not hurtful changes.
(no offense, only observation)

garethh.3518:

Chaith.8256:

The problem with this is the fact that Energy Sigils exist, endurance levels are very transient and no, it’s not reliable information to count dodges or see the endurance bar atm until that’s changed.

With shown endurance bars, you can know.
You can see the energy sigil pop on weapon swap and know to watch out for it from that guy on that weapon swap.
It’s part of learning your enemy.

Without actually seeing the endurance bar (especially on a class like the ranger where they have a constant half-vigor) you can’t be sure, you have to be counting dodges perfectly and taking into acount vigor/exc. to a T… without that you can never really be sure if it was the bonus endurance regens or the actual bump from an item.

It was already explained that this wouldn’t help much. Someone is low on endurance, you push for the kill, they just weapon swap and immediately dodge. What were you going to do then? How different is that from what we have now?

If it’s only natural regen, it’s easy to just assume 8 seconds regen if it’s a Ranger unless they’re running a build you know doesn’t use the trait. If a class has access to vigor and is using it then you should just assume 5 seconds.

Endurance is good as it is imo.

I think that it’s fairly easy to figure out what sigil the enemy is using. From a pvp perspective there isn’t a very big choice. Fire, geomancy, doom, hydromancy have all pretty visible effects. Usually, if one isn’t using one of them he’s using energy, at least in spvp.

Keeping track of enemy skills, cc, endurance and so on is part of the game and part of the skill.

We definitely want to avoid WoW pvp interface, where you had to use so many addons to keep track of everything (enemy cc, drs, enemy trinkets, enemy combo points, i could go on forever) that you barely see the enemy

Of course, that’s IMO

Proven.2854:

It was already explained that this wouldn’t help much. Someone is low on endurance, you push for the kill, they just weapon swap and immediately dodge. What were you going to do then? How different is that from what we have now?

It’s not any worse than an on weapon evade.
IMO it’s actually far better than on weapon evades.
(I’d be exstatic if most if not all on-weapon evades were removed and replaced with sigil of endurance style regens)

Anyways….
1.
Sigil of endurance isn’t on, even most, builds.

2.
Swapping weapons is very important.

There is a risk/reward and skill around sitting in one weapon set and holding on to a sigil of endurance… are giving up a bunch of new CDs for a chance at baiting out an attack if you know your enemy well enough… you can be pressured out of the set early so miss some CDs, or you can stall out the fight a bit if it’s in your advantage…

That’s good.
No, I take that back.
That’s great.
The depth it can allow… that’s exactly the sort of thing games thrive off of…

I guess people don’t even realize it if you kittening throw it at them.

(Sure if you’re a burst spec and just trying to overpower an enemy in a few secs, it can be a bit of at gamble… but oh darn… poor insta-gib specs and all their unavoidable attacks and CCs…)

I thought the whole reason this thread existed was because of burst specs. Sustain and Condi specs don’t have as much of an issue with the dodges as they usually carry enough CC or enough consistent pressure.

And don’t you get the same risk/reward with weapon swapping in the current system of the endurance bar being hidden information? You wouldn’t even know about the energy sigil in the new system until partway through the fight either.

heck yes, please
this would help the health of pvp immensely

DiogoSilva.7089:

I think the minimalistic quote “Less is More” should be applied here.

“Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius — and a lot of courage — to move in the opposite direction.” -Albert Einstein

I sense a touch of irony after getting to the bottom of that post.

Regarding the thread topic, the unpredictability of what the other guys is gonna do is half the fun. Figure it as best you can and take your shot. You know . . . like combat?

No one likes randmomness because dealing with randomness is difficult, but it exists to emulate the uncertainty in RL combat. If you want predictability go to PvE.

Right now we have a nice balance of knowing what the profession you face can do, but not necessarily knowing what they WILL do. This is a good thing because it forces us to learn the player in the seat in tandem with the profession on the screen with a little luck thrown in. That is what makes PvP way more fun than PvE. Why on Earth would you want to take that away?

Basharic.1654:

I sense a touch of irony after getting to the bottom of that post.

Regarding the thread topic, the unpredictability of what the other guys is gonna do is half the fun. Figure it as best you can and take your shot. You know . . . like combat?

No one likes randomness because dealing with randomness is difficult, but it exists to emulate the uncertainty in RL combat. If you want predictability go to PvE.

Right now we have a nice balance of knowing what the profession you face can do, but not necessarily knowing what they WILL do. This is a good thing because it forces us to learn the player in the seat in tandem with the profession on the screen with a little luck thrown in. That is what makes PvP way more fun than PvE. Why on Earth would you want to take that away?

I don’t agree. When I bait 2 dodges and go in for the bursties, I don’t find it fun when the Guardian/Mesmer opts in for a triple roll. I find that infuriating. When I want Elixir X to give me Rampage, and I get Tornado – which seals my doom, I find that infuriating. When I wanted the old Toss Elixir S to give me invisibility, and it gave me stability – causing my death, I found that infuriating.

I think the ideal PvP environment which you visualize that’s full of surprises and counter-plays is pretty far from the reality of how Energy Sigils are used to throw a bit more random blanket avoidance in the mix.

clint.5681:

cymerdown.4103:

Yes, definitely. Can we also get a visual cue for Stability? Crazy to me that we have one for Protection but not Stability.

Just look for the icon before using cc

I think his point is we shouldn’t need to. I agree because we should be able to read the state of boons and condi’s from watching the Game, not the UI. There’s no reason why Stability should be an exception to this when all other Boons have some kind of visual cue.

Stability could be some kind of effect on the feet of the character model or on the ground below.

Chaith.8256:

I don’t agree. When I bait 2 dodges and go in for the bursties, I don’t find it fun when the Guardian/Mesmer opts in for a triple roll. I find that infuriating. When I want Elixir X to give me Rampage, and I get Tornado – which seals my doom, I find that infuriating. When I wanted the old Toss Elixir S to give me invisibility, and it gave me stability – causing my death, I found that infuriating.

I think the ideal PvP environment which you visualize that’s full of surprises and counter-plays is pretty far from the reality of how Energy Sigils are used to throw a bit more random blanket avoidance in the mix.

I actually agree with you about elixirs. No player should have to worry about their own skills betraying them. As a thief I can feel you there. You need some of the same love we got. Not knowing what your own skills might give you was a bad design choice.

As for your Guardian/Mesmer example, you illustrated my point. As players/predators we want our targets to be predictable. It’s a natural and understandable preference, but it isn’t necessarily what is best for the game.

Now a debate about how much random blanket avoidance is available is a perfectly valid discussion. Maybe there is a better way to give the level of possible avoidance ArenaNet wants through player choice/play instead of RNG.

But throwing a bar up where you know for sure what a target has outside of health/buffs/condi is a terrible idea. Especially since the current implementation does provide a line between experienced players who can “read” their targets and inexperienced players who can’t. It gives us something to learn generally about the professions, and then specifically about an opponent, and that problem solving makes games fun.

its very unusual for video game to give access to enemy’s inner status. cooldown status, etc. that’s players job to tracks.

gesho.9468:

its very unusual for video game to give access to enemy’s inner status. cooldown status, etc. that’s players job to tracks.

I don’t remember the last western MMO I’ve played without a Health & Resource bar on enemy nameplate, actually. I don’t think many people consider endurance to be ‘cooldown status’, to be honest.

Chaith.8256:

I don’t remember the last western MMO I’ve played without a Health & Resource bar on enemy nameplate, actually. I don’t think many people consider endurance to be ‘cooldown status’, to be honest.

it (endurance) is certainly not health/resource type asset. if anything, its much more close to a cooldown/resource on one certain spell (dodge).

Then what about a visual cue when endurance sigils proc? Other sigils give some kind of noticeable info that “hey X just happened/will happen”. At the very least, you can learn that the person has those sigils, and next time you can try to keep track of that and make smarter decisions. As it is now, the only way you can know if they have energy sigils is if you are perfectly tracking their endurance mentally, and know if they do/don’t have any other hidden endurance gain.

Would probably improve gameplay to make dodge more accountable.
You can mentally count skill cooldowns if you wish, and adjust for CDR, but Dodge can be very inconsistent due to vigor popping in and out as well as traits/runes/sigils on top, not to mention wild strike 10 endurance gain.
It wouldn’t hurt the games depth to make it visible.

/ghosting

Dodge is one of the good things that they added in this game. For in GW1, you will surely get hit by any kitten once youre locked and focused. the only way to negate that is by evasion/blocking which is basically negating damage without doing anything but clicking a skill. Dodging promotes spatial awareness and timing. You don’t have that in GW1. Endurance mechanics is ok and it should not be visible to other people how you manage your endurance or how is it filled or not. It will make things not predictable and formulaic.

alcopaul.2156:

Dodge is one of the good things that they added in this game. For in GW1, you will surely get hit by any kitten once youre locked and focused. the only way to negate that is by evasion/blocking which is basically negating damage without doing anything but clicking a skill. Dodging promotes spatial awareness and timing. You don’t have that in GW1. Endurance mechanics is ok and it should not be visible to other people how you manage your endurance or how is it filled or not. It will make things not predictable and formulaic.

For sure. Dodging is awesome, truly a great addition to the genre.

gesho.9468:

Chaith.8256:

I don’t remember the last western MMO I’ve played without a Health & Resource bar on enemy nameplate, actually. I don’t think many people consider endurance to be ‘cooldown status’, to be honest.

it (endurance) is certainly not health/resource type asset. if anything, its much more close to a cooldown/resource on one certain spell (dodge).

It clearly has attributes of both. It’s like a resource in these ways:

• It’s presented like a common resource – being attached to the health bar and present on every character.
• It’s transient. It goes up and down very fast like traditional MMO’s ‘energy’ mechanics.
• It’s regeneration can be decreased by the condition, Weakness. Chill saps the recharge of cooldowns.
• It gets ‘regenerated’ as opposed to ‘comes of cooldown’.
• It has no explicit cooldown. You have to do many calculations and factor lots of transient boon uptimes & unknown variables in order to know the cooldown in seconds.

It’s like a cooldown in these ways:

• It can only be used for dodges, currently. (That would be a highly interesting mechanic to explore, ie: abilities expending endurance in order to fire.) The only thing that consumes this resource is a dodge.