Guild Wars 2

Gw2 innovated in a variety of ways. One of these innovations was eliminating roles and giving everyone access to heals and removing resource pools such as mana. In doing so certain limitations were revealed.

Game Modes
The ease of access to low cooldown powerful heals have certainly led to a limitation in game modes. This game cannot have a conquest game mode specifically because conquest is heavily attrition based and would not work with a sustain heavy meta. Capture the flag would not work for similar reasons. The way that domination varies from those other game modes is that in domination you are forced to stay at a point. Running away is very easy in GW2’s sustain heavy meta.

High Damage
Recently there has been an outpour of support for lowering damage, part of it motivated by Helseth’s rant. The reason damage is the way it is is because there is a fairly short window between a target’s heal attempts in which one can attempt to burst down the target. Heals are on a 15~30 second cooldown. So damage has to be high in order to prevent an infinite fight. Again, slowly whittling down works in attrition based games, but does not work in a sustain heavy game. The fact that we have healing power as a stat brings more volatility into the mix. If a character has low healing power and bad class heals, they are more prone to attrition in an extended fight. On the other hand, Gurdians, for instance, can experience incredible burst and comfortably heal back to full while at the same time mitigating a large portion of damage.

Conditions
Conditions and the heavy damage they deal is the answer to a sustain heavy meta. Conditions, if not removed (i.e after active condition removals have been used), have to outpressure heals.

Skill Spam
With the current sustain heavy meta time is your enemy if you want to kill a target. If you miss a skill through one of many possible ways dodges/invul/block/out of range/LoS/intercepted by AI, you give the target precious seconds lowered on their heal cooldown. Missing a skill as a result is much more heavily taxed than in attrition based games. Not only are misses more taxed but misses are also much more common than in other games in which damage is prevented primarily by juking. Skill spam is the answer to this.

Dodges/invul/block/out of range/LoS/intercepted by AI/protection

Sounds like the problem to me.

The problem is that the current sustain heavy meta is a core part of the game. If they were to want to change it to a more attrition based game it would change the game on a fundamental level. I don’t know if the devs would have philosophical disputes with that. But, I encourage the devs to be open minded about this as I’m sure the devs want the game to head in the direction of a serious and fun esport.

Becoming an popular esport game is not without its merits ofcourse, look at LoL as an example. But, much more importantly look at smite. The devs should see smite as serious competition in the esport market because unlike other MOBAs it is a third-person MOBA and will draw the attraction of competitive PvP players. I’m not here to promote smite, both GW2 and smite have their own merits. I’m simply trying to encourage the devs pay attention to this competing game and do some research on what aspects of its gameplay is making it a skyrocketing success (specifically in the realm of esports). Don’t necessarily copy them, but learn from some of their gameplay mechanics. Recently, the asian publisher Tencent (who were early backers of LoL) have given their financial backing to smite.

I encourage the devs to not be afraid to upset the community with changes. If big sweeping changes are made ofcourse it will make many people upset. But, you will be surprised at how open minded gaming communities can be if they feel like the game is headed in the right direction.

Suggestions
All this being said, here are some suggestions about how to take the game in a more attrition based direction:
- Reduce the fundamental importance of healing in PvP. This can be done in a variety of ways. Healing could be made less accessible via long cooldowns. Healing effectiveness could be reduced greatly. Out of combat health regen rate could be reduced greatly.
- Dramatically reduce the access to regen effects. Regens should have high cooldown and low duration. (See Hercules’ regen from smite)
- Increase health pools. Rather than reducing all damage, increasing health pools seems like an easier change.
- Remove RNG from damage. Make it such that damage works on a fixed formula and it always does a specific amount of regular and crit damage based on your stats.

The idea behind the above suggestions is to make people not always approach a fight with full health, but rather pick and choose their engagements. With reduced high CD healing, players will be much more prone to attrition and damage taken will feel much more impactful. Furthermore, increased attrition gameplay would open the door for new game modes.

I think healing is being overestimated. In many areas healing can be quite weak and certain heals have situations where they just fall off in effectivity.

I’ll be blunt in that while I appreciate attrition,pressure and stall teams,
I don’t think those styles translate well to Conquest. Respawn times are relatively short for that play and conquest is about quick flipping nodes and holding them. If you take too long to flip nodes you let points accumulate, and you allow more time for help to arrive. Sure if you can get the nodes and hold them no problem, but pressure specs aren’t fast node assaulters which goes against the scoring system of the game which ticks every second.
I think naturally unless conquest scoring system changed and maybe even the respawn time, attrition specs wont be favored. That and with the flexibility many professions have you don’t need to spec “attrition” because you already have damage and sustainability.

If I can condi nuke or Power spike why would I go attrition and take 2 or 4x as long to kill and maybe give them 15+ points as a result of taking that long to flip when I can do it faster and with less points given while having a Bunker sit on what we take. Like you said you need to shoot gaps between defenses/heals or just straight over-power them but if that weren’t the case the game would probably be slowed so that the person who flips a node gets 40+ points off it because no one can take it back quick enough.

I think in part you are right, the sustained based gameplay is built for conquest where it is all about a timer. This naturally hurts the potential for other game modes which could be more enjoyable. Honestly most of this stems from PvE design with the intent to get away from the artificial need to stop to recover.

However numerically healing is not the largest culprit preventing attrition based gameplay. In a 30s window it is more than possible to stack on more damage than what can be healed. However much of this potential damage can be mitigated and often with very minimal cost. Many weapon skills are full of blind, blocks, evades and have very little opportunity cost and end up contributing much more to the defensive sustain a player is capable of. The frequency of these active defense cooldowns ends up amplifying the sustain effect of healing. It is really how these two factors line up.

There doesn’t seem to be much attention to this interaction on the devs part. If a class has more active defense they should have less hps to achieve a similar time to kill. However the role of certain classes is designed in such a way that time to kill isn’t meant to be kept within specific bounds. I don’t think this is entirely a bad thing, within reason. There should still be some factors in place that allow fights to resolve and just more of a motivating factor to aim to end a fight. Throwing conquest out the window, I don’t think any fight with any class in a 1v1 should go longer than 2 minutes. That it is conquest makes it a bit more difficult as someone needs to be able to take the AoE spam from a number of players and still stay on a point for a respectable period of time.

This ends up getting more into attribute extremes a class can take advantage of. I am not a fan of being able to spec into a purely defensive build. Amulets stat choices in part could help prevent this by forcing players to get further away from defensive extremes. I consider cleric builds to be cheese myself unless the class is designed to have a high degree of team support. Otherwise the purpose of the build is just survive which, well is cheese if your not surviving for the purpose of winning the fight.

Now I would definitely like to see a game with some attention to attrition without a game mode based around time. I definitely want to know fights with other classes will resolve and there is an explicit goal to kill the other player. Or at least play offensively in some manor.

Now compared to Gw2 I would like to see more of a focus on tactical usage of active defense cooldowns with time to kill being maintained in an acceptable range by having a bit higher heal pools. A higher health bar in comparison to what is being healed gives a better sense of progression.

Now for tactical use of active defense I wonder if a resource system would be better. In a competitive game a resource system can have 2 purposes. First allowing flexibility in skill choice as the resource acts as the limiting factor as opposed to skill cooldowns, a singular resource as opposed to spit individual resources. This allows cooldowns to be lower and allows the player to decide where they wish to allocate their focus. Now flexibility is not good for conquest as there is too high of a motivation to play defensively.

Second the resource system acts to create periods of relief and reorganization. Whether ammo systems or mana pretty much all competitive games make use of this. If a player can win by conserving resources they are left in a better position. Having to restock also helps to prevent snowballing as if a team is not in a position to close the game they need to take a step back. Conquest again doesn’t allow for this.

ensoriki.5789:

I think healing is being overestimated. In many areas healing can be quite weak and certain heals have situations where they just fall off in effectivity.

I’ll be blunt in that while I appreciate attrition,pressure and stall teams,
I don’t think those styles translate well to Conquest. Respawn times are relatively short for that play and conquest is about quick flipping nodes and holding them. If you take too long to flip nodes you let points accumulate, and you allow more time for help to arrive. Sure if you can get the nodes and hold them no problem, but pressure specs aren’t fast node assaulters which goes against the scoring system of the game which ticks every second.
I think naturally unless conquest scoring system changed and maybe even the respawn time, attrition specs wont be favored. That and with the flexibility many professions have you don’t need to spec “attrition” because you already have damage and sustainability.

If I can condi nuke or Power spike why would I go attrition and take 2 or 4x as long to kill and maybe give them 15+ points as a result of taking that long to flip when I can do it faster and with less points given while having a Bunker sit on what we take. Like you said you need to shoot gaps between defenses/heals or just straight over-power them but if that weren’t the case the game would probably be slowed so that the person who flips a node gets 40+ points off it because no one can take it back quick enough.

You misunderstood completely. Attrition is not a spec. Attrition based gameplay means targets can be whittled down. This doesn’t have to mean that the whittling process has to be slow. It can mean that health lost is more difficult to get back, which is at the core of this discussion.

In this sustain heavy meta you see players’ health pools ping ponging between low and high. Many of the aspects of the meta that people are upset with such as skill spam are a result of the devs trying to counterbalance against a high level of sustain.

Fourth is correct in pointing out that the lack of a low regen resource pool such as mana further increases the sustain in this game. Smite, for instance, does have some high sustain gods such as Aprodite, Hel and Chang’e, but 1) their heals are not nearly as strong as the heals in GW2 (health pool does not ping pong) 2) they have to take mana into consideration. In our sustain heavy meta a 1v1 fight, where both characters have high heals and low damage, can draw out potentially infinitely because of the lack of a slow regen resource.

Heals aren’t that strong, imo. What’s making it appear that healing is the problem, is that so much damage is mitigated by built-in evades/blocks/protection that what little damage does go through is easily healed.

Change protection to 1% reduced damage per stack that stacks intensity, with moves giving protection providing 5 stacks.
Change all “You block attacks for X seconds” moves to either one attack only or one second.
Remove the built-in evade (but not the movement element) from skills. If necessary, have those moves provide vigor instead.

I’m not saying this’ll create a balanced game right away (indeed, this would require a lot of skills to be reexamined), but it’ll in the long term put the game in a better position.

The problem with removing these types of things from the game or infact changing them greatly is that it removes the skill variable and has very easy potential to push the game towards nothing but professional face rolling.

= thats insane healing.

I’ve said before that this game needs some kind of long term resource. For example, every 10 points of damage you take, your max HP reduces by 1 point.
Your max HP regenerates over time when out of combat. (or when you stomp someone?)
This means over time you can wear someone down, even if they heal a lot.

That’s not the only possible resource they could make (eg. Make stamina have more uses, both offensive and defensive, but then have a similar max-reducing mechanic) but you get the general idea.

Geff.1930:

ensoriki.5789:

I think healing is being overestimated. In many areas healing can be quite weak and certain heals have situations where they just fall off in effectivity.

I’ll be blunt in that while I appreciate attrition,pressure and stall teams,
I don’t think those styles translate well to Conquest. Respawn times are relatively short for that play and conquest is about quick flipping nodes and holding them. If you take too long to flip nodes you let points accumulate, and you allow more time for help to arrive. Sure if you can get the nodes and hold them no problem, but pressure specs aren’t fast node assaulters which goes against the scoring system of the game which ticks every second.
I think naturally unless conquest scoring system changed and maybe even the respawn time, attrition specs wont be favored. That and with the flexibility many professions have you don’t need to spec “attrition” because you already have damage and sustainability.

If I can condi nuke or Power spike why would I go attrition and take 2 or 4x as long to kill and maybe give them 15+ points as a result of taking that long to flip when I can do it faster and with less points given while having a Bunker sit on what we take. Like you said you need to shoot gaps between defenses/heals or just straight over-power them but if that weren’t the case the game would probably be slowed so that the person who flips a node gets 40+ points off it because no one can take it back quick enough.

You misunderstood completely. Attrition is not a spec. Attrition based gameplay means targets can be whittled down. This doesn’t have to mean that the whittling process has to be slow. It can mean that health lost is more difficult to get back, which is at the core of this discussion.

In this sustain heavy meta you see players’ health pools ping ponging between low and high. Many of the aspects of the meta that people are upset with such as skill spam are a result of the devs trying to counterbalance against a high level of sustain.

Fourth is correct in pointing out that the lack of a low regen resource pool such as mana further increases the sustain in this game. Smite, for instance, does have some high sustain gods such as Aprodite, Hel and Chang’e, but 1) their heals are not nearly as strong as the heals in GW2 (health pool does not ping pong) 2) they have to take mana into consideration. In our sustain heavy meta a 1v1 fight, where both characters have high heals and low damage, can draw out potentially infinitely because of the lack of a slow regen resource.

Maybe. I’m trying to say that it doesn’t fit GW2’s combat because of Conquests time based nature.
Smite has very powerful healing and many mana concerns dissolve over the course of the game. Hel and chang’e heal a Group, there heals are individually low but very heavy for a group and stronger generally than GW2 heals. GW2 heals are individual focused similar to say Lifesteal in smite (which can heal incredibly fast).