Guild Wars 2

D best.3547:

1. Add a 1 (or .5) second delay to marks, sort of like the toolkit grenade for engineers or a elementalist using AoE the damage tick can be avoided on a proper dodge, the instant mark damage is what truly makes the Necromancer incredible in team fights right now.

Make staff 1 less ‘will never hit a competent opponent’ and more ‘grenade 1 aoe condi procs murderdeath’ while you’re at it.

Everyone fears necro
I fear dev’s now ^^

Must say that necro animations are the most clear ones imo.
Big huge icons above our heads in dark colors big huge marks on the ground.. big huge animations on transform.. big huge movements when healing..did i mention very..big and huge? good..
so yeah you just have to watch the staff being raised and considering the cast times for necro i wouldn’t be too worried about marks (wouldn’t mind them having different colors though..)

I’d rather see castbars in hotjoin or other so i can make sense of skill rotation etc.. instead of deleting my chars to pick up a profession i don’t really enjoy playing to learn their abilities..
[and deleting my lvl 80 guardian in the proces!]

Merlin Dyfed Avalon.5046:

Must say that necro animations are the most clear ones imo.
Big huge icons above our heads in dark colors big huge marks on the ground.. big huge animations on transform.. big huge movements when healing..did i mention very..big and huge? good..

When my necro uses marks, the opposing team doesn’t see the big huge marks on the ground. Something to do with the fact I use them offensively and not as traps most of the time maybe? I put them under my opponents feet. Which is rather easy since there’s a nice circle the size of my marks drawn by the game where the game rules more or less guarantee their feets will be in. I think they call that control points :p

stof.9341:

Merlin Dyfed Avalon.5046:

Must say that necro animations are the most clear ones imo.
Big huge icons above our heads in dark colors big huge marks on the ground.. big huge animations on transform.. big huge movements when healing..did i mention very..big and huge? good..

When my necro uses marks, the opposing team doesn’t see the big huge marks on the ground. Something to do with the fact I use them offensively and not as traps most of the time maybe? I put them under my opponents feet. Which is rather easy since there’s a nice circle the size of my marks drawn by the game where the game rules more or less guarantee their feets will be in. I think they call that control points :p

Well people should learn never to stand in circles ^^.. but yeah point made

ColinJohanson.2394:

Super Riceman.8702:

3. Add a way to spectate tournament games but make it delayed by 5 min instead of watching it live.

Since it’s late and I’m here, want to quickly debunk this one. This is like a year+ work minimum for an entire team of engineers, and may not even be feasible in our game engine.

Just to give some perspective on why stuff that often seems so easy to do, often times isn’t being done.

In general great thread though folks, keep the suggestions rolling =)

It’s dev quotes like these that dishearten me the msot.

How many times have you guys said that you were/are trying to build a game that can grow into a viable e-sport? If your intentions truely are to build a esport class game as promised then how is this a valid excuse in the least bit?

You have enough people on the payroll to fund multiple PvE living world teams, that is clearly important to you, but to put a team on a long term project that would be a gigantic assest to PvP is unrealistic? I don’t recall Riot Games saying “oh, you know what we could make a replay/spectator mode but we don’t want to invest the resources”.

In this day and age you can not half kitten competitive gaming. There are too many other options for people wanting to be involved in esports. Either commit to it, or stop dangeling the proverbial carrot in front of our noses.

It is unacceptable to hear about a lack of resources while PvE gets massive content patches bi weekly.

It is unacceptable to hear about not being able to balance certain builds because it would affect PvE and WvW.

It is unacceptable to cry out esports while still not having the daily, montly, and annual tournament system we were promised at lanuch, 1 year ago.

You have the resources, you just choose to allocate them largley not towarards competitive gaming. You show your priorites every patch with the content that is put out, and sPvP is not a major one in the least bit. You mentioned not adding multiple game modes to PvP in fear or spreading your player base too thin; I think there is some great advice in that for yourselves at Anet. By trying to have a game with WvW, sPvP, and PvE you are spreading yourselves too thin and you are not giving sPvP the attention needed to create this e-sport that you hooked a large majority of us in with.

The ones I’m liking as a daily player;
1) Use of glory for buying levels when you enter PvE.
2) Diminishing returns on CC/stun
3)Obvious animation to stealth skills.
4) Light armoured profession are in fact made light. Heavy tanking shouldn’t be so easily viable on some current light armoured professions.
5) Rank/glory proportionate to dmg done. 1 vs 1 rewards the highest. 2 vs 1 rewards 50%. 3 vs 1 rewards 33% etc etc..heavy ganking will still capture nodes, but is rewarded less. Solo capturing nodes and defending them rewards better.

ColinJohanson.2394:

butch.8136:

So I shouldn’t expect a replay mode nor observer mode a la gw1 anytime soon. K, is automated tournaments like gw1 hard to implement?

Just so we can get some perspective…

Yes, that’s also very hard to implement, but will be a great addition to the game down the road!

I never played GW1 but if you already had all those platform running, why didn’t you have them in mind wile creating GW2? or at least build the engine with the “foundations” to easily allow the implementation of such features in the future?
Now it takes years to modify it…

First, I want to say that the variety between the playstyles of classes in GW2 combined with the ability to dodge shapes a solid fundament for a great competitive game. I still think it’s one of the best games to play PvP ever. At the same time, whenever I play the game, I simply cannot avoid getting overly frustrated. Here is why.

1. The concept of reacting to visual signs from your opponents as to which skills they use is interesting, but as the game is now it simply does NOT work. Too many effects/pets to distinguish important abilities being used, and some skills are indistinguishable from auto attacks when you are in the middle of an intense fight. This is particularly problematic with asura characters, where the problem is amplified.

Add the OPTION to enable casting bars. I have no game engineering knowledge, but I imagine it must be less time-consuming to introduce casting bars rather than going through all skills & abilities and clean up the extent of glamourous effects/pew pew.
Furthermore, add the option to scale all characters, regardless of race, to a certain size. This will circumvent the asura issue. People who enjoy playing asura can continue to do so with NO detriment. The rest of us can stop puking on our keyboards because our opponents are stealthing their animations by playing a small character.

I have pvp’ed in every mmo, and I mostly only play mmos to pvp. My pvp experience in GW2 is by far the most confusing compared to other mmos, and I believe the above issues are partly the cause of this.

2. Too high damage output across the board. Being able to one-shot players, or kill them in one combo in a span of 1-2 sec is fun and exciting to pull off, but I find it detrimental to the overall fight. It doesn’t allow for comebacks. Some players are great because they are able to predict the next few of their opponents’ steps, which is where skill really shows, and what is fun to watch. Right now, it is more a matter of reaction time, because one-shot combos are so powerful. On top of this, several of these combos provide little visual cue. Elementalists with Fresh air, lightning strike weapon sigil and double arcane utilities can do incredible damage in the blink of an eye. Necromancers can swap to death shroud and immediatly fear the target, preceded/followed by a full complement of conditions, which deals so much damage it resembles a direct damage burst.

I don’t think an overall damage reduction across the board would be the right answer, as some weapon sets/abilities already deal mediocre/poor damage, and thus would become completely obsolete, instead you could perhaps move the damage from certain abilities to others ( move damage from lightning strike to other scepter attacks, for example), or just reduce the damage on all the big-hitting abilities.
At the same time, the strongest healing abilities should also be reduced(Looking at you, warrior heal sig), or else it will become an attrition battle with too great advantage for certain classes.

3. Make it possible for players to disable de-targeting when left-clicking the ground. It’s annoying when you lose your target because you left-click to rotate the camera to watch your opponents chase you, or when you spam left-click to use template-placing abilities and lose your target. You will still have Esc to deselect a target.

4. Too many dodges available. Nerf energy sigil or just remove it. There’s too much random dodging going on, because it is too easily accessible.

5. Allow us to use glory for the PvE aspect of the game by converting it to gold, karma or something else.

I’m not sure why exactly spectating a recording would be too hard. I know the way MMOs keep track of where all the other players are that are near you is it keeps relaying the timestamp, their x, y, z position, the skill they’re currently using, and the timestamp of when they began channeling that skill. Those are the things your client constantly needs to know from the server in order to keep up to date on what’s going on and thus replicate the correct gamestate. So, to create a recording, you just need to record this “action timeline” to a table, and then when a user wants to watch the recording, it’s just like displaying a real time match, except it reads the data from the table and sends it to you as if it’s a real-time match. The only issue that I could see is that the size of the table might get huge since you’re recording this data many times a second per player in the match, but if you’re only looking to record this data only for games being spectated and have it die after all the spectators leave, it shouldn’t be too big of a problem.

put in deathmatch modes like how Smite does theirs. It could be a generic looking map. You wouldn’t have to change much.

BrunoBRS.5178:

well, going from my own experience with programming, that shouldn’t be harder than tying a visibility parameter to a checkbox (or just outright wiping the code that displays AI names and health bars).

then again, i’ve never worked on something of the complexity of a AAA game, so who knows what weird way they chose to display those.

shouldn’t be hard though.

It’s always encouraging when “experts” come in and lend a hand with their php/website experience, but I highly doubt that’s an “add a checkbox” problem, or that there’s “code for displaying AI names”. More likely it’s inherited from some sort of a Unit superclass so it would have to be overloaded; also, visibility of names/healthbars would need to vary by zone (PvP, outside of PvP), player (enable/disable kind of option, or several detail levels?), mode (you might want to see names when playing, and not see when spectating); adding new display options would need to drag UI artists/developers into the mix, et caetera, et caetera.

Just please don’t go smug with a “lol this is a one checkbox fix”, applications don’t just work like that.

“Just please don’t go smug with a “lol this is a one checkbox fix”, applications don’t just work like that.”

I want checkboxes too!
They dont have to work, i just want to check them..

but i am happy to say my personal wrath has subsided a bit…again..

JonathanSharp.7094:

Jumper.9482:

JonathanSharp.7094:

Jumper.9482:

Since everyone else is suggesting visual improvements,
Necromancer marks, IMO, should have a distinct signet-ish icon when casting. I mean, as it stands, every mark is pretty much equally deadly and you’re forced to dodge each one no matter which it is, but it would be nice to know if their Reaper’s Mark went on cooldown or not for example.
When versing a Warrior, when I react and dodge his Eviscerate or Hammer Burst, I know I’m safe for the next 9 seconds (unless he weapon swaps) and can act accordingly.
Against a Necro? I can’t possibly count their cooldowns…because, well, they all have the same animations..

This is assuming ANET doesn’t want to spend the resources to completely rework the Necro’s animations.

Nods, I agree. Some of those are hard to see, or all use the same animation.

The marks themselves may have different effects once they’re placed on the ground, but that doesn’t help if the mark instantly hits you or an ally.

Or, better yet, simply emphasize the color glow of the hand which swings while casting (Chillblains and Putrid have this but are barely noticable/distinguishable)
Make it similar to Heals or Moa/Mass Invis which are readable even on Asuras most times.

Countless number of games against Necros and 400+ games on Necro and I only just now noticed they had this “hidden” feature.

Nods. The reason you’re noticing the heal/elites is because they have their own cast effects (the blue glow for the heals, for instance) when they’re used. If we put that on all the marks, that’s 5 more skills using those effects…which means you’d no longer be able to differentiate them.

what if it was just a glow/effect on the necro’s arm as he casted? for example, the chill mark would have an icy blue effect (similar to ele dagger #2). the character’s animation would stay the same, but you’d have a small yet noticeable effect on him that allowed you to distinguish each mark as it’s being cast.

i might be wrong because i’m just picturing this in my head, but it doesn’t sound like something that would negatively impact the “effect clutter” that the game is suffering from.

also, do marks really have differing effects on the ground? if you mean the symbols, maybe you should add an effect to them that makes them instantly recognizable. i know that you’re fighting against the cluttering, but at the same time, clear tells from AoEs are important.

Leto Atreides II.2153:

BrunoBRS.5178:

well, going from my own experience with programming, that shouldn’t be harder than tying a visibility parameter to a checkbox (or just outright wiping the code that displays AI names and health bars).

then again, i’ve never worked on something of the complexity of a AAA game, so who knows what weird way they chose to display those.

shouldn’t be hard though.

It’s always encouraging when “experts” come in and lend a hand with their php/website experience, but I highly doubt that’s an “add a checkbox” problem, or that there’s “code for displaying AI names”. More likely it’s inherited from some sort of a Unit superclass so it would have to be overloaded; also, visibility of names/healthbars would need to vary by zone (PvP, outside of PvP), player (enable/disable kind of option, or several detail levels?), mode (you might want to see names when playing, and not see when spectating); adding new display options would need to drag UI artists/developers into the mix, et caetera, et caetera.

Just please don’t go smug with a “lol this is a one checkbox fix”, applications don’t just work like that.

yes, i’m sure my computer engineering degree is akin to “my first HTML code”.

like i said, it all depends on how tied to other systems it is, but by nature, all visibility things work on an on/off switch. if the “show health” code isn’t there, the health doesn’t show, but unless they did some really stupid things, that should never affect the calculations from happening.

the question here is how ingrained to the overall, generic “UI” superclass the display of NPC health bars is.

the checkbox i referred to would be an option that hides all NPC health on all game modes, at all times. of course setting specific kinds of NPCs (friendly summons) on specific game modes (PvP spectator) would require more work.