I am going to speak freely about my overall sentiment of the game, which is partly prompted by my nostalgia for some of my previously played games. I will quickly mention that I have been gaming for over 20 years, 15 online, and around 9 in mmos – details which aren’t meant to act as credentials, but to paint perspective. I find it interesting to note that I know gw2 is the first mmo, or even first online game, for many players, including within the pro league.
Gw2 is one of the few games where I repeatedly leave and come back. Sometimes I would leave, or return, merely out of boredom, and other times due to dissatisfaction. Whereas in the past, my primary game would hold me for several years at a time.
The biggest issue I have always had extends beyond just balance; I have played games with potentially worse class balance, but that had better separation of player skill.
My initial reaction to Gw2, and what seems to be a lot to most other recent games within the genre, is there are too few skills. What happened to the days of having 30, 40, 50, 60+ skills to work with and manage? I am going to be downright crass in saying that developers, in hopes of creating more accessible games (therefore more casual), expect the average player to be too dumb/bad/noob to be able to manage more than 15 skills successfully. Why is this a bad thing?
Despite the fact that I play gw2 almost exclusively for sPvP, the lack of skill slots/base detracts from the RP part of mmorpg – the progression aspect. There was a lot to be said about the learning curve of training new classes. This involved the process of acquiring and integrating your new skills over time, in order to be properly be knowledgable and specialized in your class/build. However, in gw2 someone – who has decent to good base knowledge of the game – can go and learn a new class (1 build, some classes more than others) in under 15minutes and be at least moderately successful by just spamming abilities as they come off cd (I will come back to this). However, I am a huge advocate for the heart of the mists and spvp system, and not to be gated by gear/progression grinds to be able to pvp.
I read someone else’s post recently that perfectly captures the problem I am trying to address. It said something to the effect that: ‘the game better rewards using ones skills as they become available, rather than when opportune.’ This is where I find the lack of skills available is both detrimental and exacerbates this problem.
Opportune moments implies the ability and need to create vulnerability in your targets. The general mechanics of offense, defense, and control have to allow this type of gameplay. Typically, one should have to use control elements to create holes in enemy defenses (such as forcing CC removal CDs), to create opportune windows of attack. Yet, this games mechanics, and lack of skills, doesn’t properly allow for that to work. Why?
With the lack of active abilities, the burden is placed on passive traits, effects, and long duration buffs to accomodate these mechanics. A lot of this boils down to boon mechanics. Might is long lasting, and increments in stacks over time, rather than in large quantities for very short periods of time – which would create small burst windows. Similarly, protection isn’t something that you need to be wary about when to apply; one because there aren’t small windows for huge spike potentials, and because it is something that gets applied easily, frequently and passively.
Instead of having abilities with unique purposes, one that stacks vulnerability, one that CCs, one that makes CCs more potent, one that gives you a damage buff, ones that heal, ones that cleanse etc, most of the extra abilities in this game are compacted into traits, passives, and modifiers that modify the small set of abilities to do multiple things at once. This further contributes to the spamming of skills, and to be rewarded with outcomes you didn’t intend – like happening to interrupt a crucial ability because you were spamming it for some other reason rather than noticing they were using an important ability.
The problem of auto attacks. Part of the way they work in this game is because you can often find yourself with everything else on cd (again, too few skills). I am going to describe the auto attack mechanics from one game specifically that I played, but that is similar to others.
First of all, there was attack speed relative to weapon speed: you attack once for Y dmg every Xseconds depending on your weapon type, and then you have typical things like daggers attack faster, but do less dmg, and greatswords attack slower but do more per hit. This places a huge emphasis on attack speed buffs. For one, it means there is more active ability, but also more precision necessary when you choose to attack/burst. Maybe you want to pair your attack speed buff, with your short duration increase in damage buff, which means you need to make sure your target is CCd to fully capitalize on your burst window. Almost more importantly, you could animation cancel your auto attacks by using a skill right as an AA starts. It would only play the skills animation, but you would get damage from both. This placed a great deal of emphasis on mechanical ability of the player, but also their knowledge of what combos/skills rotations worked with different levels of attack speed modifiers. Overall, it created further depth to combat, and helped separate simply good players from the experts.
What does it all amount to? Less active skills means far less combos and complicated skill rotations, less control of added effects (anything your traits do for you), less depth to the game, and, consequently, less skill gap between the different tiers of players.
The theme of the metas and the general gamplay of gw2 is low risk-high reward, and the general mechanics of the game promotes low skill floors, as well as low skill ceilings.
I feel like the metas in this game are the equivalent to everyone in your server using aimbot; you either use it yourself to stay competitive, or you leave/join a new one.
I am reminded of a story someone told in a vodcast (maybe it was Thorin). Whoever the story was about was trying to get one of their friends to play a game he played(quake I think it was). So he put his buddy on the game and let him play for an hour or so. Then he asked him how he liked it. His friend said something to the effect: ‘it was cool and fun, but I didn’t like that it was so hard to compete with the really good players’. The whole story was about the outrage that someone would expect to able to play a game for an hour and be competitive with people who have played it for years or longer. Why then do developers cater their design to these kinds of people…? Ya, the short answer is money. I would say that is a discussion for another time, but it highlights one of the core problems: can an MMO ever be competitive?
At the very least, there needs to be an environment where competitive level players can thrive. Whether by the system of gameplay – tournaments, matchmaking etc – or, by depth to gameplay mechanics, there needs to be better separation of player skill tiers – higher skill floors and ceilings, and further distance between the two.
Some suggestions, and ya these are serious overhauls:
Obviously, more active abilities. How?
Its been so long since I’ve thought of this, that empathetic bond was one of my examples used.
-A new skill bar, a reactive bar. Probably placed above the utility bar where one can slot all the trait created abilities into active abilities. IE use Elixir S at 25% health, any auto stun break, but also rather than modifiers like, 10% more dmg from behind, or to stunned targets etc, you get abilities like do 30% more damage for 2-3s, the next 2 attacks are guaranteed crits, etc.
Overall revamp of passive procs.
-Boons and most abilities that apply them need to be revamped: higher potency, MUCH less frequency. ie might applied in large quantities for very short periods of time. Only boon I see someone should potentially permanently have is regen. (especially not all of them ALL THE TIME…)
-Stun breaks that are actually stun breaks – actual CC immunity, like defiance not stability, for brief periods(up to 1 second) after successfully breaking a stun.
-Revamping for meaningful counterplay: heal skills that need to be activated, not passively obtained, which means they are properly interruptable (healing turret 0.5s cast, still. wtf?)
-Auto attacks not being 80% of peoples dmg, and not ones that do more dmg on support weapons than actual dps ones…
There are too many to list…
Although most of this is thinking outloud, there is question posed for everyone, but directed at anet: is this game, in its current state or direction, worthy of being a real competitive game? Either way, what needs to change?
I’d say this game needs surgery more than bandaids.
