Guild Wars 2

Im really curious. And to make this clear this thread is NOT meant to discuss about how bland MM and minions are in GW2 compared to GW1, but whats the reasoning/design philosophy about such drastic changes to minion master gameplay between the 2 games. I always seen NEcromancer as THE flagship class of GW universe with an iconic playstyle.
Im mainly curious: was the system with health degeneration on multiple strong temporary pets too intimidating for players too manage in your opinion? It seems like giving necromancer a few permanent but weak pets a little like dumbing it down for lack of better word to make the class more accessible? It certainly played like an advanced class before. It would be very interesting to know the motivation and reasoning behind those design decisions if its not too much trouble.

Thanks.

P.S: If anyone else wants to follow up with other things they would like to know from “behind the scenes” of minion master necromancer feel free to add things and hopefully the devs can give us some insight

I too would love to know their reason for “streamlining” the necromancer beyond recognition .. -.-

Flat out wouldn’t work in 60% of the content. Of the things that changed from GW1 to 2 for the necromancer, the MM changes are one of the rare good ones.

Well the change from instance to open world probably had to do with the limited minion amount for one.

Still hoping for a dev answer on this one

Skaramush.3480:

It seems like giving necromancer a few permanent but weak pets a little like dumbing it down for lack of better word to make the class more accessible?

Skaramush.3480:

dumbing it down

Ding ding ding!

You’ve stumbled on the #1 most discussed design philosophy around the “round table” discussions in every developer board meeting since 2004!

“Let’s dumb it down to appeal to more people”.

There hasn’t been a sequal in the last 10 years that hasn’t “dumbed it down” to “appeal to a broader audience”.

Gaming has been on this downward slope for years… It devastates me sometimes to think that my favorite hobby is going the same route as all other media based entertainment.

Why have a fewer dedicated fans that stuck it out and really learned how to play a difficult/rewarding game when we can just dumb it down so that every moron and man-baby can have a blast playing it? Dumber people in general are pleased with simpler mechanics and they STILL feel like they’re showing “skill” even if the game’s overall learning curve is practically non-existent. Thus, every developer seems to be taking this stance.

Yes, I know my tone is a little biased, but please look objectively at every game that has come out in the last 10 years. Very few games and even fewer developers actually make difficult games. Instead the model is “dumb it down so that everyone and his mom will play it, then nickel and dime the larger player base with downloadable content.”

Look at Diablo 3 compared to Diablo 2. Every modern warfare game to come out one after the other. This game’s mechanics follow the same path. “Conditions” are VERY streamlined (i.e. if they need an ability to do damage over time, they just slap bleed on it); in fact all the class mechanics are more streamlined than their GW1 brothers. They even removed cross-classing (which I’ll admit may have been a design choice that aimed at something other than simply streamlining).

Skaramush.3480:

Im mainly curious: was the system with health degeneration on multiple strong temporary pets too intimidating for players too manage in your opinion? It seems like giving necromancer a few permanent but weak pets a little like dumbing it down for lack of better word to make the class more accessible? It certainly played like an advanced class before.

I think it has to do with how the utility skill system works in this game.

In GW, you got 8 skills period. Caster weapons were mostly the same unless you needed one to trigger specific skills (cold for spinal shivers, for example), but other than that, they could be upgraded to be the same unless you needed a named weapon with unique stats. So those 8 skills made up the entirety of your capability, whether you wanted to spam minions or whatever else. You could make a flat character that specialized in one skill type, or you could mix and match to meet different needs.

In GW2, your weapon actually lends its own skills. There really can’t be any builds centered around one mechanic, because all jobs have certain weapon skills, certain utility skills, and certain unique mechanics. I think in GW2, the goal is to choose which skill/trait sets you want in a way that synergizes well. Not that you couldn’t do that in GW, but GW2 prevents players from putting together gimmicky skill bars. (and some things like minion factory were definitely gimmicky in GW)

There’s also the logistics to consider. In GW every out of town map was instanced, so you could have 30+ minions (before they added the soft cap) with no problems. If we tried that in GW2 – with its massive participation in several maps – the number of AI scripts running would grow many times over.

To the “advanced class” comment, Necro most certainly is. If it seems overly simple to you, i’d say it’s because you’re trying to focus entirely on minions while ignoring some of the other things we can do while simultaneously managing our pets.

GW1 minion master wasn’t complicated, it was tedious. I mained a necro in GW and loved minion mastering, but now I simply cannot play him anymore.
-minions degenerating and in large numbers meant you needed to bring blood of the master in order to heal them, which was a huge toll on the healer of your group.
-minions constantly degenerating and dieing mean’t you needed to stop after a fight and create a bunch of minions, typically leading to your party leaving you behind. You would end up spending more time lagging behind than helping.
-If you were a minion master you damage relied solely on your party successfully setting you up with many bodies, putting them at a man down at the beginning.
-If a zone didn’t have a large amount of bodies, you were forced to swap to another spec to be useful.
-You could not MM in any high end dungeon due to the massive amount of AOEs flying around and enemy damage. Not only that, but they pulled aggro when it would cause your party to wipe.

In GW2 I’ve found minion mastering to be so much more enjoyable. There isn’t any “skill” involved with minion mastering in GW1 outside of death nova. While here in GW2 there are:
-minion actives to utilize
-minion positioning to take into account for the actives
-choosing the proper targets for your minions
-proper use of death shroud (transfusion is wonderful for minions)
-your own positioning
-your own spells
-swapping between weapon sets
-ect

minion mastering in GW1 was as follows:
-stand next to dead body and push [minion summon skill]
-activate minion healing skill when they’re all low on health
-maintain they’re buffs
-don’t stand in stupid spots

Minion master is overall MUCH more engaging and challenging than it ever was in GW1. Maintaining the minion army does not count as skillful in GW1 as none of it required timing except for MAYBE the minion heal. Even then you ended up needing to spam the heal keeping them alive.

The fact that curses/hexes are gone just completely ruins necro, doing simple damage over time doesn’t cut it since every single class can do it, and fear really isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, it’s a binary mechanic that doesn’t require a whole lot of thought.

Blood magic is also terribly weak now. What’s the point of healing for 50 health points a hit when you lose hundreds of health points just trying to get in range of you target.

The Minion Master in GW1 starts off as pretty useless.
Then as stuff dies you get corpses for more and more minions.

Once you have a huge army you are very powerful but need to move fast from corpse to corpse.
It’s a cool system and works well in GW1 but it just wouldn’t fit in GW2.

Imagine if Necros in GW2 started off as useless at the start of the map and then after raising some corpses they’d start facerolling through everything…
That’s not really balanced.
It’s just being underpowered in one way and overpowered in the other.

I think that Life Force basically replaced this.
If you play with no Life Force you are at a disadvantage, if you start at full Life Force then things are much better.

It’s just not as drastic as GW1 MM scaling.

Also it’d just raise issues like 10 MMs running around with 20 minions each in WvW…
Imagine the lag 200 minions would cause!

Not to mention corpse stealing, and how corpses despawn extremely fast in GW2 for performance reasons.