I’m going to talk about another game briefly to illustrate my point, which is one that applies to many games and not just Guild Wars 2, and then I’ll talk about the principle with respect to Guild Wars 2:
Years ago, I played the Magic the Gathering card game. In that game, you active land cards to use the abilities on other cards. I built a deck of cards to played with that was based around the strategy of destroying my opponent’s land cards so that they couldn’t power any of the abilities on their other cards and could essentially do nothing to hurt me. It was a fairly effective deck that worked quite well. It also sucked all of the fun out of the game for my opponent (who essentially couldn’t play) and for me (because the strategy would play out pretty much the same way every time).
The lessons I learned? Just because it works doesn’t mean it’s fun and strategies based on denying a player the opportunity to play aren’t a lot of fun.
I see those problems in Guild Wars 2, particularly in those areas where players are playing against each other, but also with quite a few boss fights. What makes this problematic is that the design philosophy of Guild Wars 2 is specifically oriented around discouraging or even preventing players from griefing and frustrating each other and letting players play the way they want to play.
One of the more obvious examples is stealth, which is a great source of complaints in the forums. The root problem is that steath makes it difficult and frustrating to fight an opponent using it. While I’m personally fine with the basic strategy of using stealth (sneak in, do burst damage, flee if it doesn’t kill the opponent), there are two aspects of it that I find seriously not fun to play against, and comments on the message boards suggest that I’m not alone. The first is that players can stake other players while in stealth and there is little that can be done to counter it. The second is that players can heal, gain boons, and otherwise recharge while in stealth so they can quickly come back for a second attack. What’s problematic in both cases is that they put control of the encounter into the hands of only one player and the encounter normally ends when the other player either gets their kill, makes a mistake, or runs away. I’d rather the stealth lasted longer (even much longer) but they couldn’t heal or boost up while in stealth.
Next up long-duration or repeated CC effects such as long duration immobilizes, stuns, and repeatedly being knocked down by a hammer train. Not being able to control your character for a second or two because they’ve been knocked back, slowed down, or immobilized seems reasonable. Being frozen in place for seconds or repeatedly knocked around like soccer ball until dead means I’m not playing my character. I’m helplessly watching my character frozen in place or getting moved around by my opponent. It’s not just other players that do this, An increasing number of boss encounters seem to be working the same way.
Which bring me to my next point, which is that ANet must realize how problematic stealth and CC are to fight against, since they make many of their champion and other boss encounters largely immune to both, by having them spam AoE damage that will hit an opponent whether in stealth or not and by making them immune to most, if not all, CC effects. So in a case where there is no player playing the opponent to get frustrated, the NPC monster gets to frustrate the players by making abilities of their class that work just fine in every other situation not work at all. If it’s hard for ANet to create an NPC boss that can stand up to a team or zerg of players using steath, CC, and other abilities (clones, pets, etc.) such that they have to render those abilities largely worthless against their NPC boss encounters, what do you think playing against those situations as a player plays like? If an NPC champion encounter becomes hopelessly lame if the players start tossing the champion around like a beach ball, what do you think it feels like to be a player watching their character tossed around like a beach ball by a zerg in WvW?
I don’t expect all of this to be fixed, nor do I think all of this can be fixed. But the point I’m trying to make is that ANet should be thinking about letting players do interesting things with their characters during encounters, not how to prevent them from doing things with their characters or, in the extreme cases of CC spamming, do nothing at all until their character is killed. Not being able to move or attack and watching your character die while helpless is not fun and the designers should be trying to make that as rare in the game as possible. Basically, the more the game takes control away from the players and forces them to play a certain way, the more frustrating the game is going to become.