Guild Wars 2

AvalonBright.6957:

- First and foremost, the lack of the Trinity makes this an utter nightmare. There is no way to pull aggro, there is no way to really keep people alive, CC does little to nothing, the entire dungeon is nothing but a chaotic zergfest.

There is no way to pull aggro because the benefit of a tank pulling aggro — keeping a mob off someone else — can be accomplished by different means. Pushes, pulls, launches, knockback effects, stuns, kiting, all essentially also accomplish that.

There are most definitely ways to keep people alive. You have to think about neutering the damage output of mobs (blindness, weakness, protection effects, reflection and projectile absorption effects, condition removal, etc.) It may require you utilizing combo fields and figuring out how to best pool party resources. Dodge or LOS telegraphed and ongoing effects, revive downed party members.

AvalonBright.6957:

- Bosses are a nightmare. The jaded part of me wants to think ANet deliberately designed dungeons to be a gold sink with how much time you’re spending dying, repairing, and zerging right back in again from a waypoint. All of the above points make this impossible as well. With no way to keep aggro, no way to keep people alive beyond some extremely minor, long-CD healing, no CC, every fight is basically a rush to kill them before they can kill you.

Bosses are a learning experience and if you are new to them without having read up on the fight, then, yes, it may take a few attempts to figure out the mechanics. There is little point in keeping aggro on a boss, however, because most characters should have comparable base survivability (there’s only a few percentage points of difference offered by the different armor types; most everything else is a matter of your build and stat choices). Everybody is a potential tank and needs to adapt to potentially having aggro. And yes, there are ways to survive.

AvalonBright.6957:

- Loot is pathetic. You realize the point of dungeons is to get some sweet loot, right?

To each their own, but traditionally the point of dungeons is to experience adventure, not as loot dispensers.

Jordan.6157:

I totally agree with the OP. One of the most promising things I saw with GW2 was combining abilities for an increased effect… such as a flamethrower engineer placing a wall of fire and physical ranged firing through it to gain such fire effect. However in dungeons there is no promotion of doing this at all considering the damage increase from it is pathetic.

Combo fields for damage may not always be great and are often just an incidental perk, but combo fields for defensive effects (condition removal, blindness, weakness, healing, etc.) are well worth leveraging on purpose.

Urrelles.4018:

If there is an icon for stability stacking how the hell would I know. Id have to hover the mouse over it to read the description, which means I am standing there dying form AE effects.

It’s the Unshakeable mechanic that a lot of champions have, both inside and outside of dungeons. The silver and golden icons for it always show up to the left of the conditions that the mob has. The counter on the golden icon tells you how many more control effects have still to be applied to temporarily remove the effect.

You can observe it easily in action during pretty much any dynamic event involving a champion fight.

Note also that not all champions do have this mechanic.

This is, to be honest, part of preparing properly for a dungeon by familiarizing yourself with the game mechanics, just as in other MMOs you may read mechanics and strategy guides before going into an instance.

In fact, I suspect that much of the inherent difficulty is currently simply because there’s no “go to” site (yet) with readymade how-to guides for dungeon bosses and trash that explain the fights in detail. So, everybody is learning the encounters from scratch, more or less, often doing them with non-optimal strategies.

Robert Hrouda.1327:

This system does not stretch across servers, or to other maps.

And that’s exactly the problem. The similar LFG system in City of Heroes worked fine because it was server-wide (and you got to specify what you were looking for when listing yourself as LFG). Right now, the GW2 LFG system buys you next to nothing; you already have to travel to a zone to look for group members, so at this point, you can just as well advertise in map chat.

Sahfur.5612:

If I recall they had said they planned to make every build viable. If thats the case, and it is… Why not just come through on the promise?

They said that they would make every class viable, not every build.

Smiley.1953:

I’m not enjoying the mess that dungeons are now. I apreciate the idea to wanting to remove the trinity, but ANet seems to have done so without presenting an alternative.

It is worth noting that RPGS (both tabletop and online) existed before the trinity was invented. The trinity was a byproduct of how DIKU muds evolved, but party play predated the trinity for a couple of decades.

GW2 does not play significantly differently from a tabletop RPG (except at a much faster pace and with more movement). There was no thing such as tanking or aggro in D&D, and jokes about Eric the Cleric aside, healing was much too weak to be a significant factor in combat. Yet, these RPGS somehow worked without a trinity.

In GW2, the alternative system is that you are tank, healer, support, and DPS, all rolled into one and that your role can change from one second to the next. That is obviously more effort than just specializing in one single thing, and probably a painful transition for some players.

• Every player is capable of dealing with aggro, so there is no need to keep aggro off other players. Thus there is no need for a dedicated tank. If you have aggro, well, congratulations, you just got promoted to tank (at least for the next few seconds).
• There is no dedicated healer, because players are expected to pool buffs, debuffs, controls, dodge, and kiting abilities to mitigate incoming damage and have self-heals to deal with what is left over.
• If someone did not avoid a mechanic, the responsibility for cleaning up that mistake is not that of a dedicated healer spamming heals, but of everyone who can hit the “F” key to revive. If somebody’s downed near you, congratulations, you just got promoted to healer.

You seem to be asking whether you can delegate the responsibility for your survivability to some other person if you have a glass cannon build.

The answer is generally: No, you can’t.

If you have a glass cannon build, your dungeon experience will mostly consist of graveyard zergs (if only because there are mobs that preferentially target low-health, low-toughness players). If you don’t have a glass cannon build, then you’ll already be as capable of “tanking” as any other character (insofar as “tanking” has any meaning in GW2).

If you’re just throwing dead bodies at a boss, then you’re doing it wrong, I’m afraid.

Everybody in the party has a hybrid damage/support role. You mitigate damage through buffs (such as protection), debuffs (such as weakness), and controls, then avoid what you cannot mitigate and heal what you cannot avoid.

And yes, you can play melee. You just can’t stand there and take hits to your face.

After you transmuted your starter set based on the Krytan armor set’s appearance, you can now transmute your new set based on the starter’s set appearance (which it should have inherited from the Krytan one).

If that doesn’t work, that’s a bug, and I’d contact ArenaNet.

According to what the guildwars2guru.com people tested in beta, the direct damage formula is

damage = power * weapon strength * skill coefficient / armor

where armor = toughness + defense.

Condition damage is not affected by toughness.

From the rules of conduct: "You may not use any third-party program (such as a “bot”) in order to automate gameplay functions, including playing, chatting, interacting, or gathering gold or items within Guild Wars 2. You may not assist, relay, or store gold or items for other players who are using these processes."

That the third-party program runs on your keyboard’s hardware is irrelevant. What matters is that you’d be automating gameplay functions.

Warrior and guardian can probably both appeal to you if you liked the plate classes in WoW.

Note that warriors are a perfectly viable ranged class, too, if you’re worried about surviving in melee range. That said, circle strafing helps a lot with staying alive, and you can build a pretty tough warrior, too (put trait points in the defense line, use a mace or a hammer for the weakness debuff). You won’t be able to just straight up tank stuff, but you can take a bit more of a beating than a glass cannon build.

You can, if you want to, try to shoehorn the design into a model of roles or functions, but it won’t do anything but limit you.

To survive, you use controls or defensive boons and conditions or heals. You don’t use only one or the other because of some model. You use whatever you have on your action bar that will reduce or compensate for damage intake. If you’re playing a guardian, then you may put up a protection boon at one moment and use a knockback bubble the next. One is technically support and one is control, but in the end all that matters is that both make mobs hurt less.

tralon.2135:

I noticed when I got to level 8 and was following the “chain quests” as instructed, but enemy in each of those quests got to be 2 levels higher than me? I am a hunter at level 8, but the enemy ranges anywhere from levels 10 to 12? I don’t stand a chance. So how do I deal with this problem?

There are at least two zones for each level range (plus, downleveling allows you to do zones below your level and gain appropriate rewards/XP). If you’re hitting content that is too high for you, I recommend switching to a different zone. Zones do not have linear stories leading through them, so there’s no need to stick with the same zone for an entire level range.

Also, do every dynamic event you come across; this will be the bulk of your experience in PvE.

Warriors actually have very little mitigation advantage over thieves. Heavy armor typically has 7% more defense than medium armor, and innate toughness of either class is the same.

Warriors, like thieves, depend on active mitigation for survivability. Neither can just take hits to the face and expect to survive.

First and foremost, if you’re playing either as ranged, you will want to be kiting a lot; if you’re playing as melee, you will want to circle strafe a lot. Both allow you to avoid effects with a wind-up time, kiting will also allow you to avoid instant melee attacks.

Second, dodging, either to evade telegraphed attacks, or to gain some distance is useful and should be used frequently.

Third, abilities matter. Especially those that aid your survivability. Blindness effects negate hits, knockdown effects (tripwire) stop mobs from doing anything.

Finally, if you still have problems, you may consider speccing into traits that aid your survivability. Shadow Arts gives you toughness, healing power, and some nice survivability traits.

HykCraft.4610:

They claim it’s not… I still think it is… healer, tank, etc.

There are no such things as tanks and healers in GW2 in any meaningful sense of these words. There is no controllable aggro. Even if you could hold aggro, no character could take the damage to its face, and no character could heal through the damage.

GW2 party play is primarily a game of pooling buffs, debuffs, and controls to minimize incoming damage and maximize outgoing damage. It’s a system where every party member functions as a force multiplier rather than being assigned a narrow task.

The closest equivalent you have in existing MMOs would be all-defender/controller teams in CoH.

There is no fundamental difference in what you do in GW2 compared to other MMOs at max level. Instanced PvE, open-world PvE, PvP (just with different kinds of flavor and seasoning).

What is different is that there is no gear progression associated with doing that content; or rather, that the gear progression is capped at the exotic gear level.

Now gear progression has good and bad sides. It gives you an objective to work towards; on the other hand, it means that you will have to deal with fairly constant gear resets and the problem that if you took a break from gaming, you will afterwards have to re-gear your character completely. An additional problem is that gear progression makes content obsolete fairly quickly.

Some players, for the aforementioned reasons, prefer games with a gear progression. Some prefer not having to deal with the downsides. Both are fine, but they are also mutually exclusive, and you cannot please both types of players at the same time. ArenaNet can really only do one of them well, and they apparently chose to carve out their own niche rather than competing with the majority of MMOs on their own turf.

The direct damage formula that the guildwars2guru.com people figured out through testing in beta is basically:

power * weapon strength * skill multiplier / armor

(where armor is the sum of toughness and defense)

So, if you double your armor, you will cut direct damage intake in half. Increasing armor by p% in general will reduce damage intake by a factor of 1-1/p%.

Note that toughness does not reduce condition damage.