Guild Wars 2

This is an old story but eh…

Can someone please, preferably an ANet sPvP dev, explain the reasoning in the PvP gear setup? One amulet and one jewel with a roughly 90/10 split in stats, compared to the 2 weapon, 6 armour, 6 trinket setup which is roughly 50/50 between armour and trinkets in WvW/PvE?

Also why aren’t there any TDM maps/matches yet? What’s the problem with stripping out the cap points from the maps and changing scoring to “on kill” or “on stomp”? If you don’t want these to be ranked just have them as a custom arena only option.

It all comes down to balance.

They said that they dont want to release half finished and not tested content. What I can understand in some way.

The game and the balance were designed regarding capturing nodes. Since it was part of this eSports plan the devs have put more power into that.

I can’t comment much on PvP stats; I think players should at least be able to choose from 5-6 accessories to dictate their stat combinations. I imagine the logic behind only using an amulet is for simplicity, both in creating builds and in transitioning players into the PvP scene. However, I feel there would only be benefits from adding more flexibility in state choices and combinations.

As for PvP modes, specifically TDM, I do have a solid answer for that. I’m just going to link what i said in another thread:

Let me first respond by highlighting the pros of conquest.

Capture points are a tool Anet uses to force combat. No matter what the secondary objective is, no matter the size of the map, no matter the position or state a team is in, capture points will always gravitate players towards them. This is something a regular team death match would not, and was a problem in gw1.

In random arenas in gw1, occasionally a team would have 3/4 of their members killed, and the last member would run around frantically trying to avoid death. Sometimes it would be because he had a res skill, other times it was to troll, but nonetheless, the losing team was not punished for avoiding the fight until the timer ran out. In gw2, with so many stealths and movement skills, all someone would need to do in order to win a team-death match is to get more kills than the opponents and then avoid them for the rest of the time.

I think there will be some form of a team death match in the future, but it will be accompanied with a mechanic that forces fights much like conquest. We saw some prototype modes in the stream that all have the potential for this, most specifically “Stronghold”. I imagine it to be similar to GvG from gw1, but we don’t know enough now to say. “Arena” was also shown, which could very well be straight up death matches in a very small area.

So, in short, I would expect some version of team death matches in the future, but not in its purest form.

Cheers!

It all comes down to balance.

They said that they dont want to release half finished and not tested content. What I can understand in some way.

The game and the balance were designed regarding capturing nodes. Since it was part of this eSports plan the devs have put more power into that.

I can understand that to an extent. But even the most comparative games have multiple game modes even when the game play and most of the competitiveness is designed around a single one.

q3 – Duel, TDM, CTF, DM etc
SC – 1v1, 2v2, 3v3 etc
etc etc

Cheers!

That’s not even the game mode I was thinking of. I was thinking of infinite re-spawns and a frag counter, win conditions based on total team frags. One life, win on total team wipe and draw otherwise is just bad for this game’s mechanics some classes just have too much mobility and would always be able to force draws.

If you’re asking why gw2 didn’t release with more game modes, or why they’ve waited so long to add in new ones, I can’t answer that. I feel that was a mistake on their part.

However, they are developing new game modes right now and we can expect to hear about them within the next month or so, or so I’ve been lead to believe. Patience is in order here.

Actually I sincerely hope they do not go down the one life route for TDM, it can’t work in a game like this.

It would encourage blobbing harder and with passive healing out of combat and auto acquire skills it’s next to impossible for 1 person to kill 2 people assuming similar skill levels.

With reference to your point on gear, this game is basically played by builds very few things require lots of player skill to pull off. So for me not only are they hurting build verity but the whole sPvP game mode as a whole.

For the first question the answer is simplicity. The system with variable amounts of stats tied to each piece of armor wouldn’t work well in PvP as it should be possible to look at someone’s build in a couple seconds requiring as little real-estate as possible. When it comes to competitive play you need to know at least the frame work your opponent is bringing to the table. Now Gw2 has yet to actually add that to the score board, but it becomes feasible when the framework can be summarized with an amulet and weapon sets.

Now in all honesty how Gw2 executed this came at the cost of diversity which isn’t completely necessary. Something like +60%/20%/60%/0/0 is basically as simple to view as berserker’s amulet + berserker’s jewel. So I believe the other reason for this approach comes down to controlling balance. This allows them to control certain stat combinations such as forcing berserker’s to take some amount of vitality instead of more offense. Though I do question how they chose to layout the stats on some of their amulets like clerics so I am not sure if this choice has been made proper use of.

Now with your second question about game modes it seems to be resource issues and how the classes were designed. The PvP team seems really small and I doubt they are given a very high priority when it comes to implementing balance changes. So given those restrictions their rational seems to be focus on one thing and do it well, with that one thing being something that somewhat meshes with how the PvE classes were designed.

I honestly think that 10 choices of stat distribution is the most you are going to get… Reasonably if you min/max for whatever role, sure some amulets don’t exist
Healing Power/ Toughness / Vitality
(For good reason, in a conquest based structure)
I don’t get why 10 choices are not enough for some people, especially with rune choices.

The reason that there are more combinations for Wvwvw is because the devs have stated there is no point in balancing Wvwvw.