Guild Wars 2

I considered posting this in the WvW forums, but it seems more appropriate here. Consider how moves work in this game, and how support skills scale to the number of people involved. Also consider things like melee viability. You want all these things – primary concepts in your game – to be viable in some form in any range of PvP combat.

Now, I’ll stipulate, you don’t have to worry about map size. Nor objectives. Your only goal in this hypothetical situation is to take your group of X number of people and go kill another group full of the same number of enemies. Not necessarily any defenses, terrain variations, nothing. Final Destination, I guess.

Now, without worrying about these other factors, at what point do you think the combat of GW2 breaks down, and ceases to function properly? I ask this because in WvW, obviously the game has problems. Many are associated with rendering, no doubt, but even ignoring this problem, obviously this is not Mount and Blade. You won’t see a huge collision of Warriors and Guardians at midfield, wailing into one another in an attempt to force their way into the weaker ranged lines. WvW just favors ranged, and you can use melee in very specific situations against less numerous enemies; you can also make odd “strike team” builds that try to jump in, do five seconds of damage and then run away before the literal hundreds of thousands of damage obliterates them in an instant. This is just one example; there are plenty of others.

Even moving away from WvW, in hotjoins, many believe there are simply too many people involved. Many cite maps as being the problem – being too small. Yet, even if it was an open battlefield, do you feel like the abilities and profession focus in an 8v8 would still be even enough that combat would scale smoothly?

In GW1 this was a problem, mainly due to spiking. Even if healing could cover an indefinite number of people, having even eight or nine people spike you with a basic attack at the same time meant instant death, in some cases. There was no DR system to ensure that when someone was ganged up on by multiple people, the damage was reduced or mitigated a little to give them a chance to fight back. The number of people in some game modes was adjusted because of this problem. Again, one example out of many.

So, what do you think? What’s the point that combat “breaks?” In GW2, is this number 5v5? Is it 8v8? 24v24? 50v50? Or do you believe there isn’t one? And why? And if you consider it a problem, what is your solution?

I struggle to find a reason to engage in this discussion. What exactly is the point of it? Honest question, nt trying to shut you down.

People talking about 8v8s being too much on certain maps and how WvW combat, even when it works, can be messy and lacking in strategy since you’re just standing at range spamming AoEs, hoping to catch people who wander too far in.

Basically, just asking if there’s a “sweet spot” for the number of people who get involved in a single fight with one another. If there is, it seems like that should be the aim for WvW, and possibly a game type for a style of PvP.

Also, it leads to other issues of why there would be a sweet spot at all. I personally think it’s because of the class system. As there’s no healing class, no sort of “list healing” skills (heal everyone in your party/squad, all party members receive X, etc), those recovery and mitigation measures don’t exist in this game. Yet, damage will of course have no such problem. You heal for one person. When three more people show up, you’re still healing for yourself, but you can potentially take far, far more damage. Combat consequently doesn’t scale, because the systems in place in some other MMOs don’t exist (nor should they). Like I said, one way of covering that is a DR system for damage. 1v1 = natural. Two people attacking you = minor damage reduction. Thirty people attacking you = major damage reduction. That would allow people to actually move into melee in WvW, for example.

Basically it’s just a topic about the source of combat scaling problems in the game. I thought it would be interesting. Maybe it’s just confusing.

Would depend on the match type. For now, 8v8 is probably just on the tip off to large for Conquest. Something like a King of the Hill match or a larger map CTF? Maybe you have the potential for an increase.

The survivor game from Halloween held a considerable number of people compared to sPvP pick up or tourneys because of the game type. Because the mechanics and goals justified the large number of players. Granted, it also normalized people’s HP and abilities.

It heavily depends on the map design.

WvW fighting works (aside from culling issues) because the battles are large, and can be fought just about anywhere. Positioning yourself atop a wall keeps you safe from being ganked by one thief who strayed from the group you’re facing.

8v8 doesn’t work out so well on the sPvP maps, because battles are centered around small locations, and people who die can be back to the battle in under a minute. Some fights will just never end because the same people can keep running back on the control point. It also doesn’t help that the map is much more closed in.

AB in WoW was capture the point and it was, what, 15v15 (I don’t remember it being that much, but thats what the internet says)? Why is 8v8 a problem for this game?

The answer to your question, in my opinion, is entirely dependent on build makeups.

And regarding your theory about scaling:

AoE damage has mechanical limits, which are strict.
AoE boons/heals have limits, but they are far less strict.

Okay, after talking about this with other people, apparently I wasn’t clear on the question. Instead, I’ll give an example from the previous game. Guild Wars 1.

In GW1, the most number of players you could have in a match was 8v8. They had to play with this number for a while because, especially at the end of the Prophecies run, spiking had become a big problem. Why? Well, for example, in GvG, you could have a team full of almost nothing but Rangers… (and so the story begins)…

Now, combat in GW1 was more about pressure, watching for big moves and responding to them. If you just sat there attacking normally, no one would ever die, unless one side was just built poorly. You had to carefully plan for how you were going to break your enemy. You couldn’t just spam heartseeker as hard as you could or throw down a lot of overlapping AoEs, generally. You had to coordinate. You had to be clever. You had to play mind games with your enemy by canceling moves, changing the way you moved, tricking them into using important moves. Otherwise? It’d never end. Point being, GW1 combat between two competent people often took a long time, and wasn’t just about applying a CC and DOTing someone to death.

Now… This team of rangers could, at any point, select a target from the enemy team at random. It didn’t matter who, so long as it would take out an enemy, force the use of a resurrection signet and give them a death penalty. All the rangers would fire on this target at the same time. The total amount of damage was over the amount of health any player could possibly have. This killed the player, of course. There was no real defense against this, because you couldn’t have protective spirit on every single player, at all times. If the enemy team was coordinated enough, they could easily just spike one of you after the other. Your healers could not heal a dead person, and not react humanly fast enough to catch the damage before the target died.

Okay. Now, this was a big problem, because it didn’t matter what you did to the skills. If all those people attacked one person, all at once, they were going to die. It wasn’t fair to the other team, obviously. The only thing you could do is make every single attack in the game so incapably weak that spiking was impossible. Yet, this would also make actually killing anyone normally next to impossible. The solution was to limit the number of players able to participate in these matches to eight people per side. 8v8 was the breaking point of combat in GW1, more or less. Once you got past this number, damage overmatched the intended functions of all the design elements of the game. I hope that part makes sense.

TBC…

Now, I’m asking what that number is in GW2. It’s a complicated and difficult question, because it entails a lot, I know. But at what point do the design elements in the game just stop working, because too many people got involved? I use WvW as an example because it’s very evident there. If you get fifty people together, you end up just spamming speed buffs and spamming AoE in front of you as you steamroll through everything. All the various elements of the game’s combat design just stop working at that point. No condition damage, no control effects, no chasing moves, no backstabs or blinds. All that becomes a stupid idea. The fighting just becomes a mess, and is tantamount only to trying to cover as much area with as much damage as possible. You don’t care where it goes, because tracking targets is pointless. You’re just hurling damage around wildly without any reason behind your decisions, other than “there’s more people on this side than that side.” The combat system just breaks in these situations, and not just because of rendering issues or the size of the map. It just flat out breaks, and a vast majority of your traits, skills and potential combos and so on just no longer matter. You’re just praying and spraying.

Personally, I think the point in GW2 in which the basic conventions of combat stop working is somewhere around six people per side, if you’re just outright attacking one another with no other objectives to worry about. I don’t have hard data for this obviously, but it feels like around this point, certain basic functions of combat like melee, the importance of boon application, condition application and so on start to fall apart and cease to be viable, and the importance of tracking individual targets also falls apart over just throwing as much damage into a general direction as you possibly can. Nowhere near as bad as WvW combat, obviously, but it still becomes a bit of a mess. And I think this may be why they focused so heavily on Conquest and why people are having a problem with 8v8 sPvP – because it splits up the combat in the game into very small engagements between two to six people.

I hope. That. Made sense. That’s about as clear as I can make it. It’s a question about design in relation to the combat system, not map sizes. It’s not just related to spike damage, but to the way you want combat to be played in your game. I’m not saying if you get past this number it’s no longer fun, or anything like that. I’m just saying that many of the elements of design get very shaky at an indeterminate point between two even numbers of enemies. I think that number, assuming everyone is fighting and not running flags or capping points, is somewhere past 5v5, although a 6v6 obviously would still be very playable.

So if that made sense to you and you now have a number in your head, do you feel like that’s a problem? And if it is, why do you think it’s a problem, and how do you fix it?

With the clarification of your question, my opinion is that 5v5 is perfect for the type of PvP you’re looking for. And, I think 8v8 is a mess.

WvW is very different though, and my answer would be far different in that context.