Guild Wars 2

We’ve probably seen enough of these, but I figured I’d throw in my two cents. First off, I’ll give a little personal information. I’m 21, I’ve played MMOs for about 9 years now starting with FFxi, then through GW1, WoW, SWtor, Tera, and so on. With that said, I’ve been around the block a few times. A huge passion of mine has always been game design, however I never quite felt safe enough, having a small family of my own, relying on a more or less subjective degree. So, instead I give my PoV from the side lines with much experience in actually playing the games rather than blindly theorizing.

I’m not sure if the reason there aren’t huge overhauls to the combat/PvP system in this game is due to lack of income from the game, I haven’t looked into it, but I do understand that money and effort can be a pretty big issue. If the net gain isn’t worth the effort, why do it? That aside, I’ll just talk in ideals, assuming the health of the game would net more income than how it is now, these are what I suggest could really improve gameplay. This is specifically around combat, not the Maps, how hotjoin works, etc.

1. Clunky game play.

First, I’d like to say I feel that the gameplay isn’t very fluid. I’ve played a ton of MMO’s, and I’ll say there are much better examples of better combat fluidity. For example SWtor, minus the horrible gear differences at max level, the 1-49 pvp in that game was amazing. You have various skills, they reflected upon one another well (without the, in my honest opinion, annoying background feature that is combo fields) making the character feel dynamic, this coupled with great reaction time made combat feel wonderful. When you pressed an ability in that game, the effect you wanted to happen did even if it was after a casting time. In GW2, for example charging someone as a warrior with a great sword, you can run up to them and sometimes you’ll attack, sometimes you end up standing there until they move, then you chase them a bit more.

Another very annoying clunky feeling aspect of combat is all of the self-immobilizing abilities from animations, sometimes even with abilities that don’t necessarily require you to stand still. It feels like when you press a button while moving the game is fighting itself deciding on what to do, and you end up losing a lot of time that way. Some abilities suggest you can’t move, others you end up finding out on your own, and isn’t a part of the overall ability design. It’s just frustrating to have your movement stop while attacking someone because of your animation. If burst was tuned down a bit, which I’ll discuss later, I’d suggest no abilities having to stop to cast ever. One fun aspect of other games, especially as a melee, is being able to attack while strafing around the enemy, you feel mobile, which a melee very well should. A few examples of abilities that have sort of clunky pauses when using them are: Pistol Whip and Warrior GS charge.

Another thing that could lessen the clunky feeling for melee specifically is to remove the cast times for abilities that aren’t “charge up” feeling abilities, such as maybe Banish for a Guardian, where you’re winding up your hammer to send them flying. Again I’ll use the example of piston whip, you have to think 3/4 of a second ahead of using the ability, which feels weird as a melee character to have to deal with cast times, and here’s why; Ranged abilities will trigger despite the enemy moving a few feet, which is why its generally okay to have casting times as ranged classes. It’s also what prevents ranged from dominating, if you can do the same thing but far away, why be in the mess storm? Melee, however you don’t have that luxury, so you always risk your abilities missing just by basic combat movement. There’s a reason why nearly every MMO allow melee attacks to trigger initially, and the delay of the ability comes from the Global cooldown. Enough of that, though.

2. Burst and Tanking.
Bursting and in smaller casses tanking is out of control! The amulet in SPvP provides such an alarming amount in either direction that it’s almost (if not actually being) the most important part of a build… There’s little room for inbetweens since the game, as it stands comes down to “fast, fast, fast!” 22k bleeds in 2 seconds, Frenzy, Bullscharge PEW PEW, haste pistol whip spam, 3 clones and BOOM! I mean… Sure, it’s fun for the average noob to pick up a Google build and feel like a good player because he can mindlessly kill someone in about half a second. But that doesn’t promote competitive, or even really decent casual play at all. Going from a tank to a damager you shouldn’t go from tanking 3 (non burst, of course) players, to killing anyone and any build in .5-3 seconds. That sort of thing just doesn’t really have a place in MMO pvp, if you ask me. This isn’t a FPS.

All I know to suggest is to rebalance stats. normalize hp a bit, bring up guardians and ele’s hp some, tone down the burst (or rather, scaling of condition and power at least in PvP) make toughness matter a bit more, and on some builds such as elementalists and guardians and rangers, tone down the self healing to compensate for a more useful toughness stat.

One thing I feel I could suggest to help this issue is giving ALL PvP amulets Power, Toughness and Vitality as a base, where some have more power, some have more toughness and some have more vitality, so you have to chose which to focus on, but never being without the other (in net, they become closer) and make each of the numbers a bit smaller than on current amulets. Then, have secondary stats such as Precision, Condition Damage, Healing, Crit damage, etc on the Jewels, and increase the stats on the Jewels to compensate for the loss of stats on the amulet, and so that there is enough of the stats to make a difference. Together, lessening the stat-gap between specs can improve the rate of combat by toning down burst and tankiness.

On another note, haste abilities could use a massive nerf, but compensated. Remove the penalty of using them, possibly even let them last longer, but with only a 25% haste.

3. Reliance on long cooldowns.
This may just be a personal opinion, but I feel like all of the abilities need much shorter cooldowns, maybe at the cost of putting Utilities on the global cooldown. I haven’t played many games where cooldowns aren’t a large factor, but they really don’t need to be. If the effects are evened out, and placed to where one character can’t get TOO much CC to create a perma-CC build (the less CC in a game, generally the better anyways.) I know I said this isn’t a FPS, it isn’t a combat action brawler, neither. But I do feel there is merit in that having to look at your bar less, and weaving less “powerful” moves together to create a powerful effect is lightyears more fun than having to rely on your “auto attack” while you wait on your “cooldown”. Both of these terms plague mmos, though, I think other games coming around are starting to realize this and utilize that knowledge. I’d much rather have to press 1 to swing, 2 to do an uppercut then 3 to finally slam your weapon down causing them to be knocked down (assuming you land it) than let 1 do its thing until your 20 second cooldown comes off so you can slam your weapon again… o.O I feel thats all I have to say about that, really. And again, that’s where fluid combat comes in too. Making your abilities reflect on one another is much more fun than having them feel completely segregated buttons you press on cooldown.

4. Sigils & other “on crit” abilities.
This is a personal distaste. I feel that the massive amount of “on critical damage” sigils say "if you’re not running a typical burst-crit build, most of these are useless. I’m also not a huge fan of inconsistancy. Why not have sigils say, instead, On hit gain a “strike of air”, when you reach 10, your next attack deals lightning damage, also? Or, if that doesn’t work, how about EVERY attack does some minor bleeding or fire aoe, just with a much smaller actual effect. In general, and I know this is an RPG, but in my feelings, PVP isn’t a place for randomness. I beleive most players like to know what they expect their characters to do, not get frustraited because their 15% chance didn’t work as hoped.

5. Builds limit customization rather than broaden it.
This is the last thing I’ll point out for now. I feel like the trait system is really broken logically. For a lot of professions it basically tells you how to play. If you expect to be a useful bomb engineer, you have to put points here, and so forth. That said, overall I just don’t like it. There’s not enough room for trying new things. For many classes you’d be just as well adding the traits to the initial design of the skills and removing the trait tree for them, then just give them a few extra stats. Here, I don’t really know how to get into whats wrong with it without wanting to just scrap it and trying again which one, I don’t have the time to do, and two, would just be very confusing.

So these are my current feelings on PvP combat. I realize this would effect PvE as well, but I just felt like mentioning my concerns.

Protip, if you’re going to make a super long post like this, try to format it in a way that doesn’t seem overwhelming for us trying to read it (ie bullets/bold+italic text). It wouldn’t hurt to add some tldr’s at the end of each segment. Not to sound lazy- it will just help you get more views and ppl will take your posts more seriously.

As for my response; I think this game is much more fluid than SWTOR, it may just be a matter of taste, but I felt that “self-immobilizing abilities from animations” was pretty much the bread and butter of swtor (i played sniper though so maybe that’s why). On the other hand, I think I agree with the majority of what you had to say regarding the whole bursting/tanking issue.
Right now some builds/classes (bunker guard/ele) are just impossible to kill, while other builds (backstab thief/100 nade engi) just do way too much burst. The bunker aspect correlates more to utilities, while the burst aspect correlates mainly to traits, amulates only rely affect power builds (i feel), bunker eles and gaurds actually take valkery/other heal power amulates -and have hp pools around 15k because of it, while burst builds almost always take zerkers amulate.

tldr: Swtor was extremely clunky (imo). Amulates are fine; need to balance utilities for tanks, and traits for burst builds.

I also think that most if not all Sigils and Runes have to be reworked. Too much RNG going on and too much reliance on crit chance as you have stated thus limiting choices for those builds not specced to precison/critical chance.

Traits and traitlines are a good way of providing choices to the players and at the same time having these choices in check and thus easier to tweak (nerfed/buffed) if needed be. However, certain traitlines and specific traits for each class have to be seriously looked at and realize the reasons as to why there is so little to no build diversity within each class (read: ele and thief). These useless/unused traits need major rework.

Wow, I can’t believe you a really said the combat in this game feels clunky and SWtoR felt fluid. When I read that my eyes popped out of my skull. There was about a 500+ page thread on the SWTOR forums after release that went into great detail describing the ability delay and how clunky the game was. It was the reason I quit. I even made a video going into detail about where that game had major flaws in the fluidity. The game designers, after the thread grew so big they couldn’t ignore it, stated they knew there was a problem, thanked me for my video, and vowed they would work diligently to fix it. They never did, that game is now free to play.

Still can’t believe I just read that.

Holy kitten, way to make your post meaningless with the first point. SWTOR had some serious clunkiness issues, abilities never fired when expected they had bad delays even on instants and so on, the Forum was ablaze because of this and many PVP guys just gave up. I actually think GW2 has a pretty fluid combat system, that could improve but is pretty solid as is. The reliance on RNG is a bit to much and should be toned down or at least make builds that don’t rely on RNG aspects better.

I,.

As others have posted, we seem to disagree with the OP’s opinion on the fluidity of GW2 combat. It’s awesome!

But he has other valid points.

felivear.1536:

Wow, I can’t believe you a really said the combat in this game feels clunky and SWtoR felt fluid. When I read that my eyes popped out of my skull. There was about a 500+ page thread on the SWTOR forums after release that went into great detail describing the ability delay and how clunky the game was. It was the reason I quit. I even made a video going into detail about where that game had major flaws in the fluidity. The game designers, after the thread grew so big they couldn’t ignore it, stated they knew there was a problem, thanked me for my video, and vowed they would work diligently to fix it. They never did, that game is now free to play.

Still can’t believe I just read that.

I’m not going to change what I said due to extremeists, because I know SWtor got a lot of hate, it ended badly and put a VERY bad taste is some peoples’ mouths, but I’ll elaborate.

In SWtor, I’ll admit, there were some unusual spell cast delays, but that wasn’t due to clunkiness or responsiveness. Its because the game was heavily animation based. THAT part I don’t really agree with. For example, Throw Projectile in that game, Sages had to animate lifting then throwing it, while the counter parts had an instant shock. Yes, that wasn’t good. But that isn’t really my point, often enough in that game your abilities worked when expected, and the bigger more vital part to my argument is (beyond casting abilities) instant skills even with animations didn’t cause an animation self immobilize. Again while the sage lifted the object, while moving, you just kept moving even though it was lifting. That’s the fluidity I’m referring to. When I pressed it (regardless of how annoying the animation was) I got what I was expecting.

As for the complaints mentioned on buttons not working, I’d have to say the game probably had some lag issues much like GW2 does. I can’t really defend that, but I can say I never had those issues. The only issues I had were a few abilities that had animation delays, but those were frustrating and GW2 has quite a handful more than SWtor did. (All of this excluding having to stand still to cast, SWtor was a traditional MMO in that perspective, I didn’t love it, but it can’t be compared.)

This really isn’t about a SWtor vs GW2, I could have referenced numerous other games, it was just an example, especially given that I didn’t have the claimed lag issues people were complaining about. Maybe that’s why I did so well in the game. Take it as you will, remove the SWtor out of my post, my point stays the same.

Basically most other big names have stop and cast mechanics. ( Every game to its extent, GW2 the least )
GW2 has only some channeled spells and that makes it such a good game.

I will agree that stand still casting is frustrating. GW2 is good in that field, however the few “stand still” casts in GW2 are melee, which is a pretty big no-no. Even if its because otherwise they’d be considered “OP”, then just tune them down a bit, being stuck in place as a melee at will let alone being kited is never a ‘fun’ idea.

ronpierce.2760:

I will agree that stand still casting is frustrating. GW2 is good in that field, however the few “stand still” casts in GW2 are melee, which is a pretty big no-no. Even if its because otherwise they’d be considered “OP”, then just tune them down a bit, being stuck in place as a melee at will let alone being kited is never a ‘fun’ idea.

Talking about warrior’s 100b, it may need either team support as in cc or good preparation. I think warriors in the competitive scene on NA partly even used Throw Bolas.
The warrior is a team-dependant class on highest level.
But I agree changing the mechanic and toning dmg down would be a refreshing change.

Lady Sara Goldheart.2764:

ronpierce.2760:

I will agree that stand still casting is frustrating. GW2 is good in that field, however the few “stand still” casts in GW2 are melee, which is a pretty big no-no. Even if its because otherwise they’d be considered “OP”, then just tune them down a bit, being stuck in place as a melee at will let alone being kited is never a ‘fun’ idea.

Talking about warrior’s 100b, it may need either team support as in cc or good preparation. I think warriors in the competitive scene on NA partly even used Throw Bolas.
The warrior is a team-dependant class on highest level.
But I agree changing the mechanic and toning dmg down would be a refreshing change.

It can work, not saying warriors are useless for it, it just feeks too gimmicky, especially as its honestly one of the most effective ways to play a pvp warrior, but comes down to a frenzy combo, or a lot of support.