(edited by sorrow.2364)
Why Guild Wars 2 is not a team based game
You’re quite right. There’s more teamplay with voice chat, but it involves a player in one corner of the map providing valuable information to a player in the other corner of the map. It’s something that does not exist and will never exist in pug teams. Outside of this, you can coordenate some bursts with voice chat or call target, or have a pre-prepared tactics for rezzing, and in some more specific cases, ask someone over voice chat to stand beside you to get healed, but otherwise party support is a bit under developed ad self-sufficiency and map design goes to much toward solo play. Pug teams especially have little or nothing to play in team.
I keep reading around the forums people saying that Guild Wars 2 is a team based game.
Well, in my opinion, it is far to be an 1vs1 game.I’ll sum up in few points on why I think that, making also comparisons with Guild Wars 1, which is, in my opinion, a true team based game.
Solo play is allowed and encouraged
How many times in PvP you’ve found yourself fighting alone someone holding up a point? I tshink quite many. There are three points in every map and teams are composed by 5 people. Most maps, also, have a secondary objective which forces at least someone to split out to control it (like Trebuchet or Skyhammer).
5 people can’t control 3 points and secondary objective without being split up most of the time. A true team-based game shouldn’t encourage team splitting that much.
Let me give you an example. Have you ever watched Scooby doo? In pretty much every episode they always split up to find the bad guy. Why do they do this? To cover more ground. Splitting does not mean the game isn’t encouraging team play, in fact, it takes more team coordination to split up and still work as a unit.
No team-based roles and team synergy
Back in Guild Wars, every profession had a role in a team composition. There was frontline (melee), midline (pressure, support and ranged) and backline (protter, healers and support healers). Those roles were a prerogative in pretty much every team and the lack of one of them hamper the whole team.
If you didn’t have a frontline, you wouldn’t be able to kill a thing. If you didn’t have a midline, frontline would take way too much time to kill and enemy pressure would be out of hand. If you didn’t have a backline, your team wouldn’t survive.
In Guild Wars 2 there aren’t those strict roles. You can live without a bunker as much as you can live without a roamer. Everything fades between all the 5 member of the team which are everything and nothing at the same time.
Roamer, Bunker, DPS. There are roles in GW2, there are also several team synergy builds and it’s up to people if they want to build like that or not.
You can live without your team, you’re an one-man team
In a team based game, without your team you’re good as dead.
In Guild Wars 2, you have all the tools you need to cover the roles of your teammates.
You can have in the same build direct damage, AoE and single target pressure, healing, control and defenses. Obviously you can adjust those aspects depending on the build, but, still, you are capable to cover the role of an entire team in a single build.
Elementalists are a good example of that.
Even though an Ele can last quite long against two people. Without his team he’s performing less than optimally. Also if he’s out-witting his opponents, it’s a testament to his skill but it is also a testament to the bad timing that his enemies have.
So, at the end of the day, IN MY HUMBLE OPINION, I find pretty obvious that Guild Wars 2, as it is designed, is not a team based game. The fact that you are forced to play in a team in PvP doesn’t mean that the game is designed around team competitions.
Corrected.
http://www.youtube.com/user/ceimash
http://www.twitch.tv/ceimash
I keep reading around the forums people saying that Guild Wars 2 is a team based game.
Well, in my opinion, it is far to be an 1vs1 game.I’ll sum up in few points on why I think that, making also comparisons with Guild Wars 1, which is, in my opinion, a true team based game.
Solo play is allowed and encouraged
How many times in PvP you’ve found yourself fighting alone someone holding up a point? I tshink quite many. There are three points in every map and teams are composed by 5 people. Most maps, also, have a secondary objective which forces at least someone to split out to control it (like Trebuchet or Skyhammer).
5 people can’t control 3 points and secondary objective without being split up most of the time. A true team-based game shouldn’t encourage team splitting that much.Let me give you an example. Have you ever watched Scooby doo? In pretty much every episode they always split up to find the bad guy. Why do they do this? To cover more ground. Splitting does not mean the game isn’t encouraging team play, in fact, it takes more team coordination to split up and still work as a unit.
It does take some skill to coordinate a team spread out over a map. That was, in my experience, the skill ceiling in this game. Knowing who to send where, and when to disengage. That’s not nothing, but it’s not much either.
It is team based, just a different type of coordination. Instead of trying to chain CCs and interrupts while avoiding the enemies (Which does happen, just not as much as in other games). There’s more emphasis on team strategy: where you are pushing or retreating, where the other team is pushing.
Every team is made up of 5 individuals. The idea that the game should be designed so an individual cannot stand on their own is just faulty design. Already, competitive teams have different builds that contribute different things, such as area control, debuffs, bunkering, and burst DPS. The ability for some builds to kind-of do multiple things at once is actually good design, because it allows hybridding of roles and more viability in build diversity.
Take the inversion: Dedicated Holy Trinity team MMO. You have to have a certain team composition, and you can’t break away or be unique about it. A hybrid tank/DPS will always be worse than having a pure of either side, and a hybrid damage/healer will always be worse than having the pure healer.
I’m glad GW2 has such an open ended system. It lets me be creative.
@OP, if you think that, my recommendation would be to just play more of the game, or watch some of the top teams play. In these teams, comps are very carefully constructed so that all important team aspects are covered, and by no means are the builds set up for solo play (unless the build is specifically meant for 1v1 fighting, such as far point engi). Coordination, build synergy, and communication wins games, simple as that.
What wins in the game is not build synergy.
What wins in this game is map control and how much you can coordinate splitting up with your team.
Team composition does not matter at all, ever.
There is a video going around these day on the Zoose twitch of a team of only spirit rangers (so a completely imbalanced composition) winning against a balanced team composed of 5 different professions, not even inexperienced players.
There is no such thing as team synergy. When you are in TS coordinating you are just giving information on where the enemies are and when you need to move your individuals. Other than that, the fights are just “I’m going down”, “I’m down” and “I’m ressing you”, “I’m stomping” while you’re fighting with your team, but, in most cases, you are 1vs1. When fights are not 1vs1, then they are only zergfest and mindless spamming of AoEs, skills and combos over a point. There is no such thing as fight coordination. I’ve seen quite a number of streams to say what I’m saying.
The “team based” is just those times when you coordinate your team on how and where to split up and play as individuals, which is, in fact solo-play situations. That’s the point.
Even though an Ele can last quite long against two people. Without his team he’s performing less than optimally. Also if he’s out-witting his opponents, it’s a testament to his skill but it is also a testament to the bad timing that his enemies have.
What you are calling “performing less than optimally” and “bad timing of his enemies” are, still, individuals features.
An Elementalist is not winning because his enemies did not have team synergy while fighting. An Elementalist is winning either because enemy team did not moved enough manforce to that point or because players he’s facing are bad individually, not as a team.
I’ll give you guys another comparison with Guild Wars 1. I don’t know if you guys who are saying Guild Wars 2 is a team based game have ever experienced the GW1 PvP, if you didn’t, watch at some matches on youtube.
In any situations, the fights are either 7v7 (in GvG) or 8v8 in HA. You can see how a whole team effort and synergy takes place to make the enemy lose.
An interrupt from the ranger or the mesmer at the right time can potentially indirectly kill an enemy.
A good AoE placed by an elementalist/necromancer will make enough pressure to make enemy monks to waste more energy than they should.
A well-coordinated spike by the whole team won’t give enough time to the enemies monks to heal back.
A well-timed knockdown by the hammer warrior on the protection monk is significantly increase the chances for someone to die.
The team fight depths were incredibly higher. Each individual should be aware of every move of your teammates to be successful and take actions accordingly. Individual skills are, of course, necessary but they are nothing if the whole team isn’t skilled as well.
Those things don’t exists in Guild Wars 2. A skilled Elementalist is capable to hold off 2+ people with ease changing the outcome of the whole match. You don’t need at all to have your whole team to be as good as you are to be successful. You just need some key elements to be good and you have high chance to win.
Also, I’, not trying to say that Guild Wars 2 being not a team-based game is a bad thing, it is just different. I want to point out that a game that is obviously not team-based should balanced and treated as a not team-based game.
(edited by sorrow.2364)