Guild Wars 2

If I had to point out one major flaw in GW2s combat design then I’d point towards the downed-state.

But if I had to point out two, I’d follow that downed-state with the fact that roughly 80% of skills in this game are AoE. AoE as well as poorly telegraphed.

Just look at your classes and see how many traits and skills affect an area, rather than a direct single target. This is completely counter to what GW2’s active combat was supposed to be about where you could dodge incoming big hits and important CC.

This is no longer the case when practically everything hits AoE. The amount of “splash damage” in this game is unbearable. Splash damage is damage that you take that is not aimed at you.

But since barely any skills have to be aimed and players and instead have an excessively generous targeting rectile there’s no way to avoid it. Instead of saving my 2 dodges I have every 15 seconds for important skills aimed at me I have to waste them just to get close to somebody without taking damage.

Just look at a typical Necro or Engineer doing their thing. Unaimed, untargeted damage and CC going out all around them.

And this is exasperated by the fact that unlike most MMOs, GW2 has no negative consequences for excessive ability use. The only limit is a cooldown and those are mostly very liberal or can be rotated around via weapon-switches. There’s no mana, rage of focus that would otherwise limit the mid-long term use of abilities.

Imo this has led to the least interesting, spammy and one-sided MMO combat I’ve seen in a game to date. And that’s a shame because the ingredients for greatness are there.

Having come to Guild Wars 2 from Lotro this is something that endlessly bothers me both in sPvP and WvW. In Lotro the WvW style gameplay involved 24 man raids against each other and some really amazing battles came out of this that lasted well over 10 minutes at times. The reason this was possible is because of the lack of AoE both in radius and availability and believe me when the one class that did have comparably more AoE used it effectively they wrecked other raids. But even then the damage and cd in comparision to single target damaging skills was significantly lower.

In Guild Wars 2 the availability of AoE skills both in terms of cd and radius is plain ridiculous. Theres very little strategy in a 3v3 at a cap point other than mass AoE because some weapons and builds are purely AoE based without any loss of damage. Take 24 vs 24 in Guild Wars 2 and you find yourself in some mindless AoE zerging mess that has absolutely no pace and requires very little in terms of knowledge and tactics to be successful.

It really is a shame because those raid versus raid moments in Lotro were so kitten fun and one of the main issues thats really keeping Guild Wars 2 from becoming a better competetive pvp game is the correlation between AoE and victory.

I think there’s so many aoes because the game strongly depends on zerg mechanics.
There’s zerg everywhere, even in spvp hotjoin. WvW is already a ZvZ.
Other games had longer combat time because they were encouraging small group combats with healers. Also they had single-targeted skills to allow that.
Fight mechanics must be reconstructed from head to toe to reduce amount of aoes in this game. I think that would be good to prevent zerging.

You obviously have a learn to play issue, all I see is someone whining because he gets killed by better players.

Mochann.5298:

You obviously have a learn to play issue, all I see is someone whining because he gets killed by better players.

playing condi tank and spamming aoe on point is so skillful… (eyeroll)

in any other game aoe was quite limited and aoe spam was punished to certain extend, it would be only great if you hit more than 8 targets or so

in this game aoe does high dmg and is actually promoted… aoe also kind of kills the whole purpose of dodge… i don’t understand it… why should i play a build/class that is based around single target dmg when aoe is so strong? same issue with condi tanks: why should i play squishy dps when i can play tank and do as much dmg in form of conditions?

Oh gawd, they killin my AI with AoEs! Must nerf!

hihey.1075:

Oh gawd, they killin my AI with AoEs! Must nerf!

i play thief and i find aoe spam kittened, what is your point?

Mochann.5298:

You obviously have a learn to play issue, all I see is someone whining because he gets killed by better players.

The opposite actually.

I’m not even getting killed by skills targeting me, just skills targeting my general vicinity.

It’s hardly skillful play to lay your AoE right over the node point either.

I wouldn’t actually mind losing to better players if they’d actually have to target and focus on me for a second.

Cynz.9437:

hihey.1075:

Oh gawd, they killin my AI with AoEs! Must nerf!

i play thief and i find aoe spam kittened, what is your point?

I don’t know if this was intended since the beginning, but I for once like the high number of AoE skills.

Most things couldn’t even be approached if there weren’t AoE skills: think about Spirit Rangers, MM necros, most Mesmers. Even Thieves with Stealth are countered by AoE.

Imagine a match with 3 MM necros, one mesmer and one Spirit Ranger. If there weren’t so many AoEs you coulnd’t even approach the point (and it would still be a pain to fight those specs even if you have plenty of AoEs).

You NEED AoEs in this game, especially on autoattacks. If every skill would have been like Thief Dagger #1, it would be impossible to fight some specs.

Yea, about this.

Wasn’t there a statement by the dev team at some point, like litteraly monthes ago, where they said they were looking into a way to reduce AoE effectiveness ?

Between spammable large AoEs, cleave and AIs, single target damage is becoming less and less usefull.

hihey.1075:

Cynz.9437:

hihey.1075:

Oh gawd, they killin my AI with AoEs! Must nerf!

i play thief and i find aoe spam kittened, what is your point?

I don’t know if this was intended since the beginning, but I for once like the high number of AoE skills.

Most things couldn’t even be approached if there weren’t AoE skills: think about Spirit Rangers, MM necros, most Mesmers. Even Thieves with Stealth are countered by AoE.

Imagine a match with 3 MM necros, one mesmer and one Spirit Ranger. If there weren’t so many AoEs you coulnd’t even approach the point (and it would still be a pain to fight those specs even if you have plenty of AoEs).

You NEED AoEs in this game, especially on autoattacks. If every skill would have been like Thief Dagger #1, it would be impossible to fight some specs.

ahhhh and here we come to the point while thieves struggle in such aoe spam meta

if every class had such high trade off and had to rely on single target dmg, we wouldn’t have as much aoe spam

if every class had to rely on single target dmg and not cleave, then maybe QQ about AI would be bigger and devs would actually FINALLY adress it instead of buffing that bullkitten further despite all the complains comming from pvp community

Everything started with Conquest mode, who is the mastermind and the one who created Bunker. When we got a Bunker we need a Counter and when we got a Counter we need another Counter to counter a Counter.

Just looks at Hotjoin where Conquest and Bunker don’t exist there, most people would just use the most OP build to own anyone in their path. When we complain about those OP builds, Pro players would come out and say “Nah, those builds are useless in tPvP so they are fine”
And yet you still want to balance GW2?

Dee

Just look at a typical Necro or Engineer doing their thing. Unaimed, untargeted damage and CC going out all around them.

im not sure you’ve given quite a thought to what you are arguing. aoe could be a combat problem, but its far from skill-less. in fact, usually aoe needs more skills then single target spells, most of which are self aimed and have no positional requirements. while aoe is either ground targeted (need aim, grenades) or point blank (need to be there yourself, bombs). try catching up to a ranger to put bomb#3 confusion, as opposed to sitting back as mesmer or ranger and did you mash 5 key? hit scored! or try landing those grenades. its far from skill-less, it takes way more skills.

there is a tendency of spamming aoe in the crowd in team fight in the big crowd, without quite knowing whos there, what they are doing, etc… but this is not caused by aoe vs single target nature, you can spam single target just as you can spam aoe.