Guild Wars 2

I’m so glad to see you guys are getting some use out of this old thing. Have fun out there!

Typo fixed. Thanks. Pure of Voice actually uses the condition conversion mechanic, which is very specific.

The trait gives all your shouts an extra functionality as a condition remover. So if you use, say, “Hold the Line!”, your allies gain Protection and Regeneration, plus any conditions they might be suffering from turn into boons. Crippled allies gain Swiftness. Bleeding allies gain Vigor. And so on.

Turning Smite into a symbol, or at least adding a symbol component, is an elegant solution to a few persistent Guardian issues.

• Scepter doesn’t have much (if any) real Trait support, despite being our only real ranged weapon. Giving it a Symbol solves that by opening up trait synergies in the Honor and Zeal line.

• Zeal is a difficult line to justify. It’s good for Spirit Weapons, one or two Adept traits and the Minor traits, and that’s about it. Adding a Symbol to Scepter helps fix this issue by making Zeal a more widely applicable line.

• Scepter is our only ranged option, and even then, it’s a 1-hand, which means we only get three skills. Of those three skills, two deal direct damage. Adding a Symbol helps alleviate this issue by giving the Scepter a little more tactical “muscle.”

It’s an elegant solution to so many little problems. I hope ANet looks into it.

Wow, that’s actually very sweet and thoughtful of you, ANet.

Nothing about Mr. Sharp’s post says we have to maximize boon up time, in the sense that we aren’t required to invest heavily in boon duration. We are, however, reliant on boons to do our job. At least, we’re supposed to be. I don’t know how true this is. Boons are a constant in a Guardian’s playstyle, but they aren’t what define us, and having boons stripped from us isn’t really going to leave us any more vulnerable than other professions in the same situation.

Area control is definitely an cornerstone of Guardian play, not just in Area Denial (shields, reflections), but also symbol placement and advancing/retreating. We are definitely at our most powerful in melee range, so that statement seems accurate.

And we are absolutely effective in removing conditions. Guardians have so many ways to remove conditions, across nearly all our builds, to say nothing of our overabundance of Light combo fields.

The description is an accurate one, though I think Mr. Sharp overemphasized or mischaracterized the role of boons in Guardian play. Boons happen, but we don’t depend on them. In fact, the presence and absence of specific boons rarely matters to a Guardian so much as the presence or absence of any boon at all.

Examples:

• Pure of Voice turns Shouts into condition removals. The actual effect of the boons are unchanged, and in many cases, the boons themselves are not as important as having conditions stripped.

• Altruistic Healing benefits from volume of boons, rather than boon uptime or specific boons. It doesn’t matter so much if you’re granting Retaliation, Swiftness, Aegis or Vigor—AH will heal you for the same amount. Here, the boons themselves don’t matter, but the frequency with which you grant boons does.

—

It’s a minor quibble. The description is mostly right. Yes, we rely on boons to make up for our low levels of innate health, but a more accurate description would be: we rely on Virtues and Aegis to make up for our low levels of innate health, along with the mitigation baked into our more defensive weapon selection.

And while the Guardian is not reliant on boons to the point where we “feel the pressure” if we lose them, we do incorporate lots and lots of boons into nearly everything we do.

I’d have added a couple of things to the description: Guardian playstyle changes dramatically between weapons, moreso than warriors. The difference between mace and staff isn’t just damage or skill selection, but strategy.

Humans tend to revere all the Gods, but Dwayna represents healing and protection, Balthazar warfare and tactics, and Kormir righteousness and justice. As a note, Guardians aren’t really paladins in the sense that they do not necessarily follow the Gods, and do not draw their power from divine inspiration. So, really, they’re just as likely to revere Lyssa or Grenth or Dwayna, or none of the Gods at all.

@OP,

A lot of people will tell you it’s your own fault, that you invested in a game that isn’t suited to you and provides nothing for you. I feel these criticisms are unfair. You clearly derived pleasure from being the backbone of your team, a “healer” in the sense that you provided the non-violent support that kept your team going.

Guild Wars 2 has done away with the trinity, so the concept of a healer as it relates to damage and tanking roles is no longer present. However, the absence of the “classic” trinity that’s dominated PVE mechanics for the last decade does not and should not eliminate the entire concept of team support.

I encourage you to think about healers outside the usual DPS-Healer-Tank tactical triangle that has become the de facto standard of PVE. Instead, try and remember what it was that drew you to playing a healer in the first place. The pleasure of being a force multiplier for your team? The idea that you could help keep your team alive in tough spots? The mother-bear playstyle that emphasized protecting the vulnerable and reviving the wounded?

If so, your playstyle may have a place in GW2, provided you’re willing to adapt. If you want to spam heals and fill green bars all day, this isn’t the game for you. But if you want to protect your allies, support their offense and help keep them out of harm’s way, then there are ways to build for that, and professions well suited to fulfilling the healer impulse, if not embodying the traditional healer playstyle. Guardians and Elementalists are a good starting point.

Good luck!

Hold on. Put the brakes on for a second.

Arenanet doesn’t give out enough gold rewards or provides a means to make money that counters the sellers who ARE legit.
They exist. They take their job seriously, provide adequate security concerning your personal info and have been providing bargain prices since the inception of WoW.

There is no such thing as a “legit” gold seller. Leaving aside for a moment the fact that selling gold is in and of itself an illegal (read: illegitimate) act, there is absolutely no such thing as a legit gold seller. In the same way there’s no such thing as a legit smuggler or a legit counterfeiter or a legit bootlegger, and supporting these “enterprises” under the guise of legitimacy only encourages their existence in the first place.

There is absolutely no situation, under any reasonable circumstances, in which you should justify handing over your credit card information to a gold seller, or hiring farming services, or anything in that exceedingly dubious vein. Not only are you putting yourself at risk for hacking, theft, or possible bans from ArenaNet, but you are participating in—and therefore proliferating—a pernicious culture of gold trading that has done nothing but cause problems for the MMO community.

Every time you fork over real money to these people, you are implicitly encouraging the underhanded business of gold selling, and implicitly encouraging more sophisticated and more pervasive forms of botting, hacking and identity theft.

The problem is not ArenaNet’s prices or the low availability of gold or the cost of precursors.

These are problems which exist independent of the allure of gold sellers. Gold sellers don’t exist because precursors are expensive. Gold sellers don’t exist because gold is rare. Gold sellers exist because enough players are impatient and lack discretion.

If the price of a precursor is prohibitively high, then don’t go after one. If ArenaNet’s economic design leaves you penniless more often than you’d like, then hold ANet responsible. Don’t look to gold sellers for a solution.

Players need to get better at saying no, and taking a hardline stance. If getting a precursor is going to be a boring grind that sucks away months of your life—don’t do it. And don’t try to justify throwing away your integrity by paying gold sellers money. That is not a valid solution—it’s a cheap excuse by someone struggling to justify their own lack of discretion.

I don’t mean to be rude, but I have to be blunt. The quote above displays exactly the sort of reasoning that is slowly, steadily and inevitably giving support to gold sellers, botters and hackers. Don’t do it.

Sword works fantastically with the Radiance line, both for boosting damage via crit, Right-Hand Strength, and for taking advantage of Virtue of Justice passive damage. Unlike other weapons, Sword’s basic attack chain hits five times, not three, and therefore guarantees at least one Virtue of Justice trigger. That’s at least 1 second of Burning for every attack chain.

Sword is flexible. With Focus Offhand, it becomes quite defensive, mixing blinds with a solid block mechanic and regeneration. Sword and Torch is a good pair if you’re building for burning damage, and adds some modest AoE as well as potential for spike damage.

On top of that, Sword comes with a short cooldown distance-closer with a built in blind, which, properly traited, can allow a savvy guardian to chain blinds and boost mitigation. Zealot’s Defense is pretty sexy too, guaranteeing a couple of VoJ triggers in the mix.

It has a few downsides. Sword isn’t great against multiple opponents. It has no combo finisher and no symbol. But it’s a solid weapon.

Nonlinear.9823:

Hydrophidian.4319:

3. Play the game normally, and collect what’s needed over a long period of time.

Play the game normally, what does this even mean?

I am confused about what this, how does it work? How do you play the game “normally”?

If you do 100% map completion you won’t get all the 250 stacks of t6 mats you need. Not even close. What other “normal” stuff is there to do? Wander around in Orr? Kill Jormag 1,000,000x? Stand around bored in LA?

That’s Hydro’s point. Broadly speaking, if you aren’t specifically trying to accumulate as much gold as possible (grinding) or paying out of your wallet (gems), then it follows that you ought to be able to make money parellel to routine gameplay. World of Warcraft had Daily Quests, which were essentially chore lists but would give you a decent stipend of gold to cover expenses if you needed it. Other games relied on Dungeon runs to facilitate wealth; you ran a dungeon, got a reward, which was either a pile of gold or a shot at something rare which you could then sell.

Except that Guild Wars 2 does not provide you with any means of earning gold which is either reasonable, reliable or readily apparent. Purchasing gold from gems isn’t reasonable; grinding isn’t reliable owing to DR, and there is no content designed to award you a steady flow of currency.

You’re perpetually broke because, by design, gold is supposed to be very valuable. Dropping 4-5 gold on an item should be seen as a moderately large investment. Unfortunately, this is only true provided everyone else is just as broke as you, but the moment a small enough percentage of the population manages to accumulate a disproportionately large sum of gold…

…well, to use an old cliche: prices rise but wages stay low.

It’s up to ArenaNet to step in, either by adjusting or removing DR so that grinding for gold is something you can do, or implementing some repeatable content that provides you with a steady sum of money, which constitutes a bottom line (i.e, everyone should be able to make at least this much.)

Dailies/Monthlies are a good place to start.

Woljnir.7810:

I have a quick question. I know Guardian’s can’t be healers per se, but if I stack healing ability and trait +healing and basically put on my best face as a healer, will I suck soloing? I mean, the survivability of Guardians in general is great, but it won’t take an hour to kill stuff will it?

Not necessarily, because it’s not as simple as stacking +healing or going 30 Honor. Even if you do take a lot of +healing gear, you’d have to try exceptionally hard to not have Power on your gear as well. So your offensive ability won’t be terrible; however, +healing generally doesn’t provide you with as much mitigation as it would an entire party, so it’s possible that, going solo, you’ve stacked so much +healing that either your toughness or vitality suffers.

Furthermore, Honor is thankfully a very versatile trait line. When soloing, you can just “flip” the appropriate traits on the fly. Use solo-appropriate traits while soloing (writ of persistence, two handed mastery, maybe Superior Aria), and switch out those traits when grouped up. Depending on where you put your other 40 trait points, you should be able to solo just fine.

IV Endu.8920:

Philosoraptor Question: Can one retaliate retaliation? hmmmm*

Serious Question: Can 1h Sword’s third auto-attack chain proc Sigil of Earth 3 times on crit?

Philosoraptor Answer: No. Retaliation responds to strikes, rather than damage procs.

Serious Answer: No. Sigil of Earth has an internal cooldown of about 2 seconds.

I’m not sure I understand your point, Star Ace. I’m not berating the OP for choosing a suboptimal build. I’m reminding him that the build he’s asking for doesn’t exist. There’s no such thing as a Support Guardian, not in the stereotypical sense of an MMORPG Healer. If you try to build like one, you’re severely limiting your potential.

GW2 is built in a way that severely discourages focusing entirely on boons and heals. You are expected to go toe to toe with your enemy and deal damage, so it’s always a good idea—regardless of your build—to have some good offensive stats (power/crit/condition).

If you don’t want to do that, that’s fine. It’s your playstyle. And you can probably clear most PVE encounters regardless of your build. I’m just assuming that since the OP asked for advice, he wants a good build. And every decent build that emphasizes support skills carries a good deal of damage too.

Hickeroar.9734:

I’ll give it a go and tweak the heck out of it. I’m not married to anything as far as traits go, so if I need to change things up, I do.

It’s worth noting also that every piece of gear, every weapon, every gem in my build also provides Power as well as either Precision or Condition Damage. So it’s not like I’m going into this as a weakling…

Yeah, that’s what I’m getting at. You do want to strike a good balance between offensive stats and everything else. Crippling your offensive capacity is never a good idea and rarely a good bargain for better healing/boon duration.

Still, I do think deep Honor and deep Virtues can function well with the right playstyle. So the question is: What’s your focus? What does your playstyle emphasize? Symbols? Shouts? Virtue boons? Healing?

The general rule of thumb is that, no matter what, you want to make sure you have a solid mix of offensive power and survivability first. After that, build toward a specific concept, a specific playstyle or a general tactic. You’re better served focusing on, say, Shouts or Symbols or Spirit Weapons or Virtue activation than picking up traits scattershot.

Also remember to keep a full array of weapons at your disposal. I see you have Staff + Scepter, but don’t be afraid to swap at least one of those weapons out as necessary, and as the encounter permits.

Guardian traits tend to be (though there are exceptions) weapon-agnostic. You don’t build for specific weapons so much as you build for certain tactics. Altruistic Healing, for example, does allow for Sword/Focus. So does Spirit Weapons with 30 Radiance for Right-Hand Strength.

30 Radiance is usually a good way to go if you really want to maximize the potential of one-handed weapons. It’s open ended enough that you can dip remaining points in Honor, Valor or Virtues and create a relatively well-balanced build. If you’re focusing on Sword, and you want to mix up some damage and party-wide support via Virtues, look into the Virtues tree for stronger Virtue of Justice Passive. Sword is a great candidate for maximizing VoJ procs, and a Radiance/Virtues build could strike a good balance between high damage (Right Hand Strength) and party support via stronger Virtues and Boons.

(this is the only forum that doesnt cry)

Hah! Come drop by after a new patch nerfs us, and say this again.

You’re still stuck on the incorrect assumption that healers and support guards are “dead weight.” Once you get rid of that, the rest of your argument falls apart.

Healers and Support guardians don’t really exist—not in any meaningful sense of a role. Support is not a role you fill—it is the sum of your tactics on the field. So saying that a Guardian is “support” is, at best, woefully imprecise.

Support can mean just about anything, but let’s assume that by Support we’re referring to the body of skills and traits which provide boons, remove conditions and improve your allies’ performance. Even then, Support isn’t a role you fill but an adjective we use to describe certain abilities. Empower, for example, can be described as a Support ability.

Consequently, you can’t really “build for Support.” You can build around certain skills (Shouts, for example) or a certain concept (Battle Presence), but Support is not your role in a team because roles don’t exist except in the most abstract sense. Teams aren’t composed of 2 DPS, 2 Support and a Tank. Teamwork happens not between roles, but between individual players.

So it’s not that “Healers” and “Support Guardians” are dead weights—it that these concepts are inviable. They don’t exist in a meaningful discussion on teamwork and coordination.

What Ironzerg is therefore saying is that by assuming these roles exist and trying to build specifically for these roles and shoehorning yourself into the tunnel vision of DPS/Support/Control (or whatever specious pseudo-Trinity we’re going with these days) you’re actually severely limiting your potential and your contribution to the encounter, and therefore, you may as well be a dead weight.

The choice of words is a bit harsh, and probably not accurate (you can make a 30 Honor 30 Virtues build work well, but it will require finesse), but I hope you can see the underlying point.

cesmode.4257:

Kharma is worthless right not, aside from crafting a legendary at some point or purchasing the Orr sets.

Worthless otherwise.

A perfect sink for kharma would be an “Armor skin closet” of sorts. Once you acquire a skin (after equipping it), seemlessly and without the player knowing that skin gets saved in a “closet” where you can go to, spend kharma to take a copy of that skin out and use it to transmog your gear.

This is a really good idea. Have you posted it in the Suggestions forum?

Torch isn’t bad at all. It’s wonderful for what it offers: dependable burning, dependable condition removal, and a good spike. It works well with Radiance/Condition builds, has something to offer every one-handed weapon, and is a classic favorite in a sword/torch Meditations spike build (which, admittedly, I don’t see as often these days).

If Torch gets a bad rap, it’s because we as players often fall into the trap of absolutism. I.E, if it isn’t the best, it’s garbage. So the argument goes that you should never use Torch if you have the option to use Focus. However, Focus doesn’t spread Burning as dependably as Torch; Blind isn’t useful against Champions; Torch arguably offers superior condition removal as well, and synergizes better with the Radiance line. Weapon Swaps also ensure that we’re never stuck with just one weapon.

The Torch is a solid, dependable weapon if you want damage, burning and condition removal. It does take a little finessing with positioning, though.

There is no Holy Trinity; however, there is no system in place to replace the Holy Trinity either. Guild Wars 2 broke down the old familiar trinity system and introduced in its place a role-agnostic system that depends on individual performance rather than clearly defined builds.

I’d argue one of the weaknesses of Guild Wars 2 is the absence of a robust metagame. PvE tends to be a hectic free-for-all with every player responsible for keeping themselves alive. Teamwork doesn’t happen through roles but by coordination (picking up Downed allies) or navigating terrain (kiting, using environmental weapons). Consequently our builds don’t provide us with clearly defined roles, and therefore we don’t come up with a new lexicon. And therefore we’re back to using outdated, inaccurate—but familiar—terms like DPS, Tank and Support.

Language emerges out of necessity and develops organically. As long as we have no roles to define, then we won’t invent new definitions.

(PVP is a pretty good example of this phenomenon. We needed a way to define highly defensive attrition builds, so we have “Bunker”. And we needed a way to describe fragile brinksmanship builds that depend on dealing a huge amount of damage before dying, and so we have “Glass Cannon”.)

I think paying for their waypoint fee is a very classy thing to do. Just be discreet about it so it doesn’t feel patronizing. A quick “Thank you for helping me out; the waypoint fee is on me” note will probably strike the right chord with the right kind of people.

That’s some subtle satire. Well done.

Limited, at best. Most of our ranged options exist to facilitate closing distance. Even if you build for range, the best you’ll get is midrange (400-900) with a Staff, Scepter, Consecrations and Virtues build. And even then, you’ll need to be pretty mobile.

Hey GraynX,

Unless you’re strapped for cash and the Skybringer is selling well, I’d hang on to it. There’s a possibility ANet will talk about relative stat value in a coming update, because I can’t possibly imagine they intend all Guardians to sit in Knights+Valkyrie’s, if not full Berserker’s. So a future update may make the greatsword more useful than it is now.

This is assuming you’re attached to the sword and want a good excuse to use it. If that’s not the case, and it’s selling well, may as well rake in a fistful of gold.

Use both, switch appropriately. There will be times where having a mace in your mainhand will make all the difference, and times when you’ll want the mobility and blind of Sword.

This topic is a correllary to this topic. Just to be clear, I’m not trying to undermine jamasont’s discussion, but his topic made me wonder about the timeline of MMORPGs. If you’re like me and your introduction to gaming coincided with an introduction to MMORPGs, then you probably grew up with the genre. The genre has a history, with ups and downs, and new games building on the successes and failures of the last.

With that in mind, what are, in your opinion, some of the best individual design decisions implemented into an MMORPG?

(Please, please, for the love of Dwayna, do not turn this into another angry litany to ArenaNet’s betrayal of the Manifesto.)

Here’s my list.

• City of Heroes: Mission Architect

CoH was, and will remain well after its execution date of Nov. 30th, one of the few MMORPGs that tapped into its players creativity and provided them with all the right tools to express themselves. Mission Architect went one step further, and allowed players to create their own in-game missions. It had problems, sure, like every risky decision. For the first few months, players did nothing but powerlevel in Farming missions, but Paragon was pretty aggressive about shutting these down. Mission Architect became its own subculture in the community. The best mission stories received awards from the developers, and Paragon Studios hired at least one designer specifically because of his Architect Mission.

• World of Warcraft – Cross Server Dungeon Finder

One of the very few design decisions met with widespread applause from the WoW playerbase. Cross-server dungeons did have some downsides, such as the further dilution of server identity and a feeling of community, but it was a practical and elegant solution to the otherwise impassable gap between casual and hardcore players in experiencing dungeons. Cross-server dungeons made dungeons frequently available to nearly everyone, dramatically improved accessibility and opened up five-man dungeons to millions of players who would be otherwise excluded owing to server population, guild size or free time.

• Warhammer Online – Public Quests

Warhammer didn’t survive long, but its system of Public Quests intrigued developers enough to imprint itself into future MMORPG design. Champions Online unabashedly swiped the Public Quest system in order to give its world a little more life, a move later adopted by City of Heroes. Even GW2’s Dynamic Event system draws heavily from the design principles of Warhammer’s PQ’s.

Public Quests, in theory, encouraged group play while simultaneously giving a sense of dynamism to an otherwise static world. Events would pop up around the world, and you’d be rewarded in proportion to your participation with your allies. The concept challenged the old Questgiver content system and I’d like to believe that, in the future, we’ll see more dynamic, open world quests rather than static interactions with individual questgivers.

• Star Wars: The Old Republic – Personal Stories

Say what you will about ToR. It’s hard to argue that it forced a debate on the role of narrative and storytelling in MMORPGs. Stories were usually considered the purview of single-player RPGs, not MMOs. Quest texts were superfluous bits of lore you skipped. It didn’t matter why you had to collect 10 bear pelts; you needed the XP to level. ToR challenged that, for better or worse, and made a solid case in favor of narrative, personal stories and characters in whom their players could invest genuine emotion.

It’s a discussion for another topic on another day, but I firmly believe that storytelling is absolutely central to a good MMORPG. We just haven’t figured out quite how to do it yet, but I imagine that when we do, it’s going to be a mix of the branching arborescent dialogue model of The Old Republic, and the more organic emergent storytelling of EvE.

Is this a serious thread chronicling some missteps and controversial decisions in the history of MMO design, or another thread decrying Ascended gear as the ruin of GW2? Assuming it’s the former, here is my list:

• World of Warcraft (vanilla) introducing the original Honor system. PVP was originally limited to the open world, and offered no rewards other than enjoyment. The Honor system not only introduced a system of top-tier rewards for World PVP, but made these rewards competitive, meaning you had to out-kill every other player in your faction in order to earn rank, and therefore gear. And you had to keep that gear.

The Honor system drove off a lot of players and killed the subculture of World PVP, replacing it with a gear grind of the worst kind. The competitive nature of the system ensured massive factional imbalances (the Alliance would almost always have a huge numerical advantage) and disproportionate rewards for players with far too much free time. It turned Tarren Mill/Southshore into a nearly inaccessible area, and led directly to the development of Battlegrounds and over four years of struggle trying to manage and balance PVP.

• Champions Online Day 1 Patch. CO generated a significant degree of hype. It was Cryptic Studio’s next, revised shot at a comprehensive superhero MMORPG after Paragon took up City of Heroes; CO attempted to be everything City of Heroes should have been. However, an early release coupled with serious balance, performance and design issues culminated in a massive Day 1 patch that retuned the game across the board.

CO has since bounced back. Or climbed back, rather. It took some time, but they’ve carved a solid niche for themselves with an innovative combat system and lovely design. They’ve been doing well and I’m happy for them. But I have to wonder how things might have been, if there were no Day 1 patch.

• DCUO – Limited Social Systems. DCUO was a wonderful game in so many ways, despite a few missteps: a highly stratified endgame raiding system, for example, and a bug-riddled post release. However, DCUO’s developers publically announced and went forward with a design plan that specifically limited social options. Owing partly to a PS3 release, chat was highly limited, and it was nearly impossible to find a group, join a guild or even emote.

DCUO vastly underestimated the importance of social options in an MMORPG—and this is coming from a player who passionately argues that one of the strongest qualities of City of Heroes was its robust social options. Consequently, the game was never able to fully capitalize on word-of-mouth hype and never facilitated the creation of a cohesive community. The game went free to play within months, and Sony Online cut half its staff.

And special mention of…

• World of Warcraft – Real Name Fiasco. This happened a few years ago alongside the introduction of the new Battle.net. WoW was on the verge of rolling out a new Real Name system, which would require everyone who posts on the forums to use their real names. The outcry was loud, angry and universal. Within a few days, Blizzard capitulated, issued an apology by e-mail and rolled back their decision.

It would’ve been arguably one of the biggest blunders, but it never actually happened.

Okay. I’ll play:

Guardian – Longbow
Warrior – Pistol Offhand
Engineer – Hammer
Ranger – Rifle
Thief – Axe
Necromancer – Mace
Elementalist – Sword
Mesmer – Dagger

arabeth.2361:

Serious question: why do mainstream companies like Anet use Reddit to answer questions like this, when Reddit is most famous for being a site that people use to post creepy pictures of underage girls? Also: it’s a horrible site for organizing any kind of information. It seems like the sketchy nature and poor structure of the site would be a terrible match.

The President used Reddit for an AMA not long ago. Take that as you will.

Orwell said that the problem with a cliche isn’t that it’s popular or overused; the problem with a cliche is that it does the thinking for you. You spit out a cliche when you don’t know what else to say, and when you aren’t being critical.

For the last two weeks, this forums has been caught in a series of circular arguments that lead nowhere and conclude nothing, and as a community we’re nowhere close to a clearer understanding of this issue than we were on the 15th. I suspect the argument will ultimately die out through attrition, but that’s beside the point.

The point is we’re arguing about the grind, the treadmill, vertical and horizontal progression without actually knowing what these terms mean. This is like trying to have a political discussion over the course of two weeks with several hundreds of participants, none of whom have the same definition on what “socialism” or “deficit” or “entitlement” or “mandate” actually mean.

The OP wants to have a discussion about the discussion itself—a kind of meta-argument. Okay, but if we’re doing that, then we need to talk about this problem of cliches. We haven’t been able to have a cohesive and productive debate over the issue of Ascended Gear and its place in Guild Wars 2 because we don’t agree on the necessary terms which we’re arguing about.

What’s a grind? Some of us have argued that any boring, repetitive activity is a grind, like the “grind” to level 80. Or the “grind” for getting a Legendary. Or the dungeon grind for new skins. The Manifesto defines the “grind” in terms of raiding—or the gear grind, in which every new tier of gear forces you to constantly grind out more dungeons, more gear and invest more hours doing the same thing just to keep up.

But that’s actually the definition of a “treadmill.” A treadmill never ends, and it functions by giving you the illusion of progress without actually advancing you another inch. You work because you’re forced to; stop walking and you’ll be thrown off. So the gear treadmill is a design concept in which the game introduces new tiers of gear as soon as you finish the last one, which leads to a neverending grind (there’s that word again) on a road that never ends (a treadmill) for a reward you’ll never get (a carrot).

Which is yet another term we can’t seem to clearly define. Personally I think a carrot is a long, orange taproot of the Apiaecae family, which goes well on salads when grated—but that’s neither here or there. The etymology of the MMO cliche “carrot” comes from the image of a carrot-on-a-stick. The story goes that if you want to a mule to pull your cart, you hang a carrot from a stick in front of its eyes, and it’s going to chase it forever. So a carrot is a goal you can never reach, which appeals to your basic lust for progress. But we’ve also been using the “carrot” to mean “any goal at all.”

TLDR Version

We’ve been having a debate over the Manifesto and whether ArenaNet broke its word by introducing a grind at endgame. Is the Ascended Gear a viable carrot for casuals and hardcore players alike? Do all MMOs need to have a treadmill in order to be successful? Does Ascended gear count as vertical progression if it’s just there to bridge the legendary gap? And how fun was grinding for skins anyway, if that’s what horizontal progression means? Is this the fault of locusts or fanbois?

^

The above is a summary of the arguments we’ve been having for two weeks now. I’ve italicized every term for which we have absolutely no clear definition.

I don’t know how we’re supposed to have a constructive debate like this.

I’m actually pretty happy with the way Guardians are right now. The few things that do annoy me are: Zeal’s Grandmaster Traits, both of which are very difficult to justify. Scepter, which really needs something. Attack chain, faster projectile speed, but something. I have some issues with a few of our Utilities having punitive cooldowns the length of which far exceed their relative value (Signet of Mercy, for example), but that is neither here nor there.

Sorry guys, you are indeed a vocal minority.

What’s wrong with being a vocal minority? The problem with this line of thinking is that it implies the only legitimate problems are the ones that upset a majority, and as long as there are still people in Lion’s Arch looking for a group, everything’s fine.

In order for players to leave every server en masse in waves large enough to leave ghost towns behind, ANet would have to implement something absolutely catastrophic. I don’t know if there’s ever been an MMORPG in recent memory that lost massive numbers across the board in a two week window.

The indignation on the forums doesn’t have to spill over into Lion’s Arch mapchat. Players don’t have to leave in numbers so massive that you can’t find a group.

If even one in twenty players puts their money where their mouths are and either leaves the game or stops spending money in the Black Lion Store, ANet will notice. Because that constitutes a pretty severe blowback. You won’t notice, because the game will still be populated and groups will still be plentiful.

No one needs to be part of a majority. Being a statistically significant minority is enough. (In fact, if that minority ever becomes a majority, then it’s far too late already.)

CureForLiving.5360:

Crazylegsmurphy.6430:

This is a very important point because using that argument is actually nothing more than an ad hom attack.

Actually no, you’re mixing up your fallacies, technically it’s argumentum ad populum. Ad hom would be saying you’re stupid and thus your argument is wrong. An appeal to the majority is when you argue that 1 million people can’t be wrong, or that the minority must be wrong because they do not agree with the majority. Although I guess you could twist argumentum ad verecundiam in order to support the opinions of the minority while negating the opinions of the majority.

But point taken none-the-less.

Yeah, “Vocal Minority/Silent Majority” is basically a variation on argumentum ad populum. “I’m right because I have more people on my side.”

It’s also a False Dichotomy, because it takes complex controversies with a complex range of responses and divides them into neat little “For” or “Against” piles.

It also misses the point. Minorities matter in this community, vocal or otherwise. Pretend you have some reliable means of polling, and you discover that 75% of players are in favor of or neutral toward a design decision, while 25% of players are against it.

25% is a pretty obvious minority, but what if those 25% play less and spend less and participate less? Suddenly the minority matters. And it doesn’t even have to be 25%. If even 1 in 25 players stop playing for a few months because of a certain design decision, that’s a pretty massive loss.

This happened in Cryptic-era City of Heroes too. They implemented the massively unpopular Enhancement Diversification system. The forums exploded with outrage. A lot of players critics as a “vocal minority,” but they left. Not nearly enough for a majority, but easily enough to cause a very visible dent in subscribers, which Cryptic didn’t recover for a while. Paragon developer BackAlleyBrawler talked about the phenomenon a few years ago.

Minorities matter more than we think.

Robbyx.1284:

Respect is earned, not given…they completely misled their customers, and their apparent lack of concern over players real concerns isnt helping….they deserve neither my respect nor my money.

See, I don’t see it that way. To me, respect is never something you have to earn; it’s something given by default, unless you prove you’re not worth it.

I’m very close to a few people in the game design industry, so I have a lot of sympathy for developers. All too often the decisions of upper management or publishers force their hands. Developers are usually not too different from us; they’re passionate gamers who happen to have transformed their passion into a profession, and they’re usually pretty good at it.

I have a lot of respect for GW2’s development team, based on what I’ve seen, read or personally experienced. I think we can criticize the Ascended armor decision without slipping down the path of ad hominem.

Leonard.2867:

Say what? What exactly are you trying to say here?

TLDR: It’s pointless to count the number of posts in a given thread and try to draw a meaningful ratio between that and the number of players in the game. So saying things like, “Well, there were 11,000 posts in that thread and 2 million players in game, so that’s a pretty insignificant portion.”

Instead its more valuable to look at the forum as a subcommunity in and of itself, in which case the huge Ascended Gear thread is the biggest argument in the history of this community. Then the question you’re asking is: How accurate a bellwether is the forum community in reflecting the attitude of the game communtiy?

Finally, it’s important to remember that you don’t need a majority opinion to make a difference. It’s not like you need 51% of in-game players to be upset over this for Ascended gear to matter.

If even 1 in 20 players were upset enough that they’d spend less money on the store or log in less often, that’s a noticeable repercussion and ANet’s internal metrics will pick it up.

If I’m rambling, I’m really sorry. I have a habit of doing that and I’m working on it. I also haven’t had much sleep lately.

I think the argument over GW1’s designation as an MMO or CORPG is interesting from a semantic or taxonomic point of view, but not very useful in the practical sense. Fundamentally these arguments hinge on matters of definition, and definitions in game design are by their nature subject to constant change. Arguably the term “MMORPG” itself is more significant for its connotations (a big persistent world, probably painted with WoW’s brush in one way or another, usually with some kind of subscription, usually with some kind of progression system) rather than its stricter denotation (a roleplaying game with a large, persistent world inhabited by a virtual community).

@OP, your argument is intelligent and nuanced, and I’m not trying to dismiss it. Clear definitions are essential to clear arguments. But I think your argument isn’t really about whether or not GW1 is an MMORPG; it’s about whether or not we should dismiss GW1’s ideas because of how we choose to label the game.

This is the elephant in the room that everyone seems to be ignoring. It’s not that GW1 is or isn’t a CORPG or an MMORPG. That distinction is predicated on GW1’s omission from most discussions on MMORPGs. We have a habit of conveniently leaving Guild Wars 1 out of the picture whenever we discuss the genre, as if Guild Wars 1 were a bizarre fluke or some kind of half-breed hybrid and therefore excluded from the discourse. Like Guild Wars 1 is the Third Party that never gets a seat on the debating table.

Guild Wars 1 is an outlier—it is a rare breed of MMORPG that shamelessly undermines nearly every conventional mechanic and design trope endemic to the genre: subscription costs, open worlds, high level caps, loot progressions, rigid class definitions, gear-driven PVP. And precisely because it’s so weird, so different, so obviously an outlier, the game becomes conveniently (and tragically, and erroneously) excluded from serious discussions about the future of the MMORPG.

If we’re going to have a serious discussion about what an MMORPG should and should not be, then logically speaking, we’re doing ourselves a disservice by limiting our discussion to MMORPGs which neatly conform to the mold of World of Warcraft. We should be at least entertaining the idea that every other game is doing it wrong, and Guild Wars 1 is doing it right, at least for the sake of argument.

So, OP: I think your argument is well presented and your points well taken. However, I think that fundamentally an argument over semantics (Is this game an MMORPG or not?) may be fascinating in an abstract way, but misses the point, which is: Why are we dismissing GW1’s design whenever we talk about MMORPGs? Even if it isn’t an MMORPG—who cares? This is a successful, seven year old game that doesn’t look at all dated, successfully implemented some wildly original game mechanics, bucked MMORPG conventions (to be fair—before they became conventions) and somehow avoided a subscription cost.

Any game designer worth their salt should be interest in considering the merits of Guild Wars 1, regardless of how we define its genre/subgenre, when imagining what the MMORPG of tomorrow will look like.

That discussion certainly starts with an argument over taxonomy, but should never end there.

Counting forum posts/unique views and comparing that total to the player population isn’t really a statistically viable or useful way to measure player discontent. Not only is the ratio inaccurate at best, but you’re ignoring a crucial point: the forums are a subcommunity of the game. It’s impossible to know how many players join the forum for the first time in order to voice their discontent, but it is fair to say that there’s a reasonable core of forum readers who drop by at least regularly enough to have some vested interest in the forum.

Therefore the question isn’t “How many people in the forum are complaining about this change, vs. how many people are actually playing the game?” The question is: How reliable a bellwether is the forum for predicting player attitudes?

Probably not terribly reliable, but also not insignificant. If an issue is fiercely contested on the forums over many, many days of angry debate, then chances are, it’s a matter of at least some concern to a significant portion of the playerbase.

Then the question becomes: What constitutes “significant?” In this case I think arguing that ‘significant’ necessitates ‘majority’ is specious reasoning. Even if 1 out of 20 players is upset enough at this change to discourage them from spending quite as much money on the Black Lion store, or discourage them from logging in as often, then that is a significant repercussion, the effects of which will probably be noticed by ANet’s internal logistics.

When City of Heroes implemented “Enhancement Diversification,” the forum exploded with outrage. Some players left—not nearly enough to constitute a majority, but a significant enough portion to cause a noticeable dent in activity. Developers talked about this phenomenon (BackAlleyBrawler in particular) years later.

Hmmm…analogies, analogies…

Okay, sure. I’ll play:

Let’s say a candidate runs for office and campaigns on big promises, shares a powerful vision of a different future, gets elected by an enthusiastic voter base, and then three months following inauguration, goes back against one of his/her core promises.

Former supporters flip tables. Press secretary insists it’s for pragmatic/practical purposes. Loyalists start doling out the entitlement rhetoric. Days go by with no further dialogue and the situation becomes an impasse. Meanwhile the administration is bunkering down and hoping it’ll blow over, while a grumbling core of players air their discontent all over social media.

How close was I?

Daddicus.6128:

If you write trash posts here or use this as a sounding board for any real or imagined slights by others or the game, I will ignore you. Unless you keep doing it, in which I will report you.

I’m not trying to be funny: What is ascended gear, and why is there a big bruahaha about it?

All I want is simple technical answers. I previously asked what was “max armor” and “max weapons”. I was directed to some guys selling stuff in the south-central area of Lion’s Arch. Well, that was incorrect, because I’m wearing armor that’s better than what they sold. So, my question has returned.

What is “max” armor? Where do you get it, and how?

Ascended Gear is a new tier of gear introduced in the recent Lost Shores patch. It is statistically superior to Exotic gear and statistically equivalent to Legendary gear, but easier to acquire. Ascended gear is available primarily through the new dungeon, “Fractals of the Mist,” and facilitates progressively deeper exploration of this dungeon. Linsey Murdock’s blog, available here, describes Ascended gear in more detail.

The controversy surrounding Ascended gear is complicated, and in order to understand it, it’s important to understand the ArenaNet Manifesto and what it means to some players. The Manifesto is a mission statement which describes a game that eschews the traditional gear grind and distinguishes rare gear not by stronger stats but by rarer and more impressive appearances. Opponents of Ascended gear argue that adding a new gear violates the principle of Horizontal Progression, in which newly introduced gear is statistically equivalent to the best gear in the game, but differs in appearance or rarity. They believe that violating the Manifesto damages ArenaNet’s credibility, and violates the trust players have cultivated with the company. Many players also believe that introducing new game mechanics that go against the company’s mission statement constitutes false advertising.

ArenaNet maintains that Ascended Gear does not introduce a gear treadmill, but instead serves as a bridge in the gap between Exotic and Legendary gear, in which Exotic gear was relatively easy to acquire, but Legendary gear was incredibly time consuming. The Ascended Gear tier was therefore introduced to give players something to pursue without hitting what ArenaNet calls the “Legendary Wall”—or an abrupt and prohibitively steep cost in the next “tier” of gear.

Critics of Chris Whiteside’s response point out that a bridge between Exotic and Legendary gear need not have necessitated a new tier of stats as, previously, Legendary gear and Exotic gear shared the same stats. ArenaNet has not commented with any new information since Mr. Whiteside’s response, and therefore the dialogue has come to an impasse.

That’s a basic summary of the core of the controversy, from my POV. I tried to be pretty objective about it. Let me know if I missed anything important.

If there’s anything I’ve learned from this debacle, it’s this: Don’t put your faith in Manifestos. Don’t put your faith in the things a developer says or the hype a community generates.

No matter how noble or sincere a developer’s intentions, everything they release to the public is subject to often unforgiving realities of the post-release development cycle, which often demands concession to publisher demands over the passions of the developers, and often requires compromise for the sake of pragmatism over dogged allegiance to creative vision.

It’s the nature of the business.

Don’t put your faith in manifestos or visions or developer diaries; Don’t follow uncritically the excitement generated by an excitable online community. Words are cheap; judge a game by what it actually delivers.

Expect great design from your developers; expect innovation and expect progress, and expect them to take risks. But honestly, for Dwayna’s sake, don’t expect them to keep promises. You’re going to end up burned, and frustrated for days, and that doesn’t help anyone.

I’m not saying this to rain on anyone’s parade or stamp out anyone’s enthusiasm or encourage pessimism, but as a cautionary lesson. Controversial decisions like the Ascended gear debacle will happen again, and they will happen in Guild Wars 2, and in Neverwinter Online, and in Elder Scrolls Online, and in every MMO ever. Once you make peace with that inevitability, it becomes a lot easier to stay passionate about the MMORPG genre and stay even-handed when things get ugly. Otherwise, you’ll just end up feeling betrayed, and then bitter, and then scornful, and then turn your back on the genre entirely and I don’t think anybody wants that.

OP’s right. We should move on.

I still really love the game. I don’t think my criticism of recent developments precludes my enthusiasm for the game, but rather reflects it. =)

At first I was pleasantly surprised to find this survey in my inbox, and then baffled to realize it was entirely about the One Time Event, and didn’t mention Ascended armor at all.

I used the Other spaces to make my opinion known. This is a pretty good way to get your voice out.

dalendria.3762:

Eveningstar.6940:

Raine.1394:

I would really like a non-PR recounting of the thought process that led to this.

In short: They honestly thought a tier was missing from the game. They honestly thought it wouldn’t be a big deal if they added a new one with a modest stat upgrade to bridge a rarity gap. They honestly thought Ascended gear is something that could benefit the game in the long run, which wouldn’t alienate casual players but would also appeal to hardcore players, which wouldn’t result in a grind but would create a sense of progression.

They just didn’t anticipate such a massive outcry. And now that it’s happening, there’s nothing they can say that won’t lead to yet -another- outcry because their credibility is shot.

(P.S: This is roughly more or less what happened with LOTRO and Radiance. The Devs wanted to be bold and honestly had good intentions with it. They tried hard to sell it despite outrage. It didn’t work. So there is precedence for this kind of thing.)

You may be right.

But that means they also did not understand their core customer base and the reason people bought their product. They never advertised this game as similar to the WOW or gear stat progression model. In fact, their marketing even said if “you hate MMOs” give us a try.

I agree. The simplest explanation is that they’re being honest about why they implemented Ascended armor and that they really do think it’s a good idea for the game. But this explanation is predicated on a failure to anticipate the backlash owing to a failure to properly appreciate their demographic.

In other words, the simplest explanation also strongly suggests that, for them, the Manifesto is actually pretty flexible, more a combination of PR spin and genuine idealism. They probably just didn’t expect so many players to feel as strongly about the principle of “no more gear progression after Exotic.”

(Conversely, it’s arguable that they did anticipate the backlash but believed the trade-off worth it in the end. A calculated risk seems like a sinister motivation, and I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt on this.)

For my own curiosity, could you explain what you mean by Bioware’s PR nightmare? I regretfully admit ToR is probably the one major MMO title released in the last six years that I haven’t played at all, so I have no real experience here.

Raine.1394:

I would really like a non-PR recounting of the thought process that led to this.

I can give you my best guess, but I don’t know how much that’s worth without solid evidence. The justification for Ascended armor is to bridge the reward gap between Exotic and Legendary—one is relatively easy to get; the other is going to take months.

I’m going to give them the benefit of the doubt and assume they’re telling the truth. That’s probably why they added Ascended in the first place. So why did they make Ascended armor one tier higher? This time I’m just deferring to Occam’s Razor; the simplest explanation is most probably the correct one, and to me the simplest explanation is this:

They just didn’t think it was a big deal to add another item tier—one they felt was missing from the game. They felt that a relatively small stat bump would deflect fears of introducing a gear grind, and just did not anticipate as large and angry a response as they got.

Of course this explanation assumes that the Manifesto was never a sacred document but more of a combination of vision and PR spin. ANet always intended to take the pragmatic route and design a game that’s supposed to be inclusive and fun for everyone, casual and hardcore alike. Therefore the inclusion of Ascended gear is actually consistent with the overall design of the game, but not the Manifesto.

In short: They honestly thought a tier was missing from the game. They honestly thought it wouldn’t be a big deal if they added a new one with a modest stat upgrade to bridge a rarity gap. They honestly thought Ascended gear is something that could benefit the game in the long run, which wouldn’t alienate casual players but would also appeal to hardcore players, which wouldn’t result in a grind but would create a sense of progression.

They just didn’t anticipate such a massive outcry. And now that it’s happening, there’s nothing they can say that won’t lead to yet -another- outcry because their credibility is shot.

The Manifesto is idealistic, but ANet is being pragmatic. They did what they did with perfectly good intentions, and did not anticipate the response they got.

No conspiracy theories. No Under New Management interpretations. No Nexon Overlords. This is my sincere and honest guess at what happened behind the scenes, just based on what little evidence and patterns I can discern.

(P.S: This is roughly more or less what happened with LOTRO and Radiance. The Devs wanted to be bold and honestly had good intentions with it. They tried hard to sell it despite outrage. It didn’t work. So there is precedence for this kind of thing.)

Xandax.1753:

Eveningstar.6940:

<snip>
Yeah, I agree. And you know, people aren’t really talking about this much but…

…this degree of constant negativity on the forums will, over the long term, have very real and tangible effects in shaping the identity of the forum community. The more consistently hostile a forum, the more likely we are to drive away sensible people who might have something very cool or imaginative or intelligent to share with us, but end up thinking, “Wow, look at these guys. They’d rip me apart. I’d rather not waste my time here.”

Consequently forums which stay ugly for a while tend to spiral, because they either drive away readership and discourage contributions or sort of become cannibalistic where just a small, angry core of perpetually dissatisfied players (or ex-players) who chase each other in circles over the same arguments over who’s ruining the game and why.

I’m not trying to be dramatic. I love forum communities and I’ve been part of at least a dozen major MMO communities over the last decade. This sort of situation can end up defining the tenor of a forum.

:(

If you’ve been part of a dozen major MMO communities, you’d also know that the situations on the forums were shaped by the state of the games.

Absolutely, but that doesn’t keep me from saying that the situation of the forum is regrettable. Yeah, it’s on ANet in the sense that only ANet has the ability to be the mediator here, step in and get an honest dialogue going about why people are upset, whether it matters to them and what, if anything, is going to be done about it. Until then, the forums are probably going to stay unproductive and hostile for a while because we have no closure.

That goes without saying. The only thing I’m saying, though, is that if that doesn’t happen, and we don’t get some kind of decisive closure to the issue before long, the attitude and tenor of the forums could change permanently. We could go from a rare MMO forum that’s largely characterized by friendliness and civility to yet another toxic community full of anger and divisiveness.

My point is, I don’t think anyone wants that. It’d damage the community in the long run (I honestly do think forums are more important to the health of an MMO community than we give them credit) in ways we aren’t really anticipating.

Maz.8604:

Eveningstar.6940:

Guys, the OP isn’t exactly complaining about the game or recent changes, but expressing regret over the dramatic change in attitude in the General Forums over the last weekend.

He has a credible point. Whatever you might think about Ascended armor, the forums have been objectively nastier and more hostile lately, much more argumentative and far less constructive.

The OP is talking about how the forum community went from relatively civil to almost exclusively flooded with a front page of angry, baffled or hostile threads. Frankly I agree. It’s depressing.

That’s ultimately on Anet’s head. They are allowing speculation and debate to rule the forums. Their only communications have been largely unsatisfying and their community moderation is as draconian as SWTOR was back when I quit it in March.

Since Whiteside’s post, only Mcleod has replied and his words are summed thusly:

We don’t want to encourage exclusion based on gear, but we have no way of controlling how players react to content.

We won’t tell you why Ascended and Infusions raises the ceiling on max stats, but here, let me point you to Chris Whiteside’s post about the “no treadmill.”

Unsatisfying responses, leaving the community to duke it out amonst themselves.

I know, and I definitely see where you’re coming from. I want to make it clear that I’m not ascribing blame or pointing fingers on the source of all this negativity, just thinking about the long-term effects of having such a hostile forum at all.

I think it’s fair to say that it would be in everyone’s best interest if we somehow managed to calm things down, one way or another, with either the players who are dissatisfied coming to terms with the way things are and moving on, or ArenaNet opening up dialogue that ends up placating a lot of our concerns.

One way or another, having a hostile forum community sucks. I think we can all agree on that. Most of us anyway.

Shifu.4321:

The pre Lost Shores forums was pretty much civil. You had a few dissenters complaining about bugs, lack of content, missing trinity etc., but they were probably like 10% of the actual threads. All in all, pretty much a normal – even one of the better- game forums around.

The forums now reminds me of the scorched earth wasteland that the Diablo 3 and TOR forums became a few months after launch. Whoever is reading these forums must have a pretty negative picture from all the threads. Not certain if anet anticipated THIS much of a backlash (I’m sure they anticipated some).

Yeah, I agree. And you know, people aren’t really talking about this much but…

…this degree of constant negativity on the forums will, over the long term, have very real and tangible effects in shaping the identity of the forum community. The more consistently hostile a forum, the more likely we are to drive away sensible people who might have something very cool or imaginative or intelligent to share with us, but end up thinking, “Wow, look at these guys. They’d rip me apart. I’d rather not waste my time here.”

Consequently forums which stay ugly for a while tend to spiral, because they either drive away readership and discourage contributions or sort of become cannibalistic where just a small, angry core of perpetually dissatisfied players (or ex-players) who chase each other in circles over the same arguments over who’s ruining the game and why.

I’m not trying to be dramatic. I love forum communities and I’ve been part of at least a dozen major MMO communities over the last decade. This sort of situation can end up defining the tenor of a forum.

:(

Guys, the OP isn’t exactly complaining about the game or recent changes, but expressing regret over the dramatic change in attitude in the General Forums over the last weekend.

He has a credible point. Whatever you might think about Ascended armor, the forums have been objectively nastier and more hostile lately, much more argumentative and far less constructive.

The OP is talking about how the forum community went from relatively civil to almost exclusively flooded with a front page of angry, baffled or hostile threads. Frankly I agree. It’s depressing.

Okay so imagine that GW2’s dungeons were tuned so that you absolutely REQUIRED certain builds/abilities to complete them. I can see a lot of bad things resulting from this.

The easy fix to this is to allow every profession to have access to several boons/conditions/effects, along with the ability to swap between them on the fly.

The great news is this system is already in place. We can swap traits on the fly—we just don’t have a reason to yet. We can swap Utilities on the fly, and we should, but most of us don’t because it doesn’t help as much in the long run.

It’s so easy to avoid a situation where people are asking for, for example “Stability Guardian” because there’s no exclusivity for Stability and no exclusivity for Guardian. If you open up tactics for every profession, then theoretically, you don’t have an exclusionary PVE system where thieves and mesmers are being dropped from groups for guardians and warriors.

The great part is that the framework for such a system already exists. We already have a situation where nearly every profession can perform a necessary tactic. Everyone can spec for stability if they need to, usually on the fly and without respec costs. Everyone can inflict conditions and remove conditions.

We already have that system. We just need to improve it and make better use of it.

Finally, I don’t really see why you guys are convinced that making skills and builds sine qua non if objectively “better” than the way it is. I really think it’s just a personal preference.

Because builds should matter, and builds mattering doesn’t make the game worse for anyone else. This isn’t really a matter of personal preference, unless you actually prefer going through the trouble of making a build in PVE but having the strengths of that build rendered largely inconsequential by encounter designs that emphasize environmental awareness and dodging.

And even if that were the case, the environmental awareness + dodging would still remain an absolutely crucial part of the game. Coordination wouldn’t disappear. It wouldn’t fundamentally change. It would just became deeper, more varied, with more room for interesting tactics.

Finally, it shouldn’t be necessary to point out that I must have a personal preference in order to make an argument. I have to believe in a change that’s good for the game, and I have to believe in it strongly enough to try to convince you of it.

If all we’re going to do is walk past each other at arm’s length, behind a rhetorical shield of “Well, that’s just YOUR personal preference,” then why have a debate at all? Of course it’s my personal preference. I think it’s a good one and I’d like to convince you to see it my way through reason and discussion. And if I can’t convince you, then I respect our differences nonetheless.

@Creslin,

I’ll give you Reflection, Condition Removal and Stability. I mentioned Kohler in my first post actually, but it’s true—Stability really does trivialize that fight. I found this out when I decided to equip Stand Your Ground.

Kohler is an example of a fight done right. You need to be on the ball with rez, positioning and dodging, but you also need to time your utilities right, and you need to pick the right utilities for the fight.

It’s not that your skills make categorically no difference in fights across the board. It’s that your skills, your profession and therefore your build make consistently less of a difference in a fight than dodging and environmental awareness.

The result is disheartening, because all the toil you put in to fine-tuning a build really doesn’t mean anything. As a Guardian, I can be Spirit Weapons, Altruistic Healing, Pure of Voice, Deep Virtues, whatever. But fundamentally, my choice of build, my choice of weapon, my choice of utilities don’t make nearly as much of a difference in a fight compared to whether or not I dodged telegraphed attacks or ran out of red circles.

And that’s the problem. Dungeons are overtuned toward coordination via environment, dodging and spatial awareness, and far undertuned for profession/build/skill synergy.

When a game overemphasizes dodging and spatial awareness, and underemphasizes build diversity, and doesn’t reward timely use of utilities, you end up with a shallow combat system rather than a deep, tactically rich combat system.

Consequently we have a glass ceiling on player skill that’s about as pernicious as the old tank and spank model (in which your abilities/build didn’t matter so much because there was always one perfect build and one perfect rotation.)

We don’t have to go back to the tank/spank model. GW1 had a system where (with some notable exceptions) your build mattered and most professions could swap builds on the fly, and your role wasn’t pigeonholed into healer/dps/tank. City of Heroes had a system where a team of eight of any given profession could clear any given content; they’d just do it differently. Even Champions Online emphasized build diversity by rewarding builds that were balanced, with damage abilities on top of control and survivability.

It can be done. GW2 can do better. The combat system has amazing potential, but overdependence on dodging, environmental awareness and profession-agnostic tactics leads to a shallow system.

So yeah, I’m sorry…dungeons in GW2 require way, way, WAY more teamwork than most other MMORPGs I’ve played. In other MMORPGs, it is typically one dude tanks, one heals, the others kill…and that’s it. Sure, it’s teamwork, but once you know your role you don’t even have to talk with the team at all to make things happen.

It’s not that GW2 doesn’t require teamwork and coordination. Of course dungeons do. Coordination is the basis on which dungeons are tuned.

It’s that the way you coordinate and the way you work together as a team depends less on your skills and more on the way you negotiate the environment.

The Lovers in AC requires teamwork, yeah, but the CC comes from boulders, not from your own build or your own skills.

The Graveling traps in AC require good timing with spikes more than anything else. Yes, the bait needs to know how to kite, and area denial/speed boost/teleport skills definitely help, but fundamentally this is an encounter that boils down to spike timing.

The ‘coordination’ element in dungeons doesn’t emphasize your profession or your skills or your build, usually. You’re coordinating through the environment.

This is a double edged sword. On the bright side: your build, profession and skills don’t matter—all you need to do is stick together, know how to rez, run out of red circles, or use the environment. On the down side: your build, profession and skills don’t matter, since all you need to do is stick together, know how to rez, run out of red circles or use the environment.

It’s a bizarre design philosophy which proudly claims that the trinity is dead and class roles are gone—but not because any class can do anything, but because nearly everything you can do within your profession is largely inconsequential.

(To be fair, this isn’t -always- the case. Lieutenant Kohler, for example, is a fight that benefits tremendously from someone who can grant Stability. This is a good example of teamwork where your skills actually matter.)

TLDR: The problem is that teamwork and coordination happens in a way that largely ignores the nuances of your profession. Instead of having a system where the trinity is dead because every character can perform every role, you have a system where the trinity is dead because no character can perform any role.