Targeting Allies
I’m honestly surprised that they didn’t disallow targeting completely and force you to use AoE for everything. At what point did ANET sit down and say:
You know what guys, instead of being able to both use individual spells and AoE skills, you can only ever use AoE skills to help your allies.
At some point, I realised that simply complaining about the lack of targeted healing skills was wrong. The issue was that there are no ally targeted skills in existence in GW2 AFAIK. Everything is AoE, the best you’ll get is a closest ally skill which is of course incredibly impractical.
Take an example:
Your support guardian (lol support) just died, along with your ranger. Without your support guardian what remains of your party will die and the situation isn’t convenient enough for you to manually slowrez. So you decide to use your 240s recharge rez signet. Only problem is it will only rez the closest ally – you have no choice, the developers decided to give you less control because too much control is bad for casual play. You aren’t in the right position to rez your guard and moreover, you can’t get close enough to his position because there is a ton of AoE everywhere and you are already low on health. So you resolve to rez your ranger and unfortunately, you wipe.
There is a major difference between saying “you may only rez X player within Y range” and saying “you may only rez X player if he is closest to you”. Did the developers seriously not consider this?
What point is there in teamplay if everything you do is coincidental? No, there is no point trying to be careful about who you support, who you let die and who you rez first. Not within AoE range? Too bad then. Team composition? Get whoever is best at 1v1. I’d also like to point out that team position =/= lolbringbacktrinity.
What happened in that above example? Because less control was given to the players, the amount of tactical potential was decreased and a team lost where they might otherwise not have merely because control was taken away unnecessarily.
Direction of sPvP
This kind of thing doesn’t need to happen. Apart from the flawed queuing system and lack of GvG and other game modes like Heroes Ascent, GW2 PvP has the potential for more.
I haven’t mentioned how I think boons should generally last longer and I haven’t mentioned how I think the condition system is flawed.
This issue, unlike the other issues simply does not need to exist. The only ‘arguments’ I’ve seen against the implementation of targeted skills is ‘balance’. That’s it.
I get that the developers wanted to make GW2 PvE ultra casual. What I don’t understand is why they force this casual play on everyone playing PvP. I thought the entire point of splitting PvP and PvE was that you could change skills and theoretically have the game play completely differently? This isn’t GW1 anymore where there are a billion skills and a trillion combinations and a main and sub class per player. There is no excuse for not being able to balance such a limited set of skills.
I would love to see a thorough, reasoned dev response to this, but of course I’ll be disappointed. Seriously, If a dev is reading this right now, are you going to do a stream where you answer real questions and thoroughly explain your direction and vision for sPvP? As of right now, no one has a clue.
We don’t even know what it is the developers are working on. We’ve seen some leaked pictures of PvP maps, but apart from that? Nothing. Don’t say you can’t afford to have someone interact with the community.