Guild Wars 2

took me a while to realize it, but when looking at Reddit posts to gauge public interest, the resources that have gone into PVE fluff and other content, and the lack of WvW and spvp content (we’re 14 months in guys), i cant help but conclude that GW2 is a PVE-centric game. soon enough, new weapon skills and utilities will be introduced, yet dozens of traits and utilities are broken or utterly useless.

i make this post in the spvp forum because this was supposed to be a big pvp game, so what gives? why am i playing real pvp titles like EVE, dota2 and soon bf4, instead of this? i pretty much exclusively pvp in gw2 (WvW and spvp) but nothing is holding my interest lately so i find myself barely logging in.

90 minutes of applause

Yup. GW2 was falsley advertised, im still asking for a return on my electronic copy on that premise.

Combat engine was designed specifically for structured PvP, content is targeted at PvE players (because they make money).

Same thing they did in GW1.

just cant believe it took me so long to realize this…

Actually, and unfortunately, it’s a PvE game with combat mechanics better suited to PvP….look at condition cap and CC uselessness in PvE…

bcos monetization is so much more easier on the PvE side.

now tell me who buy PvP Glory Boosters when we get them free from PvP daily and monthly?

finishers, now this is a good start.
but would it sell as good as those PvE items?

ya well, for a game that’s trying to do pvp this one really sucks at it. hard.

conditions / hexes / enchantments / boons got a lot worse from gw1 to 2. like, spam and auto remove instead of decide.

dodging isnt really a big ‘fun’ mechanic whatever the devs may tell themselves.

the game is cluttered with ai

crowd control was perfect in gw1, in gw2 we see the whole ‘loss of control’ thing creepingin.

downed states and rallying isnt actually fun for either side. i guess its easy to watch? basically its a big o’l ‘do you havestability? does the other guy have boon removal?’

basically, they took the best mmo pvp. tried really hard to make something better while taking nothing from the origional — failed, and now suck.

They didn’t fail, they just need to fine-tune it. The core of the combat is amazing imo. The problem lies with the way certain builds are cheese and how anybody can line up the correct traits+runes+utilities and suddenly their ‘skill’ is amplified beyond those players who don’t run cheese builds and have to play twice or three times better to win against a cheese build.

There’s a few other issues as well. Namely the lack of Dev support. We also lack very basic features that are so standard, it’s almost depressing that we don’t have them after over a year of the game being out.

No, they failed.

Mathias.9657:

No, they failed.

^

ryston.7640:

conditions / hexes / enchantments / boons got a lot worse from gw1 to 2. like, spam and auto remove instead of decide.

crowd control was perfect in gw1, in gw2 we see the whole ‘loss of control’ thing creepingin.

Sadly GW1 too is a now place where you’ll frequently encounter a lot of CC, hex, and condition spam. Elementalists in particular are suffering from the so-called GW2 syndrome, for it is rather clear the final ele skill patch was largely influenced by the innately spam-oriented GW2 gameplay. It is a world’s difference to how hard it was to play an ele 5 years ago, not to mention how much harder it was to play it well.
Much like GW2, and owing largely to the ele buffs, GW1 too is/can be saturated with CC conditions (cripple, blinds, weakness) and overloaded with low risk-high reward damage, but at least there are ways to play around it…as long as you’re playing classes that do more than just try to break the world record in number of key strokes per minute.

So yea, CC and damage used to be relatively well-balanced in GW1. Now, however, they’re not all that far off from the GW2 situation, yet the rpedecessor still has it better in that regard, because there are multiple safeguards to keep spam in check (energy management, e denial, interrupts, prots, and change of strategy/tactics if its in a gvg environment)…to a certain extent.

classic guild wars was this:

Your team captain built a deck, he said these players will bring these skills with at least this attribute allocation. Sometimes they defined every detail, sometimes they left some slots open. The team worked together with one or more ‘plays’ they could make. That is a pattern in which different players could unload different skills inorder to have a powerful effect on the enemy team.

Lets take an example, my favorite build was classic singles smite. It was somewhat overpowered and eventually was nerfed, which is all well and fine.
Your ele/mo ran zealots whatever, some prot skill ive forgotten, and ether renewal. The other skills were open, but we usually saw a couple of smite magic nukes, balthazars aura i think, a glyph and maybe an aegis. Double melee, gale hammer warrior was my favorite, of course this was before the gale nerf and subsequent shift to shock in the meta. Also hammer instead of axe cause thats how i rolled, but we usually let our warriors choose. a degen / corpse control necro was another slot. had to have corpse explosion, if they were super cool theyd use glyph of sacrifice and well of the profane, but that was far from reliable. feint heartedness and parasidic bonds.

those were your 4 ‘offense’ and the youd have 3 defense and one interupt, who could do whatever was needed. or in my case, another elementalist who brought ward v foes and ward v melee.

come to think of it, the only two robust and well rounded character slots in that team were the warriors. nobody else brought 5 single target damages and a self heal. maybe if you had a cs ranger in that interupt slot.

the point is, the team was a deck, and when it faced other decks it had to identify that decks win condition and defend it, then it had to identify a win condition of its own and execute it.

in gw2 you just have a bunch of people brawling until someone goes down, then theres some team coordination about stability and boon removal for a few moments. The combos never get much bigger than two people on each team helping one another.

the builds arent intricate, no codependancy exists. its like a first person shooter or something, but without the aiming… which it turns out is sorta a big part of the fun in those games.

That’s because GW is a completely team-oriented game, while GW2 is a game where relatively self-sufficient “individuals support each other”, as some poster put it once. The difference in the level of depedancy on your team is massive when you compare it to GW1.
Some like that key change of approaches, others don’t, and perhaps it wouldn’t have been all that terrible, had the game actually come out polished enough to support the large volumes of players it had at release, while facilitating playerbase growth and fostering competition (hello ATs, mATs?), instead of shoving a single average-quality game mode down their throats, which also happened to be ridden with bad design decisions and lacklustre secondary/main objectives and dull-looking fighting environment.

you know ive enjoyed games that were about robust characters supporting eachother somewhat. GW2 just isnt very good in that field. Smite comes to mind as a very similar game thats just a lot more fun to play.

i tried gw2 pvp when it came out for several months and it just wasnt fun. thats when i got nostalgic and asked where the gw1 inspiration was at.

personally, i feel like if theyre going to change the games genre, they should have said something in the releases. i feel like this was false advertising. i ordered steak and got salmon, and to be blunt it was a pretty kittening gross salmon at that.