Guild Wars 2

TL;DR version: GW2 has far too many skills and traits that are less dependent on the player and more dependent on build and spam for correct usage. This game has a lot of potential as a PvP game but as of now it caters far too much to mindless gameplay to be taken seriously. Buff reactive defense, nerf passive defense. Buff damage skills that reward timing, nerf damage skills that can be buttonmashed.

This is a thread that has had a long history to it, and shares a lot of animosity that not just myself but how a lot of other players feel towards this game in general. Especially those of us that have moved on to other games.

The combat. It just…isn’t active enough. I keep finding myself coming back to GW2, and then leaving again because of the problems I am about to disclose here. And I am also going to offer some serious solutions because fortunately there actually ARE things that can be done to fix a lot of this. Some of them are small changes, some of them extreme. This is largely a theorycrafting thread and I invite multiple players to pitch in on how things can be improved.

Note: There will be a lot of comparisons to Tera in this thread. This is not to say Tera is a better game. On the contrary, GW2 is managed way better than Tera in almost every single way and I consider Arenanet to be a far more competent developer than Bluehole Studios…except for the combat system and how it works in PvP.

PROBLEM #1. GW2 combat system lacks significant punishment against mindless spam.
One of the biggest issues myself and many others who try to get into this game is the realization that many builds allow you to just mindlessly buttonmash your DPS skills. DH Trapper is the worst example on this. Stand on point, faceroll 12345. Condi builds: Click on enemy player, 12345. Most bunker builds: Spam aoe skills, 12345 your defensive skills. Spam. Spam. Spam. This isn’t fun. It isn’t enjoyable to play as, it isn’t enjoyable to play against.

Possible solution#1: In Tera, there are enough reactive ( Not passive ) defensive skills that allow you to avoid pretty much everything a player throws at you if they are just mindlessly buttonmashing. Most classes have a zero cooldown block skill that only blocks frontal attacks and depletes stamina/energy while in use. Players cannot take any other action while blocking in this way. Something like this can be added as a universal skill similar to evade that slowly depletes endurance while in use. I am aware that this would be a HUGE change to GW2, but I urge the devs to at least give it thought. This alone would fix so much wrong with the game.

Possible solution#2: In Guild Wars 1, not everything could be mindlessly spammed. Powerful AOE skills often had long cast times, and could be interrupted quite easily. Ranger traps had a 2 second cast time and would be disrupted by any damage, and yet DH traps have practically no cast time and no real disruption. Why? The lack of disruption options and surplus of instant cast easymode skills in GW2 is quite frankly absurd and absolutely out of control. Consider a major balance overhaul that greatly increases the cast time of certain key skills, adds an animation symbol for them above the casting players head, and greatly buffs disruption abilities.

PROBLEM#2: GW2 has way too much passive defense.
There are a lot of defensive passives in GW2 that really just make you feel like everyone including yourself is wearing a diaper and binky at all times. There are tons of these in the game, way too many to list. But the biggest textbook examples of this cancer are:
-https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Defy_Pain_%28warrior_trait%29
and
-https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Mirror_of_Anguish
Why are these in the game? Why should classes just randomly get free defenses for no reason? The amount of passive handholding defenses in the game almost feels like a way to mask the amount of mindless unavoidable skillspam in the game. Sort of like a no-skill-required solution to a no-skill-required problem, except it doesn’t fix the main problem with these which is that there is no skill required.

Possible solution#1: Want to know how passive defenses work in Tera? Trick question! They don’t exist. So the solution is to delete them. Yes. All of them.

Possible solution#2: Make them PvE only. But seriously for PvP they should be removed or drastically nerfed ( Smiters Booned ). Buff all reactive skill based defenses for each class based on how many are removed.

PROBLEM#3: There are too many get out of jail free cards
First off let me explain this one. A “Get out of jail free card” is defined as such: An ability that saves you from a problem after you already got hit with it. Dodging or blocking is not a get out of jail free card since it is based on reaction and prevention. Stun breaks, skills that allow you to freely get out of a bad spot after you already screwed up and got into that spot in the first place, are get out of jail free cards. This actually isn’t a problem GW2 has always had. Stun breaks absolutely should be in the game to prevent a “Stun and kitten on” style of gameplay which is a whole different kind of bad issue. The problem is that since HOT came out the new stunbreak skills are just on a way ridiculously low cooldown. Skills like Outrage or Bandits defense are just absurd and make players practically uncatchable. This also applies to defensive skills that allow the player to keep attacking, like Shield of courage. This allows players to defend passively instead of reactive, where you just toss one up and continue to spam. Example: The current DH build is full of this cancer and chains multiple of these in a row while continuing to spam bow/traps.

Possible Solution: Just nerf the cooldown on a lot of the new HOT get out of jail free moves. Really that would be good enough. Seriously nerf or tweak skills that allow attacking and defending simultaneously, as any time players are allowed to do both at the same time you are basically giving them free spam-time.

PROBLEM#4: It is too easy for teams to stunlock players when they don’t have a stunbreak.
This is sort of a spinoff of the first problem in that the game is too spammy. It is super easy for teams to just mindlessly spam stuns on one target and go crazy. I see this in a lot of league matches: team targets one guy, he gets kitten on by ten billion CC skills per second.
Possible solution: In Tera, there is a skill called retaliate that every class has that gets a player out of a knockdown. After using it, you are CC immune for a few seconds to prevent instant stunlocks. One way to incorporate this into GW2 would be making a nerfed form of “eternal champion” ( gains stability for a few seconds after stunbreaking ) a universal aspect of all stunbreak skills. This way a team that continuously tries to 12345 spam CC on one target will be wasting their abilities if the stun is broken.

Conclusion: All of these problems listed converge to create an experience that just makes the game feel like people are spamming their rotations at each other and only occasionally dodging or reacting. GW2 has potential to be so much more than this. “Build wars 2” will continue to be a problem until at least some of this is addressed. When player skill is less of a factor, the winner of 12345 spam builds will nearly ALWAYS end up being the player with the better build.

It doesnt require any skill. It is based on repetition and knowledge of match ups and skills. It is also based on builds. There is basically no skill to this game at all

I guarantee you will get destroyed against any competent player if you are mindlessly spamming skills.

What a strange complaint … you realize what this game is about right?

Solstace.2514:

I guarantee you will get destroyed against any competent player if you are mindlessly spamming skills.

Nah you wont.

Solstace.2514:

I guarantee you will get destroyed against any competent player if you are mindlessly spamming skills.

Exactly!

If it’s so easy to kill people mindlessly then we should have no problems going into legendary tier then now.

Lordrosicky.5813:

Solstace.2514:

I guarantee you will get destroyed against any competent player if you are mindlessly spamming skills.

Nah you wont.

How much more salty can you get?

I dont know how it goes in WvW but if you are of the opinion that spamming skills will get you in high pvp tiers i think you are mistaken. You should play more pvp and go in to duel servers. Especially in duel servers people will rek you if you spam your skills. And when it comes to guardian…. if you play more than the healing trap and test of faith you wont have much luck against a guardian who doesnt use all traps.

Agreeing to all problems except #1.

SeekZ.3561:

I dont know how it goes in WvW but if you are of the opinion that spamming skills will get you in high pvp tiers i think you are mistaken. You should play more pvp and go in to duel servers. Especially in duel servers people will rek you if you spam your skills. And when it comes to guardian…. if you play more than the healing trap and test of faith you wont have much luck against a guardian who doesnt use all traps.

I have gone on 1v1s. There is slightly less skillspam at higher levels, but there is still way too much. I reccomend you try Tera PvP and you will understand what I am talking about.

I’m fully aware that you don’t always spam 12345 with every build. You spam 123, use a block skill, spam 45, wait for their stability or immunity to run out, use a stun skill, weapons swap spam 234, etc. There is certainly some reactive gameplay in GW2, it’s just not enough. It could be so much better. If you spam against a good player in GW2, roughly 50% of your damage will hit. Guess what spamming in Tera will do? 0%.

I’m not saying GW2 requires absolutely no skill to play whatsoever. I’m saying it doesn’t require enough and can be seriously improved. Currently at high skill levels the only class that doesn’t faceroll their skillbar at some point in the fight is thief. One class does not redeem a game.

It’s a game for casuals.

The balance team doesn’t care as much as you’d want them to care.

There’s your answer.

@Opening :GW2 PvP doesn’t require enough skill to play.

this game doesn’t promote skill play but build play.

You play this build you are good or decent, you play the other builds, you suck.
The pvp balance team said themself.

They focus on changing build to push each class toward the direction, the class should to take for each season.

this has been for years like this…..
well it is not the smartest things to do.

But I still think, it is because they lack talent now at ANET.

SeekZ.3561:

I dont know how it goes in WvW but if you are of the opinion that spamming skills will get you in high pvp tiers…

Mindlessly spam, sure, but GW2 is still pretty spammy regardless compared to more skilled games. (But then what else could it be in a game with little to no resource management, generally short cooldowns and alot of tab-targeted skills)

I remember Lord Baldseth making a VOD sometime pre-HoT, talking about how spammy this game is compared to other competitive games, he gave the example of staff 3 on necro, that even in ESL tournies when people played necro they didn’t for example save staff 3 to use the chill on an opponent to peel for a team-mate, they spammed it, because it was used to overload players with condies.

Seyiwaji.4082:

They focus on changing build to push each class toward the direction, the class should to take for each season.

this has been for years like this…..
well it is not the smartest things to do.

Well of course it isn’t the smartest thing to do, because it’s an impossible task. Balancing for builds will always result in some builds being OP and certain classes being over-represented. Player skill needs to be a dominant factor to even things out otherwise their balance team is just wasting time tweaking numbers for similar results.

Asur.9178:

It’s a game for casuals.

The balance team doesn’t care as much as you’d want them to care.

There’s your answer.

PvE catering to casuals is fine tbh.

But PvP? No.

Master Ketsu.4569:

Asur.9178:

It’s a game for casuals.

The balance team doesn’t care as much as you’d want them to care.

There’s your answer.

PvE catering to casuals is fine tbh.

But PvP? No.

Exactly, and them catering to casuals on PvP has done jackkitten for the actual active player population, the numbers have been ridiculously low.

I couldnt bother reading the whole post because its too kitten long and has no tldr. Why do you think the game caters for casuals in pvp? Why do you think its too easy? The only thing relating to this that i can see as a problem is that there are not enough players for there to be good players but i dont see why youd complain about that either.

Forsty.7968:

I couldnt bother reading the whole post because its too kitten long and has no tldr. Why do you think the game caters for casuals in pvp? Why do you think its too easy?

Why are you asking questions that are answered in the post you didn’t read?

If you really are interested in the specific details on what/why you might as well read it.

Regardless, I added a TL;DR.

Lordrosicky.5813:

Solstace.2514:

I guarantee you will get destroyed against any competent player if you are mindlessly spamming skills.

Nah you wont.

so your number 1 right? because if your correct. then you are #1 right now.

I’m not sure how you can talk about spam.
Most skills do have a cast time and also a rather long recharge.
Or are 30-40 seconds not enough?
Should we go higher? Do you want to play with your auto attack mostly?

How about every skill on 60 seconds, would that reduce spam?

I’m not saying that the powercreep HoT introduced is good, far from it, i would love to see a lot of balance changes but you can learn how each class works and counter most of it.
Most Dragonhunters don’t even use full traps anymore but a set of two, maximum three because they loose out on utitility otherwise.

And many people (ab)using multiple stunbreakers or some with a lower cooldown, sure, but you should ask why they see this as neccessary.

A lot has to happen to make this more skilled again but spamy?
Not sure i can agree on that point.

Also: Trying to put TERA and GW into relation to each other really doesn’t work. I’ll admit i never played TERA for long because the game just doesn’t fit my taste but it isn’t similiar enough to try and compare.

its true. this game is passive wars 2

Forsty.7968:

I couldnt bother reading the whole post because its too kitten long and has no tldr. Why do you think the game caters for casuals in pvp? Why do you think its too easy? The only thing relating to this that i can see as a problem is that there are not enough players for there to be good players but i dont see why youd complain about that either.

You post has nothing to do with what are talking about……

Master Ketsu.4569:

Forsty.7968:

I couldnt bother reading the whole post because its too kitten long and has no tldr. Why do you think the game caters for casuals in pvp? Why do you think its too easy?

Why are you asking questions that are answered in the post you didn’t read?

If you really are interested in the specific details on what/why you might as well read it.

Regardless, I added a TL;DR.

The game has become different from what it was to begin with, yes. But it doesnt exactly make it cater more to casuals, id say it does the opposite. Most people dont know how to play the rotation game as well as just a reactionary game with a few buttons that you need to press. You just like reactionary fast paced gameplay more than the rotation based one, which is understandable but it doesnt make the game worse.

wtf are you talking about?
We are saying that gw2 is not a based on your own skill, but based on the build you play.
What do you come here with rotation? this is not the topic.

@OP:

I mostly agree with pretty much all you said.
Especially number 1 and 3.

I would rephrase #1 saying that the game is too rewarding of the spam-playstyle. Or, on the flip side, one could say that the game doesn’t punish mindless spamming.
Some people argue against this, saying that you can’t be number 1 in the world if you only spam.
That is 100% true. But that is not the issue. The issue is that a player that spams mindlessly can get pretty good results despite spamming / not playing well.

I’ll give an example of rewarding good play and punishing bad plays/spamming: the elementalist skills Ride the Lightning (RTL). It used to be spammed left and right by any Elementalist, until it got changed that if you don’t hit with RTL it has increased CD; if you hit it has lower CD.
That’s a skill that rewards strategic use, promoting good plays, punishing spam and bad plays. Also, it rewards good counter-play by the opponent.

Almost every skill should have the RTL treament: somehow promote good, strategic play/counter-play and punish facerolling on the keyboard.
I think currently no other skill in the entire game has the “increase CD is you don’t hit with the skill” clause like RTL does.
Off the top of my head, a lot of the thief skills should be like this, as well as most skills in other classes too.

As for 2# and #3 – Too many stun breaks + CC spam – they are different aspects of the same problem: there should exist a CC immunity after any CC.
If you take GW1 (a game done by ANET, there’s no need to go to other games from other companies), whenever you were under the animation of a CC (a knockdown), you couldn’t get KDed again until the animation would end. That’s a form of CC immunity. There was no need of a special effect, or diminishing returns. Just make it so that while you’re under the animation or effect of a CC, you can’t get CCed again.
Now, this would be a huge change, but one that would promote healthy, strategic plays, punishing mindless CC stacking and spamming (which goes to the #1 point previously discussed).
Good players would time their CCs, knowing that if they just spam, it would be a waste of CCs; bad players would be punished since they’d just keep using one CC after another (like they do now) and just waste their skills. It would also reward good counter-play from the opposing players.

Additionaly, players wouldn’t need so many CC-breakers, on such a short CDs, since now CCs couldn’t be effectively spammed.
So, it would make it so that ANET wouldn’t need to create so many CC-breakers for every class and every spec, and also wouldn’t need to make them with such a short CD. Again, this would reward good players that know when to pop a CC-breaker and punish bad players that just panic and use them randomly.

Last but not the least: most of these ideas have been repeated for years now. Also, they are not exactly rocket-science or a new thing; they are also not new for ANET, since their previous, still “alive” game, GW1, has this same ideas in it.

TL;DR:

1. Try to reward good plays/counter-plays, punish mindless spamming.
2. Make it so that while under the effect of any CC, players get CC immunity until it wears off; also change and reduce the number of CC breakers in the game since now CCs couldn’t be spammed effectively anymore.

Bio Flame.4276:

Just make it so that while you’re under the animation or effect of a CC, you can’t get CCed again.

Bring back q-knocking, those in favour raise hammer
Good idea tho, you don’t even have to nerf/buff skills this way to make the game more fun.

Here’s what you’re allowed to say:

Some skills invalidate other skills too much.

Lowering the spammability of skills WILL NOT change the skill floor. It will keep the meta the same but with less gameplay/skill.

IMO this has to do with boons. Boonstripping and boon guarding needs to be balanced so that it’s a calculated part of every matchup, not

>okay, we either run a necro or just deal with the boons.

For instance: increase the toughness damage reduction on elementalist but reduce its duration.

duster.7013:

Here’s what you’re allowed to say:

Some skills invalidate other skills too much.

Lowering the spammability of skills WILL NOT change the skill floor. It will keep the meta the same but with less gameplay/skill.

IMO this has to do with boons. Boonstripping and boon guarding needs to be balanced so that it’s a calculated part of every matchup, not

>okay, we either run a necro or just deal with the boons.

For instance: increase the toughness damage reduction on elementalist but reduce its duration.

Actually, if you reduce the spamming of skills and effects, it would affect boons too.
Remember that since boons couldn’t be spammed neither, they would have to be used at the appropriate time and not mindlessly.
Again, the goal is to reduce the spamming of skills, promoting healthy, strategic plays and punishing bad plays, also rewarding good counterplay.

Currently, boon-strips and such are garbage since a player can with a single skill get so many boons that stripping is not rewarded.

The key here is that every skill is being spammed or “over-used” at the moment, including but not limited to boons. I’d say that boons are not the main culprit here, but damage, multi-effects on a single skill, CCs and CC-breakers.
Reduce the spamming of skills, and you also reduce the overuse/stacking of boons.

I disagree with Master Ketsu:

1) The only skills you can spam are auto attacks, and albeit you can win through them most of the builds rely on cooldown skills to both kill and survive.

2) Some of the strongest and more impactful skills in the game (especially in PvP) have huge cooldowns, of 60+ seconds.

3) You can gain access to a evade every 5 seconds, so for people which can read the enemie’s animations evading the dangerous (again: not spammable) skills is critical.

4) You blame the game to have “too much stun breaks” als also to have “too much” stunlocks". So you want a game with long coodowns and fewer stun breaks to make the enemy harder to escape from combos but you don’t want being locked by “too many stuns and locks” from the enemy. Tsk Tsk.

Yeah, no, if anything this game needs to be much less spiky, much more based on stats and passive skills and much more linear.

Well, I can’t agree that there is no skill to the game. Clearly there is.

However, making it possible to target allies with support/defensive buffs would add another dimension of skill. I miss this from GW1.

Archon.6480:

Well, I can’t agree that there is no skill to the game. Clearly there is.

However, making it possible to target allies with support/defensive buffs would add another dimension of skill. I miss this from GW1.

I agree with you, there is skill in this game.
However, what the OP said is different, read the tittle: GW2 PvP doesn’t require enough skill to play .

Emphasis on enough.

Bio Flame.4276:

Archon.6480:

Well, I can’t agree that there is no skill to the game. Clearly there is.

However, making it possible to target allies with support/defensive buffs would add another dimension of skill. I miss this from GW1.

I agree with you, there is skill in this game.
However, what the OP said is different, read the tittle: GW2 PvP doesn’t require enough skill to play .

Emphasis on enough.

That would make the game to hard for the gw2 playerbase target/audience…. if u guys notice that goes against the gw2 ideal of how it was initially designed, it is a game where players dont need to be good (to be good skirts) at playing game, they took all that made gw1 a very very decent game as an objective to make a game where player just need buildX to be effective most of the time.
This gameplay is here to stay that is what gw2 is about… yeah it sucks…and its ugly to watch.

yeah i miss gw1…gameplay…as well.

Spam = condi D/D thief doing nothing but dodging + lotus, etc.

Not spam = using skills appropriate to your target’s defenses and boons and such, and sparing utilities until you need them.

There’s a distinct difference between spam and not-spam, and I’m guessing you’re in bronze-gold because, otherwise, you won’t see a lot of spam.

Too many passive defenses? Eh, I got used to it. Everyone runs out of them eventually.

Aeolus.3615:

Bio Flame.4276:

Archon.6480:

Well, I can’t agree that there is no skill to the game. Clearly there is.

However, making it possible to target allies with support/defensive buffs would add another dimension of skill. I miss this from GW1.

I agree with you, there is skill in this game.
However, what the OP said is different, read the tittle: GW2 PvP doesn’t require enough skill to play .

Emphasis on enough.

That would make the game to hard for the gw2 playerbase target/audience…. if u guys notice that goes against the gw2 ideal of how it was initially designed, it is a game where players dont need to be good (to be good skirts) at playing game, they took all that made gw1 a very very decent game as an objective to make a game where player just need buildX to be effective most of the time.
This gameplay is here to stay that is what gw2 is about… yeah it sucks…and its ugly to watch.

yeah i miss gw1…gameplay…as well.

How I would love to be able to cast Xinrae’s Weapon on allies.

All of the passive traits that trigger on cc can kitten right off. I’m with the OP on that one. Remove them all from the game.

Example: Last Stand

I’m using Engineer Rifle facing a roaming Zerker coming at me. The warrior doesn’t have stability, so I go for Overcharged Shot to knock them back. But wait! The warrior has Last Stand proc which gives them stability. Since I’m self-cc’d from OC shot, they rush in and kill me.

There’s no icon on their bar for Last Stand. There’s no way I could have known about that trait aside from just assuming every warrior is running it (which they are, but .. come on). There ought to be reasonable counterplay to things.

Bio Flame.4276:

Archon.6480:

Well, I can’t agree that there is no skill to the game. Clearly there is.

However, making it possible to target allies with support/defensive buffs would add another dimension of skill. I miss this from GW1.

I agree with you, there is skill in this game.
However, what the OP said is different, read the tittle: GW2 PvP doesn’t require enough skill to play .

Emphasis on enough.

Ah, good point. I should have read that more carefully. I kinda agree with that idea.

^Yeah, I’m not saying there is absolutely no skill to this game whatsoever. If that was true there would be no difference between bronze and legendary, which there certainly is.

The point is it could be so much better. This game has potential to be more than just 12345 and yet more often than not it isn’t. GW2 spam is especially bad in group fights. There is enough reactive defense and dodge to deal with 1v1. But large group fights are just a massive spamfest even in high ranked games.

There is a reason I am using Tera as an example. A situation in GW2 where spam could land 70% of your abilities would land maybe 10% of your damage in Tera. I can 1v2 people in that game and take zero damage purely by blocking and dodging. A universal frontal block for all melee weapons that depletes endurance like what exists in Tera would fix so much wrong with this game.

The second biggest problem is those passive get out of jail free cards. At the very least certain passives should show up in players buff bar so there can be some sort of real counter to them. But they really just shouldn’t exist. Tera used to have passive self resurrection for some of the newer classes but they later removed them from PvP due to them being an awful mechanic.

Lordrosicky.5813:

It doesnt require any skill. It is based on repetition and knowledge of match ups and skills. It is also based on builds. There is basically no skill to this game at all

If it requires no skill then why do you perform so poorly and complain so much on the forums?

Very well put, OP. I absolutely agree that, although this game already requires more skillplay than most mmos I’ve heard, it still has plenty of rpg vices to get rid of.

- I don’t see anything inherently wrong with autoattacks, but you are right that there should be some counter play to it. I don’t think a good game is one where you pop all your important skills only to be matched by the opponent’s and both of you end up facing each other with fists all the time. Also, autoattacks are hard to balance because of the dynamics between ranged x melee.

- You are on spot about the CCs, Stunbreaks and passives. Right now big fights are indeed zergfests. Imagine a scenario where all stuns, passives CCs, lazy AoEs and lazy heals are removed from the game. Suddenly you have a very tactical fight where every single action counts. Besides improving skill cancels and trick shots, this has also a huge benefit for spectators. This concept can and should be applied to all other areas of gw2 pvp. make it simple, and let players figure ways to counter each other via skillplay.

- There is a very important underlying topic in your argument: GW2 doesn’t require enough skill because in many senses it doesn’t give the player the opportunity to know what the other player is using. Think about how in mobas you study your opponent during the match to discover which build he is going to choose; in gw2 you have to guess beforehand what amulets, sigils, utilites, elites, weapons and traits your opponent is using. There is no possible immediate counter. It’s just guessing. I’m not saying we should have progression, but any competitive sport is based on reading your opponent, and gw2 makes it way too hard to discover information. You see, information isn’t even on the table.

Right now, GW2 is closer to a First person RTS than an arena fighting game (which I believe was part of the original concept, see the weapon/shield animations, downed state revive and finish). It has way too much of an indirect combat system, too much zoning. I don’t think the community is going to accept any changes after so many map change attempts, so if we’re stuck with conquest mode, why not remove roaming strategies, small points, AoEs like traps and heals and make it focused on the battles that the community loves, be it small skirmishes or big teamfights. For me, GW2 shines in its combat.

I think we suffer from too broad of a design, we need to make things simple.

ps.: Ah, also, before I forget: has anybody ever suggested that the devs create a test client so that they can test game changes with the help of players? I’d love to test wacky concepts in the gw2 engine.

Seyiwaji.4082:

wtf are you talking about?
We are saying that gw2 is not a based on your own skill, but based on the build you play.
What do you come here with rotation? this is not the topic.

Im not sure who youre talking to but in case it was me, i read the tldr and answered. Not based on your own skill but based on the build you play? You one of those people that wants every build to work on every profession or you just hurt because the spec you liked isnt usable anymore? My point was simply to say having most things be reactionary instead of rotation based will not make the game harder to play.

Actually you got it all wrong.
We don’t want things to be reactionary, we want things to be proactive.

Spamming things is not proactive. Having lots of automatic skills/traits (such as automatic CC breaks, auto-immunities and so forth) is not reactionary nor is it “rotation based”. It’s passive gameplay.

And to be fair, it’s ugly to watch.
Some people post here as if GW2 was the pinnacle of PvP and as if GW2 has a healthy PvP population. Let me assure you, it has not.

Archon.6480:

Aeolus.3615:

Bio Flame.4276:

Archon.6480:

Well, I can’t agree that there is no skill to the game. Clearly there is.

However, making it possible to target allies with support/defensive buffs would add another dimension of skill. I miss this from GW1.

I agree with you, there is skill in this game.
However, what the OP said is different, read the tittle: GW2 PvP doesn’t require enough skill to play .

Emphasis on enough.

That would make the game to hard for the gw2 playerbase target/audience…. if u guys notice that goes against the gw2 ideal of how it was initially designed, it is a game where players dont need to be good (to be good skirts) at playing game, they took all that made gw1 a very very decent game as an objective to make a game where player just need buildX to be effective most of the time.
This gameplay is here to stay that is what gw2 is about… yeah it sucks…and its ugly to watch.

yeah i miss gw1…gameplay…as well.

How I would love to be able to cast Xinrae’s Weapon on allies.

yeah i guess if we want a decent gameplay(for normal people) we have to install a more decent pvpish game…. gw1…
Wish Anet can change the game in time to be a fusion of gw2 movement + gw1 skill aply, and that would fix alot of bad thing that are happening in this game… would be better than make fake changes that later need to overfixed…. mindblow Anet development….
They need to make gw series great again!
Why not import what made gw1 good?
Why stay with mediocre pve game with decent graphics ???

Bio Flame.4276:

Actually, if you reduce the spamming of skills and effects, it would affect boons too.
Remember that since boons couldn’t be spammed neither, they would have to be used at the appropriate time and not mindlessly.
Again, the goal is to reduce the spamming of skills, promoting healthy, strategic plays and punishing bad plays, also rewarding good counterplay.

Currently, boon-strips and such are garbage since a player can with a single skill get so many boons that stripping is not rewarded.

The key here is that every skill is being spammed or “over-used” at the moment, including but not limited to boons. I’d say that boons are not the main culprit here, but damage, multi-effects on a single skill, CCs and CC-breakers.
Reduce the spamming of skills, and you also reduce the overuse/stacking of boons.

You’d have to pair the longer cooldowns with buffs to their strength, particularly with boonstripping, but across only 9 or so spells that people will want on cooldown, you’d be gimping yourself to have a skill waiting around to remove some boons if it could remove like 3 every 30 seconds.

It seems right now boons are balanced around tournament play and running necro. I’d like to see the devs transition balance to 2k elo matches instead of pro games before we see overhauls like that.

Lack of nerf creep in regards to cooldowns is one of the reasons I like GW2 over something like dota 2.

Buran.3796:

I disagree with Master Ketsu:

1) The only skills you can spam are auto attacks, and albeit you can win through them most of the builds rely on cooldown skills to both kill and survive.

2) Some of the strongest and more impactful skills in the game (especially in PvP) have huge cooldowns, of 60+ seconds.

3) You can gain access to a evade every 5 seconds, so for people which can read the enemie’s animations evading the dangerous (again: not spammable) skills is critical.

4) You blame the game to have “too much stun breaks” als also to have “too much” stunlocks". So you want a game with long coodowns and fewer stun breaks to make the enemy harder to escape from combos but you don’t want being locked by “too many stuns and locks” from the enemy. Tsk Tsk.

1- It doesn’t matter if a skill has a cooldown or not. If the gameplay encourages you to use it on recharge without punishment it’s still spam. “12345 -wait for cooldown- 12345” isn’t much better than “123451234512345”

2-See #1

3- The evade system is OK ( could be better ) in 1v1 but in group fights people can still mindlessly spam. It’s also unbalanced as hell since certain classes have better evade.

4- This is not a contradiction at all. The point of this is to create a system of anti-stun that works in groupfights without being broken in 1v1. Before HOT, stunbreaks all had much longer cooldowns and as a result teams would often just spam stuns on one target and destroy them. This was not very interesting gameplay.

So as a solution, Anet gave them all very low cooldowns. This is a bad solution for two reasons:
(1)It screws over 1v1 as it allows people to be practically CC immune, and CCs are supposed to be a way to combo chain other players and disrupt key skills.
(2)It doesn’t actually fix the problem. Groups have so many CCs that a low CD stunbreak really isn’t going to help you.

By increasing the cooldown of stunbreaks, but buffing them all to grant a few seconds of stability, it makes it so stunbreaks aren’t broken in 1v1 while also punishing multiple players for mindlessly CC spamming one target.

This just seems plain incorrect if only for the most basic flaw in the argument: the road goes both ways.

If there are passives, then all players have passives. This means that all players are level in some regard.
You can play around the passives. You know that automatic Endure Pain will proc at 50% HP. All passives have fixed conditions and if you understand the conditions you can play around it.
If you take passive defenses, you are passing up other powerful traits. There’s like, one trait I can think of which isn’t the case, which is Last Gasp.

Sarrs.4831:

This just seems plain incorrect if only for the most basic flaw in the argument: the road goes both ways.

If there are passives, then all players have passives. This means that all players are level in some regard.
You can play around the passives. You know that automatic Endure Pain will proc at 50% HP. All passives have fixed conditions and if you understand the conditions you can play around it.
If you take passive defenses, you are passing up other powerful traits. There’s like, one trait I can think of which isn’t the case, which is Last Gasp.

You are confusing game balance with player skill. Two totally different topics.

man i wish i could see the exact ranking on forums and number of games played

So i know which posts (opinions) to take seriously and which ones to just ignore

I disagree with most of it. There is plenty of confusion and torment in the game which will quickly filter out the people that blindly spam skills or run around like a chicken with its head cut off. Maybe the game is more twitchy now, but do you really want reduce the game to turn based combat? It mostly sounds like someone that doesn’t like the current DH builds.

What I do agree with is there are passives that need to go. Passives that trigger immunity at 25%/50% health that is always active should go. Several of the rune passives need to go to. You shouldn’t be applying CC conditions to someone when they attack you for free, and no way for the attacker to know this will happen until they hit you.