What I don’t understand most is how they could get PvP so wrong this time around…
I see lots of comments like this, and my thought is always “you seriously don’t understand?”
Gw1 was built on a series of pvp principles; things like simple gear, small numbers, and a concept of build making which was an mmo analog to mtg.
What’s changed? Aw jeez, everything? We have big numbers in every category, poorly streamlined condition categories, no concept of energy management, hardly any concept of team build making and no ally healing other than downed state. No ally healing changes response types. The closest thing we have to gvg in gw2 is foefire map, in which the lord pit is so lethal that you can send any one character to get in there and hold off 2 or 3 characters – there’s one response and it’s the exact same every time. OH! AND ELITE SKILLS! Yeah man, in gw1 elite skills just offered a tool or a refinement of playstyle, obviously that had to go because without having a button so strong that you receive a herculean surge in power pvers wouldn’t feel like big boys. The concept of effective skill use, as it was in gw1, is neutered. Sure, you might have a combo or some kind of burst potential with stuns/blowouts/knockdowns/redundant status, but there is no energy to be careful with.
Why did these changes occur? For pvers, if I hadn’t made that hypothesis clear already. Pvers in gw1 would constantly complain about how a max damage sword had stats which were like 12-21 or something. That does not make a pver feel like a cool kid! You also didn’t have huge aoe on every single class, very uncool! People were really elitist about what builds to run in gw1, so obviously the devs had to take matters into their own hands and choose the first 5 skills for people then give them 1 functioning elite and mostly bad utilities. Oh yeah, that previous sentence? Same reason energy was removed, because if the devs are making the builds you can’t punish players for the devs making bad builds.
For the record; I really want to like gw2 and I’m not anti change – it being inevitable and all. The fact that gw2 is not gw1 is used both as a complaint and a justification, which is messed up because a lot of good changes were made in gw1 and the knowledge from that just doesn’t seem to be present too often. Problem is that the engagements are so schizophrenic that the combat alternates between toughness-vitality nonsense and instant death. If Jon Peters thought that gw1 pvp was too hardcore ( http://www.guildmag.com/pvp-interview-with-jon-peters ) then what he helped build is so focused on deciphering non-distinctive skill animations, dodging, and twitch-like reflexes that it has to be way more hardcore than gw1 pvp ever was. At least the controls in gw1 didn’t represent a barrier to entry for pvp.
agree with most everything you said. “big numbers” is however a non-issue I feel.
btw I think we’re going to get lampooned for saying so, but I think removing energy was a net loss. it was an interesting idea, but it alters everything else to promote the gw2 style of facerolling pvp. and yes, i understand it was removed because of the weapon-skill combat in gw2. these were interesting experiments, but the sum of these parts is difficult to see the good pvp that we knew from gw1
(edited by milo.6942)
My comment was more in regards to the depth and variety of PvP in Guild Wars, compared with that of Guild Wars 2 (which lacks both depth and variety). Either way, I do agree with much of what you said.
I think removing energy was a net loss. it was an interesting idea
It wasn’t really a design idea.
There was energy, and at some point they just realized that the gameplay wouldn’t be any different if it were removed, probably because there was no way to deny energy and builds had good enough energy management that you never ran dry.
agree with most everything you said. “big numbers” is however a non-issue I feel.
You’re right. It was my intention to show the mindset of a developer catering for what pvers like, not that we can fault them for that.
(edited by mbh.8301)
I agree with OP. Tho you forgot to mention one really big difference between GW 1 and GW 2. GW 1 was ment to be PvP game where PvE is just something else to do while there is no PvP. Thats why PvP in that game was so awesome. GW 2 on the other hand is trying to be best in every aspect, at least thats what we are getting from interviews. WvW is epic server vs server battle, PvP will be e-sport (yea, sure) and PvE is like no other before because of super cool events.
WvW is played by some I’d prefer Planetside because WvW seems like demoversion to it. PvP e-sport? Well in GW1 it was because it was a lot about skill, it wasnt so fast and wasn’t about who gets to zerg whom first. That we can see on mesmer, change from a guy who can turn off the enemy to basically dps. And PvE, altough I like event system a bit its really only quests where you don’t have to go ask NPC what to do. The area with centaur camps is awesome (not sure on what map is that) and I thought its going to be like that in whole world, or similar. Well, it ain’t. Yes I was overhyped as a player of GW 1 I was really looking forward to this. The bigger hype the bigger dissapointment.
Don’t get me wrong I still play PvP and I’ll probably continue for some time, yet there is a lot of weird things going on with this game. We’ll see where it will lead.
People keep saying that gw1 was an esport.
It wasnt. It was a nightmare for solo players and that is why it would never have succeeded as an esport, even now.
Not to say that gw2 is any better atm
btw I think we’re going to get lampooned for saying so, but I think removing energy was a net loss.
Doesn’t feel that significant to me.
E-denial was certainly an interesting tactic, but basically every build of merit was self-sufficient in handling its energy. When half your skillbar is already chosen for you, they’ve already done the restriction on your efficiency that they had energy once do.
Mostly all that was lost was E-denial or the interruption of E-denial. The latter gets replaced by the global interruption of self-heals for the most part.
People keep saying that gw1 was an esport.
It wasnt. It was a nightmare for solo players and that is why it would never have succeeded as an esport, even now.
Not to say that gw2 is any better atm
True it was an esport but it was competitive. The game did have live championships with cash pools similar to some of the current MLG tournaments, and that was back in 2005. For its time, it succeeded incredibly well as a competitive pvp game, and thats very obvious cause some of the top gw1 players are now some of the top LoL players etc, so it attracted the good players because it was a competitive game. The same cant be said for gw2 now. If GW1 was solo friendly though, it would have made for something amazing, even though I cant see how GvG could possibly have been made solo friendly by nature.
btw I think we’re going to get lampooned for saying so, but I think removing energy was a net loss.
Doesn’t feel that significant to me.
E-denial was certainly an interesting tactic, but basically every build of merit was self-sufficient in handling its energy. When half your skillbar is already chosen for you, they’ve already done the restriction on your efficiency that they had energy once do.
Mostly all that was lost was E-denial or the interruption of E-denial. The latter gets replaced by the global interruption of self-heals for the most part.
i suppose i should have specified more the connections the energy has
pre-set wep skills → energy should be removed
makes sense, however:
no energy → no resource to pace fights → just use skills that give most dmg and are off recharge.
also:
no energy → balancing becomes tradeoff between skill power and skill recharge → the more powerful the skill, the longer the recharge → elites have longest recharge →
this is partially the reason devs said we can’t have teamfights -- just begin fighting, pop elites and after a short time fight will be over
not having energy affects the style of pvp we have now
btw I think we’re going to get lampooned for saying so, but I think removing energy was a net loss.
Doesn’t feel that significant to me.
E-denial was certainly an interesting tactic, but basically every build of merit was self-sufficient in handling its energy.
Yes, good builds did have energy management, but if you spammed your buttons you would still run out of energy. Also; monks and warriors didn’t have energy management, so they had to be particularly smart about when they used buttons.
Technically Helseth is right, gw1 wasn’t an esport outside of the world championships. Gw1 did have a lot of components for esport which gw2 doesn’t have, in particular it had easy to read combat which made the game pretty easy to understand/spectate outside of the 8v8 fights for the uninitiated.
btw I think we’re going to get lampooned for saying so, but I think removing energy was a net loss.
Doesn’t feel that significant to me.
E-denial was certainly an interesting tactic, but basically every build of merit was self-sufficient in handling its energy. When half your skillbar is already chosen for you, they’ve already done the restriction on your efficiency that they had energy once do.
Mostly all that was lost was E-denial or the interruption of E-denial. The latter gets replaced by the global interruption of self-heals for the most part.i suppose i should have specified more the connections the energy has
pre-set wep skills -> energy should be removed
makes sense, however:
no energy -> no resource to pace fights -> just use skills that give most dmg and are off recharge.
also:
no energy -> balancing becomes tradeoff between skill power and skill recharge -> the more powerful the skill, the longer the recharge -> elites have longest recharge ->
this is partially the reason devs said we can’t have teamfights -- just begin fighting, pop elites and after a short time fight will be overnot having energy affects the style of pvp we have now
Seriously long cooldowns are such a boring thing.
Oh I used my elite, now I cannot use this skill for 3 minutes.
I want fights which last 20~30s and during which I can use a variaty of skills multiple times. I don’t want to use one utility just once in a fight, and either live or die. I want to use the same utility 2 or 3 times in a fight, and the timing when I choose to use it makes the difference if I win or lose.
I really dislike skills with 30s of cooldown, because you can often just use them once in a fight.
Add a real interrupting system, with skills designed for interrupting, which cause the skill to go on full cooldown instead of 5s. For example headshot and distortion would such interrupt skills.
sPvP and more so hotjoin feels like playing CoD with Swords.
Aquire target, press some buttons and watch what happens.
btw I think we’re going to get lampooned for saying so, but I think removing energy was a net loss.
Doesn’t feel that significant to me.
E-denial was certainly an interesting tactic, but basically every build of merit was self-sufficient in handling its energy.Yes, good builds did have energy management, but if you spammed your buttons you would still run out of energy. Also; monks and warriors didn’t have energy management, so they had to be particularly smart about when they used buttons.
Depended on what you played.
It was hard to tap-out meaningfully if you played an Assassin. Energy was quickly replenished.
There were many Monk builds that run E-management (remember Mantra of Recall?) or utilized skills that were conservative on energy such as Zealous Benediction. Warriors didn’t run much E-management due to Adrenaline fueling most attacks, though a couple builds that required E-manage did exist as a result of more energy focused attack skills being utilized in certain builds. Some warriors ran just a minute few e-skills since adrenaline was good enough, and really they didn’t need to manage it, because they didn’t use energy frequently enough to care for managing it.
Energy was mostly just a limiter to prevent obscene combinations that would happen as a result and played an additional purpose for allowing e-denial strats. With them already restricting obscene combination through forced weapon skills, eh energy wasn’t really needed. So it’s not much of a net loss, unless you weep for e-denial.
Or in other words instead of every prof taking a Heal skill as in gw2 , they more or less took a E-gain skill in gw1. Lulz, gotta be self-sufficient somehow.
(edited by ensoriki.5789)
The only GW1 tournies with large cash prizes were funded by ANet themselves, and I did not know a single person who actually watched GvG matches who didn’t themselves play the game alot. GvG was a ton of fun though.
Energy was a needed balancing mechanic in GW1 because you had free reign over what 8 skills were in your bar. GW2 is totally different with only 3 utility skills and 5 pre-defined skills tied to your weapon sets.
GW2 is more akin to Team Fortress, and GW1 was more like Magic the Gathering. I think a lot of the overarching design decisions they made in GW2 were good from an esport perspective, such as unique attack animations, skills tied to weapon sets, etc. GW1 was too arcane to be understood by anybody other than players well versed in it themselves. If GW2’s combat system was a complete failure the PvE population would also be struggling but it isn’t.
The problem with GW2 really comes down to the lack of interesting team combat mechanics in PvP. AoE is too strong (especially vs downed corpses to prevent rezes), CC is too weak, burst is too high, and there’s no strong support or healing classes. The complete lack of interesting team fight dynamics makes the game mostly revolved around forcing favorable engagements via mobility and map/node control.
While the game will never be an eSport (that dream is dead IMO), ANet can still salvage the game to at least appease the remaining fanbase. For example, they said on a SotG that when they tested team deathmatch internally it wasn’t fun because everybody just waited until their elites were up before going in and that wasn’t fun. And while I’m no fan of TDM as a competitive game mode, that should’ve alerted them that powerful elites on big cooldowns make for poor team fight dynamics. And that is just one issue. Some other ones off the top of my head:
-They already said they are looking into toning down AoE, but very slowly due to its affect on PvE. But what they can do right now is buff the rezes so every class has a viable rez. I think they need to tone down downed state abilities and HP as well. I see the need for a downed state in PvP, otherwise burst comps will rule all, but they have to make this a bit more dynamic. Viable rez sigs on all classes is at least a start.
-Make support and control builds viable. The game was advertised as rather than having a tank/dps/healer dynamic, it would have a control/dps/support dynamic. In PvP it is really only a bunker/DPS dynamic, with everybody running more or less self-sustainable builds. This will require a lot of balancing, but the end goal IMO should be toning down individual bunker defense, increase team support such as healing, condition removals and buffs, tone down spike DPS (which they already said they are going to do by adding a “boon hate” mechanic instead), buff CC, nerf vigor in some fashion so people can’t spam dodges all day, and put a greater emphasis on the combo mechanic by making fields/finishers less abundant but have a stronger effect. I could go on and on but at this point I think I should start charging ANet.
btw I think we’re going to get lampooned for saying so, but I think removing energy was a net loss.
Doesn’t feel that significant to me.
E-denial was certainly an interesting tactic, but basically every build of merit was self-sufficient in handling its energy. When half your skillbar is already chosen for you, they’ve already done the restriction on your efficiency that they had energy once do.
Mostly all that was lost was E-denial or the interruption of E-denial. The latter gets replaced by the global interruption of self-heals for the most part.i suppose i should have specified more the connections the energy has
pre-set wep skills -> energy should be removed
makes sense, however:
no energy -> no resource to pace fights -> just use skills that give most dmg and are off recharge.
also:
no energy -> balancing becomes tradeoff between skill power and skill recharge -> the more powerful the skill, the longer the recharge -> elites have longest recharge ->
this is partially the reason devs said we can’t have teamfights -- just begin fighting, pop elites and after a short time fight will be overnot having energy affects the style of pvp we have now
Seriously long cooldowns are such a boring thing.
Oh I used my elite, now I cannot use this skill for 3 minutes.I want fights which last 20~30s and during which I can use a variaty of skills multiple times. I don’t want to use one utility just once in a fight, and either live or die. I want to use the same utility 2 or 3 times in a fight, and the timing when I choose to use it makes the difference if I win or lose.
I really dislike skills with 30s of cooldown, because you can often just use them once in a fight.Add a real interrupting system, with skills designed for interrupting, which cause the skill to go on full cooldown instead of 5s. For example headshot and distortion would such interrupt skills.
sPvP and more so hotjoin feels like playing CoD with Swords.
Aquire target, press some buttons and watch what happens.
Basicaly, what you want is GW 1.
btw I think we’re going to get lampooned for saying so, but I think removing energy was a net loss.
Doesn’t feel that significant to me.
E-denial was certainly an interesting tactic, but basically every build of merit was self-sufficient in handling its energy. When half your skillbar is already chosen for you, they’ve already done the restriction on your efficiency that they had energy once do.
Mostly all that was lost was E-denial or the interruption of E-denial. The latter gets replaced by the global interruption of self-heals for the most part.i suppose i should have specified more the connections the energy has
pre-set wep skills -> energy should be removed
makes sense, however:
no energy -> no resource to pace fights -> just use skills that give most dmg and are off recharge.
also:
no energy -> balancing becomes tradeoff between skill power and skill recharge -> the more powerful the skill, the longer the recharge -> elites have longest recharge ->
this is partially the reason devs said we can’t have teamfights -- just begin fighting, pop elites and after a short time fight will be overnot having energy affects the style of pvp we have now
Seriously long cooldowns are such a boring thing.
Oh I used my elite, now I cannot use this skill for 3 minutes.I want fights which last 20~30s and during which I can use a variaty of skills multiple times. I don’t want to use one utility just once in a fight, and either live or die. I want to use the same utility 2 or 3 times in a fight, and the timing when I choose to use it makes the difference if I win or lose.
I really dislike skills with 30s of cooldown, because you can often just use them once in a fight.Add a real interrupting system, with skills designed for interrupting, which cause the skill to go on full cooldown instead of 5s. For example headshot and distortion would such interrupt skills.
sPvP and more so hotjoin feels like playing CoD with Swords.
Aquire target, press some buttons and watch what happens.Basicaly, what you want is GW 1.
personally, i was expecting something closer to GW 1.5, not GW here-have-some-random-quickness-procs edition
I agree most of what you said. I thing GW2 can be that awesome PvP game like GW1 if they just made a few changes. First by bring back all of those game types such as kill number and annihilation. The two big things that they should really bring back though is HA, this would also allow GW2 to give PvE type rewards to those who are mostly in PvP (if you are a decorated champion in PvP you should be able to show that off in PvE, just as being a champion PvEer should be able to show of there gear in PvP). In addition, bring back GvG! With out going on too large of a rant how can GW2 be GUILD wars without a rank based battle between groups of organized individuals? It is possible to have a very active and intense battle between too groups of 5 and not base it on capping points, but rather going back to killing a guild lord.
The two big things that they should really bring back though is HA, this would also allow GW2 to give PvE type rewards to those who are mostly in PvP . In addition, bring back GvG!
Conceptually, HA should be brought back. You know, the whole winning favor of the gods and defeating the scourge that is Europe for great justice thing.
However, I had hoped it would be obvious that with the combat being so different and one dimensional it would be impossible to bring back the exact same game modes without a complete overhaul in pvp design philosophy.
Also; people should really stop asking for pve rewards in pvp – it will never happen. Ever. EVER.
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