Guild Wars 2

TL;DR: if this game had fewer damage-dealing skills, and more skills that don’t deal damage directly but can improve your positioning and tactical openings in the game, this game would be better off in terms of the interest in the game, playstyles, and the enjoyment coming from this game.

I just watched Helseth’s latest rant, and although I disagreed with him on a variety of issues, I did feel inspired to make this post. So, let me list some skills here:

Elementalist:
- Staff: Healing Rain, Frozen Ground, Static Field, Magnetic Aura, Unsteady Ground
- Dagger: Magnetic Grasp/Leap
- Focus: Flamewall, Flame Aura, Swirling Winds, Gale, Magnetic Wave, Obsidian Flesh

Engineer:
- Rifle: Net Shot
- Pistol: Glue Shot
- Shield: Magnetic Shield
- Kits: Napalm, Smoke Vent, Acid Bomb

Guardian:
-Staff: Line of Warding
-Hammer: Ring of Warding, Zealot’s Embrace
-Shield: Shield of Absorption
-Focus: Shield of Wrath

Mesmer:
-OH Sword: Illusionary Riposte
-Focus (assuming you have VIII in Inspiration): Temporal Curtain
-Shatters: Distortion, Diversion

Necromancer:
-Dagger: Dark Pact

Ranger:
-Greatsword: Counterattack
-OH Axe: Whirling Defense

Thief:
-Shortbow: Choking Gas, Infiltrator’s Arrow
-Pistol OH: Headshot, Black Powder
-Dagger OH: Dancing Dagger
-Sword: Shadow Return

Warrior:
-Mace: Counterblow
-Sword OH: Riposte
-Warhorn: Charge

These all are skills that, while looking through the build calculator, I thought either are or could be skills that are only used strategically or tactically for teams, with goals that can be related towards the objective of capping points rather than simply endless slaughter.

The two that I bolded were Infiltrator’s Arrow and Line of Warding (I do play a thief, so I might be slightly biased towards thief skills, or know more about them than some of the skills that I listed, but nonetheless that should not affect the point I’m about to make). Now, Infiltrator’s Arrow is an incredibly interesting skill as a thief; it’s used for mobility around the map outside of battle. Inside of battle, however, it plays a different purpose. For example, during a battle in the Graveyard over in LotF, I might use the skill to get a better position overlooking the battle, and help my allies thusly, perhaps by targeting or calling out animations. In other situations, I’ve used the blind specifically to prevent an interrupt from, say, a ranger or a guardian who is in downed state. So, in other words, Infiltrator’s Arrow can be a tactical (taking advantage of short-term features of a battle) or strategic (taking advantage of long-term features of a battle) weapon that does not deal damage, but rather relies on skillful timing in order to be used most effectively.

Line of Warding isn’t much different (at least, in potential). When used correctly, it can create severe positional problems for the enemy, perhaps by splitting a point in two, or preventing an enemy from getting where he or she needs to be. LoW can be spammed for minor bonuses, but, when used correctly, can be absolutely devastating, potentially.

So what’s the problem? In this game, fights typically require that you kill opponents by dealing more DPS to them than they deal to you. This gives people an incentive to spam the skills that deal DPS in order to deal more damage as quickly as possible, which is necessary for winning fights. On the other hand, skills like Infiltrator’s Arrow, for instance, might get left behind because their initiative cost (in the thief’s case) takes away from the amount of damage that can be dealt simply by doing the same attacks over and over again. Because such skills as this don’t deal damage directly, due to the volume of skills that can deal direct damage easily and efficiently, players will prefer to focus on those skills than to invest time/initiative/etc in skills that don’t directly deal damage (or much damage, anyways), because it’s simply inefficient, given the objectives of the team fights.

I’d like to make a comparison to the Aspect Arena, one of the mini-games for Cutthroat Politics. I played the game a lot, and I enjoyed it a ton, in spite of the fact that almost everything in the game was the same from game to game. I always used to play the Wind Aspect. Of its five skills:

-One is an autoattack that gives you more advantages to having good positioning
-One takes advantage of enemy positioning while dealing no damage
-One allows you to take advantage of enemy CD’s (although there was a glitch in this skill that allowed it to be used every 3 seconds that I found out pretty early on; still, every usage of the skill was a tradeoff)
-One deals a nice bit of damage, but deals even more damage if your positioning relative to your enemy is good, as well as your predictions of enemy movement
-One sacrifices an evade for a possible positional advantage

See, to me, this is the ideal kind of a setup I’d like to see weapon setups have in GW2. There were only two damage-dealing skills, and yet all of the skills were useful in their own situations, and did not benefit you by spamming them, necessarily. Furthermore, all of the skills benefited you for having good positioning and strategy in the game, and that’s something that really does require skill. We didn’t have so much of an incentive to spam damage-dealing skills because- hey! There weren’t so many damage-dealing skills. Rather, we could improve our damage by taking advantage of various strategic and tactical features of the game. Right there and then, this simple mini-game represented the ways that we could change this game to make it require more skill, more strategy, and all the while being infinitely more fun.

I hope that you read this and take this into consideration, ANet. It would certainly require some radical changes, but it would make this game a better one in the long run, and make it infinitely more fun and interesting, both to play and to watch.

~Arganthium

Agree 100%, OP. I’d love to see the game make itself different from GW1, and from a lot of other MMO’s by really utilizing movement across the Z axis, or by rewarding clever use of area denial and tactical abilities.

This always struck me as an obvious problem as well.

Manijin.3428:

Agree 100%, OP. I’d love to see the game make itself different from GW1, and from a lot of other MMO’s by really utilizing movement across the Z axis, or by rewarding clever use of area denial and tactical abilities.

Yeah, the Z axis has been a favorite of mine for multiple shenanigans. as a thief, I’ve had the pleasure of jumping up and down throughout the map using various shadow steps and the like. Still, it’s just not enough. Using Infiltrator’s Strike and Shadow Return skillfully in the Clocktower on Kyhlo just doesn’t seem to do much for you- at least, for the coordination it requires.

But yeah. When I tried out guards in the past, I was always super excited to use LoW. It’s just that it was never a good enough skill to give you large benefits of using it well, simply because of the mass of DPS skills in this game.

Ya know what I’d like? A mesmer weapon skill, maybe on scepter, that swaps positions with the target it hits. Or maybe an earth elementalist skill that creates a long-duration area which cripples opponents for a second when they move through it, or a necromancer skill that blows up a nearby dead ally that heals nearby allies, or…

Manijin.3428:

Ya know what I’d like? A mesmer weapon skill, maybe on scepter, that swaps positions with the target it hits. Or maybe an earth elementalist skill that creates a long-duration area which cripples opponents for a second when they move through it, or a necromancer skill that blows up a nearby dead ally that heals nearby allies, or…

Yeah, these would all be incredibly cool ideas. I especially like the mesmer one; I can just picture swapping an enemy into the middle of your forces to get bombarded by damage coordination tactics like that. It’d be fantastic.

Temporal Curtain is already used strategically, even if not specced into it. I can close the gap between me and my target, or create a gap if I’m trying to escape; I can pull many people into an AoE pressure/spike zone; I can pull them off edges; I can pull them away from a downed target they’re trying to resurrect; and I can buff my entire team with a 12 seconds swiftness.

If you don’t use it correctly, that’s your problem.

Same thing with Illusionary Leap/Swap. While the skill has a HUGE pathing bug, it can be used to your advantage on flat ground, in a 1v1.

Magnus Pym.2356:

Temporal Curtain is already used strategically, even if not specced into it. I can close the gap between me and my target, or create a gap if I’m trying to escape; I can pull many people into an AoE pressure/spike zone; I can pull them off edges; I can pull them away from a downed target they’re trying to resurrect; and I can buff my entire team with a 12 seconds swiftness.

If you don’t use it correctly, that’s your problem.

Same thing with Illusionary Leap/Swap. While the skill has a HUGE pathing bug, it can be used to your advantage on flat ground, in a 1v1.

First of all, I incorporated how certain skills are often used in determining which ones could/were being used strategically. While TC can be used for all of those things, in practicality, it’s often just thrown sloppily into the middle of the battle to insta-pull as quickly as possible, which is fairly predictable and thus easily evaded. I also factored in the effectiveness of a skill at doing things such as you mentioned, and their usefulness. Swiftness is nice for early game openings, but throughout the game it tends to get progressively weaker as positions are established, and eventually AoE swiftness just changes to swiftness for the individual to get from point A to point B faster, while having virtually no effect in combat whatsoever. If I wanted to interrupt a rez, on the other hand, I’d use a faster, less visible method of attack, and would probably use the pistol instead. Either way, because you can just AoE interrupt a bunch of skills at any given point, and there are few times where you actually need to use the skill for some particularly important purpose, it becomes more of a skill to just use as often as possible, whenever possible in practice. On the other hand, long-CD skills like Line of Warding and Infi Arrow don’t give any direct advantage in battle (which Curtain does), which is why I mentioned those two skills specifically and not TC. I will grant you, however, that because of the nature of curtain, and the fact that there aren’t extreme direct benefits to using it, that it is certainly on the higher end in terms of skill required. Of course, as a wall of reflection, it both serves a unique purpose for the mesmer while increasing the opportunity cost of simply spamming the skill.

Leap/Swap, however, I would certainly not describe as being very strategic. It creates a clone that immobilizes opponents, and then is often used to swap into Blurred Frenzy instantaneously. I mean- because clones are so important for mesmers, and because the Swap/BF combo happens often due to the incredibly short cooldowns, I can’t call it much of a strategic skill. The opportunity cost of using Leap/Swap is much lower when the CD is 12 seconds than it is when the skill has a CD of, say, 40 seconds (not to say that it should have a CD of 40 seconds).

It’s like the necromancer’s marks. In theory, they all look like some extremely tactical and strategic uses. In practice, however, because of the high opportunity cost of not spamming them as often as possible, rather than using the skills carefully and skillfully, they’re used sloppily and in a spammy fashion, and because of the benefits coming from each of these skills, a player is actually rewarded to use these skills often and without skill than to use them selectively and in a method that fully utilizes all of those skill’s strengths. On the other hand, if Mark of Blood had a 15 second cooldown and only applied regeneration to allies, if Chillblains only applied chill and heal reduction without dealing any damage- the plays that would come of these skills would require much more skill and would be far more ingenious, and that’s why I compared sPvP to the Aspect Arena. Although it was a fairly simple mini-game, what you saw in it was that every skill had its usage in very specific situations, and that these skills gave you benefits for having better positioning and the like. Timing had to be good on these skills too. You couldn’t just condi burst a guy instantly with a short-cast signet on a 60/48 second CD that gave you very little counterplay. Instead (with the Lightning Aspect), similar to Churning Earth, you could take out a quarter of everybody’s health within a decent radius, but the skill had a long cast time and was easily counterable and thus had to be used skillfully, and when it was used as such, it gave significant benefits to those players who did use the skill selectively.

That’s why I didn’t put in Illusionary Leap/Swap, because, in practice, they just really don’t have to be used skillfully whatsoever.

Burp.

Improving positional and conditional skills ingame would go a long way to making GW2 more engaging. While I think it was the devs intention to have combat on a fast paced manner, the lack of skills that disrupt combat flow by positional hazards make it a DPS centric game.

I don’t see what removing damage from some skills would do to promote more ‘skill based’ play, other than encourage people to run one shot builds.

If a necro lays down all their marks all at once on someone, all they need to do is dodge roll through them and maybe use one condi clear and they’ve just negated all of the possible utility and damage that those marks would have dealt out. Most necros don’t spam all their staff skills just because they provide damage on a low cool down, the same way most thieves don’t use 4 signets with a signet of power build, blow them all at once and spam heartseeker, even though on paper it provides high damage and heartseeker is cheap on initiative.

The game is already skill based, but currently revolves heavily around burst damage because of what builds are currently possible. Anet obviously wanted to avoid people making builds that were purely utility based or purely support based, as classes would be pigeon holed into having a fully specialised role and not doing anything else, if they were the most effective at it.

A skill like the necro’s chillblain when used effectively and not spammed is one of the worst skills to face playing as a d/d thief, as having my movement impaired while my utility skills are on cooldown can cause me to get heavily focused and have no way to prevent it. A good necro would know this and would wait until I’ve burned my shadow step utilities and am about to try for a cloak and dagger, and would use a chill skill to counter that. I even make a point of using withdraw as my heal skill all the time now, specifically as a counter for movement impairing skills, even though it leaves me with very little condition removal options for damaging conds like bleeds. That’s the trade off I make because I know the hardest people to face aren’t the ones that use all their skills immediately off cool down, they understand when and where to use skills to their maximum effectiveness.

Something like line of warding is already a really strong skill in small scale fights or GvG matches, it can interrupt rezzes, can stop groups stacking/balling up and all charging you at the same time, or can be put down on top of you as a pseudo knockdown trap when you’re expecting a melee burst like a hammer warrior or dagger thief.

If like you said, this game had fewer damage skills and more utility skills that give you positioning advantages, there would be less overall risk in a fight as the only skills that you’d need to worry about avoiding/negating would be the damage skills, and if you know that your opponent has already used their 1-2 skills that do damage, you don’t have to worry about them countering your attack. What’s the use of gaining a positional advantage if you don’t have any damaging attacks to use. All it would take would be one dodge roll and a block or invuln and you’ve blown your only damaging attacks, leaving you with just utility skills. Then what would most likely happen is the meta would become everyone running full zerker gear, using all of their utility skills to set up a one-shot attack.

Jakare.6807:

Most necros don’t spam all their staff skills just because they provide damage on a low cool down, the same way most thieves don’t use 4 signets with a signet of power build, blow them all at once and spam heartseeker, even though on paper it provides high damage and heartseeker is cheap on initiative.

The game is already skill based, but currently revolves heavily around burst damage because of what builds are currently possible.

I don’t believe we’re playing the same game.

Honestly Jakare, there’s so much garbage in your entire post that I’m really having to debate whether or not to engage in this discussion with you. For example…

- You can’t dodge roll through a mark you’ve already activated
- 4 sig thieves don’t even look good on paper, I have not the slightest idea what you’re talking about.
- Why would classes be pigeonholed? As a thief I can play a tank, a burster, a high DPS sustain, a far-node assaulter, a VS support build, and a wide variety of other roles. Changing weapon skills so that they had more indirect utility would in fact diversify builds more and, as opposed to what you said, in fact would prevent pigeonholes from occurring, because every class would have a wide variety of utility on each weapon.
- Chilblains tends to be spammed and, in spite of what you say, the chill has been useful in pretty much every situation. More useful in certain situations? Sure, but why wait another 10 seconds for such a situation to occur when you could just use Chilblains now and apply some more chill and DPS on average than you otherwise would? The fact of the matter is that you want to believe that a “good” necro waits carefully for the perfect opportunity to attack, when really most top-level necros will just spam.
- I don’t think you know what utility skills are. One earlier suggestion was a skill that swapped you with your opponent. I’m not sure that it’s a good idea to just allow yourself to be positioned such that the entire enemy team is surrounding you and blasting you to pieces. Also, one of the damage attacks would be the auto. You can’t just invuln past all damage.

You seem not to realize the strategic and tactical advantages of positioning, territorial dominance, and area denial. This is what separates the mediocre players from the best players.