Guild Wars 2

Since we have this handy forum I might as well dump some of the things that I’m sure a lot of us were already thinking, which is that holy kitten, this game promotes the hell out of just stacking DPS and blowing through everything. This is fine in some areas but it also creates problems in others because:

The less you contribute, the easier it is:
- Make the aggro system more transparent: the more health/armor/healing you have, the more aggro you take. The more damage you deal, the less aggro you incur.
- Give mobs in general more low-damage, unavoidable attacks (swipes for 1k per, etc.) that prioritize

Explanation: Right now, zerker/assassin gear are pretty much the only viable gear sets because the game heavily favors just hitting everything as hard as you can and dodging any one-shots. Reducing the frequency of these attacks and replacing them with faster, smaller hits that can be tanked, but not easily avoided, means that defensive stats actually make a difference. The more straightforward aggro mechanics means that these attacks will primarily be directed at the tankier players. This will have the effect of forcing low-DPS players to pull their weight more and also incentivize players to balance their stats a bit more.

Put DR on damage received:
- Implement DR on the amount of damage a mob can take at any given time, so that DPS scales down the more of it you have.
- Significantly reduce mob health across the board.

Explanation: Taking ten minutes to kill a boss is lame but so is one-shotting it. There is a ridiculous damage disparity between organized groups and pugs. The former SHOULD be incentivized to have good DPS but not to the extent they do currently. Reducing boss health pools makes ordinary pugging less tedious and organized speedrunning less faceroll, resulting in a more balanced gameplay experience.

More emphasis on boons, CC, and conditions:
- Rework condition-stacking issues and overall condition power. Not going to go into this as I’m sure Anet has plenty of ideas stewing about this.
- Rework Defiant to be a property on certain moves (i.e. cannot be interrupted) rather than a constant buff. Normal attacks without Defiant property can be CC’d normally. This includes blind.
- Rework the effectiveness of certain boons. For example, regen and weakness could stack in intensity.
- Give mobs more reliance on boons and conditions that aren’t straight-up boonspam. Adjust mob health and damage output to compensate, i.e. give a boss the ability to put protection on itself but also reduce its total health by 33%.

Explanation: Most fairly self-explanatory. Encouraging build diversity by making it so that straight DPS isn’t always the best option for every single fight. The regen/weakness change would also be a good way to allow players to deal with higher levels of unavoidable damage by giving more ways to mitigate it short of going full tank.

That was really tl;dr. I should stop typing out posts when I’m bored. Just read the last bit, the rest is kinda just me ranting at silly things.

EDIT: I made it less kitten lol

Seems like some pretty good ideas here. I’d also like to add that increasing the viability of healing and condition damage in PvE is definitely something that should be worked on as well. For healing, either make healing power something worthwhile by having it scale better with healing abilities or decrease the cooldown of healing utilities to make trickle heals more valuable in a party as an alternate form of damage mitigation. Having to put 1000 healing power in your build just to make a 5k heal into a 6k heal when there’s 30 seconds of downtime just isn’t worthwhile at all.

Conditions might be a little more difficult to incorporate into PvE meta, but there have been plenty of suggestions on how to do it thrown out there, and I’m sure there’s a way to make it work.

REVISING THE DPS META IN PVE

• Rework veteran/elite/champion enemies into enemies based around the Heart of the Mists NPCs and the pvp map NPCs such as Svanir or the Keep Lord and his henchmen (no downed state)
• Defiant now has a stacking cap of 15.
• Defiant now passively sheds stacks at a rate of 1 stack every 1 second.
• A single instance of CC now removes up to 3 stacks of defiant.
• When an unshakable enemy with defiant stacks loses all of its defiant stacks, that enemy is Flatfooted for 4 seconds.
• Flatfooted enemies cannot gain stability or defiant stacks.

tl;dr
ANet won’t do it because it’s too much work. We’re in too deep now.

I think you are going to have a hard time convincing people that we need an aggro system when one of the main promotions of gw2 was the removal of the Holy trinity.

I’m of the opinion that the trinity was a good thing, and I would actually agree that an aggro system based off who was built for defense would help pve diversity.

It may hit healers though. It’s harder to focus heal one person than it is to are heal a group of people.

I think the one of biggest issues, and one that contributes the most to the pro-DPS crowds is the fact that Armor does nothing against a lot of hard hitting bosses. Take for instance a lot of the encounters in higher level Fractals; you can be specced for 3k+ armor, yet still get one-shot by almost anything in there. You can’t tank.
It makes sense because movement and positioning take precedence in terms of damage mitigation, but then why do we even have Toughness and Armor as a stats.
For me, one of the best ways to make full DPS builds seem less worth it would be to actually help make stats like Armor and health matter more.

Also everything rewards DPS in this game. Your contribution to an event or a fight is based on the amount you (or your group) does to the enemy. Too busy buffing or healing? Too bad, you won’t get credited for that champion.

If the entire mob targets whoever has the most defense has many glaring issues. First, the necessity for a team to have a tank increases ten fold, which results in old problems with the holy trinity. Guild Wars is the only game where 5 players of any class/role can go into a dungeon and be successful.

Second, unavoidable damage simply isn’t fun or realistic. If you are an extremely skilled player against a boss (lupicus, for example), you shouldn’t die even if you play the fight perfectly.

If damage is avoidable, that means it takes skill to actually avoid it, which separates good players from bad. It makes sense for good players who can avoid damage to be able to invest less in defensive mechanisms. Forcing a skilled player to use defensive gear because of unavoidable damage creates stale and less dynamic combat and is only fun to bads who don’t want to take the time to familiarize themselves with a boss’ mechanics.

Zhaitan.2578:

If the entire mob targets whoever has the most defense has many glaring issues. First, the necessity for a team to have a tank increases ten fold, which results in old problems with the holy trinity. Guild Wars is the only game where 5 players of any class/role can go into a dungeon and be successful.

Second, unavoidable damage simply isn’t fun or realistic. If you are an extremely skilled player against a boss (lupicus, for example), you shouldn’t die even if you play the fight perfectly.

If damage is avoidable, that means it takes skill to actually avoid it, which separates good players from bad. It makes sense for good players who can avoid damage to be able to invest less in defensive mechanisms. Forcing a skilled player to use defensive gear because of unavoidable damage creates stale and less dynamic combat and is only fun to bads who don’t want to take the time to familiarize themselves with a boss’ mechanics.

One of the biggest problems is that while the system does reward players for being “too good”, it also rewards players for being “too bad.” If you join a pug, who do you think is going to have the hardest time on any given run? The bearbow at 1500 range in full clerics gear or the zerker D/D thief? You get to show off, sure, but at the same time it also teaches people to expect to be carried. If the boss starts beelining for the bowbear and starts smacking him repeatedly for 1k per swing, we get two possible outcomes:

1) He realizes that sitting in the back dealing no damage isn’t such a sweet deal after all if it means the boss is also going to target you. He’ll hear that more damage will equal less aggro so he’ll spec more for damage.

2) He decides that if the boss is going to go after him, he better be tough enough to survive it, so he revises his build so that he can actually tank the boss’s attacks. Now the boss is focused on him nearly exclusively so the ones dishing out DPS have an easier time of it.

Ultimately it might be annoying for the 1% who enjoys soloing Lupicus, etc. but it’d be a big buff for the other 99% who actually want to play with other people.

One of the big problems that PvE has is damage is almost always fully avoidable. Dodge the big attack and learn to stay out of circles and you’re home free.

Having the highly telegraphed heavy damage attack is fine. It promotes saving dodges/blocks/etc for the right moment. But it needs to be complemented by enough moderate damage attacks such that no player can avoid them all. When everyone has to take damage over time that will eventually kill them, defensive stats matter. A balanced character won’t kill as a fast as a berserker, but has a higher uptime, which balances out the time to kill.

Mobs could also use more defenses against CC or burst like the protection boon on a cooldown or just plain dodging out of 100blades spam. While these wouldn’t stop full berserker groups from being better, it would reduce the gap between berserkers and balanced characters.

And a comment on the MMO trinity: GW2 got rid of it, but they didn’t change the style of PvE encounters with it. It still plays like it should have a trinity. Almost every single PvE battle is still a group of trash mobs that get AoE’ed down or a boss that’s an HP punching bag with some easy gimmic. What if more content was like the dredge where they have group protection and daze/knockdown (preferably without the endless dredge clown cars)?

Your idea to make more damage pull less agro just further pushes the DPS meta. The more damage you do, the less likely you are to get hit, meaning that you can get less defensive stats and do more damage. Also, whoever does the least damage, will end up having to take the damage. This is likely to be the worst player in the group, which isn’t really a great mechanic when everyone will be as DPS specced as possible to try to gain as little agro as possible.

supporting the general idea of this thread as hard as I can
It’s really stupid that stacking damage upon damage is far and away the best way to play PvE. I don’t mind it being the best way, but I do mind it being the best by such a large degree.

However, I do not like the proposed ideas on aggro, because I don’t like the idea of a tank being able to absorb damage for everyone without even trying (That’s dumb and unrealistic. If you want to keep someone off your allies, you should have to physically pull them to you, or something like that. not just stand there and be defensive while it tunnel visions you for no reason), BUT

I really like the idea of adding in some weaker harder to avoid attacks. If done properly, the ideal result should be that the ones that built full damage glass cannon have to spend a lot more of their time healing and staying out of danger, while the ones with more beef on them get to spend a lot more time attacking, dodging only the attacks that actually hit hard. It should even out the dps a bit.

I also really like the idea of getting bosses to move around more, and giving them movement attacks

We have bosses that move around a lot with annoying gimmicks. No one does them because more coordination = bad.

We need to think smarter, not harder. The content needs to be made so it’s most easily done by a team with a good build, not with whatever team has a voicechat server. Stuff like TA Aetherblade, Mai Trin, etc. are dumb because they rely on everyone in your group knowing what to do. How many pugs know what to do in a dungeon? I consider it a success if no one falls off the bridge in COF1.

What? It’s group content. Group coordination should be a factor in success or failure.

Guanglai Kangyi.4318:

We have bosses that move around a lot with annoying gimmicks. No one does them because more coordination = bad.

well I mean like moving around normally.
like Lupicus just stands there, as do most. I’d give out a lot of pass-through dash attacks and perhaps even make them strafe occasionally

like that Karka boss was cool, cuz it rolls across the field and iirc has some kind of evade move.

reikken.4961:

Guanglai Kangyi.4318:

We have bosses that move around a lot with annoying gimmicks. No one does them because more coordination = bad.

well I mean like moving around normally.
like Lupicus just stands there, as do most. I’d give out a lot of pass-through dash attacks and perhaps even make them strafe occasionally

like that Karka boss was cool, cuz it rolls across the field and iirc has some kind of evade move.

Enemies often do move around. The problem is that this is easily countered by cornering them or pushing them into a wall, because they usually only move in a single direction.

Make PvE support carry better.

Really I don’t think it matters unless your group dose abysmal damage. The meta of PvE is kind of redundant other than elitist being like “you guys do no damage I’m carrying. noobs, I might as well solo!”

Full DPS groups are just more efficient as long a the players aren’t terrible. But I wouldn’t say other builds aren’t viable or don’t have their place.

Daishi.6027:

Make PvE support carry better.

Really I don’t think it matters unless your group dose abysmal damage. The meta of PvE is kind of redundant other than elitist being like “you guys do no damage I’m carrying. noobs, I might as well solo!”

Full DPS groups are just more efficient as long a the players aren’t terrible. But I wouldn’t say other builds aren’t viable or don’t have their place.

But I don’t want to solo, I want pugs to carry their weight, otherwise I really would just solo. Right now the game is outrageously easy in organized groups and super hard mode with the average pug. Obviously playing in a group of competent people will make things easier in general (since it’s 5vDungeon instead of 1vDungeon) but the disparity is just too extreme.

And honestly while DPS is fun and all, I wouldn’t mind an excuse to bust out my guardian’s mace from time to time.

Daishi.6027:

Make PvE support carry better.

Really I don’t think it matters unless your group dose abysmal damage. The meta of PvE is kind of redundant other than elitist being like “you guys do no damage I’m carrying. noobs, I might as well solo!”

Full DPS groups are just more efficient as long a the players aren’t terrible. But I wouldn’t say other builds aren’t viable or don’t have their place.

What you don’t understand is that support in PvE carries a ton. Guardian blocks, timed blinds/CC against mobs, CC against golem in CoE, warrior banners, battle standard, for great justice, etc. etc.

There’s a reason in organised groups with one warrior they get called banner *****es, it’s because they have to go full support on their utility bar with like fgj/banner/banner/signet (or banner for extra might + fury).

Just because support doesn’t mean big green numbers or blatant buff/debuff doesn’t mean it isn’t significant, people don’t understand that.

Guanglai Kangyi.4318:

Since we have this handy forum I might as well dump some of the things that I’m sure a lot of us were already thinking, which is that holy kitten, this game promotes the hell out of just stacking DPS and blowing through everything. This is fine in some areas but it also creates problems in others because:

The less you contribute, the easier it is:
- Make the aggro system more transparent: the more health/armor/healing you have, the more aggro you take. The more damage you deal, the less aggro you incur.
- Give mobs in general more low-damage, unavoidable attacks (swipes for 1k per, etc.) that prioritize

Explanation: Right now, zerker/assassin gear are pretty much the only viable gear sets because the game heavily favors just hitting everything as hard as you can and dodging any one-shots. Reducing the frequency of these attacks and replacing them with faster, smaller hits that can be tanked, but not easily avoided, means that defensive stats actually make a difference. The more straightforward aggro mechanics means that these attacks will primarily be directed at the tankier players. This will have the effect of forcing low-DPS players to pull their weight more and also incentivize players to balance their stats a bit more.

Put DR on damage received:
- Implement DR on the amount of damage a mob can take at any given time, so that DPS scales down the more of it you have.
- Significantly reduce mob health across the board.

Explanation: Taking ten minutes to kill a boss is lame but so is one-shotting it. There is a ridiculous damage disparity between organized groups and pugs. The former SHOULD be incentivized to have good DPS but not to the extent they do currently. Reducing boss health pools makes ordinary pugging less tedious and organized speedrunning less faceroll, resulting in a more balanced gameplay experience.

More emphasis on boons, CC, and conditions:
- Rework condition-stacking issues and overall condition power. Not going to go into this as I’m sure Anet has plenty of ideas stewing about this.
- Rework Defiant to be a property on certain moves (i.e. cannot be interrupted) rather than a constant buff. Normal attacks without Defiant property can be CC’d normally. This includes blind.
- Rework the effectiveness of certain boons. For example, regen and weakness could stack in intensity.
- Give mobs more reliance on boons and conditions that aren’t straight-up boonspam. Adjust mob health and damage output to compensate, i.e. give a boss the ability to put protection on itself but also reduce its total health by 33%.

Explanation: Most fairly self-explanatory. Encouraging build diversity by making it so that straight DPS isn’t always the best option for every single fight. The regen/weakness change would also be a good way to allow players to deal with higher levels of unavoidable damage by giving more ways to mitigate it short of going full tank.

agro doesnt need to be transparent, being able to completely control agro will always lead to tank and spank senarios. I do think they need to totally rework defiant, it makes control worthless, and also makes lowers boss depth since they cant expect players to use control skills to get out of situations.

I am in favor of the play well style they have now, but they could make other stats have certain skills they improve. For example, say condition duration/dmg was effected by vitality. Toughness effected endure pain duration and dmg negated etc. problem is defensively a DPS player is very similar to a defensive player in terms of what they can actually do.
Id keep away from the type of pure stat driven defense play your talking about. the lack of a trinity is honestly something most of the players who still play like

Guanglai Kangyi.4318:

We have bosses that move around a lot with annoying gimmicks. No one does them because more coordination = bad.

We need to think smarter, not harder. The content needs to be made so it’s most easily done by a team with a good build, not with whatever team has a voicechat server. Stuff like TA Aetherblade, Mai Trin, etc. are dumb because they rely on everyone in your group knowing what to do. How many pugs know what to do in a dungeon? I consider it a success if no one falls off the bridge in COF1.

i disagree, battles shouldnt be only a simulation. It should be about how well you can execute. I agree that the stats are not giving enough differences in playstyle, but i dont think autowin with the right build is a good idea for this game

Derek.6017:

• Allow bosses to cleave.

Bosses already cleaves unless they use ranged attacks and most of them do not cleave by the defintion.

Exedore.6320:

One of the big problems that PvE has is damage is almost always fully avoidable. Dodge the big attack and learn to stay out of circles and you’re home free.

Having the highly telegraphed heavy damage attack is fine. It promotes saving dodges/blocks/etc for the right moment. But it needs to be complemented by enough moderate damage attacks such that no player can avoid them all. When everyone has to take damage over time that will eventually kill them, defensive stats matter. A balanced character won’t kill as a fast as a berserker, but has a higher uptime, which balances out the time to kill.

Mobs could also use more defenses against CC or burst like the protection boon on a cooldown or just plain dodging out of 100blades spam. While these wouldn’t stop full berserker groups from being better, it would reduce the gap between berserkers and balanced characters.

So what would be the point of going full glass cannon if balanced would do similar amount of dps because of better sustain achieved solely by his gear?

What needs to be done is to increase the difficulty (coordinated mobs in teams like in gw1, give them boons, more conditions, especially weakness) so that going with full zerker groups in dungeons should be reserved for coordinated teams, not random pugs.

Another culprit, reflections. You can trivialize a lot of encounters by putting a wall of feedback and just dps-ing everyone down.

There are several undeniable issues with PvE, like condition stacking or any form of control being worthless for most bossfights. Solving them, while highly desirable, would not dethrone DPS setups as the most efficient ones out there.

Playing the most efficient build is, however, far from mandatory. “Balanced” setups are not only capable of completing every content, but also require less coordination and usually provide an easier time doing it.
Limiting the DPS output (and thereby increasing the required time for downing a boss) while going from big avoidable hits to a faster and unavoidable steady pressure doesn’t cut off that efficiency, it just destroys high DPS setups. The first change is enough to render them quite useless; the second one just ensures they’re suicidal and unusable.

There’s a big difference between the current state, where some setups (those requiring a more active and coordinated approach for the most part) are favored in terms of speed (farming capabilities), which sounds quite fair to me tbh, to the proposed one, where everyone is pretty much forced to an even ground which also happens to be easier and more passive reliant.
The proposal doesn’t try to solve any lack of difficulty that could be allowing pure DPS specs to achieve higher rewards without experiencing enough risk. It just makes easier an already easy game while depriving more skilled/coordinated groups of any kind of additional reward.
I’ve no words to describe how terrible I find it. It’s such an extreme example of casual idiosyncrasy that I don’t even think developers could like it (and they are not exactly known for their hardcore love)

As an alternative solution, I would propose a rework of some AI behaviours (like LoS stacking) and moving from the classic bossfight approach to fights against multiple non defiant enemies where control and coordinated spikes might shine.
A higher amount of threats, however, would not only make full DPS setups less optimal, but also the game overall harder and more coordination requiring, so high chances are on organized teams (currently running DPS specs for the most part) being the most interested and the largest part of the casual community raging against it even if a zerker meta nerf is achieved.
Needless to say that I don’t expect this to ever happen :P

I am for improving PVE, but some of your suggestions are the wrong way to do it.

#1: Aggro management. Your suggestion is to take away all the risk of running GC, specially in a pug, and instead input an easily exploitable aggro mechanic in an attempt to force people to arbitrarily build differently. The way aggro is handled now is fine. The only thing that needs to change is to make defensive stats more viable, and things will fall in line.

#2: Diminishing returns on damage. This is a bad idea, since it forces a soft trinity not through engaging or intuitive design, but by arbitrary gates that make it so players objectively hinder other players just by being as good as they can be. Your suggestion is to make everyone suffer from the condition cap, essentially. This is also unnecessary: by making enemies more threatening to pure DPS setups, you immediately make pure DPS setups do less damage. GCs will have to spend more of their time disengaged from the fray and more time kissing pavement, meaning that their damage contributions will decrease overall.

I have my own list of suggestions I made in another thread. It’s a big post, so I’ll have to cut it in half.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

The annoying part is that mobs are made tanky just by their HP. It is rare for mobs to have high toughness, so there is no reason to diversify and add a condi user.

It is something Nemesis originally said, and I agree with him: PVE needs to be more like PVP. Now, when Anet hears this, they decided to put the down state on PVE enemies, which was the stupidest thing they could import. There needs to be several things ported over, and these things need to all center around one thing:

Enemies have to be built to kill you.

Its that simple. So many mobs in the game are currently build around the idea of giving them a gimmick they use once or twice without any real meaning. Mobs need to have much better AI, and more things they do with it:

#1: Primarily ranged mobs should try to kite players. Nothing to elaborate, but as players approach them, the ranged mobs should walk backward, or walk sideways away from players. In game, we currently have many pulls, leaps, cripples, chills, immobilize, and stealths, and yet we don’t have much of a reason to use them. Why? Enemies just run up to your face and fight you at point blank. There’s no one to chase and no one to run from.

#2: Mobs that grant boons should not spam boons. One of the biggest issues with fighting the dredge is that, if you remove or corrupt the boon they have, they immediately reapply it to everyone in range. This is true for most mobs that use boons on themselves: there is no reason to ever remove the boon because it just comes right back. Mobs, if having boons, should always have long duration + long cooldown, so removing them matters.

#3: Unshakeable and defiant need to be reworked. First, unshakeable needs to no longer reduce vulnerability and weakness, since champions are really the only place those conditions can be effective. Second, stacks of defiant need to dissolve on their own. Maybe one stack every 2 seconds or so. That way, you can have meaningful CC, even when only one player has CC skills.

#4: Melee mobs need to be more effective at chasing players, because currently players can just kite and shoot mobs without any additional help. Enemies need to do stuff like use swiftness, use more cripples/chills, have leaps, and also use stability. Not all at once, of course, but it would be helpful.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

#5: Stability needs to mean something. This is for players, mostly. Currently stability has limited access, really short durations, and long cooldowns, which makes stability nigh useless. Stability needs longer durations, since the amount of CC in the game is already disproportionate to the amount defense there is against it.

#6: Enemies need to attack more frequently, but do less damage with each individual attack. Currently, you can just loldodge nearly everything in the game because enemies have big slow attacks. If enemies had rapid but weaker attacks, then passive defenses would be more important, as well as regen and protection. Not every enemy has to be reworked, but having diversity in enemy attack patterns would be a boon.

#7: Enemies need to cleave and pierce more often. One of the reasons why stacking is so effective is because when an enemy attacks, it only hits one player in that group, which means players effectively have 5x the durability while in a stack. If enemies cleaved more often, then to stack you would still have to actively block and dodge.

#8: Enemies need to have their attack rate effected by chill.

#9: Enemies need less health, and they need to heal themselves. Nearly any enemy that is veteran rank or higher needs to have less health, but also have a self heal that is on a long cooldown. This will make timed CC more important, as well as make the healing reduction from poison important in PVE.

#10: Enemies need diversified defenses. Currently, they just have high HP and nothing else. There needs to be mobs who have high toughness, mobs who use strong protection and strong regen, making condition users more important for the team, as well as boon stripping.

After all this is put in, then PVE will be interesting. Nearly every class has something they can use to deal with all of these problems, and having players deal with these challenges will make for better players and more entertaining gameplay.

Additional ideas:

#11: Enemy groups have to be built to kill you. A random group with random abilities doesn’t do anything. An enemy group with more dedicated roles (such as a debuffer, a ranged attacker, and a stunner) that follow a more coordinated behavior sets means a world of difference between mindless enemies and a legitimate threat.

Enemies need diversity in their attacks. I’ve already seen good examples of this with Aetherblades, and in Orr. Enemies with endless channels, enemies that focus on debuffing and stunning, enemies that focus on buffing, stuff like that. It should be the standard, not the exception like it is now.

I do like the idea of having regen stack in intensity, though.

Some excellent suggestions in this thread.
I sincerely hope that Arenanet takes the time and reads through all this.

Fermi.2409:

Your idea to make more damage pull less agro just further pushes the DPS meta. The more damage you do, the less likely you are to get hit, meaning that you can get less defensive stats and do more damage. Also, whoever does the least damage, will end up having to take the damage. This is likely to be the worst player in the group, which isn’t really a great mechanic when everyone will be as DPS specced as possible to try to gain as little agro as possible.

^ this. It would lead to every group having 4 glass and 1 super tanky guard that deals no damage but just eats boss attacks/evades them so the rest of the group can burn it down. I agree that something needs to be done but I don’t think it is this!

JonPeters.5630:

We are trying to take steps to address some of the dominance of Berserker/DPS players. More info next week, I think.

Jon

If you want to go through with this, please do not make Berserker’s setups weaker but make the other setups stronger/more useful. Nerfing the zerker gear will only end in dumbed down and more boring gameplay. Buffing everything else will likely have similar effects but there might be ways to avoid them more so than when nerfing zerker.

I was hoping this was going to be about balancing PvE damage more reasonably throughout the classes. Sadness

JonPeters.5630:

We are trying to take steps to address some of the dominance of Berserker/DPS players. More info next week, I think.

Jon

What bothers me is not that zerkers do more damage, but the point that zerkers can ignore most of the mechanics due to killing bosses before they can use their skills.

If an enemy do a really big attack each 45 seconds but you kill the boss in 40 seconds… there is the reason of why I hate zerker. It’s cheating in a sort way of speaking.

The only legit way to make 100% zerk less desired is to make smarter AI; mobs with actual ability to react to player skills or mobs with more synergy and sensible movements.

Any stat adjustment to mobs or adding anti-dps skills is just being lazy.

Elrey.5472:

What bothers me is not that zerkers do more damage, but the point that zerkers can ignore most of the mechanics due to killing bosses before they can use their skills.

If an enemy do a really big attack each 45 seconds but you kill the boss in 40 seconds… there is the reason of why I hate zerker. It’s cheating in a sort way of speaking.

lol, please play something aside from crap mmos

Elrey.5472:

JonPeters.5630:

We are trying to take steps to address some of the dominance of Berserker/DPS players. More info next week, I think.

Jon

What bothers me is not that zerkers do more damage, but the point that zerkers can ignore most of the mechanics due to killing bosses before they can use their skills.

If an enemy do a really big attack each 45 seconds but you kill the boss in 40 seconds… there is the reason of why I hate zerker. It’s cheating in a sort way of speaking.

That’s clearly one of the biggest issues with zerker in PvE. It’s supposed to be a risk vs reward spec, but sometimes (too many times if the group is coordinated enough and stacks boon/vulnerability correctly) it can easily bypass that risk.
The easiest solution would be just about increasing armor/HP on enemies , but then the game could become extremely annoying for all those “play what you want” groups.

Elrey.5472:

JonPeters.5630:

We are trying to take steps to address some of the dominance of Berserker/DPS players. More info next week, I think.

Jon

What bothers me is not that zerkers do more damage, but the point that zerkers can ignore most of the mechanics due to killing bosses before they can use their skills.

If an enemy do a really big attack each 45 seconds but you kill the boss in 40 seconds… there is the reason of why I hate zerker. It’s cheating in a sort way of speaking.

Risking all passive defense to rely on skill to mitigate through dodging and blocks is cheating?

No, playing my 11k hp zerker guard does not even remotely feel like cheating.

But of course, ArenaNet are catering to people like you rather than allowing organised group to reap the benefits of fully communicating either through party or voice comms, running strong builds and optimal rotations, we must ALL BE MEDIOCRE.

I’ve spent like £100 on gems in this game, and once again, the dungeon community is ignored.

GG ANet, you win.

JonPeters.5630:

We are trying to take steps to address some of the dominance of Berserker/DPS players. More info next week, I think.

Jon

Let me give you five things to think about;
Rangers, WvW Sentry Guards, Dragons and Skelks.

To those not familiar with how ranger pets and the ranger works;
The Bear pets have 2 survival attacks.
1 = http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Bite_ Which grants regeneration. When the bear is taking moderate damage, it uses this skill
2 = http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Defy_Pain Similar to the Warrior Skill. When the bear takes heavy damage (backstab or eviscerate) it activates this skill

Ranger Devourer Pets;
1 = http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Devourer_Retreat When faced with strong incoming damage/danger, the devourer automatically evades backwards.

The ranger also has the ability to remove 4 conditions every 10 seconds, as a passive.

For those not familiar with WvW Sentry Guards:
Whenever sentry guards drop below 15~30% HP, they activate a healing skill that instantly heals them for 15% of their total health.

Skelks;
Those incredibly annoying lizards that goes invisible and attacks you. Similar shadowstepping functions and stealth could be given to other NPC’s.

Dragons:
The Dragon-type bosses have multiple defense functions. Among which is knockbacks (Tequatl Waves), heavy damage aura’s (Claw of Jormag), imprisonment (Shatterer), however they got one in common. Massive AOE fear shout.

Applying these any or all 7 functions that i mentioned, would make it increasingly harder to simply facetank bosses. Because you would get CC’d more often, and the bosses would simply because conditions, raw DPS and grouping up against monsters would become harder. It would also make it a lot harder to corner an NPC and then just DPS it down. As the NPC could potentially use a “NPC Elite skill” and shadowstep behind your group. Or simply evade in any direction.

The notion of the NPC’s getting harder and harder to kill, and bosses even more so, is slightly thrilling. If PvE could potentially as challenging as WvW, then i would play PvE a lot more.

What can Anet possibly do against the DPS meta? They can’t make clerics gear better for DPS than berserker’s… Since this game is built of hardly anything but kill mobs → kill boss → walk → kill mobs → kill boss → done, obviously people will choose the fastest way to do those things, wich is ofcourse to deal as much damage as possible. The only viable way to fight this meta is to make content too hard for teams of full berserkers to complete, or to redo every single instance in the game. What will this mean for the future?

- Content will be too hard for casual players.
- The holy trinity will return and become a new meta.
- People will start to complain about the holy trinity and content being too difficult.

Even if Anet will buff non-DPS classes to where they become useful, DPS will still be the main factor to speed things up. It just isn’t possible to create a world where every class with every setup will be able to do a smooth and quick dungeon run. Whatever changes will just determine what classes with what builds we will pick to be the new meta, and cause a new set of complaints from people who get kicked from parties for not running what they want them to run.

Seems like a few people get it that until the mechanics of the game move to bring in the holy trinity there is no reason to do anything other than DPS… Which is why all of my toons are setup for zerker. I don’t understand why you’d want to run anything other than DPS unless you are in 40+ factals… but even then…

JonPeters, you guys can try to change the meta but until fundamentals of the game are changed (like getting rid of condi caps and defiance) then DPS will always be king.

Vargamonth.2047:

That’s clearly one of the biggest issues with zerker in PvE. It’s supposed to be a risk vs reward spec, but sometimes (too many times if the group is coordinated enough and stacks boon/vulnerability correctly) it can easily bypass that risk.
The easiest solution would be just about increasing armor/HP on enemies , but then the game could become extremely annoying for all those “play what you want” groups.

So high skill and proper play shouldn’t be able to mitigate the risk? You want it to be all risk and no reward? Its not actually easy to coordinate boon stacking right out of the gate in terms of player experience to be able to burst down bosses faster than they can do something. All it takes is one person stupidly laying down the wrong field and that 25 might stack doesn’t happen and you get AoE weakness or blindness instead. If it was easy every time I Iay down a fire field when I pug the other players which I know have them would use the blast finishers as part of the the pre fight buff rotation. As it is, its pretty unusual for a pug to get more than 3-12 stacks going and good luck with perma fury as that pretty much never happens outside of organized groups.

Your suggestion to increase the HP actually just plays into the dps meta as the reason why it became so popular is some bosses already have too much HP. HotW takes FOREVER to burn down bosses with anything short of full zerker builds. A good zerker team is actually still good at the active damage mitigation skill use that any HP level you give the bosses will still be done better by them.

The real way to kill the zerk meta is give enemies a higher rate of attack (so can’t dodge all of it) but with lower damage per attack (so toughness mitigation matters more). This would reduce the power of blinds, limited number of blocks skills (like focus 5 on guards), and also increase the potential value of healing and a decent HP pool ( you could still burst the enemies down, but you need a larger buffer of HP ect).

A less draconian option would be to make conditions viable, as it is now the capping of conditions makes them utter garbage in a PVE setting. The zerk meta is a result of the only viable damage in a pve setting being direct damage. The only way to maximize direct damage is to go with full glass builds, with active dodging and over powered slow attacks that down face tanking toughness/vit builds in 1-3 hits reinforce this play style. Whats the point of tough/vit if you can’t face tank and dodging/active skill use is superior? Then in fractals with hard ticking damage and even trash that get stronger as you go up, the best defense is “dead mobs deal no damage”.

Hopefully the changes involve buffing conditions and not nerfing berserkers. Otherwise you should have changed the meta before you had players making all that berserker ascended armor.

JonPeters.5630:

We are trying to take steps to address some of the dominance of Berserker/DPS players. More info next week, I think.

Jon

This is how the slippery slope begins !

- it’s not the class or archetype that needs fixing !
- Defiance is what needs fixing to make control & support builds viable again !

but as always instead of addressing the wound, you wanna give pain killers an leave the wound unattended.

JonPeters.5630:

We are trying to take steps to address some of the dominance of Berserker/DPS players. More info next week, I think.

Jon

What happens with “play how you want” if we hypothetically need defensive passive stats to survive?

JonPeters.5630:

We are trying to take steps to address some of the dominance of Berserker/DPS players. More info next week, I think.

Jon

The dominance of Berserker/DPS is because of the WEAKNESS of other archetypes, not the strength of Berserker/DPS. So long as you and the rest of the balance team remain cognizant of that, whatever changes you make will be good. We do want condition builds to be good in PvE. We also would like you to completely get rid of Defiant stacks and use some other means of control reduction (give bosses stability when they use a skill or something, so that there is counterplay and we can remove the stability to CC them, for instance) so that control builds like Hammer Guardian/Warrior are useful in PvE. These sorts of changes will be welcome and wonderful for the PvE meta, and will also not hurt the direct damage players, which is good and helps keep things paced appropriately for speed clears.

The biggest change I think that can help condition damage dealers in PvE is to, in general, reduce the HP of enemy mobs and increase their Toughness. In this way, condition damage does greater percent damage over time, whereas if you tailor the enemy stats appropriately direct damage percent damage over time will be unchanged. This would be an optimal approach that helps all schools of thought.

But please, whatever you do, don’t nerf Berserker/DPS builds heavily! If you do that, you just slow down the game’s action, and you will alienate and damage countless players, and shoot yourself in the foot.

JonPeters.5630:

We are trying to take steps to address some of the dominance of Berserker/DPS players. More info next week, I think.

Jon

your game is on the rooftop and ready to fall.
i hope you wont make any unnecessary changes.

if you want to address the dominance of berserker/dps players, then give us more difficult content so only REALLY GOOD players and REALLY GOOD groups will be able to survive in berserker gear.

we are asking for difficult pve content for a very long time now.
dont nerf what i feel is fun to play, because you are not capable of delivering challenging and difficult content.

wildstar release will be really soon. if you want to safe your PvE community, which has been ignored for months, you have to do something already. and it has to be good.
and its not “nerfing berserker”.

please listen to us, just once.

i spent lots of gold in my zerker gear you CANT change this now!! I’m agree with the rest that is the other build that needs buff

Rising Dusk.2408:

JonPeters.5630:

We are trying to take steps to address some of the dominance of Berserker/DPS players. More info next week, I think.

Jon

But please, whatever you do, don’t nerf Berserker/DPS builds! If you do that, you just slow down the game’s action, and you will alienate and damage countless players, and shoot yourself in the foot.

FTFY

You’re welcome.

haviz.1340:

JonPeters.5630:

We are trying to take steps to address some of the dominance of Berserker/DPS players. More info next week, I think.

Jon

What happens with “play how you want” if we hypothetically need defensive passive stats to survive?

Then again sir, you cannot always get it your way. Balancing a game is a matter of compromising, a lot of compromising.
However, i think while we cannot directly change the DPS meta, we can change how the AI responds to said meta. Previously i suggested giving more evades, automatic heal upon hitting XX% HP, invulnerability, life stealing attacks.
What we need is not alter the player. It is to alter how the NPC’s work.

Theoretically, if we say the AI responds in 4 ways to an series of attacks. Each attack trigger one or more responses. The harder you hit, the more often the NPC heals or CC you. In the end, the “way you want to play” decides the “way the NPC tries to counter you”. If you spam Stun/daze. The NPC will use stunbreakers and stability. If you spam conditions, the NPC will try to cleanse, if you try to hit and run, the NPC will immobilize and charge you. If you try to facetank and DPS the NPC down, the NPC will evade and use CC’s or knockbacks.

NPC’s all get one or more ability to counter certain moves or all moves.
Bosses get a random set of abilities (RNG 3-4 different AI settings for bosses. making each encounter different and challenging). So say you fight Claw of Jormag. Normally it applies the frost aura, and uses standard fear waves and ice crystal thingies. Now perhaps, this time, it uses AOE chill splash attacks. It randomly triggers retaliation (NPC version, stronger then normal), reflects ranged attacks, swings around and smashes people with it’s tail.
Small changes in terms of coding. Massive effect ingame. The content will be much harder. And Events which at this point is 100% transparent after replaying it thousands of times, is now random, dynamic and fun or frustrating (depends on what you were hoping to fight :P)

If they changed, atleast bosses, to work this way. Different professions would shine in one or many areas. It would force people to take builds into account. If you cannot forsee if the enemy will be glassy and aggressive or passive and defensive, you cannot use one build.

At first, if anything, test this system out on a few open world bosses. They are the most encountered, and thus the ones you can get the broadest spectrum of feedback from

Yeah, if the balance team remove the viability of zerker builds that will be the final straw for many players, as they in many cases just got done grinding out their full ascended set. Yeah, its not as much as a grind as in other games, but its still a lot of hours of play for ugly armors (requiring a transmutation) and time gated gear.

Make conditions viable, so my necro can be useful other than a mule to carry extra bloodstone. Make it so confusion matters for my mesmer, actually make an interrupt build viable while you are at it.

Make it so artillery builds (ranged dps) can actually be useful. As it is ranged dps misses out on team boons AND does less damage. Considering that one class is supposed to be an archer but effective players use melee weapons exclusively, another class doesn’t actually have real melee weapons but summons them for some of the highest dps in the game, and lastly one class can’t ever really melee (only guns) and thus is nearly useless… Yeah, give some love to ranged players. Sure you will have to balance encounters to take that into consideration, but hopefully it won’t be a punish the whole team like spider queen does when somebody dares to range (spits poison if the entire team isn’t in melee).

The real problem with the “zerk stack in corners” meta is melee is the only good choice, and the AI falls for it.

as i said, its not about berserker being too good.
its about that arenanet fails to deliver fun, challenging and difficult pve content.
thats why every player without skill and lots of experience can run around in berserker gear.

arenanet needs to wake up.

and another step in the right direction would be to fix all the exploits in dungeons.

/agreed

make us feel useful again when running a dungeon.

dutchiez.7502:

If you want to go through with this, please do not make Berserker’s setups weaker but make the other setups stronger/more useful. Nerfing the zerker gear will only end in dumbed down and more boring gameplay. Buffing everything else will likely have similar effects but there might be ways to avoid them more so than when nerfing zerker.

As PvE feels way too easy currently, I don’t see how a buff is the way to go, sorry. We (the player chars) need to be weaker, not stronger. On pretty screwy setups I tried for sheer curiosity, PvE even felt… balanced. Challenging at times. :O