Guild Wars 2

Great post!
That just reminded me how great GW1 was!
To me, GW1 was meant to be a PvP game and ended in a more PvE one (with great PvP content).
GW2 just seem to be a PvE “bad” game with very little “PvP” content.

Unfortunately, I don’t think Anet has the human/financial resources to deal with any of those remarks.

Please, God, prove me wrong!

Bumping this to bring it to Devs’ attention (again). Yes, it’s a lot of text, but its a bloody fine read that might just help you save what’s left of this pvp.

I fear it is exactly as Lailendil stated six months ago. Anet doesn’t have the resources to make big changes to pvp even if they wanted to so all they can do is try to make the best of the current situation, and even that is very little. It’s not like the devs don’t know what we are saying here, they just can’t do anything about it.

I believe this gem also belongs in here:

Muramasma.1570:

Note: I will be making a lot of comparisons to GW1. Try not to let this sway you, I’m not trying to turn GW2 into GW1.

GW1’s “trinity” worked nothing like the traditional trinity of other games. By design, their system created an intricate level of teamwork beyond the usual tank being tanky, healers healing and DPSers, well, DPSing. This is largely because there were MORE roles than the traditional three, many more in fact, and each profession (for the most part) had a wide range of capabilities to spec for. The role of shutting down support (via interrupts, mana drains, etc.) is a beautiful example.

The problem with GW2 is that, while they did remove the trinity – a move that I don’t think is necessarily bad – they failed to replace it with anything. We are left with professions that support themselves while still being pigeonholed into specific roles of bunker or glass cannon. Essentially, we now have a holy duality with little extra flavor, and limiting support capabilities to self-support has only moved this game away from a competitive teamwork oriented MMO to something that resembles an FPS.

When people on these forums say GW2 takes more individual skill, it is because that is frankly all the majority of builds need to be responsible for. Teamwork in GW2 consists of occasional focus fire, possibly sharing a few boons or condi removals that you’ve cast for yourself, and, due to the single game mode we have, where to properly allocate team members to capture/hold points. Despite what you may think, this creates VERY little depth.

My suggestions would be to buff support roles in ALL classes (I.E. any class may spec for GROUP support that is ACTUALLY beneficial). My ele’s healing rain ticks for, say a few hundred HP at most. His little healing splash skill heals maybe for a 2k burst. This won’t help you’re teamate who is getting instagibbed by a the a their in the slightest. Additionally, mechanics should be added, again, to EACH profession that would allow for a spec for shutting down said support. In my opinion, damage should also be cut across the board in order to force greater team coordination, but this is not as essential.

Support and shut down are just two roles that could be easily added to the game using its current mechanisms, but there are also many other roles that could be added that would greatly improve the quality of teamplay (just look to GW1 for inspiration). While each profession should be able to assume any role – assuming this is properly implemented – each one would also bring its own unique flare to that role, creating vast opportunity for extensive teamcraft.

ANet really wanted to scrap the idea of the holy trinity for one reason: people were tired of every group requiring a certain profession assuming a certain role (LF 2 Monks anyone?) I think they went about fixing this all wrong.

With the way GW2 works now, each profession is running around trying to do the same thing (or one of two things, in this case), and the only difference between them are gimmicks, more or less. A specific profession will either excel as a self-supporting bunker spec or a self-supporting DPS spec. While the different professions go about these two roles in different ways, once you understand how each class works, the lack of variety becomes painfully obvious.

I believe that the anti-trinity mindset has led to the severe lack of roles and the ultimate denigration of true team play. Unfortunately, it seems everyone who hasn’t given up on Guild Wars PvP actually enjoys the FPS style of gaming – I assume because they’ve only experienced sub-par PvP as found in WoW and it’s 7823434 clones.

tl;dr: anti-trinity —> anti-roles —> anti-teamplay —> anti-PvP

And this one…

Paradoxine.8192:

Generally, if people are playing well, then we can already see situations where 1v1 occurs and the battle lasts more than a few minutes and not necessarily just with bunkers. This is what should be the case. I know the devs want ‘fast paced’ play, believe me, the play is already too fast paced, a point I believe would be agreed upon by many people. Disregarding the problem of AoE spam and the particle effect spam, battles are over too quickly. The difference between living and dying is one backstab, or one auto attack and telegraphed attacks, the thing that should be battle finishing moves, are almost nowhere to be found.

I am not proposing that we systematically change damage. All I’m proposing is that we improve the sustain of each class (apart from the already adequate bunker builds) by say 20%. In addition, now here’s the important point, is making some support spells ally targeted.

Now, I don’t know what the line of thinking was when the devs decided to have no ally targeted skills in the game, but this is unacceptable for PvP. In PvE its fine because most of the time people will be balled up anyway and using AoE is the most convenient approach to support, even though support is rarely used even in PvE.
In PvP AoE heals are not only inefficient in terms of when you want to heal a particular person, but it is impractical when you have such a mobile combat system as GW2.

Getting to the point:

What we need is a measured, careful move towards changing some skills that are currently very small radius AoE heals towards targeted heals. In addition, the healing power scaling for such spells should be carefully looked at to ensure that it is indeed viable for skilled support play, rather than simply spamming boons on a guardian.

We need more sustain in general, except where it would turn already strong bunkers into unstoppable builds. We need more telegraphed moves, similar to the elementalists ‘Churning Earth’, where there are both primary effects on skill activation and secondary effects upon cast completion.

The goal here is to decrease the frequency of what are otherwise bad teams destroying teams that by all accounts shouldn’t lose, but did due to the low skill ceiling (I am not referring to the last tourny, I wanted to see TP lose ).

gw2 is a weird game where tanks(bunkers) have support skills such as shouts and a staff to give might, where ellys can be the frontline and to be a succesul warrior you have to be more ninja than a thief, becouse yeah if u are a melee and u cant be healed by a healer or substain yourself u p much die.
Team work in gw2 is press F to ress an ally,give an aura to a dude getting wrecked and maybe give stab to others to stomp, the other stuff such as positioning and knowing where ur team is and what they are doing can be found in any other game.

Thank you KarlaGrey, those posts are a very nice read.

I think in the end, one of the most important things that I’ve found that are easy fixes could be a simple refocus on gamemode, a more informative observer mode, and a buff to support options.

I love Muras post about the trinity particularly and I think he is completely correct. GW1 had lots of options for diversity within a team and if they took the concept and mashed it together with proffessions that could ACTUALLY do anything, you would have a pretty interesting concept on your hands.

And by gamemode, I think it is clear I mean anything that has an objective which focuses on a team.

I can beg and plead all I want, but to fix the game I think those are the most minimal changes one can offer.

Juan Ignacio.8903:

gw2 is a weird game where tanks(bunkers) have support skills such as shouts and a staff to give might, where ellys can be the frontline and to be a succesul warrior you have to be more ninja than a thief, becouse yeah if u are a melee and u cant be healed by a healer or substain yourself u p much die.
Team work in gw2 is press F to ress an ally,give an aura to a dude getting wrecked and maybe give stab to others to stomp, the other stuff such as positioning and knowing where ur team is and what they are doing can be found in any other game.

couldn’t be framed better!

Some really quality points in this thread. I hope the devs listen and commit resources to making good on their so far false promises.

ryston.7640:

Some really quality points in this thread. I hope the devs listen and commit resources to making good on their so far false promises.

This thread was made 7+ months ago, pretty sure we can safely assume they don’t get it, or care considering countless similar posts have been made since.

Written so long ago, still so very true.
Just sad.

However you sugar coat it, the only reason why you play GW1 is to be famous.

1.) If you consistently win HoH, your guild name will be posted in the general status and you open the portals to UW. Your guild will not only be seen by someone farming trolls in Shiverpeaks but also be rooted by the ones farming ectos or getting Obsidian Armor. You’ll be relevant in PvP and PvE and somehow the PvE crowd will look up on you. This is way back then of course. I bet you didn’t know about this.
2.) If your guild is on top of the ladder, you’ll be given the chance to be observed in GvG and in Tombs. TV coverage +9000 to the fame.
3.) You get two types of fame – fame for your emote and e-fame.
4.) And if you get this, you will be talked about in the lots of forums.
5.) Finally, you’ll be covered in Guild of the Week (http://www.guild-hall2.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=43482&sid=215f8ce3c289f9df77993a9b1427bfad) and your players will be interviewed in Gamer sites (http://gwvault.ign.com/View.php?view=Columns.Detail&id=52).
6.) And even after 6 years after you played, there will always be people who will remind you of the feeling when you were hot and you’re in the top.

No bullkitten things as “i play a high skill cap game and i think im better than anyone” kitten.

EDIT: Copy and paste the links coz it will resolve to “requested topic doesn’t exist” – URL resolving to kitten.

Does anyone even know what alcopaul is talking about anymore

GankSinatra.2653:

Does anyone even know what alcopaul is talking about anymore

About the incentive to play and why HA/GvG from GW1 succeeded with such an easy model. Actually everything that a top-player wants to have, but nothing from it can be seen in GW2.

alcopaul.2156:

However you sugar coat it, the only reason why you play GW1 is to be famous.

1.) If you consistently win HoH, your guild name will be posted in the general status and you open the portals to UW. Your guild will not only be seen by someone farming trolls in Shiverpeaks but also be rooted by the ones farming ectos or getting Obsidian Armor. You’ll be relevant in PvP and PvE and somehow the PvE crowd will look up on you. This is way back then of course. I bet you didn’t know about this.
2.) If your guild is on top of the ladder, you’ll be given the chance to be observed in GvG and in Tombs. TV coverage +9000 to the fame.
3.) You get two types of fame – fame for your emote and e-fame.
4.) And if you get this, you will be talked about in the lots of forums.
5.) Finally, you’ll be covered in Guild of the Week (http://www.guild-hall2.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=43482&sid=215f8ce3c289f9df77993a9b1427bfad) and your players will be interviewed in Gamer sites (http://gwvault.ign.com/View.php?view=Columns.Detail&id=52).
6.) And even after 6 years after you played, there will always be people who will remind you of the feeling when you were hot and you’re in the top.

No bullkitten things as “i play a high skill cap game and i think im better than anyone” kitten.

All right, even though I think this is wrong, I will grant you it. Let’s first drop your points about HoH because this post wasn’t made with HoH in mind.

So, what does one need before they can be talked about? For someone to be prideful of their accomplishments (which you claim is the sole motivator for playing anything ever) they need a reason to feel prideful about it. A 6 year old child is happy to catch bugs better than his friends, but one day he realizes that people don’t really care for that and many people have done much more. My point here is, that if you believe that this is a motivator then there must be some reason why I was capable to look towards that.

Why do I not care to do this in GW2 and other pvp games?

I will place my argument in saying that it is because I like to be proud of my achievements in a game I feel I actually have a right to be prideful in. If I beat someone because I was good enough to beat them, not because of some predetermined formula, then a feeling of pride will be invoked and those relationships you speak of will follow. Perhaps that is the motivator, but when I beat someone because I know I will always beat that kind of player, it isn’t interesting to me because I feel no accomplishment, anyone can do that after all, just like catching fireflys as a 6 year old.

This is where the skill cap part I brought in at an early forum comes in. There needs to be enough room for me to be able to say I skillfully bested someone for me to even be recognized. But you’re also right in that the game needs to essentially be easy to understand. Has the term easy to play hard to master ever come to mind? This relationship speaks directly to what I think it is you’re pointing at but you just don’t realize it. Easy to play means the system is not complex, there is nothing hard about having to kill the guild lord as an end result and holding the flag for a buff if you hold it for 2 minutes. That to me seems clear, but the actions within it and how one goes about achieving those goals is where the concept of skill cap comes in. Anyone should be able to walk into a game and get a good understanding of WHAT they need to do and then they spend the time learning HOW they will have to do it.

GankSinatra.2653:

Does anyone even know what alcopaul is talking about anymore

He’s butchering a few legitimate sciences in an attempt to claim his perspective of his motives as factually those of an entire population…
>.<

Wow. I remember reading this when it was originally posted and agreeing with it wholeheartedly. It’s unfortunate that 8 months later, reading this incites the same response, as little (read: nothing) has changed.

GankSinatra.2653:

Does anyone even know what alcopaul is talking about anymore

I’m sorry, but I got a really good laugh out of this (also, GankSinatra is the best forum name I’ve seen in forever).

Actually, I do understand where he’s coming from. The efame from HoH and GvG was glorious, and easily one of my big reasons for participating. I knew all the big names, got excited when I saw them running around, and definitely wanted that for myself. Hell, when I earned my tiger, I was whipping that thing out more often than (unfortunately, despite this hilarious setup, I couldn’t think of a good joke to insert here).

Still, as I’ve told you in various threads, alcopaul (which leads me to believe you refuse to actually listen to opposing viewpoints), the desire for fame is innate in an amazing, competitive game. Now, let’s emphasize the amazing part. Although you may not agree, in order to create a highly competitive atmosphere where efame is the highest sought award (and yes, this is as it should be), the game simply must be a sublime experience. This is the first step towards what you, as well as everyone else here, wants. I would advise you stop trying to skip this step, because it will only bring failure.

P.S. Diage, once again, you’ve said it far better than I in your last post. Kudos to you. Go read that kitten, alcopaul (and you too, ANet, for the love of kitten!)

Empathetic Fighter.2065:

Juan Ignacio.8903:

gw2 is a weird game where tanks(bunkers) have support skills such as shouts and a staff to give might, where ellys can be the frontline and to be a succesul warrior you have to be more ninja than a thief, becouse yeah if u are a melee and u cant be healed by a healer or substain yourself u p much die.
Team work in gw2 is press F to ress an ally,give an aura to a dude getting wrecked and maybe give stab to others to stomp, the other stuff such as positioning and knowing where ur team is and what they are doing can be found in any other game.

couldn’t be framed better!

oh and i forgot to say and problably some1 said this b4 … but this game promotes single play like its better that u have 5 strong individuals than people designed to support. Im not saying a guy that thorws a refugee and 3 ppl get into and they gank 3 other dudes.
Most of the time is “i won my 1v1 im going to help u so its 2v1” and when the actual team fight happens, lets say red took close and mid and blue got their close and blue is ganging up to get mid. when red or blue realise that things are going bad they going to get 1 dude to go their far and do a 1v1 over there.
gw2 is fun to solo gw1 fun to play with ur team.

Muramasma.1570:

the game simply must be a sublime experience. This is the first step towards what you, as well as everyone else here, wants. I would advise you stop trying to skip this step, because it will only bring failure.

It was sublime on our part (my part at least) because we used one build to build different build setups. It’s not all IWAY versus IWAY match, mind you, especially in GvG. We are the only IWAY on upper top 50s. (Highest rank that the guild got on GvG was rank 8. I just read in this old thread in our forums. Good thing that we documented our GoTW correspondences)

http://yourmathteacher.myfreeforum.org/ftopic300-0-asc-15.php

Diage.6451:

alcopaul.2156:

However you sugar coat it, the only reason why you play GW1 is to be famous.

No bullkitten things as “i play a high skill cap game and i think im better than anyone” kitten.

All right, even though I think this is wrong, I will grant you it. Let’s first drop your points about HoH because this post wasn’t made with HoH in mind.

Anyone should be able to walk into a game and get a good understanding of WHAT they need to do and then they spend the time learning HOW they will have to do it.

I agree somewhat with both posts. I think that Alcopaul has some very valid points. There is no fame to be had in sPvP. If I take the portal from Anvil Rock HotM into LA you’d be very hard pressed to find someone who’s heard of Ostirch Eggs or know what kind of a person Saatarconey is for example. In the sPvP NA Community people know these players. More importantly even if you do find somoene who’s heard of more popular players such as Caed or Cruuk or Jumper X in PvE you won’t find anyone that actually cares or would be impressed by their sPvP resume. sPvP means nothing to 95% of the player base. Many PvE’rs don’t even know that there is a /rank command or what the different animal ranks mean/are. There is no fame and there is very little prestige to be had in GW2. In GW1 just walking around with my Nuclear Launch Detected [Nu] tag people recognized me and would often say something about it. It’s sad really that the most skill oriented portion of this game is the most ignored. Nobody cares, really, nobody cares.

Aside from what I stated in my first paragraph I think the most important aspect that Alcopaul didn’t mention from what’s truly missing from GW1 vs GW2 is that the PvP isn’t nearly as much fun. Conquest only is bland and boring. I’m not saying it doesn’t have a place and that Conquest shouldn’t be in the tournament rotation but it can’t be the ONLY rotation. I remember playing with some GW1 players and after winning the 3 round tournament it ended and everyone was like "That’s it?!‘. That’s ALL there is to the tournaments?! Now it’s even worse thakitten ’s a single one and done round. Doesn’t feel like much of a tournament to me. I don’t know how you feel about it but I’m guessing you feel the same. Nothing. You feel nothing win or lose.

In an attempt to make the game more casual friendly the new trait and skill system is absolutely fail when compared to the original GW. In GW1 you could seriously theory craft some insane builds. Not just builds but team compositions. I remember having groups of people in GW Team Builder coming up with some sick team comps. And you actually thought about skills and how they complement the rest of the team to accomplish the overall goal. It could be anything from Spike, Hex Condy Pressure, Direct Damage Pressure, Anti-Caster E-Denial Pressure, etc… What are you going to have in your backline? Midline? Frontline? Are you even going to have a traditional frontline? Etc… GW1 was epic. GW2 is fail. You rarely think of team comp because there are multiple professions that fill the few basic roles that are needed in an all Conquest game type. Bunker, DPS, Roamer, or Support. That’s all there is. When you theorycraft in GW2 you come up with profession specific builds. On top of that theory crafting in GW2 is a ton of MATH. No pun intended. A ton of math. Theorycrafting in GW2 is like studying to become an actuary with all of the variables and the “possibilty” of them proc’ing. Power, Crit %, Crit Damage + modifiers, Combo Field Finisher %, Different Finisher Types, Toughness, Healing, Armor Rating, Rune Types, Rune Special Effect %‘s, Amulet and the Different Jewel Impact, Weapon Sigils and their % Possibility to take effect, the increase effects of the sigils that “add to” with each kill, etc… It’s absolutely miserable. This is why everyone Carbon Copies good builds of which there are an extremely limited number of.

I don’t know what happend at ANet or what they were thinking but the PvP in GW2 is fail when compared to the original game. There isn’t a single player of the hundreds I knew from GW1 still playing GW2. Most of them quit within the first two weeks of release and are never coming back.

playboy its becouse ppl want game such as lol / dota … traits=shop where u buy items and its not really complicated and well 1v1 and 2v2 like lanes and such … and yeah team figths? oh its that time we get all together and we throw stuff to the ground

Juan Ignacio.8903:

playboy its becouse ppl want game such as lol / dota … traits=shop where u buy items and its not really complicated and well 1v1 and 2v2 like lanes and such … and yeah team figths? oh its that time we get all together and we throw stuff to the ground

You know what I find amusing?…

Anet looked high and low for games to model their pvp after. They looked all around and checked everything that either is currently or could be considered a contender for an e-sport. They then said alright, now with all these games, how do we mimic these games? To me, this question was a big problem because those genres already have representatives in the e-sport community. If you want something that plays like league, play league. If you want something that plays like an FPS, play an FPS. If you want something that plays like an actual RPG, well you’re official SOL. Anet could have moved to take up that niche but instead opted for things that have already been done. Ironic for a dev team that spouted how innovative they were seeking to be.

alcopaul.2156:

Muramasma.1570:

the game simply must be a sublime experience. This is the first step towards what you, as well as everyone else here, wants. I would advise you stop trying to skip this step, because it will only bring failure.

It was sublime on our part (my part at least) because we used one build to build different build setups. It’s not all IWAY versus IWAY match, mind you, especially in GvG. We are the only IWAY on upper top 50s. (Highest rank that the guild got on GvG was rank 8. I just read in this old thread in our forums. Good thing that we documented our GoTW correspondences)

http://yourmathteacher.myfreeforum.org/ftopic300-0-asc-15.php

No no no, you missed my point entirely. I’m not talking about GW1 here at all, let alone [MATH]. I’ve already told you I had nothing against your guild back in the day (mostly because I never had any trouble facing IWAY whatsoever), nor did I even reference it in my post. I can understand you’re quick to jump to your guns, but drop it for once and focus on the discussion at hand.

I simply wish to show you that you’re 100% correct in that efame is the greatest sought reward from competitive PvP; something you’ve been yammering on about for god knows how long, and something that I’ll be the first to agree with you on. However, the point I was making is that the desire for efame is something that comes naturally with in an amazing game; and countless PvPers have found GW2 to be rather lackluster. This is why many of us wish to see a focus on making gameplay the best it can be, rather than focusing on the things that are much better left for AFTER this is done.

@Theplayboy

+1. good read. I think a lot of it has to do with the sheer lack of skills to choose from. I could actually live with weapon skills remaining as they are if we actually had a more meaningful selection of utilities. As it stands, every profession is really stuck with only a handful of utilities that are even viable in PvP, certain skills are simply a must for any build, and in the end, what you can actually do is quite limited as a result.

Unfortunately, this is but one aspect of the bigger problem.

Muramasma.1570:

alcopaul.2156:

Muramasma.1570:

the game simply must be a sublime experience. This is the first step towards what you, as well as everyone else here, wants. I would advise you stop trying to skip this step, because it will only bring failure.

It was sublime on our part (my part at least) because we used one build to build different build setups. It’s not all IWAY versus IWAY match, mind you, especially in GvG. We are the only IWAY on upper top 50s. (Highest rank that the guild got on GvG was rank 8. I just read in this old thread in our forums. Good thing that we documented our GoTW correspondences)

http://yourmathteacher.myfreeforum.org/ftopic300-0-asc-15.php

No no no, you missed my point entirely. I’m not talking about GW1 here at all, let alone [MATH]. I’ve already told you I had nothing against your guild back in the day (mostly because I never had any trouble facing IWAY whatsoever), nor did I even reference it in my post. I can understand you’re quick to jump to your guns, but drop it for once and focus on the discussion at hand.

I simply wish to show you that you’re 100% correct in that efame is the greatest sought reward from competitive PvP; something you’ve been yammering on about for god knows how long, and something that I’ll be the first to agree with you on. However, the point I was making is that the desire for efame is something that comes naturally with in an amazing game; and countless PvPers have found GW2 to be rather lackluster. This is why many of us wish to see a focus on making gameplay the best it can be, rather than focusing on the things that are much better left for AFTER this is done.

Agree, but progression and “the-better-you-play-the-better-your-reward-is”-Mentality are or should be the priorities for every PvP. When the game is amazing it helps for sure. (In the case of GW2 that’s for sure not the problem, because it is pretty solid)

At the beginning ppl played it and got entertained for achieving things. But after the champion-title, which could be done easily in a week and could be farmed also in solo-join, ppl got bored of farming rank-points for a rank that can be done faster by playing hotjoin. PPl started to not feel rewarded enough for playing competitive. Many players asked what the point is of playing something competitive when playing casual will reward you more. Then QP’s came and there was a little effort of playing in paid-tournaments. Sadly, A-Net kittened it up again. Now as we have CA’s atleast we can do it on our own. But besides some ppl watching you on twitch, there’s nothing more about it.

ANet had a winning formula. I can’t for the life of me understand why they tried to re-invent the wheel.

Theplayboy.6417:

ANet had a winning formula. I can’t for the life of me understand why they tried to re-invent the wheel.

…its announced that Guild Wars 2 sold 3 million copies through 2012.

dat pve player base wit dem full wallets

Muramasma.1570:

+1. good read. I think a lot of it has to do with the sheer lack of skills to choose from. I could actually live with weapon skills remaining as they are if we actually had a more meaningful selection of utilities. As it stands, every profession is really stuck with only a handful of utilities that are even viable in PvP, certain skills are simply a must for any build, and in the end, what you can actually do is quite limited as a result.

Unfortunately, this is but one aspect of the bigger problem.

Not really.
Quality is better than quantity.

If the utilities (and weapons) laid out at least had a few extremely well made ones that promoted high skill capped, team centric play, GW2 would be fine…
Choosing from a dozen mediocre to play specs isn’t even comparable to 2-3 well made ones.
The only way more viable utilities could be a good thing… is if Anet unintentionally tweaked a few to be made very well, so you could cherry pick those quality skills instead of being stuck with numerous ones that aren’t.

Each class doesn’t need more than 2-3 viable specs, ending in a game with 20~ to choose from (sure more would be nice, but nice sits on the backburner compared to other issues GW2 has)

I think a pretty cool formula (assuming there was team-centric play already) would be to look at your weapon choice as a sort of elite of old. The choice that you built your build around. Make utility options overall better and make them a greater part of your build. They should be more dynamic and situational imo. So that way you can look at it as if your choice in an “elite” aka weapon would decide your over all play style while the other choices helped to motivate that play style. Overall, I think it isn’t about the extra utilities being stronger, but more dynamic.

And in a team-centric sort of play, I found the prospect of a 1-time (or 2-time) use ultimate to be rather interesting.

EDIT: Added- BTW, I think the traits sort of “force” builds too much, they ought to be more open ended. It’s almost as if Anet has already chosen which builds are good and which are bad.

Empathetic Fighter.2065:

Agree, but progression and “the-better-you-play-the-better-your-reward-is”-Mentality are or should be the priorities for every PvP. When the game is amazing it helps for sure. (In the case of GW2 that’s for sure not the problem, because it is pretty solid)

At the beginning ppl played it and got entertained for achieving things. But after the champion-title, which could be done easily in a week and could be farmed also in solo-join, ppl got bored of farming rank-points for a rank that can be done faster by playing hotjoin. PPl started to not feel rewarded enough for playing competitive. Many players asked what the point is of playing something competitive when playing casual will reward you more. Then QP’s came and there was a little effort of playing in paid-tournaments. Sadly, A-Net kittened it up again. Now as we have CA’s atleast we can do it on our own. But besides some ppl watching you on twitch, there’s nothing more about it.

You won’t hear me disagreeing with any of your points (save for the fact that I don’t believe GW2 is as solid as you may). For starters, it’s ridiculous that, on average, I earn more glory/rank points playing 8v8 hotjoin, which is easily the worst mode possible. Of course, once you realize how pointless rank and glory points are, gravitating towards the better game modes isn’t a big deal at all. And then you’re left with the glaring truth: there really are no worthwhile rewards in the game.

I do think that it’s necessary for ANet to implement better rewards as a solid base of motivation. Personally, I loved the kitten out of HoH titles and emotes from GW1, and those rewards (coupled with the best gameplay freaking ever made) fueled a competitive scene with fame, celebrities, and all that good stuff.

garethh.3518:

Not really.
Quality is better than quantity.

If the utilities (and weapons) laid out at least had a few extremely well made ones that promoted high skill capped, team centric play, GW2 would be fine…
Choosing from a dozen mediocre to play specs isn’t even comparable to 2-3 well made ones.
The only way more viable utilities could be a good thing… is if Anet unintentionally tweaked a few to be made very well, so you could cherry pick those quality skills instead of being stuck with numerous ones that aren’t.

Each class doesn’t need more than 2-3 viable specs, ending in a game with 20~ to choose from (sure more would be nice, but nice sits on the backburner compared to other issues GW2 has)

The problem is that, with only a few really well made ones, everyone is going to be using the same utilities! I’m by no means saying it would ideal to have a mess of lackluster ones, of which only a couple are worthwhile, I’m saying that there should be a bunch of really worthwhile ones that do very different things. Hopefully, if implemented right (which, I’ll admit, is a stretch for this game), this would bring at least some meaningful diversity. Personally, I think if each profession had more than 2-3 viable specs, a lot of the issues we find in GW2 could potentially be one step closer to being fixed. We may just differ in opinion on this matter, however.

Actually, I do suppose if each profession had 3 viable specs that effectively did different things (say, damage, support, and shutdown), that WOULD be more than sufficient at this point in time, and you’re completely correct in saying adding more is a luxury that belongs in the backseat. However, if we actually want to see each of the classes with these different specs, adding and/or improving utilities is one solid way to do it.

Diage.6451:

I think a pretty cool formula (assuming there was team-centric play already) would be to look at your weapon choice as a sort of elite of old. The choice that you built your build around. Make utility options overall better and make them a greater part of your build. They should be more dynamic and situational imo. So that way you can look at it as if your choice in an “elite” aka weapon would decide your over all play style while the other choices helped to motivate that play style. Overall, I think it isn’t about the extra utilities being stronger, but more dynamic.

And in a team-centric sort of play, I found the prospect of a 1-time (or 2-time) use ultimate to be rather interesting.

EDIT: Added- BTW, I think the traits sort of “force” builds too much, they ought to be more open ended. It’s almost as if Anet has already chosen which builds are good and which are bad.

I actually feel the same way about the weapon system; it’s another one of GW2’s interesting new ideas (note: before I get flamed, I know other games have done this sort of thing before). However, I don’t like what they’ve changed the actually elite skill system into. I’ve never liked the idea of having one super move to pop; I think it actually takes away from meaninful strategy. In this regard, I much preferred GW1’s system. However, there are much more pressing issues at hand, so really I won’t complain (much) about this.

Oh, and yes x10 to utilities being more dynamic. That’s really what I was trying to get at here.

As for the trait system, I don’t really mind that ANet seemed to have different roles in mind to spec for (this would make balancing a lot easier and whatnot), but there are many builds with poor synergy as a result, as well as a lot of traits that would go very well together, but are unavailable because they’re too high in different areas. Furthermore, certain specs that ANet seemed to have designed are just flat out better than others, which is yet another reason we see a lot of the same things on the battlefield.

Dug this up to further illustrate why I dislike long cooldown elites (and many other skills in this game, long CDs are everywhere):

Aza.2105:

I’ve seen players mention on several occasions that gw2 is a very fast paced game. I agree with this to a extent. Unlike gw1 which were the max cooldown to skills were 60secs. Gw2 gives us the traditional mmorpg approach with “powerful skills and long cooldowns”.

Because of this, gw1 gameplay actually feels more fluid, since there isn’t a long interval between rotating skill cooldowns. To make matters worse, many of the skills with the longest cooldowns tend to be the least powerful.

In the future, I hope the devs get rid of the long cooldown approach and build upon the original formula. Were skills were on short cds and elites weren’t super powerful skills but skills that you formed your build around.

I don’t see how anything is ‘lost’ 9 months in. No MMO that was great was born that way.. GW2 has the base, meaning great combat. Game still has the potential to be great (already is for my casually-pewpewing style). Clearly, cash is king, and PvP doesn’t sell very well.. common sense.

Great post by the OP. As many times as I tried, GW1 never got it’s hooks into me.

Oh, and there was one other MMORPG with great team combat: Pirates of the Burning Sea. For 5 years it had my heart.. unfortunately it was loss-based and complex, so few ever stuck it out. Never been a better combat engine, imo. Assuming you like BOATS hahahaha…

@Muramasma
I agree with the cooldown portion, one of the significant problems I find with the ability to make utilities dynamic is the fact that they seem to have a pretty long cool down and you’re mostly stuck with just using your weapon skills. So, if we look at it as if the Weapon choice was in and of itself an entire skill you have the option of choosing (assuming standard mechanics) 2 skills which only one can be active, four others, and their actual elite. I think that’s pretty good, if and only if, the other skills are important enough. That leads me into why I think the actual elite can be something ‘Extra.’

The main thing I wanted to say to you is that I too am skeptical about how exactly a large “ace-in-the-hole” skill would go about, I just think that it is something worth a little risk. I find the concept intriguing. I think they did it poorly, but imagine in an actual team fight where you need to fight as a team. I don’t think these skills should be game changing but I think they would be cool to have the ability to sort of shift the current flow of combat in your favor. It would present amusing flare to observers and allow for a game to always be 1 second away from a game changer. If the elites were in fact one time use and created a significant adjustment to the flow of battle (but they NEED to be manageable by a sufficiently skilled opponent) then I think it would be quite a nice touch on a good system.

So to reiterate, but shorter, I think there is merit to the one time shot sort of skill in that it could keep the battlefield fresh and interesting for both the players and the observers and just so long they aren’t TOO powerful, I think it would be a pretty high-skill cap low complexity addition to the game.

@Punkins

The funny thing is it took Anet only 7 months to host a $100,000 tournament in their first game. It is now past 7 months and their base audience for pvp is orders of magnitude smaller than when they started. Something is wrong, whether you agree that it is the same stuff were discussing or not, you cannot hide from the fact that something somewhere is not going as planned. How can a company that did not intend for a pvp base do that well and as soon as they declare they wish for an e-sport be this far away?

My main goal is to try to help a company I once believed in. There were so many things I bought from Guildwars 1 just because I enjoyed their product. I told so many friends of mine, “I bought this just because I feel Anet deserved the income.” I have 5 Guildwars 1 accounts and my main account has 14 character slots and a large array of purchased goods, all because I enjoyed their product. I want to want to give them money, they’re just making it hard for me. (People like me is probably one of the only reasons their non-subscription system worked anyways.)

O, and about PvP not paying well, it actually pays better than PvE because you can get into the HUGE market of well.. marketing.. Companies pay big money to get their names out to all the high end gamers and if your game provides a place to do that, you can make a lot of money.

I agree with a number of points Diage made but disagree with some of the specifics. Gw1 was great. How the game promoted team play was done excellently but that hasn’t carried over to Gw2. I also agree with Gw1’s issues being the learning curve and lack of transparency.

However removing the attrition system, although it does make the game easier to understand does create a number of other problems. Also the choice to remove the attrition system wasn’t made for PvP but instead PvE, as an attempt to decrease down time. If they were actively trying to reduce under the hood affects what is with all this on crit procs? For PvP it has the consequence of reducing the risk-reward of skill usage. This is something that hasn’t been actively addressed by designing skills with higher risk-reward in mind. It is also compounded by the frequency of active defense in Gw2. High Impact skills need to be used repeatedly to force active defense usage allowing other high impact skills to land. Ends up being too many skills are used on cd as holding onto skills for too long prevents that player from overwhelming an opponents active defense.

The real issue here is visibility. It is more than possible to create an attrition system that impacts only a subset of skills while allowing better visibility of the attrition state of the opponent and increasing risk-reward.

The other thing I disagree with is the lack of a holy trinity isn’t a plus. The team coordination in Gw1 resulted almost entirely from the presence of a monk. The back line changes the situation from how long will it take us to push a kill through to how do we actually push a kill through? The guarantee is no longer there causing the difference between teams to be an extra player as opposed to a couple extra seconds. Partially the downed state addresses this by reducing the guarantee but its implementation has so many other issues I am not going to get into.

A players self reliance for defense has just been taken a step too far. With active defense in Gw2 monks in their entirety aren’t needed but there should still be much more team dependence on defense. Actually having a single person dedicated to team defense makes the game easier to understand than each player contributing marginally anyways. Ideally each player can contribute to defense to a small extent, as seen through linebacking/interrupting enemy offense while having a person heavily focused but not entirely on defense. Healers > Bunkers+downstate in promoting team interaction.

Then in all honestly class design as a whole is pretty bad in Gw2. The consistency to impact ratio is really far off for the vast majority of classes. There is also a number of class roles being limited functionally due to risking them stepping on another classes toes as well as some roles being underrepresented. The trait system can be massively improved, not just through tweaks to individual traits but the entire layout of the system. The trait lines don’t give the impression they have a truly distinct goal in mind and are limited to a large extent by the inflexibility of the attribute system. Eg. they have to put condition damage next to something for each class even if it doesn’t quite fit the goal of that line.

Personally I think it will take a new game to turn this genre around. Gw2 has put itself out there really as a learning instrument as opposed to setting itself up for success. But when your being funded by a corporation like NcSoft who doesn’t believe PvP is a safe investment that is to be expected. At least they have revealed there is a market here that is very underrepresented.

Punkins.2087:

I don’t see how anything is ‘lost’ 9 months in. No MMO that was great was born that way.. GW2 has the base, meaning great combat. Game still has the potential to be great (already is for my casually-pewpewing style). Clearly, cash is king, and PvP doesn’t sell very well.. common sense.

Anet hasn’t even addressed the ‘problems’ driving zounds of people away since beta as problems…
That’s kinda ‘lost’.

garethh.3518:

Punkins.2087:

I don’t see how anything is ‘lost’ 9 months in. No MMO that was great was born that way.. GW2 has the base, meaning great combat. Game still has the potential to be great (already is for my casually-pewpewing style). Clearly, cash is king, and PvP doesn’t sell very well.. common sense.

Anet hasn’t even addressed the ‘problems’ driving zounds of people away since beta as problems…
That’s kinda ‘lost’.

I keep hearing this and expecting to log in to find less people to fight. Strangely, i experience the opposite..

@Fourth
Ya, I enjoy the full response to everything!

Note, I did not want an attrition removed but rather said it could be moved. In GW1 the attrition was heavily focused on the backline’s energy, in GW2 it could be pushed to be more clearly represented by actual HP. I also agree that crit is bad. I want to point out that I don’t think Anet did it properly, I merely wish to point out that within their changes, there are some saving graces and opportunities that could be taken advantage of. More recently, I pointed out that it would be nice to see more dynamic skill usage. A system of dynamic skill usage would actually make your cost-reward structure more viable since each use would have a marginal cost to it, “should I use it at this instance to get this effect or wait for the right instance to get a different effect.”

And once again the statement of the removal of the holy trinity is a discussion as to how this concept could be mutated to be a good thing. I agree that the removal is detrimental to the old system of backline/midline/frontline. However, the removal of this could allow room for a more dynamic backline/midline/frontline where players could choose through marginal decisions, what position they should be fulfilling at any given time. That is, if a player could swap between a shutdown mode and an offensive mode he has a choice as to whether he should be prepared to spike or attempting to create a window via shutdown. I can agree, however, that this sort of consideration is an increase in complexity and is questionable as to whether the associated skill-cap increase is in fact worth it. Once again, there is just room for possibility here.

IMO, the best way for stuff to be implemented balance wise is to have a large amount of offense, a larger amount of defense, and room for shut down. Note that the damage should never be able to kill someone outright but more or less depend on some form of pressure prior to a full kill being achieved. So the system of events ought to work from spread pressure/shutdown and if the appropriate shutdown is achieved AND the appropriate pressure then you can apply a spike to actually kill someone.

You know, funny thing, I wanted at one point to make a post (but thought better of it) that basically stated that I believe GW2 will be a bust but it will have an extremely influential effect on future games and be at best a remarkable learning tool for future developers (which includes myself.)

If someone doesnt understand the OP, this is what we want:

I don’t really like that first video, doesn’t really show much of anything..

The second video is pretty decent tho.

Just want to add this gem (Regarding the warrior):

Krilce.7864:

TBH, I doubt they’ll do anything to make warriors viable. There are so many fundamental design flaws in this game that they do not know how to fix it, If they haven’t done anything in 9 months, even though a warrior was subpar pretty much since release, and that JP said that they’ll be focusing on bug fixing this patch(I’m not even sure of why aren’t they making balance changes along with bug fixing concurrently), there goes another month of hell for warriors.

We are very weak against conditions, and if traited for their removal, we lose too much of pretty much everything. With traited condition removal, we cannot fill the role of spiker, which is already done better by a thief, we wouldn’t be able to bunker because of lack of access to defensive boons, the worst healing in game, and whatnot. If we go for team utility, we are again doing everything worse than other professions, so we are pretty much pigeonholed in damage specs. Hell, we can’t even spec for condi, because we don’t have access to enough conditions to cover damaging ones, so, there you go.

Our gap closers in our only viable spec are greatly affected by cripples and chills, which no other profession has problem with, because of good condition removal even when they aren’t built specifically for it. We are very easily kited, very poor in 1v1 against most professions, and quite bad in team fights too, due to lack of survivability, where we have to rely on 30 sec cd shield block, where a lot of attacks can’t even be blocked, our very limited amount of dodging, unless we are using warhorn, where you lose even that block and mega short range interrupt/burst starter.

We are the only profession, well, maybe along with necro, that needs to be babysitted, where ANet’s design philosophy was to make evey profession self reliable, by making everyone having their own heals, which for a warrior, as I’ve already said, are the worst heals in game.

Now, why are there so many problems with a warrior? First of, many of the problems aren’t really “our problems”, but rather combat/game design problems that we are greatly affected by.

First of all, there are too many evades, teleports, immunities, particle effects, AoE and condi spam. Since all of our important skills are easily telepgraphed, thus easy to dodge, which is perfectly fine, it’s insanely hard to land them on anyone that has been playing this game for a longer period of time. If they don’t have anymore dodges left, they can use short cd teleports, pretty much spammable evades, immunity, spammable blind, so they can shut us down without many problems. Meanwhile, we have no evades(well, except from ww, which is easily our greatest skill), no instant teleports, either for gap closing or running away, so we have to use our easily telepgraphed physical gap closers, which are affected by chills and cripples, though I’m repeating myself here, where ALL of the conditions are spammable, require zero brain to use in most cases. Tell me when you’ve seen someone applying poison at the moment of his opponent’s healing. No one. Or when someone uses weakness to lower his opponent energy regeneration, so he can burst/let others burst the opponent more easily, and so on. However, conditions that are affecting physical movement, aren’t lowering range of teleports, so teleports are so much batter than physical gap closers, where warrior can only rely on later, since they do not have teleports. Not to mention poor pathfinding…

Most of our traits are boring, or plain bad. I know other professions have those kinds of problems too, but you see, 9 months after release, our class specific trait, brawn, is still horrible, so warriors are underpowered in that field two. 3% burst damage increase for 30 pints in a tree, which is pretty much build defining, is really, really horrible, and I’m sorry to say this, but I really have to question intelligence of people that came up with that. I agree that 30% burst damage increase was way too powerful, but for god’s sake, couldn’t you completely revamp this kittenty trait for 9 months? Come on…

What does this game need? Less instant skills, less evade, less teleports, reduced density and intensity of particle effects, reduced aoe and condi spam, and condis, and skills in general more situational, reduced number of npcs, because, I swear it, half of the time I can’t see myself in a teamfight, and imagine a viewer of a tourney, or a shoutcaster which doesn’t know what the hell is currently happening, better telegraphed skills, just like warrior’s, or even an introduction of cast bars, because of all the kitten happening on your screen.

Even tho I am not 100% in agreement to what exactly the problem is, I can note that the warriors inability to do anything is a symptom. Where was that post pulled from?

It was long but i managed to read all about the first post…. was a nice read.
I think most of us, writing in this subforum, gave their opinion to Anet, about what is pvp now, and what we feel to be the right direction. Now there isnt much else we can say,
we can just hope that they will consider making those important changes needed to raise competitive pvp.

Lol this is so sad and true. There is always a moron that needs to be “original” and kittens things up.

I must say, as someone who got into GvG as late as 2007-on, this is spot on. Even though I missed some of the initial glory of the game, the development I saw over time was remarkable, and something that GW2 lacks. I have never gotten into GW2 PvP, in large part due to GW1 friends’ lack of willingness to do so (they hate it, of course), and because it lost a lot of the uniqueness it had from GW1.

Diage, fantastic post and I completely agree with you. It was a great read, and while nothing substantial has happened (seemingly, I’ve become more and more disengaged from GW2, to the point where I only log in once every other week or so to run around a map for 15 minutes before logging off), I admire your ambition and leadership on the issue.

Now please, Anet, please, do something to save what by far was the best franchise of my youth.

Best post I ever read on this forum. I agree. I recently made a post myself about gw2 lacking team builds and synergies. But I guess I’ll be overloooked just like this post was by Anet. :/

This entire thread has a lot of good points from a lot of people. I think it would behove Anet to consider this. I have tried to make it as constructive as possible and I am happy that all the follow up posts have done the same.

But then again, it is 9 months after I posted this and it’s as true as the day I wrote it.

It’s truly sad. Btw, I went to play gw1 for half and hour today and I almost cried. I miss some things from gw1 soooo much.

I secretly hope Anet is doing something with PvP behind the scenes. But… I don’t know. Might loose all hope soon.

I read this post 9 months later but I think this is worth to read

Dreamer I felt the same reading it yesterday. But hey. Still no response from Anet. Maybe we should ask Grouch to ask some of the questions on state of the game.