Guild Wars 2

Just a Flaw i been noticing Pure DPS roles Gaining way more badges than support roles

e.g i play Sword/horn support role in WvWvW did 4 hours with my Guild , All the DPS/AOE gained hundreds of badges , The Support/Healers Gained about 10

Hope A fairer Distribution is implemented OR else Evertone May aswell Go DPS….

No1 is expecting you to be a healer or supporter

rhodoc is funny.

Look at the bright side Decrypter. When they’re going to ask
“Who has this or that because we need to get this or that”
you can just answer
“Don’t look at me, you know I get nothing because I’m your heal/support around here.”

I got 9 badges 3 days ago and nothing after that.

Heal/support Mesmer here.

1) If you’re in a guild, and this continues, you can offer your guild to put higher tax on players who play dps’es and lower on thos who play support. Like, supports do not provide siege weapons. Issue solved – dps has to pay (with bages and coin) and you dont, so it kinda evens out.

2) You shouldnt be dedicated healer/supporter in WvW a lot, except when sieging castles – there you dont get much bages, since you only kill single idiots who like to get aoe’d on towers. Yes you have to have sword/horn to buff, but you have second weapon set to deal damage. In the moments when you advance or retreat, a player dealing (preferably aoe) damage is more imporant than one that is JUST supporting. I dont say you should not support – but support is secondary here. More damage you deal – faster you start killing them – less likely they will raise their downed teammates – win for your team. I’m in a very organised guild and we dont have any class run full support (aka mostly hit friendlies, not enemies). Some classes just have to bring one weapon set for buffs, and some utilities for buffs, but all classes take part in AOE’ing enemy or attacking enemy.

3) To get credit for a kill, you only need to deal some damage to him. This means that when you see someone going down, one or two 1’s is enough. When you’re massively owning someone, you’d better aoe enemy, not support, since that will make you gain advantage faster – then you get more loot too. When you have tough battle with little casualties – you can afford throwing one offensive aoe or spell or two autoattacks on an enemy that is going down.

So it doesnt matter, if someone deals most damage to player and someone deals only 1000. In DE’s i can agree classes w/o aoe’s are kittened, but here each player has two health bars, and you generally have time to stick in your 1k dmg in eihter first or second of his health bars before he goes down.

I rarely seem to get badges even on my ele.
Maybe its because I spent most of my time breaking enemy siege weapons rather than killing the players near them.

You aren’t doing any damage at all? Warrior support spec(s) are still quite capable of damaging their opponents.

Maybe I’m mistaken, but I thought badges were primarily a reward for killing opposing players, not for showing up to wvw?

Yes it’s asymmetric. Yes it discourages support. But you know what? I think I’m okay with it. It is things like these that keep the game from becoming a mind numbing “everybody wins” adventure.

I’m a guardian and this is just killing me as well, and that’s just the way it is. You either accept that you can and do have a huge impact on the way things turn out..but will never be rewarded for it, or you role another class. I’ve gotten tired of it, I’m going to re-roll, nothing else to be done for it. People don’t want support type of classes and the game won’t reward you for it like they will others, so there you go.

I am out of words really. OP makes a very valid argument. There are tons of posts which are very subjective, about gw2 game style and such. I can understand the trolling there. But not rewarding players for healing, buffing, CCing, debuffing, and such, is clearly a flaw.
Saying :

“badges were primarily a reward for killing opposing players, not for showing up to wvw?
Yes it’s asymmetric. Yes it discourages support. But you know what? I think I’m okay with it. It is things like these that keep the game from becoming a mind numbing “everybody wins” adventure.”

sounds plain fanatic.

To me it’s pretty clear that they just didn’t have time to implement it before release. I think they will fix it.

I am Guardian support/heals for my guild in WvW, and this is really easy to fix.

First, make sure you equip a weapon that has an AOE skill.
Tag a few surrounding enemies a couple times and go back to healing.

I do this all the time and get tons of badges. Problem solved.

@Kal – In the beta’s I had at least one dev confirm that for tower defense the mechanic for gaining contribution is ONLY based on kills, and that it was working as intended…so I’m not so sure they have any intention to “fix” it (which is a travesty to me).

We shouldn’t have to “tag a few enemies” just to be rewarded for the work we are doing. As a support guardian my crappy staff attacks barely do any significant damage. Using them to “tag a few enemies” is WASTING MY TIME. Time that could be better spent continuing to focus on my teammates, continuing to give them the protection/regeneration/might buff/shields and crowd control they need to maximize their damage.

The people asking for this aren’t saying there aren’t viable builds that are a mix of support and damage. The problem is there are very viable PURE DAMAGE builds that get plenty of rewards. There are also some VERY viable PURE (almost) SUPPORT builds that get next to nothing. That dichotomy is just wrong. Yes I’m sure some of you are offering your team some nice support while you are also doing damage, but there is absolutely no way you are doing as much as someone who focuses on it solely. Yes in your build to focus on support solely may mean you would be waiting on cooldowns, but not every build is like that. I can’t speak for other professions but on a guardian it is very easy to make a build where you are CONSTANTLY involved in the fight, and above 90% or more of what you do deals no damage. To waste your time just to “tag” enemies so you get some rewards shouldn’t be necessary.

Case in point yesterday on a Keep Attack. I was grouped up with AOE ranged attackers. We were well coordinated and I was on them like white on rice, keeping them bubbled/reflected/shielded/healed AND buffed (that empower buff is awfully nice for you damage dealers). I was using my skills just as often as they were. They were commenting in chat on how many kills they were getting on the wall. Apparently it was going very very well. The ONLY thing I knew was that these guys were being pummeled and the only thing keeping them alive was me. I know that because I left for literally 60 seconds to grab supply before the gate went down and by the time I got back I had to rez them. Once the gate was down I received a total of zero experience for my effort at that gate, no loot. No nothing. THe people I was supporting killed at least a dozen defenders. We both got contribution when we took the bay, but they also walked away with loot (likely badges, though I didn’t ask for a number) and more xp. That is just wrong. I don’t see how people can think otherwise?

ens.9854:

Maybe I’m mistaken, but I thought badges were primarily a reward for killing opposing players, not for showing up to wvw?

Yes it’s asymmetric. Yes it discourages support. But you know what? I think I’m okay with it. It is things like these that keep the game from becoming a mind numbing “everybody wins” adventure.

Players shouldn’t be rewarded for killing alone anymore than they should be rewarded for just “showing up.” The point of a reward is to encourage a specific kind of behavior, and the ideal behavior from every player on the team should be maximizing their contribution to the team’s victory. For anyone playing a support-oriented build of their profession, spamming AoE in an attempt to get kills (which is what the current system encourages) is likely to be less than optimal for actually helping win the battle.

—

The funny thing is that the solution shouldn’t be terribly complicated from a design standpoint (though I don’t and can’t know from an implementation perspective): if player A buffs/heals player B within a certain period of player B killing something, player A should get credit for assisting with the kill.

The same problem has been around in other mmos, and fixed properly there – such as wow. It sure can be fixed properly here.

However!

The game is designed to encourage using siege weapons. If you use siege weapons, you will get lots and lots of bags of loot. But it costs gold to buy those. It’s just another money sink / currency exchange incentive.

I don’t think other mmos have this problem, since the reward is usually based on group instead of individual (if you are in a group, of course)

Would I like to see some rewards for support? Of course, someone’s gotta do the thankless stuff.

But I think it starts to matter less once you’ve got your stuff with the badges. I know I’d probably be running with a more support spec after i’ve gotten my invader weap.

The original WoW PvP did not have automatic grouping, so healers/tanks would usually not get anything when contributing. They just made grouping automatic, enforced, and all rewards group wide. Done!

But WoW is a trinity game, so theres that pigeon-hole element. In GW2 a player can choose not to be support or tank.

It’s just that if you want the group to do well, someone has to perform those tasks to some degree, but currently the risk-reward element is just not there. The arguement has always been “you can just do some damage, then ress or heal and you’d still get rewarded as long as you did damage”

What is not being addressed is that sometimes that style of play “do some damage, heal some” can mean the difference between a gold and a bronze on certain events. There’s been times that I didn’t ress people who died right beside me because I was so close to my karma gear I just wanted to get gold contribution on the event. Not proud of it, but the game is not rewarding me for it (don’t need the exp from ressing, already 80), so I leave it up to someone else who is nicer than I am. But i feel that nice people shouldn’t be shafted just because they were nicer than everyone else :<

mangocheesecake.1487:

But WoW is a trinity game, so theres that pigeon-hole element. In GW2 a player can choose not to be support or tank.

It’s just that if you want the group to do well, someone has to perform those tasks to some degree, but currently the risk-reward element is just not there. The arguement has always been “you can just do some damage, then ress or heal and you’d still get rewarded as long as you did damage”

What is not being addressed is that sometimes that style of play “do some damage, heal some” can mean the difference between a gold and a bronze on certain events. There’s been times that I didn’t ress people who died right beside me because I was so close to my karma gear I just wanted to get gold contribution on the event. Not proud of it, but the game is not rewarding me for it (don’t need the exp from ressing, already 80), so I leave it up to someone else who is nicer than I am. But i feel that nice people shouldn’t be shafted just because they were nicer than everyone else :<

Ya I think people focus solely on the “pure” one thing or another….but don’t recognize that EVERY BIT OF SUPPORT you do is taking away from your dmg, which is reducing your rewards. So if you do 50% of support, you are reducing your kill/reward potential 50%, because all thos eutility skills could have been replaced by damage skill-centered skills.

The system is borked. It needs to be fixed. Bottom line.

I play heal/support necro for my guild and I get more badges than I know what to do with, — I’m just stocking up on more and more siege weapons as time passes, despite dropping them pretty much whenever needed and we have supply.

As I’ve said on the Guardian forum, support and/or control are meant (in Guild Wars 2) to be done alongside dealing damage. You’re not really supposed to go full support. You’re meant to weave in support into/in between your damage abilities.

Whether or not this is a desirable state is a different discussion.

“You’re not really supposed to [BLANK]” is a very limiting thing to say in an MMO. They provided us professions and a skill/trait system to customize our builds. You can make some VERY viable and VERY useful sole support builds using the system they built. Who are they (or you, or anyone else) to say “BUt you aren’t supposed to do that!”. If it works (WHICH IT DOES), we should be able to do it and we should be rewarded adequately for that. Artificially keeping us from doing it by limiting our rewards is lame.

Look, as I explained (to you even) in the Guardian thread: I love myself some supporting. It’s the greatest joy I can experience in a multiplayer game. I actually don’t really like dealing damage, at all. Don’t know why, just how it is.
But if you look at the game (and the way the rewards are set up) and how the skills are set up, you’re not exactly encouraged to focus purely on support/control (we should probably see them as one thing for this discussion). You have “support-oriented” weapons, but there’s not a single weapon focusing solely on support. You’ll always have a damage option available. It’s why a lot of damage skills have support/control baked into them (or why support/control skills have a damage component, if you will).

If you read the articles Arenanet wrote before the launch, you’ll notice they talk about how people didn’t actually enjoy healing, or about flexibility, or self-reliance. They don’t seem to see support as a distinct role. More as something that helps you reach a goal in a different way than dealing damage.

I, of course, don’t know the actual reasoning or opinions of the Arenanet-team on this (and I’d really like to know), but looking at the way the game is designed, I feel safe to say that playing strictly support isn’t intended by design.

You play support? Fine. Build a GDMF arrow cart, hit it a few times, and loot yourkittenbags and stop your Fitching. Man a cannon. Build a ballista. Go heal, do your support crap and hit up the arrow cart a few times.kittenI play a support and you’d be surprised how easy it is to get 20+ seals in an hour. THIS IS NOT WOW. We have these things called siege weapons for a reason. It didn’t take us long in DAOC to figure out you can wipe an entire tower full of people with a few portable ballistas and a single coordinated volley. (There was always somekittenidiot that would give ya LOS at the upper arch doorway)

“But it takes more supply to build then 1 person can carry.” Well who the hell are you supporting? Ghosts? A simple “Dropping an arrow cart” has yet to fail me in a group to get it built. Anyone, ANYONE, who play’s support complaining about a lack of seals, is ignoring 2/3rd of their options to support people.

“No Mercy for the Panda Kids”

what is equally or more unfair is players that block reinforcement routes nearby to seiges of towers/keeps/castles will be poorly compensated compared to players that beat their heads on the gate(effectively not actualy helping a whole lot)

-say 20-40 people seige a keep/tower and 5 go between enemy spawn and said keep/tower if these 5 players do their job correctly and stop players from getting to the keep they will not get a medal at all when the objective is won even tho the role they played is by far the most important in most situations as things are very much harder to take with players inside of them

There is a solution in your example Helathir.

Reward the guild those people belong to influence for kills and objectives their members make and allow guilds to purchase the WvW tokens with influence or award the guild tokens based on those kills. The guilds can then choose to reward their support players accordingly and give proper recognition to their members.

Its kinda funny. The responses to people playing support is to go man a siege weapon. This DEFEATS the PURPOSE of going support. How can i heal/support if i’m stuck on a siege engine? A pure DPSer can do this also, there’s no difference.

Next people will be like “well maybe i shouldn’t bother rezing teammates since that will distract me from KILLING MORE PEOPLE RAWRkittenderpkitten” Manning a siege is not the answer to getting support more bags (I used to do that myself when i ran a shouts-healing warrior spec into WvW, but i said kitten it, not worth running that spec if im sitting on an arrow cart anyways, might as well go for a kill-build.

They should make it so you could get badges for completing objectives.

Support Guardian, Hammer/Sceptre Shield. I get plenty of badges and loots, no problem here…you guys just aren’t playing properly, and I hate to say that.

Well as an Ele going 1200 range the only real option I have after dropping one or two AOE’s is support and soft CC, oh yes and of course using my supply to build arrow carts for freaking warriors who go on to brag about how many badges they have. Quite frankly it’s pissing me off that support get’s shafted by the current mechanics.

Personally I’d like badges to be distributed via the events.
I think it would encourage actually doing the objectives instead of the zerg vs. zerg battles that contribute nothing and seem to happen all too often as of late.
I’m not sure if it would entirely solve the support problem but it would help a bit i think.

Well if they are distributed via events, it might be easier to make them a currency item (gained along side exp karma and gold at the end of the event, automatically appears in your bag).

If that’s the case I support it 100% >__< So many times the bag appears inside the enemy zerg when i’ve already ran from the spot alreadyyy T 0T

Healing players and applying boons to others should count towards kill contribution. Each second of a boon is active for friendlies is similar to 1 second of dps on the target they’re beating on.

I don’t care much for the current system, it doesn’t encourage working together really, it just encourages you making sure you tag everybody to get kill contribution.

Somehow, supporting/healing/disabling etc during the fight doesn’t count for anything towards the kill, but hitting a downed enemy who is 1 second away from getting stomped? Full contribution, have your loot!

It’s just a silly system, and it does seem to hurt guardians more than most, since they are fairly support focused and their ranged options and both weak and limited. Do they get credit for retal on others? That alone might make it workable, but I don’t think they do.

honestly…unless your doing a complete pacifist role…you will be getting badges of honor, if you support well, your team will do better, which will cause you to win more…there is a reason why you dont see toughness, vit, healing power items, symbol of swiftness will do damage to enemies that touch it, so use that on friendlies that are nearby enemies and you get contribution.

So what I keep hearing is….." I want to play a healer / support class just like I always have in (insert MMO here) in spite of the the game mechanics in GW2 and ANet should do something about it."

Quoted from Starship Troopers..

“…This is for all you new people: I only have one rule. Everyone fights. No one quits. You don’t do your job, I’ll shoot you myself. You get me?…”

Lieutenant Jean Rasczak

Love that movie

Sorry, this isn’t (insert MMO here)…its GW2 and everyone has to fight AND support/heal.

@Raf (i’m not sure why I sometimes have the option to quote, but other times I don’t…weird)

If that is what you’re hearing, then you aren’t listening very well. I recognize the huge changes Arenanet made in this game in an effort to remove the “trinity”. I see it, I respect it AND I support it completely. Yes in most games I play a healer which typically amounts to “Spam these 3 buttons that give massive amounts of health to people…make sure everyone is at full health at all times”. Support in this game is a very different beast.

When I talk about playing support I"m not talking about healing. Healing is VERY minor in this game. I run all cleric gear, I have as much healing power as I can muster and I still do very little healing. Support for me is reflection, crowd control, absorbing damage, buffing (booning?), condition removal etc… There are literally DOZENS of skills that deal no (or very little damage), but increase the power or survivability of your teammates. Everyone skill I take that does that, I’m not taking a skill that deals AOE damage (since we have limited number of choices to make). So every “Support” skill I choose to take into battle is decreasing my “AOE dmg” capacity. Reducing that capacity reduces the number of enemies I can “tag” for kill credit and therefore reduces my reward. At the same time however, if i use those other skills well I can keep my teammates alive for much longer, which increases their ability to do damage…which in turn increases THEIR ability to tag kills, get xp, get loot and get reward. Why don’t I deserve some share of that? Those skills I’m taking are not for myself, they are for my teammates. I make my teammates better, and as a result THEY get increased rewards. I’m just asking for a small share of that.

I play a guardian too, Doc. I know what you;re talking about. But its just a game I play for fun and if I’m not getting good enough gear on him, then I’ll play my Thief for awhile or my Ranger. Until…someone says…“Uh, could you bring your guard back, we really miss him, lol”

They should fix this, it is a problem.

Decrypter.1785:

4 hours… All the DPS/AOE gained hundreds of badges

All of the DPS gained hundreds of badges in 4 hours?

I am doing something very wrong.