Guild Wars 2

Have you ever stopped and considered how frequently you are able to dodge in this game? Even without Vigor the rate at which your endurance regenerates is very fast. Now, try to imagine the effect that reducing this recharge rate would have on the game. Perhaps dodges would become something you save for a particularly dangerous skill, and not something you just use willy-nilly.

In fact, I feel the whole game in general could do with being a slightly slower paced. GW1 had such good PvP because it had a well-balanced pace. Interrupts were VERY important to the game, because the best skills had longer cast times and getting that skill interrupted was a huge setback. In GW2 interrupts are still around but are much less important because skills cast so quickly. Go look at GW1 wiki and pick a class like Mesmer or ele and look at the skills cast times compared to GW2. In GW1 most caster skills were just slightly slower than GW2, being around 1 second on average but with some of the best skills being up to 3 seconds. Now a split second may not seem like much but as someone who play a lot of GW1 I can say that this game’s pace feels much quicker, and I don’t think that’s a good thing.

I’d imagine this faster pace also makes shoutcasting much more difficult considering someone can be dropped in a few short seconds. Games like LoL and SC2 are good Esports because you can enjoy watching them without a lot of knowledge about the game because it’s very clear what is happening on screen. Now, the basic concept of conquest is easy enough to understand, but because most fights devolve into who can spam the most conditions on point while tons of particle effects obscure the battle it’s no wonder it hasn’t caught on.

A slower pace that results from less frequent dodges and re-emphasizing interrupts by having longer cast times on spells would offer the opportunity for clutch plays and possibly lessen the dominance of casters and ranged fighters.

I’m all for toning down endurance’s regeneration AND vigor’s boost, across all formats of this game, for serious reasons in my opinion.

1. The dominance of dodging and vigor restrict the usefulness of party-support builds, I think, because it offers to each build way too much self-sufficiency, especially to glass cannons, who should need outside support the most to survive.

2. Dodge spamming creates several situations where hitting with your skills is clunky rather than strategical. When the battlefield is riddled with ballet dancers dodging or evading (through skills) a good portion of the time, you’ll see your skills hitting a lot less often, but not always exactly due to well-timed defenses, but due to pure chaos or accident. Most builds evade so often, that there are times where you’re literally watching them evading your stuff half the time even when they’re not targetting or even when they’re not aware of you. This is not easy to predict, neither, because of how frequent it is. Just watch a crowded capture point, and see how everyone is dodging all around the place as if they were flies. The strategical value of punishing players for their position is not as important as it could be, because they’re almost never in the same place, even when crippled or chilled, as they can simply dodge away the next ground aoe skill. This also makes control builds, interrupt builds and others unreliable, because the chances of your opponent evading your next skill and keep evading stuff after that are too high.

3. As another consequence, the best way to deal with this is with… more spam. When you see necromancers and engineers spamming many aoe attacks in a very short amount of time, and the only real counter is total immunity/ dodging, or death, then you know the game has degenerated a bit to spam attacks/ conditions/ aoes versus spam dodges/ evades. Of course, if dodging and evading were ever to get nerfed, several meta builds would have to follow.

3. Dodging is being used to get back to points faster with no meaningful consequences.

4. Another serious problem, is related more to the nature of the fast-paced combat and how it interacts with the way Anet makes chances to their skills and traits. Currently, it’s very clear that the condition and boon mechanic is the mechanic that gives Anet the most “design space” to create creative skills and traits, or improve skills and traits in more creative ways. This creates the problem that almost everything you do applies several boons or several conditions, making them very spammy. There’s way too few situations where you’re like “I have weakness, must hold my burst and survive in the meantime”, and too many situations where you’re like “I have weakness, poison, burn, torment, fear, blind, vulnerability, bleeding, everything – I must cleanse them all, dodge them next time, or die!” This also has another negative consequence: it leads to condition cleansing becoming too spammy as well. It already was before the necro’s buffs, so toning down the necro will not fix this.

In GW1, the situation with hexes, enchantments and skills with complex abstract rules (the later which Anet is trying to prevent in GW2, designing instead simpler skills with more visual expression and more synergy with the terrain, the movement and “anything that can be watched and understood by stream viewers”) was a bit better because GW1 had several extra restrictions to control the pace: higher emphasis on interrupts, no casting while moving, or the energy system. I’m not saying GW2 should have those, but it definitely should have something to better control its own pace. Toning down the opportunies to evade attacks will open space for some slower builds, and put higher emphasis on control and party support, which should help the combat as a whole.

Here’s my suggestions for Anet to improve the pace of this game:
1) Tone down endurance regeneration slightly (somewhere to 80% of what it is now).
2) Cut down vigor’s effectiveness OR duration to half. Vigor-on-critical traits are also too strong AND spammy at the moment.
3) Tone down Sigil of Energy’s number to something like 30% from the current 50%.
4) Allow interrupt builds to interrupt dodging? In successfully doing so, affected target would also get crippled. That’s an example for a possible trait or skill.
5) Consider balancing several other conditions and boons around shorter durations too (condition damage and maybe might-stacking being the exception), so they require better timing and do not clutter so much the screen with icons.
—> 5.1) Consider balancing conditions/ boons around so that they cancel their opposite effects. For example, adding 5s of vulnerability on a target with 5s of protection would make each one cancel each other. I’ve seen some games doing this, and it’s great to not clutter the screen too much with icons, but it would require some big changes to the way these effects work (for example, vulnerability would have to be the reversed version of protection, so they would have to stack the same way, and with the same numbers).
—> 5.2) Consider taking the endurance punishment out of weakness, and make it its own condition, or due to the many problems this would create in pve, put it in cripple or chill instead. Maybe even vulnerability. Weakness is already strong as it is.
6) Find, create or expand different mechanics so that there’s not an over-reliance on adding (generic stat boosts,) conditions or boons to new traits or even to new skills. Something like weather effects, and skills and traits that affect them. New ground/ position/ map driven mechanics, and skills and traits that affect them. Etc. More mechanics would indirectly mean less spamming of conditions and boons, and thus less spamming of dodges and cleansings.
7) Add more control or party support traits. For example, add a water trait for the elementalists that reads “the radius of your healing spells is increased to X, and other allies besides you affected by those spells get healed X% more”. Then, put it in master tier alongside the cantrip’s vigor/ regen trait, forcing bunker elementalits to choose between more self-survival, or more party survival at the cost of their own survival. These kind of traits would add more depth to the combat as a whole, more depth to building, more depth to teamplay in general, and remove the heavy emphasis on “add even more conditions/ boons!” that GW2’s combat (especially trait balance) is riddle with.

BurrTheKing.8571:

In fact, I feel the whole game in general could do with being a slightly slower paced.

MMOs are braindead already.

Gw2 dumbed it down even more to 10 skills with kittenedly long cds (compared to WoW)

If the game gets any more boring and slow than it already is i wont be able to do enough drugs to bear with it.

RaynStargaze.6510:

BurrTheKing.8571:

In fact, I feel the whole game in general could do with being a slightly slower paced.

MMOs are braindead already.

Gw2 dumbed it down even more to 10 skills with kittenedly long cds (compared to WoW)

If the game gets any more boring and slow than it already is i wont be able to do enough drugs to bear with it.

Slowing down the pace of GW2’s combat slightly would actually contribute to making it deeper and more strategical, not the opposite, IMO. My post explains it.

DiogoSilva.7089:

RaynStargaze.6510:

BurrTheKing.8571:

In fact, I feel the whole game in general could do with being a slightly slower paced.

MMOs are braindead already.

Gw2 dumbed it down even more to 10 skills with kittenedly long cds (compared to WoW)

If the game gets any more boring and slow than it already is i wont be able to do enough drugs to bear with it.

Slowing down the pace of GW2’s combat slightly would actually contribute to making it deeper and more strategical, not the opposite, IMO. My post explains it.

i did now – kittening waste of time

I think the endurance regen is ok atm but Vigor is pretty dam powerful, thank god i play a necro with weakness.

Also increasing cast times may cause massive frustration, look how many CCs there are in the game, you are literally CCd most of the time, how are we meant to get off longer cast times. It may be ok for Mr.Guardian but not all classes have easy access to stability. Not to mention after that all instant attacks will become overpowering.

I know how you feel though and i do agree that the game is really clunky and spammy in PvP, it’s fun in PvE but PvP doesn’t allow for much skillful play, but there’s a lot of reasons why that is and it’s not just tied to dodging.

I still like GW2s PvP in the way that we can’t use addons and aren’t given data of how many Hit Points enemies have, what they’re casting, what their cooldowns are and all that bullkitten, it’s all very unpredictable and exciting gameplay.

This is GW2 now, it’s an Action MMO style game, so A LOT would have to be done to slow down the pace of the game in a ‘good’ way, and then this would change PvE as well unless you make the changes ‘PvP only’ which wouldn’t make sense because then sPvP would be entirely different from the main game. Point is, it’s the way the games made that determines the pace.

It’s nice to see others who are willing to write lengthy, thought out replies. Half the time it’s “l2p nub.”

I think giving certain skills a “unevadable” effect could be interesting, considering how srong not only dodges are but evades as well. Warrior’s hammer or Ranger’s longbow (Hunters shot given the ability to interrupt spells) being made into interrupt weapons could bring back some of the good mechanics from GW1. War’s hammer would be more useful if dodging it wasn’t so easy.

thought experiment:
how would the game play in pvp if dodge was removed?
would it be better or worse?

I like the idea of “Unevadable” effects, maybe even given to certain CCs or Traits that apply it to some skills. There’s ‘unblockable’, yet there’s more evading than dodging in the game.

Unavoidable attacks are also an interesting possibility, but it won’t fix all the issues with evade spamming, so at the very least, vigor and sigil of energy would still need to be toned down.

This is GW2 now, it’s an Action MMO style game, so A LOT would have to be done to slow down the pace of the game in a ‘good’ way, and then this would change PvE as well unless you make the changes ‘PvP only’ which wouldn’t make sense because then sPvP would be entirely different from the main game.

PvE would be positively affected by this. Take a look at how PvE is dominated by Berserker DPS Warriors who can self-sustain themselves enough to make control and party support mean little. Look at how the (very few) challenging dynamic events are more about players playing paralel to each other than alongside with each other. Too much self-defense, too little teamplay, outside of rezzing. By toning down evades a bit, and putting more emphasis on party support and control, it would benefit teamplay across all game modes in this game. Sure, this would not fix everything about pvp’s combat (the overreliance on conditions/ boons too, among other issues), nor everything about pve’s combat (the simplistic AI which allows dps builds to be king, the defiance boss mechanic that completely shuts down control builds, the condition cap in outside world), but toning down the spammy nature of self-reliance would certainly benefit all modes of the game.

thought experiment:
how would the game play in pvp if dodge was removed?
would it be better or worse?

If it was entirely removed, I think it would break the game in many unexpected ways, because GW2 was entirely designed around this. But toned down, I think it would open up a lot of depth.

Vigor allows 1 dodge per 4 sec.Without vigor you have only 1 dodge per 8 sec after the initial 2 and you want to tone those down? Weakness negates vigor totally.
Theres a lot of burst in this game and now a lot of condi burst too.Why cut off defence across all classes when offence in all forms is so strong?How is this gonna slow the pace of the game where people would fall like flie in teamfights to the second cc coming in their face..
There are no healers in this game! Toning down dodge will NOT slower the pace ,it will actually increase it and also remove skill.Tone down evade skills instead

You also have plenty of stun breakers, boons, conditions and other active defenses to deal with burst. EDIT And there exists party support in this game – it’s part of the damage/ control/ support trinity set up by Anet. It’s just a bit under developed. An Elementalist can heal an ally with their self-healing spells, like Water Trident, Cleansing Wave, the traited Water Attunement or with Evasive Arcana. It’s a bit clunky due to the combination of low radius (especially water trident) and the possibility of your ally moving away from it unless coordenated, but it’s something that can be expanded in the future, especially in future trait revamps, instead of filling new traits with more conditions or more boons.

About condition burst, that’s just broken and will need to be fixed as well. The combat shouldn’t be balanced around broken setups. :P

DiogoSilva.7089:

You also have plenty of stun breakers, boons, conditions and other active defenses to deal with burst.

About condition burst, that’s just broken and will need to be fixed as well. The combat shouldn’t be balanced around broken setups. :P

Until burst and condition damage is being fixed i think im gonna keep my dodges.
Besides no boon is gonna save you and active defence skills have massive cooldowns.
My point still stands..this game needs slower pace not faster ending fights

Protection is pretty good at weakening your opponent’s burst, and depending on the context, Stability and Aegis can be as well. Besides, burst has been getting toned down regurlarly with the quickness nerf among others, so at the current state, I don’t think the risk at breaking the game is high. What can truly break is the condi burst and the aoe spam, imo.

It’s just the way the game is, if you lower evades then burst classes will have a much smaller counter, just think of a thief lunging at you with heartseeker below 50%, and your next evade is miles away. Dodging is a way for ALL classes to avoid burst, not just the ones that have block or multiple burst healing skills or stealth or watever.

I am not sure if nerfing Vigor will increase the TTK in teamfights or if they will more organized , but i am up to nerfing in its place all condtions damage by 70% and increase dramaticaly their duration , so they more a <<more steady dps>> tool .

Plus buffing weakness (by removing the RNG) and buffing each condition removal (they can cleanse 1-2 condtions AND cleanse weakness , in the same time)

Tobbygnome.6793:

It’s just the way the game is, if you lower evades then burst classes will have a much smaller counter, just think of a thief lunging at you with heartseeker below 50%, and your next evade is miles away. Dodging is a way for ALL classes to avoid burst, not just the ones that have block or multiple burst healing skills or stealth or watever.

I think OP means we should lower everything.

Less 1-hit kills, less evade spam, slower pace with more complex mechanics. Or at least reduce AI swarming with some classes.

And effects should be easy to read and not so invasive at the same time.

redslion.9675:

Tobbygnome.6793:

It’s just the way the game is, if you lower evades then burst classes will have a much smaller counter, just think of a thief lunging at you with heartseeker below 50%, and your next evade is miles away. Dodging is a way for ALL classes to avoid burst, not just the ones that have block or multiple burst healing skills or stealth or watever.

I think OP means we should lower everything.

Less 1-hit kills, less evade spam, slower pace with more complex mechanics. Or at least reduce AI swarming with some classes.

And effects should be easy to read and not so invasive at the same time.

Ye but that is asking a lot from Arena Net, it would take massive balancing to slow down every mechanic to the point where its not a spamfest.

DiogoSilva.7089:

Protection is pretty good at weakening your opponent’s burst, and depending on the context, Stability and Aegis can be as well. Besides, burst has been getting toned down regurlarly with the quickness nerf among others, so at the current state, I don’t think the risk at breaking the game is high. What can truly break is the condi burst and the aoe spam, imo.

The funny thing is that i made a post about necro/engi and when i asked how i can 1vs1 necro effectively the responce was ..dodge all his marks.Since marks have same casting animation you need to try to dodge as much as you can when you see him on staff casting those kittens..Imagine if i couldnt dodge..BAM he fear chains me and im dead or i earthquake +flash him +Arcanes +updraft combo and he is dead .
Point is there are a lot of things that need to change in this game for something like that.And imho vigor and normal endurance regen is fine.Cloth classes need it if they gonna play something else than boon/heal spam.Its only some builds on some classes and traits that have nothing to do with vigor

Change evaded to 33% chance of taking glancing blow.
Drastically reduce vigor.
Reassign 50% more vigor on critical hit taken on 10 second cool down.
Up the cool down of sigils that give 50% vigor on swap.
Remove “Does more damage on low vigor.” Skills.

Watch Thief troll spec video that is in the forums currently. One thief dueling 2 warriors with shortbow and owning both due to massive and persisent evade mechanics. The first comment on the video is a engineer laughing at him for only taking on 2 warriors. The engi also left a video of them self solo downing 3 players on a node via spamming large AoE/grenades and constant evade spamming for invinci frames.

Evade is fine. Everyone has it so its not a balancing issue either.

CntrlAltDefeat.1465:

Change evaded to 33% chance of taking glancing blow.
Drastically reduce vigor.
Reassign 50% more vigor on critical hit taken on 10 second cool down.
Up the cool down of sigils that give 50% vigor on swap.
Remove “Does more damage on low vigor.” Skills.

Watch Thief troll spec video that is in the forums currently. One thief dueling 2 warriors with shortbow and owning both due to massive and persisent evade mechanics. The first comment on the video is a engineer laughing at him for only taking on 2 warriors. The engi also left a video of them self solo downing 3 players on a node via spamming large AoE/grenades and constant evade spamming for invinci frames.

You’ve gone drunk on power.

This explains my point enitrely. Look particularly at the chat panel during the duel.

google

I’m not drunk on anything…but the video shows evasion builds can get high on the taste of their own…i’ll let you insert the last word.

I particularly like the taunt at the start, “Both of you try and get me. 2 vs 1 in under a minute.” Knowing full well it is not going to be possible. So tell me again with a serious face are watching that vid that evade is currently fine..seriously.

CntrlAltDefeat.1465:

I’m not drunk on anything…but the video shows evasion builds can get high on the taste of their own…i’ll let you insert the last word.

I particularly like the taunt at the start, “Both of you try and get me. 2 vs 1 in under a minute.” Knowing full well it is not going to be possible. So tell me again with a serious face are watching that vid that evade is currently fine..seriously.

Evade is fine. Replenishing dodges becomes an issue multiple people have spoken out on. Im guessing this is the video of the SB thief spamming distracting shot and they can’t finish the last 10% of his hp when he runs off point to maintain himself.
Turning evades into glancing hits? Yeah laughed out loud.

He does’t run to replenish..he defeats them both. watch until end of video. If you feel this is not a good example head to youtube and search gw2 high evasion builds. You can choose any number of builds designed around this very mechanic. They are easy vids to find, most of them have the word “Troll” in them.

CntrlAltDefeat.1465:

This explains my point enitrely. Look particularly at the chat panel during the duel.

google

A necromancer or Mesmer would destroy this thief lol

Glancing blow is a sufficient compromise.

If you don’t think so then ask yourself this question. If playing guardian, which would you prefer? That save yourself shout grants it’s current 4 seconds protection and 6.25 regen…or 4 seconds prema evade and 6.25 seconds 100% vigor regen. Whic one of these 2 would you rather have?..naturally we’d have to change the shout name from save yourself to ‘Get out of jail free.’

Zelulose.8695:

CntrlAltDefeat.1465:

This explains my point enitrely. Look particularly at the chat panel during the duel.

google

A necromancer or Mesmer would destroy this thief lol

I can place another vid if you like where it is him against a ranged guardian, necromancer and warrior. Marks can be made unblockable..but they can still be evaded. Necromancer didn’t fair any better. Just watch this vid and watch the related video’s categorized with it.

CntrlAltDefeat.1465:

He does’t run to replenish..he defeats them both. watch until end of video. If you feel this is not a good example head to youtube and search gw2 high evasion builds. You can choose any number of builds designed around this very mechanic. They are easy vids to find, most of them have the word “Troll” in them.

Im pretty sure of the vid you’re talking about. He literally leaves the point maybe 3 4 times if not more and then comes back and spams more distracting shots. Had he simply stayed on the point they would’ve killed him. Which is beside the point, sigil of energy is allowing a lot of extra staying power relative to every other defensive sigil.

I can understand many people wanting to defend vigor and dodging. These people are probably people who use it to evade heavy hits and better position themselves in skirmishes. The point being, evade can be entirely over spec’ed and traited.

I have a build myself that is on an unlikely profession that when when played with blocks, high vigor regen and bonus vigor when hit with a crit and sigils on swaps can walk onto a node with near impunity and neutralise it against 3 others comfortably. The build can’t down a player easily, but it can neutralise and potentially take nodes with ease. Some people would fairly argue that this represents more a success than failure because I’ve designed for one single purpose and that singular purpose is efficient at what it does. They may even call this a build or bunker. However it doesn’t address that despite skillful play by opponents I can ignore everything around me and just focus on blocking, evading and staying inside the node and everything else around me is irrelevant. I am not having to engage or pay attention to anything else outside my pretty walled garden of just being mindful of my vigor, looking for when I’ve taken a crit and watching a yellow bar and evade spamming until the node is neutral or taken. I can then just evade my way to another one and rinse-repeat. What makes it more difficult for opponents to easily recognize is what skills I am using, how I’ve spec’ed and traited and that I am inviting them to crit hit me, not actually trying to defend myself thoughtfully.

ensoriki.5789:

CntrlAltDefeat.1465:

I’m not drunk on anything…but the video shows evasion builds can get high on the taste of their own…i’ll let you insert the last word.

I particularly like the taunt at the start, “Both of you try and get me. 2 vs 1 in under a minute.” Knowing full well it is not going to be possible. So tell me again with a serious face are watching that vid that evade is currently fine..seriously.

Evade is fine. Replenishing dodges becomes an issue multiple people have spoken out on. Im guessing this is the video of the SB thief spamming distracting shot and they can’t finish the last 10% of his hp when he runs off point to maintain himself.
Turning evades into glancing hits? Yeah laughed out loud.

Not turning evades into glancing blows. A 33% chance when you evade, you may take a glancing blow instead. Please thoroughly before dismissing entirely.

Skills with evasion: 50% chance to evade completely, 50% chance to evade partially (= glancing bows). Something like this is not a bad idea. Yes, it would add more RNG to the game, but I think it’s more fair for spammable evade skills to being a bit unreliable on evasion, than being the equivalent of free dodges every few seconds.