Guild Wars 2

This is really kinda complicated.
I have been trying to work my way around this subject for a while now. My temp document is a 6-pager and still barely touches the issue.
Im gonna try to keep this short:

Usually there are two complaining parties in a game:
-The casuals who think the game is too hard
-The pro who thinks the game is too easy
Now that is natural, you cant make everybody happy. The problem is:
Right now we have both. At the same time. And neither one of them are wrong.

Let me compare two basic combat scenarios:
1) Two people are dueling with swords or other medieval weaponry.
This fight, despite the outcome can be fought in many ways. It can be won with strenght, speed or thinking.
The more skilled opponent will usually win. However the less skilled opponent holds his fate in his own hands. If he gets decapitaed, it happened because he didnt block
or dodge a vicious strike.
The outcome of the fight might be almost certain from the beginning, but due to the nature of the fight the less skilled opponent has what we call an ‘illusion of control’

2)Now lets take our two brave fighters and replace their weapons. Lets just give them fully automatic rifles.
We now have the problem that the faster trigger finger decides the fight, so lets compensate for this by giving them a high quality body armor.
Now the odds have changed.
The more skilled fighter will probably still have a better chance to win, but in the end all he can do is aim at his opponent and fire. Vice versa.
Whether you win or not now depends not on your combat skills, but on your enemies.
There is nothing you can do to avoid death, only try to kill them before they kill you.
Both opponents have just lost a huge chunk of control (or the illusion of control)
Worse yet: A new player equals a fighter who has not yet equipped his armor.
In the medieval battle, they will loose, but at the same time learn. With machine guns they will just be ripped apart without a response or even an understanding of what happens.

The metaphor can easily be applied to bunkers.
A knight may uses his shield for the potential to block an opponents attack.
A swat operative may take cover. The enemy shoots. Either they hit, or they dont.
This almost perfectly equals a thief vs ele 1v1 setup.
The ele can only run in circles, heal and delay the inevitable.
The thief can only chase, and hit a target that negates every hit. The fight is probably ended by a series of critical hits.
This is not exactly a satisfying setup for either one of the fighting parties.

The core problems with the current powercreep are:
a) It takes away a huge chunk of control. From old and new players alike.

b) It transforms the ‘skill’. So unlike many I dont think the current game does not require ‘skill’ but it requires a different type. The one usually seen in pve.
I will not go into full detail here, just the following:
Right now a fight is won by using skills. In a perfect tactical enviroment a fight would be won by not using skills.

c)It twists the counter mechanic. This might require additional explanation:

d)It takes our build diversity. This is easily understandable if you read above spoiler.
A trait being numerical a worse choice makes less of an impact if the two compared numbers are lowered.
If both traits are relatively insignificant you can compensate for the worse choice by utilizing it in a specific way.
Build diversity with powercreep is not impossible, but much harder to achieve and to maintain.

Now what is the problem? Its basically a vicious cycle:

-Due to pve and the balance changes subsequent to HoT we have highly inflated damage numbers. CC is also a part of this.
-In order to deal with the immense damage we received compensation in form of invulnerabilities, blocks, evades, passive procs, stability, protection, cleanses…
-Some classes found themselves in a spot hardly able to deal any damage. And received a buff to their dps.

Symptoms
->Short cooldowns. A meaningful skill should not be something you use asap.
Right now dd’s are utilizing for max damage output and bunkers for max damage migation. This is possible because there is too much of everything.
The short cooldwons create a relatively fast paced game and promote uptime maximization, skill rotation and quick reaction.
Unfortunately they are completely removing the elements of tactic and ressource management.
->Healing and resets. Have you ever noticed how much 25% of your health is? Its 1/4, you loose 1/4, you are 25% dead. Just kidding tho. You can probably heal this back up with the secondary effect from one of your utilities.
This kind of healing makes the game extremely forgiving. You cant base a bunker on healing!
If you base a bunker on short term damage migation they will deny x% damage in every fight. Lets say that is 50000 in a teamfight and 10000 in a duel.
If you base them on healing those 50000 they need to sustain in a teamfight, its not quite suprising if they are overperforming in 1v1.
But its not even the bunkers that trouble me. It seems like playing a class with an effective health of < 3 times their actual health is virtually impossible.
This leads to all the hybrids, all the builds that can do everything at once.
You cant specialize in dealing damage, you will freaking die.
->Protective effects. How comes stability and protection are now basically passive requirements to sustain a teamfight? If you want 40% flat damage negation, why exactly dont you just nerf damage output by 40%?
Maybe its just me but stability should be a short term asset to prevent getting stunlocked on focus or to secure a stomp. And protection a similary short term effect to take the edge of an incoming burst.
->Passive procs. Basically: We have classes that can stunlock and RiP you, so instead of fixing those classes we rather invent passive effects that prevent that from happening.
I mean: srsly. A good game should be balanced to the point where all those passive procs become obsolete from the begin with, because a players reaction saves them, not their build.

Thanks for reading, I appreciate it if you actually took the time to do so, this is quite a wall of text.
Chances are pretty good that at some point you shook your head thinking ‘bs’.
I did not just write this out of nowhere. This is probably the fourth or fifth version, written over several weeks. I have given myself plenty of time to consider different points of view, taking new facts or new realisations into account and readjusting my position accordingly
And tho im certainly not finished rethinking my position, this resembles the actual issues pretty closely.

I would say you’re spot on with the problems I have with the expansion. Your text is basically a well phrased summary of exactly all the things I have been complaining for the past months.
Thanks for putting it up.

However, I have to warn you that while you will get a lot of support from many, many others seem to have just accepted that this will remain like this and will ask you to move on.

But I hope with enough messages, a-net will understand that this problem is the highest priority for PvP for many of us. They recently made a poll for WvW asking what was their priority, and if there was one for PvP, this would be hand down mine.

My priority order would be

1. Fix power creep
2. Increase build diversity (for me #1 will already go a long way for build diversity)
3. an expansion
4. change maps to make them more competitive
5. anything else

and #3 should really really REEAAAAAALLLLLLLY not happen before #1.

I would not start to redesign the current game. To get rid of the powercreep we need nothing less than an overhaul and combined with their update policy it would just drive more players from the game in the stages of flux and uncertainty.

1. Make the game in its current state playable and fair (mostly done)
2. Create PTS and start a much larger, much more experimental, alternate route of developement to adress underlying issues

This mirrors what you might do in some medical treatment cases.
First you fight the symptoms and make sure your patient wont just die.
But as a second step you start diagnosing and curing the disease. And you eventually deploy experimental treatment to test samples before you release it to your patient.
And no, whatever test mechanic you currently have, its not enough.
Pts can already be fixing a lot of QQ by giving us the beforementioned ‘illusion of control’
Trust me: the most frustrating aspect of the game and forums alike is if you feel helpless.

Oh and regarding those who are fine with the game as it is:
-They could actually be right and convince me
-They could be wrong and become supporters
-They could be wrong and ignorant (in which case I dont care about them in the first place)
Dont see a possible negative outcome here.

Well written. The only thing i think is that the impact of the (counter) build should be very strong so an average player with a build countering another should beat a top player.
So that team/build composition serioulsy matters and we see a lot of diffrent teams. A part of build diversity and strategy/tactics. Bringing a game down to reaction spam loosing skill management and tactics i a very bad thing for a large player based game.

A rework of the game is not needed. It mostly number tweaking and a few skills might be reworked. It more or less comes down to the will doing it and the dedication of someone living up for it 100% and not as a resource that gets 10% worktime on game balacing. Also interfering with classic sales pushing strategies like power creep in new expansions seriously impacts this diversity.

Wolfric.9380:

Well written. The only thing i think is that the impact of the (counter) build should be very strong so an average player with a build countering another should beat a top player.
So that team/build composition serioulsy matters and we see a lot of diffrent teams. A part of build diversity and strategy/tactics. Bringing a game down to reaction spam loosing skill management and tactics i a very bad thing for a large player based game.

A rework of the game is not needed. It mostly number tweaking and a few skills might be reworked. It more or less comes down to the will doing it and the dedication of someone living up for it 100% and not as a resource that gets 10% worktime on game balacing. Also interfering with classic sales pushing strategies like power creep in new expansions seriously impacts this diversity.

I do believe a rework is a much easier solution than the alternative.
There are more than 150 skills and traits that need immediate rework/replacement for various reasons, I made an alphabetical list for an earlier version of this document.
But those 150 changes, even if performed perfectly, will require subsequent adjustments in order to work correctly again.
And of course they will also impact other, non-fatal traits that only needed minor numerical adjustments before and eventually let them spin out of control.

Oh and: thanks for the positive feedback. I rly didnt expect to get bumps for the sake of bumps. Its good to realise I dont just live in a world of self made problems and confirmation bias.

SuperKorean.7345:

I totally agree. Healing mechanics in this game makes this game extremely forgiving.

a) Could you do me a favor and put this in spoilers? I want to keep this readable.

b) This is a simplification. Healing is a symptom of the actual problem.
The first question should be why all the healing is needed in the first place.
Healing to a certain point is also extremely healthy for the game, it just should not become a main mechanic of damage migation.

Asrat,

You spent two weeks attacking me for saying the same thing (About both sides being against each other) and now you are here saying the same thing? #Big Sigh.

Let me break this down for you in a very simple way to understand it.

Horizontal progression is the concept of progressing with more “tools” or “options” with seemly no (or almost no) gained “power” or “value” gain.

Vertical Progression is the concept of very few (or Singular) “tool(s)”, with very high “value” or “power” gain.

We use VP and Power creep because it does well at “simulating” Progression, however VP/PC are largely resposible for a huge number of problems like

- In efficient game design (zones become invalidated after a period of time).
- Large amounts of instability (Balance)
- Historically, VP//Power creep kills game (Largely due to repetitive usaging of inefficient design aspects. For example, 0-100 Level in wow over and over). Additionally, VP Simulates one single path for player expression.

On the flip side Horizontal progression also has perks and issues like

- (the strongest benefit of this system is ) Many forms of paths for player expression. With many types of tools you gain many ways of expression, and subsequently the game is very hard to get “bored” of.
- Horizontal progression massively lacks any native form of simulating progression unlike its brother, VP.
- In general, When HP is in place developers focus less on options for players to engage in (as opposed to VP Focusing on options) instead, the objective is finding ways to simulate the feel and psychology of progression.

The way to look at it is like this

You have two Valves

When you lower one, the other increases.
On is Power
The Other is Expressive Options

The more power you add in, the more you accelerate the decline of Expressive options.

For example,

One spec is “meta” Because it dwarfs the others in power output, there by invalidating all other forms of “expressive options” or unique player created builds.

Hopefully you will get it now.

I guess he already got it. Its true. But i strongly prefer HP. HP is also simulating progression if you implement it that you can´t have it all at once and must work for pathes. VP is like a pact with the devil and will bring down games. The thing is that it works for a while to make money and it might be intentionally to bring down a game after a while for opening the way to the next generation.

Silverkey.2078:

I would say you’re spot on with the problems I have with the expansion. Your text is basically a well phrased summary of exactly all the things I have been complaining for the past months.
Thanks for putting it up.

However, I have to warn you that while you will get a lot of support from many, many others seem to have just accepted that this will remain like this and will ask you to move on.

But I hope with enough messages, a-net will understand that this problem is the highest priority for PvP for many of us. They recently made a poll for WvW asking what was their priority, and if there was one for PvP, this would be hand down mine.

My priority order would be

1. Fix power creep
2. Increase build diversity (for me #1 will already go a long way for build diversity)
3. an expansion
4. change maps to make them more competitive
5. anything else

and #3 should really really REEAAAAAALLLLLLLY not happen before #1.

You cant just “Fix” Power creep like this.

To put it in context, your talking about changing the way your cells multiply, or the way you breathe in air.

Changing the numbers of the game would require a massive overhaul of the numbers. This is a HUGE task, that takes months and months (if not more) Just to investigate, test and change. You also need Database engineers to deal with massive amounts of data (with the balance team) and do massive changing to all aspects of the values in the database. I Cringe at the thought of this.

Its for this exact reason i am designing our mmorpg around the concept of skills being built on a base principle, and their (rank upgrade) values being modifiable directly with out having to tailor the entire game.

Its a huge push forward for game balance because it just requires us to modify the skills upgrades itself, with out any need to worry ever about full game value changes.

Look,

Solutions need to be the fix of a problem. You need to learn to diagnose the problem precisely and accurately. If you cant do this, any suggestion made is invalid. To change
the state of a situation you need three things; Knowledge to diagnose it, Knowledge on how to fix it, and power to implement that change.

You cant just make a generic statement like “wvw” should be the biggest priority. First of all, because “wvw” may not be the focal point of playerbase. For example, if 80% of the players do Raiding, 12% do PvP and 8 % Do WvW there is no reason why WvW should be prioritized over PvE or PvP.

WvW’s Problem

There is this ongoing issue in the industry on how to deal with the topic of “Zerging”.
It’s a very tough issue; Largely because players find ways around the fixes. Blizzard has taken a very strong stance on this by doing two key things

- Removing incentive to do WvW
- Instancing all other PvP To force team sizes to be equal.

Since we cannot do the first, we are forced with the positions that we need to create “Anti-zerg” mechanics.

In the design of our mmorpg, We looked at this issue and took a page out of the “art of war” by putting a key component back into WvW Game play, Namely, Supplies.

The reason why people can zerg in this game is largely due to the fact that they can cluster in an area. If there was mechanics in play that would stop this “psychology” you would see the dissolution of larger bodies, and more competitive aspects of game play.

What we do in our game is this.

Guild halls create “farms”. Farms generate “supplies”. “supplies” dictate re-spawn rates.

In Gw2 this could work in a number of ways, like

- Longer Respawn timers (not recommended)
- Limited Respawns (a possible option)
- Some sort of Mechanic related antigrouping aspect (recommended).

For example.

Lets say we change the map of WvW Significantly, and some objects that have key roles like

- Lumber Mill (Generates Wood used to build siege)
- Stone Quarry (Generate Stone for Some Siege Ammo, And Walls)
- Farm (Generates Supplies).

If there was a mechanic that did something like

“If all of your team gathers in this subsection of the map or set distance, you start to lose supplies. If supplies reach 0, you will start to die (Dot) or experience this negative effect (Like Fatigue giving 20% Slow, and – 20% HP until you obtain more supplies).

Then you work into the map the need for players to go to each node type, and “f” action key the resources and turn them in to your keep, or some set of other buildings (like a “watch tower” or something).

Keeping in mind this would mean that the map would need to be fractured significantly into 30-50 sub sections across the 4 zone area’s (or what ever it is).

Its mechanics like this that would improve the game play, but also stop the zergging.

-First: Im pretty sure I never attacked you. Maybe in the very end when I decided you were hopeless.

-Second: How can you say this taking into account what you posted? How can you give a class 15 stacks burning on AA and not call it ‘powercreep’?

The stuff of vertical and horizontal edit, sry: progression is actually very interesting, but I dont get what you want to tell me. How exactly is it related to what I say here?
What im trying to explain here comes down to the following:
1000/100 =/=100/10 (The expression is correct mathmatically, but not intuitively)
Or in other words: if you increase the size of the eiffel tower and the size of paris by 100%, you dont have the same city.
This has nothing to do with neither vertical nor horizontal progression as far as I can tell.
But im going to read up on this, maybe it does. Game design is always interesting, psychology even more so.

no one is saying you attacked me. I just called you out for calling me out on things you were saying i was wrong about in the recent past.

All of this has to do with your post.

Power creep and Player skill should not be addressed in the same topic (for the most part).

This is because player skill is a very subjective concept (as i mentioned in the past), much like “Fun” “hardcore” and many other words commonly used.

Don’t try to balance player skill. It’s a natural thing, inherited in our species. You should not work against millions of years of evolution, or the will the creator.

For example,

If you have a perfect game with perfect balance, player skill will offset this balance spreading people out naturally over a series of ranks. This is not a bad thing, infact its good because it simulates progression for players, and something to “challenge” themselves against.

The moment you start playing with skill is when you start messing with the natural progression of us as an apex-species. Basically your saying those who have adapted to be superior are not worthy of it, or are worthy of more of it and in both cases you break this beautiful, and natural aspect of game play (and life).

So you should not address skill in the game to much.

The only time the topic should come into play is when you are violating a condition which is

“When competition and or competitive game play is removed, Intercede”.

So unless there is this huge gap, like 1% Elite, and 99 % Being slaughtered by the 1%, you should leave it alone.

Im trying to respond to this, but its really hard to put into words what I want to say.
All of what you just said you should probably tell Anet, not me.
If you have a game with perfect balance. Unfortunately that is not the case.
The current meta is soemwhat fair, but not balanced.

And the last statement goes against my most basic beliefs im afraid.
If there is a problem you work to fix it. You dont ignore it.
Supressing symptoms of a disease is not enough. Its the cure you should work towards.

Asrat.2645:

Im trying to respond to this, but its really hard to put into words what I want to say.
All of what you just said you should probably tell Anet, not me.
If you have a game with perfect balance. Unfortunately that is not the case.
The current meta is soemwhat fair, but not balanced.

And the last statement goes against my most basic beliefs im afraid.
If there is a problem you work to fix it. You dont ignore it.
Supressing symptoms of a disease is not enough. Its the cure you should work towards.

Oh i agree fully.

A Cure is better then numbing the plain, but do you know whats better then the cure? Prevention.

All of this could be prevented, sadly.

Perfect (for lack of a better word) balance is possible. The problem is you think that balance is 10 dps on one class, and 10 on another, but this is actually game breaking. This is due to the fact that range classes can kite melee, so why do 10 dps at melee when you can do 10 dps and range and kite away. This shows us that perfect balance is possible, and it’s something like 20 dps on melee, and 10 on range.

As i said, a large amount of it really had to do with the fact that power creep and complexity all mixed into this game is destroying it all. This is all addressed by firing the lead developers, and replacing them with people that know how to design games properly, not just spam lines of code in.

That’s the problem with arenanet, not bad balance, because you can know how to balance a game (as a player) but as long as the designer has no idea or hates your idea because he/she “emotionally” thinks his or her position is better… well that’s a waste of time and leads to all kids of problems like this.

Actually I just think they wanted to make us happy and dint know how.
With hot, they introduced a mass of new shiny toys.
Interesting and inspired ideas to revive the community.
It was basically following a ‘bigger, better’ brighter’ schedule.
Unfortunately they didnt realize, and have not realized to date, that this was not what we needed.
Bigger, better and new is fun for one or two months, but when things start to settle you may start to see the flaws with it.
Looking at one of my favourite sites I can spot a bunch of psychological reasons that make it hard to consider to revert such a decision.
And im not even sure if just ‘going back’ would solve anything.
No. they arent ‘bad’ devs or designers. They made a decision for the sake of marketing, it has payed out in short-terms, and gets worse and worse in the long run.
And cognitive errors like the loss-aversion effect are preventing them from rethinking that decision.
I think it is important to let them know that we are actually willing to sacrifice some of the new shiny toys, if it helps creating a fun enviroment for gaming.

The character and pacing of the game has completely changed in the past couple years (and very very much in the past year, June patch and HoT).

Damage, sustain, effects-per-action (be it boons, condis, dmg, procs, etc), have all gone so far out of control. For a game without vertical progression, gear grind (aside from the little hiccup of ascended gear), or level increase, this shouldn’t be happening.

We and anet has to sacrifice new specs and classe, because it will make the mess greater and harder wo work out…. They should focus on other contet not new classes in the next expansion. But i fear this is somthing we won´t bring into the minds of Anets marketing …

Wolfric.9380:

We and anet has to sacrifice new specs and classe, because it will make the mess greater and harder wo work out…. They should focus on other contet not new classes in the next expansion. But i fear this is somthing we won´t bring into the minds of Anets marketing …

Well that part I completely disagree on.
This is not related to powercreep, but the introduction of moar elite specs is the best way to save build diversity.
A lot of the recent patches have shown pretty clearly that they dont want to bring elites back in line with core.
That suggests that in the long run you select 2 traitlines from the core pool and 1 from the elite pool (because 3 core will always be inferior)
So either they change their attempt entirely, or they have to introduce new elite specs to make the current ones less mandatory.

Well it depends on the devs and goals …. And i fear the worst.
So i agree that new elite can make it better and focusing on one elite + 2 core is a good thing and can bring enough diversity. But i lost belive…

Asrat.2645:

A lot of the recent patches have shown pretty clearly that they dont want to bring elites back in line with core.

Not really sure.
Last patch has been pretty much about uping non Espec related skills, or at least weapons which don’t have necessarily a strong synergy with their elite specs.
It is like when they upped boon corruption on necro which in turn became meta as reaper. The reaper part was not really involved (actually January patch had a nerf on reaper-only trait) but it turned out that people picked it mainly to add huge chill uptime on top of corruption. But the corruption itself does not require Reaper. April patch reduced chill availability but did nothing to all the core skills improvements.

Although I agree the Elite spec system will make sense when there will be more than one so that players will have to trade something, I would not say there is absolutely no incentive from the devs to equalize core profession and elite counterpart. The problem is that today, everytime they boost anything on core lines, it boosts the elite specs in the same way. And since they are developing things based on this state of balance, I don’t really see them adding some locks because they’ll have the entire game to once again review….

I don’t know if the balance team plays with stats in general on their test build (actually nobody knows what they do nor their vision…. well nothing) but playing a bit more with the amulets statistics could be a solution to limit the powercreep, and healing at the same time.

No, sry it isnt that simple.
Numerical fixes will help, but its mechanical fixes that need to happen.
And the actual ‘last patch’ nerfed a skill that has been fine for years in order for the elite mechanic to go unchanged.
I would agree that with the quarterly update they tried to slowly adjust some core specs to be more in line with the rest in order to increase core viability and diversity.
Unfortunately they approached this with buffs, once more leaving me most afraid of what they actually think this game needs.
Needles to say they failed. So far I dont see any mesmer or ele successfully running the new stuff. Its good that they are careful and dont overbuff, but with the current update frequency its going to take them years to achieve desirable results.

We need to keep in mind the original sources and contexts behind the progression mechanics:

In very old school RPGs like zeroes-ninties Final Fantasy games you’d have turn based battlescreens. Vertical progression isn’t a problem in these games because they’re noncompetitive single player games. The first Final Fantasy despite the ability to grind was still very hard since lots of the dungeons were maze like, you could fight up to nine things, some of which can turn you to stone or one shot you, and some enemies had very hard hitting and even instant death AoE’s. The second Final Fantasy had no levels so you gained stats by hitting your own teammates, not very intuitive. The best system I think came from Final Fantasy V, where stats were based around your class and if you had no classes equipped you’d have the highest from the highest class you’d master. In this way mastering thief and monk for all characters was ideal. Final Fantasy 10 also had a great system where you had no levels per se but could logically progress on a sphere grid. Has the best boss battles of the series through the optional challenge bosses.

However, Guild Wars 2 isn’t some noncompetitive single player game but has PvP gamemodes where balance and keeping power creep in check suddenly becomes a top imperative. Power creep can be good in some cases, like with hardware, Dragon Ball, and singleplayer games, but it can also be bad like what we’re seeing here.

Guild Wars 2 and other MMO’s borrowed mechanics from RPG’s without understanding the reasoning and context behind them. In a game with freedom of movement during combat do we really need mechanics designed with static abstracted combat in mind? Why not just get rid of levels entirely and have references to our increased power mentioned in later parts of story mode?

There can be superior gear progression without levels but ultimately have everything in the game scaled to level 80 but hide levels. Crafting would become more important and you could unlock different stat combinations and tiers. Eventually however I think we should move away from stats entirely and have fixed stat values and move sets attached to certain weapon types like Dark Souls (ignoring upgrade levels of course).

Anyone ever solo a champ? They have one hit kills and a huge HP pool so they can afford to make way more mistakes than you can, so taking away mechanics that allows us to be on the champ’s end would help players in the long run. Mistakes should be meaningfully felt at any stage of the game, and getting rid of levels would help, even if you’re in full ascended in a starter zone (where full white tier armor is assumed) you would still need to be careful.

The OP hit home in this article and the last point was perfect. Passive cc prevention should be obsolete.

Asrat.2645:

Wolfric.9380:

We and anet has to sacrifice new specs and classe, because it will make the mess greater and harder wo work out…. They should focus on other contet not new classes in the next expansion. But i fear this is somthing we won´t bring into the minds of Anets marketing …

Well that part I completely disagree on.
This is not related to powercreep, but the introduction of moar elite specs is the best way to save build diversity.

On that note…do these elite specs or classes for that matter really differ? We don’t have specified roles, which means each class is/should be able to cover all areas (damage/sustain/control) relatively well.

If you think about it…at the end of the day…is there really a huge difference between say, Power Revenant and Thief? I’m referring to MOBAs here and I know far too well, that this is an MMO and is not intended to be shaped to any MOBAs image, but think about it. You don’t really have to adjust your whole gameplay/team comp drastically just because a certain class is present in the enemy comp, which means the class itself has less of a meaning and it’s the player who determines who you could counter that.

I don’t think introducing new elite specs would help with build diversity or would shake things up for that matter….
Power spike damage is power spike damage at the end of the day…how you apply it may differ somewhat, but not that much that it would make things more interesting to watch in the long run… (considering eSports is the goal here for ANet).
All the spectator sees is that X got bursted by Y using Z skill. Great.

Not sure I was able to properly phrase my thoughts, but hopefully you’ll get my point ^^’

What I would like to see for example is to make each CC category class specific:
• Give thieves and only them pulls for example
• Knockbacks to Guardians
• Knockdowns to Warriors
• Fears to Necros
• Roots to Rangers
• Stuns to Engineers
• Taunts to Mesmers
• Launches to Elementalists

Just a quick list without any thought given to balance and whatnot. The idea is to make that specified class indeed unique, cause right now every profession can do everything (of course there are classes who can do better in certain roles), which renders the nature of the class almost completely irrelevant.

Powercreep in gw2 is created by the spam of condis, tons of cleave and aoe skills, if they reduce that would be much better process to balance and notice what is broken, and then improve and make true AOE skills that need more tactifull casting to compensate the less spam from classes, it would make the gamemuch more player skill based, gw2 is know for awfull pvp game i think Anet needs to change this, it would get more viewers more players streaming more revenews.

Every class should be AA single target, with some or none cleaves/aoe, but i guess that would be make gw2 way to hard for some players.

@glorius.1235 as much i hate mobas, got tired of that when playing WC3,i kinda agree with you on the CC category for classes.

God bless OP, agree on every single one of your points, being thinking about this for a very long time.
Powercreep actually started way back the 23rd of June 2015 aka Specializations Patch (trait system rework once again)
There is also something else to say, all the solutions are really nice to read but you all have to realise Anet is (sadly) completly clueless about balancing the game in his actual state, they are not ever gonna be capable of fixing such a complicate and long time stacked powercreep.
Accept the game in the state it is or simply quit, it won’t get fixed.

Aeolus.3615:

Powercreep in gw2 is created by the spam of condis, tons of cleave and aoe skills, if they reduce that would be much better process to balance and notice what is broken, and then improve and make true AOE skills that need more tactifull casting to compensate the less spam from classes, it would make the gamemuch more player skill based, gw2 is know for awfull pvp game i think Anet needs to change this, it would get more viewers more players streaming more revenews.

Every class should be AA single target, with some or none cleaves/aoe, but i guess that would be make gw2 way to hard for some players.

@glorius.1235 as much i hate mobas, got tired of that when playing WC3,i kinda agree with you on the CC category for classes.

I think making autoattack single target is a good idea, though the game would have to be rebalanced totally around that.

Someone once said Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away and Einstein himself said everything should be as simple as possible, but no simpler. However, this is a cheap form of “perfection”, it’s easy to avoid going wrong if you don’t have many steps in your goal after all, but I fear that Guild Wars 2 has taken a direction where it’s better to take things away and at least temporarily revert to a bare bones state, at least so they can look at how to genuinely increase the skill ceiling with complexity that adds mechanical depth to the game.

In Street Fighter for example the mechanics are deceptively simple; linking normals and canceling into a multi-hit juggle and combos ending in supers are a big part of the game, but a simple block and punish combo could put the breaks on any imperfectly timed step in the multistep combo, so there’s a layer on top of the mechanical skill, such as split decisions on when to poke, hit confirm, mix-up game, or a risky but highly rewarding rushdown (you’ll know your opening worked if your opponent can’t block your links and cancels).

Are there levels? Well, there are account levels and character “levels” have no impact whatsoever on the character’s performance so we’ll say no, the closest thing fighting games have to “leveling up” is the player himself leveling up, since your IRL dexterity and intelligence (game mechanic and matchup knowledge in this case, as opposed to an RPG character’s magical knowledge) improve with matches and training.

The skill ceiling in Guild Wars 2 however isn’t genuinely high, but artificially high, with safety nets that masquerade as complexity. The build feature has some great potential, but needs to be cut down so roles are still at play but always allow room for the player with the better reflexes and tactical thinking to win his 1v1’s, even against counter builds and classes if the skill gap is high enough. Because of builds and different weapons and amulets a player is a scientist in the lobby but a sportsman during a match.

Asrat.2645:

Wolfric.9380:

We and anet has to sacrifice new specs and classe, because it will make the mess greater and harder wo work out…. They should focus on other contet not new classes in the next expansion. But i fear this is somthing we won´t bring into the minds of Anets marketing …

Well that part I completely disagree on.
This is not related to powercreep, but the introduction of moar elite specs is the best way to save build diversity.
A lot of the recent patches have shown pretty clearly that they dont want to bring elites back in line with core.
That suggests that in the long run you select 2 traitlines from the core pool and 1 from the elite pool (because 3 core will always be inferior)
So either they change their attempt entirely, or they have to introduce new elite specs to make the current ones less mandatory.

I don’t agree at all here.

Lets look at some conditions

- Some Builds (Based on weapon abilities) are massively invalidated by the lack of support from talent tree’s. A great example of this is Guardian hammer or Great Sword.

- Adding more options to an already massively unbalanced game will just make the problem worse. its like throwing gas on a fire to put it out.

What needs to happen is

- Talents need to be toned to make various concepts (not builds) more valid. for example, a guardian should be the best healer in the game (it has the most specs for it) yet some how remains to be one of the worst.

- Talent Tree’s should gave a definitive Role, as opposed to more options. Look at world of warcrafts talent system. You will generally find “Damage” “Control” and “Defensive” as options. This is different then focusing a spec in a full “Role” (Damage, Control, Support, etc) but follows a principle that works.

Right now it seems that they are repeating the same tread (Get a heal when you turn something one, get a buff when you turn something on, 20% Reduction in weapon time, and a damage boost to two (or three, but not all) of the classes weapon types While invalidating that weapon with lack of talent support itself out side of that one or two talent options: For example Ranger Long Bow, Shortbow)

These issues need to be addressed, this is why my reworks of classes were so radical (but not game breaking; in theory anyways)

the most annoying thing is that skill does not really matter that much anymore. that’s the thing i cannot deal with anymore. before HoT patch it used to be somewhat okey. even if u weren’t meta and u played the build/class that is considered somewhat weak u could still outplay your opponent purely by skill. and it felt rewarding and fun. after HoT i just cannot.. now we are like this:

1 – play a class and build that we truly enjoy. yet even if we are skilled we’ll just be crushed by some meta scrapper/druid/ele/reaper/rev no matter the skill.
2 – well. point 2 is giving up. rolling the same meta OP class and playing the game no longer for fun but just for the wins.

and this is not okey. i understand that casual can be frustratred that PvP is too hard. but that’s not an issue. just play abit more. test study practice and in a week or so u’ll be alright already. but then… when skilled and experienced players get torn apart just because they don’t want to play metas or other classes… that’s just terrible. but anyway theres no reason to talk. i doubt devs will change anythin. maybe after a year or so powercreep wont be that bad. but for now im just abandoning the ship.

I think Arenanet’s “No trinity” model failed and is now backfiring. It sounds great on paper still but somehow falls short in actual gameplay. They know that too so they are giving us more and more options to build into one of the 3 roles. We can easily make a high dps toon or a heal/support toon or a tank/support toon. Only thing we dont have are officially dedicated classes for it although we kinda do since I dont expect to have a tank thief anytime soon.

They didnt want to have a holy trinity in thier game but what we actually have now is light armored casters being able to outtank a heavy armor fighters and this sacrilege is only happening precisely because we dont have classes designed around dedicated roles. I think this is one of my major GW2 problems. I mean sure give us the abiltiy to build a character in different ways but still If I i pick a heavy armor, sword and board type I expect lasting power and if I pick a light armor, staff caster I dont expect it to simply outtank and outheal everything thrown at him..

Anyway Im thinking GW2 is a pretty hot mess right now and im kinda tired of it

Adding to my “CC” post and thoughts, I think another issue is that every class applies its damage the same way – i.e: Direct/Condi

A DoT necro is not unique cause other professions can apply DoTs as well, hell, some are even better at it. Thief is not the only class with a huge power spike: Rev, DH hit just as hard. You hopefully get my point.

I think this is a result of obvious lazy class design and “copy-pasting” mechanics instead of coming up with original design.
You want build diversity, I want class diversity.

As a result the transition from one role to another (which would be multiclassing in GW2’s case) is not that big of a deal.
We could see Pro players picking up Rev instead of thief and mastering it in no time just because apart from a few differences (which are minor looking at the bigger picture), the class has the same role and mechanics.

As others pointed out before me the No-Trinity looks good on paper and could work. But you need to come up with something to replace it, otherwise we will be (are) watching essentially players with the same roles bashing eachothers’ skull just like in an FPS.

The point I’m trying to make is that by making certain CCs, mechanics, conditions class-specific, the character could turn into a really special something and would indeed reflect the player’s playstyle.

The title “Pro Thief” would actually mean something and would reflect the fact that you are especially good at that one playstyle, which would require certain skill set.

But right now every class (and every player) is a bit of a jack-of-all-trades.

Most interesting thread I’ve read in a long time.
I sincerely hope arena-net reads this.
There are a lot of well explained points in here.

I think the concept of “everything is DPS-hybrid” is interesting, but i have yet to see it implemented correctly. Its not a new thing its been done in many games.

What iv noticed is that consistently what ends up happening is the melee just end up tanking, with the increased amount of healers.

So all it really does is invalidate tanks (Which is good (for ques) but bad for the role aspects).

Instead of a ht I would much appreciate every class agining a more clearly defined role.
So for example a warrior should feel most natural to build on either full \m/ tank
or a brutal ‘close and personal’ kind of damage dealer.
If we found a way to predefine a set of fitting roles for each class without enforcing them, those roles could be balanced against each other and create a much more controllable system of balance.

As I said. Its not like we had a ‘no skill’ game, but it is very different now.
The current ‘skill’ in gw2 is mostly maximizing your strongest skills for highest uptime or strongest effect, maybe keeping a cc for the interrupt.
Its not ‘skill’ thats lacking, its the tactical element.
The ressource management.
The punishment for spamming.
In fights between damage dealers it is less of an issue, but when bunkers get involved…
The bunker only rotates and tries to get every boon and every heal possible. The bunker buster just spams all damaging skills. There is no use in timing them, since the bunker does not use timed damage denial, but constant. And if you dont attack them with your maximum strenght all the time they reset the fight.

Oh and to both you guys: Everyone can give up. I have much more fun writing alternative concepts and putting essays about powercreep up on the forums ^^

Asrat.2645:

Its not ‘skill’ thats lacking, its the tactical element.
The ressource management.
The punishment for spamming.

That’s not tactics.

Having the right player in the right spot at the right time with the right support.

That is tactics.

And guess how you win a match that’s based around holding points?

Having the right player in the right spot at the right time with the right support.

Ergo it cant be tactics that’s lacking.

Dawdler.8521:

Asrat.2645:

Its not ‘skill’ thats lacking, its the tactical element.
The ressource management.
The punishment for spamming.

That’s not tactics.

Having the right player in the right spot at the right time with the right support.

That is tactics.

And guess how you win a match that’s based around holding points?

Having the right player in the right spot at the right time with the right support.

Ergo it cant be tactics that’s lacking.

No. thats strategy. Well, based on my definition.

well then i guess bunkers and condi spammers must get punished somehow. cuz now glass chrono shatter and glass daredevil is quite a joke :/

yes..no… i dunno ^^ i guess its a giving up. as long as risky and glassy classes will be in sucha bad spot im nowhere near this game ;D and as long as this build diversity stays in this state im even further away from this game. but yea theorycrafting is fun. but theory is just theory. im just curious at this point to check up forums for new updates and see what kind of a “balance patch” devs will bring next. mark my words .. there will be atleast a year or on the brightest chances like 8 months until they’ll come up with some kind of a fix or such balance like it was pre-HoT. even back then i thought balance is broken. but now.. oh my.. i never thought it can be that broken and pushed into meta so much that all of other builds are completely useless. so yes. minimum 8-12months. and still its a very optimistic prediction ^^

Asrat.2645:

Dawdler.8521:

Asrat.2645:

Its not ‘skill’ thats lacking, its the tactical element.
The ressource management.
The punishment for spamming.

That’s not tactics.

Having the right player in the right spot at the right time with the right support.

That is tactics.

And guess how you win a match that’s based around holding points?

Having the right player in the right spot at the right time with the right support.

Ergo it cant be tactics that’s lacking.

No. thats strategy. Well, based on my definition.

Strategy is telling a player to go take a point expecting a positive outcome.

Tactics is telling the right player to go to the right point at the right time and giving the right support to him depending on the changing situation there.

Once the gates open, the strategy phase is over. What you are left with is tactics.

Agemnon.4608:

Aeolus.3615:

Powercreep in gw2 is created by the spam of condis, tons of cleave and aoe skills, if they reduce that would be much better process to balance and notice what is broken, and then improve and make true AOE skills that need more tactifull casting to compensate the less spam from classes, it would make the gamemuch more player skill based, gw2 is know for awfull pvp game i think Anet needs to change this, it would get more viewers more players streaming more revenews.

Every class should be AA single target, with some or none cleaves/aoe, but i guess that would be make gw2 way to hard for some players.

@glorius.1235 as much i hate mobas, got tired of that when playing WC3,i kinda agree with you on the CC category for classes.

I think making autoattack single target is a good idea, though the game would have to be rebalanced totally around that.

Someone once said Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away and Einstein himself said everything should be as simple as possible, but no simpler. However, this is a cheap form of “perfection”, it’s easy to avoid going wrong if you don’t have many steps in your goal after all, but I fear that Guild Wars 2 has taken a direction where it’s better to take things away and at least temporarily revert to a bare bones state, at least so they can look at how to genuinely increase the skill ceiling with complexity that adds mechanical depth to the game.

(…)

The skill ceiling in Guild Wars 2 however isn’t genuinely high, but artificially high, with safety nets that masquerade as complexity. The build feature has some great potential, but needs to be cut down so roles are still at play but always allow room for the player with the better reflexes and tactical thinking to win his 1v1’s, even against counter builds and classes if the skill gap is high enough. Because of builds and different weapons and amulets a player is a scientist in the lobby but a sportsman during a match.

GW2 has huge potential, yet we havent see anything special since its release, more of the same masked with other name.
And it is an engineer work to achieve perfection, how he achieves it, that deppends on what he is working, diferent tools need deferent apreoches.
Yet it is easy to spot Anet is completelly going on wrong direction, form the skill balance team and their idea of pvp propaganda, by calling players showing this game is easyer than the other games.
Gw2 has huge potential to be a very decent game, its just not in Anet plans for the game work like that.

Saddly.