Guild Wars 2

shaktiboi.5194:

But people who [don’t think, turn with their keyboard, click their skills] and still have only yellow or green gear? And haven’t [understood the concept that standing in fire and stuff like that is bad for you] yet?

NO. Sorry, but you’re wrong and I know at least 9 [other facepalm inducing players who most of you hope you’ll never be unfortunate enough to group with] who will back me up on that. [There could be a 10th out there somewhere but he probably thinks AC, CoF, HotW, and CoE are pretty easy so he only half agrees with me]

Fixed your post for you.

If all you want is a game where everything is obtainable with minimal effort and the only thing to do is go around collecting pretty skins that everyone else has easy access to… I believe Second Life came out years ago and did a better job of doing all that than GW2. The rest of us play MMO’s for the challenge of outperforming others and bettering ourselves. GW2 has a base talent and skill structure to be a dynamic and interesting game that can push players well to their limits… It just fails to do so due to easy content that doesnt require players to actually make use of these dynamic skill sets the game gives them.

Oh and as to whoever it was that wanted me to run the arah paths… I did those a while ago. They were mindless and easy. Lots of mobs that eat aoe and big bosses that telegraph every single attack they perform aren’t exactly challenging unless your name begins with hellen and ends with keller. Especially if your group runs some sort of traditional trinity comp, this game gives you so many tools to accomplish your task that it’s almost impossible to fail… and the “downed but not dead” mechanic combined with the fact that warriors have an aoe battle res on a mere minutes timer (wtf op much?) gives groups a huge margin for error… this not even taking into account the ability to graveyard zerg, which should never be done or spoken of again.

Bottom line is that yes, the game gives you the freedom to play your character in any role you want to. This is good in that players can literally swap gear and talents with minimal effort to fine tune to the needs of a particular encounter, and that well put together builds can cater to a wide variety of encounters and playstyles. Players become extremely versatile. The problem is that lack of challenge also gives players a liscense to be terrible… to create builds that don’t perform to standard and then play the “my game my way” card to defend their horrible playstyle and refusal to learn the game.

Oh and nobody did Yogg-0 for loot. We did it to be able to say we did Yogg-0. Having a flying robot head or a death’s demise title didn’t help you out in the game. It merely said “hey, I’m part of a crowd that can kill a really difficult and challenging boss… are you?”

Difficult encounters have always been about prestige: getting the encounter done and getting it done first. The accomplishment meant something because it came with some sort of exclusivity… like a membership into some sort of “I don’t suck at this game” club… and exclusivity is something GW2 sorely lacks since everything and anything is readily obtainable by anyone willing to dump in enough mindless grind time.

The second major misconception people have is the fallacy of the “casual player”. There’s this idea in the head of many gamers and, unfortunately, developers, that the MMO world is filled with this mythical “casual gamer” that turns his character with his keyboard, clicks all his skills, stands in fire/defile/lava/etc, pays little to no attention to what the stats on his gear actually means, and generally plays, you know, terribly. This mythical causal is juxtaposed with your hardcore gamer, which people somehow think is the vast minority of MMO gamers. Basically, there’s a lot of people out there who think that for every Billy Badazz in the gaming community there has to be thousands of Tommy Terribads out there mewling in the masses.

This is simply not so. If hardcore gaming is defined as a large time investment in and dedication to the game, then causal gaming merely refers to a lesser time investment and dedication level. The casual gamer wants to experience the game but probably is unable or unwilling to spend the endless hours that a hardcore player is or schedule blocks of their life to the game as a hardcore player might. None of that equates to a mentally handicapped idiot who is incapable of playing the game with a modicum of skill or understanding of their class.

So when people say “hey, GW2 was made for a casual crowd… don’t expect there to be real compelling or challenging content that requires strategy, thought, or skill” they fall into the casual player fallacy. Games tailored for a casual crowd are tailored to smaller intervals of time commitment. This is why events generally last 5ish minutes, why dungeons, if run correctly, last approximately 15 mins. Time commitment intervals are slow, so casual players can log on, accomplish something, and log off more conveniently than say… if they were forced to commit 5 hours straight of their life to a raid instance in WoW.

However, to say that casual players do not enjoy challenge or derive a sense of accomplishment from learning and overcoming difficult and deep game mechanics is, frankly, pretty insulting to the casual player base itself. I see no reason casual players are unable to understand that if each player performs a specialized role in the group the run will go smoother or that if they start using that dodge mechanic the game gifted them with they can spec and gear to do vastly improved dps. I see no reason why a casual would be unable to discern that if he specced and geared for +healing then his group heals and regen fields would actually be able to keep party members up through dungeon damage. I see no reason why your average casual would be unable to perform at the level that could suceed if bosses demanded both high dps AND survival.

Too long has the casual gamer fallacy been used by terrible players as an excuse to explain away their unwillingness to pay attention while they play, inability to perform, and refusal to improve. And yes, there are terrible players out there. Tommy Terribad does exist. There just aren’t millions of him everywhere and all around us like some would have us believe. For every Billy Badazz out there there’s probably is a Tommy Terribad… one… not a thousand. And they certainly arent the majority… or representative of the casual gamer in general.

I think a lot of players misinterperet a freedom to “play the game your way” as a “liscense to be terrible at the game” and the misconception that GW2 breaks away from the traditional trinity reinforces this.

If you take a second to really look at each class’s ablities and mechanics as well as the utility each can bring to the table you’ll realize that the advertised freedom to play your character your own way actually means that each character has the potential to fill mulitple roles of the traditional “trinity”. For instance, I play a warrior. I can spec so that my shouts heal my group or so my banners offer regen to the group. In doing so I would maximize my productivity to my group by gearing and putting in runes with +healing, effectively making myself a support healer. I can also spec deep into defense, wear a mace and shield, and gear/rune full power/toughness/vit. This would effectively make me a tank. Lastly I can (and most often do) spec almost exclusively stength/arms/disc (the glass cannon spec) and gear power/prec/crit. This allows much higher dps output compared with the other two options.

Groups that perform optimally and speed run dungeons (10-15 min runs) generally bring 1 full out tank character (usually a guardian) 1-2 support healers (since guardian tanks often provide quite a bit of group healing too) and 2-3 pure dps. This allows the group to efficiently and effectively kill mobs in dungeons as a traditional trinity setup and generally renders current dungeon content rediculously easy.

Many players, however, who misinterperet the play it your own way slogan, choose to set up their characters as a quasi I-can-kinda-take-a-hit-and-can-almost-do-substandard-dps type setup. I’ve seen 5 signet warriors running power/vit/toughness gear with a sword and shield combo. Really. I literally saw one today in an AC farm I pugged. Players like this are why your average pugger thinks AC path 3 is hard. When you have a group with 5 tanks, you obviously can’t kill each burrow before the next one spawns.

This game, like it or not, is still optimally played with a traditional trinity setup, which I really have no problem with at all. What I do have a problem with is the fact that the vast majority of encounters (read: anything your average pug doesn’t cry about) have been simplified and dumbed down to the point that 5 people of doubious intelligence can enter with terrible builds that offer no synergy to each other and succeed with little to no need for collaboration or communication.

The skill mechanics of this game are extremely well thought out. Together with the oft ignored combo system, it offers great potential for synergy and creative collaboration between a wide variety of classes and specs. Unfortunately, the game shoots itself in the foot by making combat and encounters so easy that players no longer need to balance damage output, survivability, and utility or perfect their play. Accomplishments lose their luster if there is no true challenge, and this game offers no challenge because it fails to punish players for poor play.

The bottom line is that even accounting for the fact that GW1 attracted the bottom of the barrel in MMO gamers towards the end of its run, GW2 promised to be not just good for a free to play game, but a truly good game in its own right. Players who came to GW2 want challenge. We want that spiffy piece of flaming armor or that super cool weapon to actually mean something other than “hey I logged on and did my compulsory runs with 6 other mentally handicapped people for 4 days in a row”. There is no meaning in success if there is no chance of failure.

Explorable dungeon content should require a higher level of play than story content. Your average pug filled with players who have no synergy with each other where half the players play with half their attention given to the latest episode of survivor can steamroll through story modes, and that’s fine. Casual players have a right to see the full story. Explorable modes are not done for their story, however, they carry unique rewards with them and should require actual coordination, effort, and at least a modicum of skill. It would make the shiny suit of armor we get as a reward that much more rewarding if it were actually some sort of accomplishment to acquire it.

Oh, and while we’re at it… armor is way too cheap. It’s ok to have one or 2 super easy explorable clears, but make it mean something if a group can only manage half the paths. When the difference is getting the new weapon in 2 days or 4 days not many people really care to do the harder 2 or 3 paths to get more badges. When the difference become a 7 day to 14 day gap, I bet you’ll start seeing people running all the Arah paths. Plus, longer acquisition time give you developers more time to actually give us some real content (harder and longer dungeons or raid instances?) before mmo gamers in search of real challenging content move on to a different game out of boredom.

MMO’s require a good balance of pve and pvp content to succeed, and while WvW is very dynamic and well put together, if all we wanted to do is pvp we could be playing an fps or an rts. Give us challenging PvE content. Even if it isn’t raid content, many mmo’s without raids such as Tera or The Secret World still offered challenging and dynamic group content. You can even do what WoW and Rift did and progressively nerf old content as new content becomes available so terrible players who can’t stay out of fire and other telegaphed attacks can experience the game. But give people who want a skill challenge and some sort of skill exclusive reward something to do and some goal to work towards other than the legendary grindfest which really, lets be honest, only requires grinding and is virutally guaranteed as long as the player puts in the requisite time.

As a veteran mmo player that has thoroughly enjoyed hard mode group and raid instances that other games have offered, I was thoroughly dissapointed in GW2 offerings. Despite their implied promise that GW2 would actually be a “great mmo” and not just a “great mmo… for a free to play game”, the lackluster dungeon encounters pretty much only amount to a welfare system of impossible to fail encounters that offer no real reward aside from universal and all too easily obtained badges for armor that everyone and their mother has easy access to.

There are two main problems that are universal to GW2 dungeon encounters. First: the mechanic that allows players to run back to the encounter after death. Second: no soft or hard enrage timers allow players to disregard dps maximization and autoattack their way to victory. The combination of these two poorly thought out mechanics is extremely frustrating to players who would actually like to differentiate themselves from the crowd and creates a systemic problem that encourages terrible players to gear power/toughness/vit, do terrible dps, and be rewarded for it with success.

Lets deal with the first problem, which would easily be solved if each boss was gated off and did not allow players reentry to the gated area until after combat was finished. Currently, there are numerous encounters that could be very well tuned and challenging but have simply been reduced to a zerg gimmick due to the fact that players can endlessly respawn and run back to the encounter… virtually ensuring success to the players. An example would be the often farmed CoF path 2 explorable protect Magg encounter, which would be a very interesting “hold out” encounter except for the fact that most people have reduced it to a line up, die, and run back encounter. Likewise, Arah path 3 has an interesting and very survivable giant fight that is trivialized by the fact that bad players can endlessly run back after dying to easily avoidable and obviously telegraphed boss attacks. Forcing groups to survive or restart an event creates challenge and prevents players from cheezing events.

The second issue is that there has to be some dps check inherent in pve encounters beyond “hey if we kill stuff faster we can finish earlier”. Most MMO’s enforce enrage timers into their pve encounters because enrage timers force players to maximize their character’s potential and make full use of their skill sets. The lack of such enrage timers, be it a hard enrage or some soft enrage mechanic on encounters simply allows players to gear heavily into survivability, ignore riskier and more damaging skills at their disposal, and simply autoattack the boss down from range while executing a primitive duke nukem circlestrafe. I’ve seen many pug warriors that go an entire instance autoattacking with a rifle in full power/toughness/vit gear, getting hit with nearly every aoe imaginable and the group still succeeds.