Guild Wars 2

In all honesty, I feel this game lacks player skill.
Everything is way too simplified in this game.
It’s great if something is easy to get into, but that’s where it stays at.
I enjoy competitive games with excitement and intensity of players proving who’s best.
But this game lacks pretty much everything that enhances this experience.
It saddens me to see that the same company that created one of the best competitive concepts (GW1 GvG/HA) and turn it into… this (sPvP/tPvP).

But I am not here to complain, somehow I feel this game has potential.
Though there are a lot of things that stop this game from fully utilizing it.

Here’s a list of things I feel this game needs improvement on and why.

Leaps – Teleports – Shadowsteps
Problem

• That the game has these mechanics is not THAT bad. The problem is that they happen too often and do not promote skillful positioning. You can easily charge/teleport into or away from your target with the press of a button. Thieves can even do this on a pretty spammable rate and hop into or flee combat with ease.
• Pretty much every melee weapon has a leap with an extremely low cooldown (Warrior Greatsword even has 2 gap-closers!). This does not promote skillful positioning and disables this one role this game currently lacks – skirmisher (looking at Ranger).

Thoughts

• There are actually 3 types of snares (Cripple, Chilled and Immobilized) as opposed to 1 speedboost (Swiftness). Seems there are plenty of viable options to close and/or create gaps.

Lack of overview
Problem

• Often people can’t tell what is going. Sure, the best way is to tell what’s coming based on animations, I can tell most of them. The main problem is that in group fights it’s close to impossible to tell what is going on. There are so many flashy effects and fields happening, it’s hard to tell what is going on. Even in GW1 you can easily tell what is going on in 8v8 battles.
• Asura, they are too small and you just can barely tell what they are going to do. In a competitive format, this is a HUGE problem.

Thoughts

• Toning down the effects of multiple skills would help a lot and provide a better overview for players in group battles. However, this does not help the Asura problem much.
• Skill-cast bars. It’s simple, it helps to provide an overview and players can skillfully land interrupts. I only see win-win on this.

Stealth
Problem

• Most, if not all, melee weapons can strike targets who are in Stealth. Heck, you even see the auto-attack chain going on. However, most ranged weaponry can not strike a target in Stealth and those players can only await their death against someone who manages Stealth and Blind properly. Not being able to auto-attack targets is pretty huge in this game.
• Thieves can manage Stealth for an extremely long duration, giving them easily the time to stay in or get out of combat without getting hit by ranged weaponry.

Thoughts

• I feel Mesmers are in a good state when it comes to Stealth. They only pop it from time-to-time to lose target for a short duration without losing track for an extremely long duration.
• Thieves work a lot more with Stealth. However, if Thieves would have Stealth that lasts on shorter durations, that would give ranged weaponry more of an opportunity to keep going in a fight more often. Players would also not lose track as easily and Thieves won’t just ’’vanish’’ and reset fights without telling.

Multi-target attacks and AoE
Problem

• This game has WAY too many skills/attacks that hit more than 1 target. Basically as a Warrior or Guardian you can run in and put pressure on as many opponents as possible while they absorb all the damage that is incoming. Other classes can simply drop a ton of AoE on a location and pressure a lot of opponents. This is even easier to do in a game that focuses on capture points, where players need to stand their ground in a small area.
• Ranged weaponry has to put points into a trait line to hit more than 1 target as opposed to melee weaponry. This is mostly unfair and makes melee weaponry far more superior.
• The large amount of mulit-target skills give fights generally a short and dull feeling.

Thoughts

• Wouldn’t you agree that longer and sustainable fights that require player skill and communication are far more interesting? I sure do!
• Having skills that require a single target would give the player the power to choose who to put pressure on, who to snare and who to help. That would improve individual skill way more than simply casting this single skill and affecting everyone in an area.

Reserving for future post.

Topics will be:

• Passives
• Conditions
• Immunities
• Damage vs Sustain is out of the box.

It feels that way to me too. That is because power creep has made everything too accessible. They have been nerfing vigor durations recently which helps. But have also been buffing/adding evasion on weapon skills. Which does not help. Too much damage, too many condis, too much sustain, too much condi cleansing, too much evasion.

Really that is the core issue with this game. Everytime people QQ about “cheese” or “balance” the heart of the issue is the power creep. You can’t have a fun game based around a game with so many powerful things. Where does it end?

have this feel often too but most time its cause combatlog dont say to me how i died

The problems, in my opinion, are the following:

1. The meta has become too tanky. We need MORE dps not less at this point.
2. AOE is skill-less. AOE should be nerfed across the board. To stay consistent with my point #1, solo target damage should be buffed
3. Condi damage should be nerfed, but at the same time, they should introduce condi crit damage. That would allow some specs to do more condi damage, but other specs will do less. Think about it… for direct damage you care about power, precision, and crit damage. For condi, you only care about condition power and condition duration. Both should have 3 stats.
4. AI is too strong. Nerf AI in this game such as spirit rangers and mm necro.

I don’t think that completely overhauling gameplay mechanics is the way to address the issues that the OP is pointing out.

I do agree that there is very little emphasis on positioning, but that’s because 1) Conquest encourages everyone to just pile on a point and keep it contested and 2) there are so few viable ranged specs that there’s seldom any reason to line of sight someone or use elevation to your advantage. However, I think addressing issue 1 also addresses issue 2 to some degree.

Regarding the ‘Overview’:
I agree this is a problem and I agree that over-the-top skill effects have a lot to do with this, but I this is really something that affects PvE more than PvP.

Regarding AoE:
AoE is problematic, but this again stems from a gameplay system that clumps people together too much. When everyone is forced to fight on a small node, AoE becomes incredibly effective as you can just drop it in the middle and the enemy either has to eat your damage or leave the node uncontested.

My suggestions:
1) Give more game types and/or objectives that don’t require sitting on a point.
2) Increase the radius of all capture nodes so that they are the same size as the mid point in Legacy of the Foefire.

These changes would make a larger variety of builds viable, would diversify gameplay strategies, and would lessen the reward of builds that can thoughtlessly drop AoE abilities.

I would not say overhauling, I would say adjusting to the PvP format.