Showing Posts For Flopjack.5314:
I would have liked to be apart of that design meeting: “Let’s make a spider boss where you have to step on each other in a corner to beat it. Yeah, that’s intuitive.” It’s an exploit, plain and simple. Going toe to toe would be fighting her in the room she spawns in. Not dragging her to a corner where 90% of the damage is lost. You’re not making sense.
You can just run up to her to do the same thing, are you aware of this? Its just more difficult to coordinate puggers to do this in the open.
Then obviously the enemy is broken, but that’s not the point…
AOE attacks are like 90% of her damage. You seriously consider crunching your entire party in an obscure corner to avoid the majority of the damage from a boss not an exploit?
What do you call it when every player gets on top of one another against the early spider area in the Catacombs? I’ve heard that to be called stacking, in which case, it is definitely an exploit.
- Stacking is a combat technique which makes it irrelevant to rest of your points.
- Whilst it’s true that the reward is the main reason making people rush through the dungeon, the quests themself are quite pinpoint. You’re not going in to hack and slash every living or undead being inside, you’re going in with a specific reason, be it sabotaging something or investigating, which are solved through getting X from Y to Z. You don’t need to kill every single guard to sabotage the whole objective, you go for the leader, deciding to kill the henchmen is your personal choice and is rewarded in form of usual loot.
- Creating additional rewards for clear percentage is moving us further from our (sometimes ironic, yet somewhat actual) motto of “play how you want”. Currently clearing the dungeon fast and narrow or poking your head in every single room rewards you the same, outside of the loot, which full clearing would net more. Your way would hurt people playing dungeons current “special ops” style by getting a lesser reward. Which at best leads to even more group separation due to different levels of clearing accepted.
-Stacking as I have seen it is not a “combat technique”, it’s an exploit. It’s one thing to fight close together, it’s another thing to position yourself where enemies deal 0 damage.
-If a dungeon’s objective was stealth, yes. I could see there being legitimate reasons to run past stuff, but 95% of this game is straight up fighting. Other areas besides a straight line were made to be explored, but their rewards are not proportional to the end reward, where the bulk of the reward is.
Guild Wars 2 does not have “special ops”, it’s simply that people figured out quickly that if you run past everything you collect the reward much faster. That’s no fault of the players, that’s a fault in dungeon design.
Do you mean Anet doesn’t test their dungeons or the dungeons aren’t designed to be played? Either way, this is a plea for the sake of good design!
You seriously shouldn’t have mentionned stacking.
If it’s an issue I should mention it!
Have fun clearing all of Arah then… I don’t think there is any amount of reward that would get me to try that.
Actual combat is a separate issue, but yeah.
Dungeons are difficult but yield a high reward. Most of you are no stranger to the common dungeon strategies: ‘stack’ against enemies you must fight or are relatively easy, and then run past everything else.
This creates a disconnect between what a dungeon is on paper and what they are in practice (in GW2). A dungeon is supposed to be an area where you fight monsters and explore for goodies. I believe there are 3 primary reason why players do this (enemy design, armor cost with tokens, and reward allocation), but I’ll only focus on the last one: how the reward is given to you. (The other things warrant other discussions.)
It’s simple. The bulk of the reward is given at the end of dungeon run. This means you try to get there as soon as possible. So, the reward you get at the end of a given dungeon should be tallied up based on the amount of areas looted and enemies slain. Exploring every nook and cranny and killing all the enemies is actually punished in the current design because your reward is only marginally better while those who run get significantly more due to time.
Now some of you are thinking: Well, it would take a lot longer to get stuff from dungeons, which would be true. What should be done? Things you can buy with dungeon tokens should have lower costs if this was put into effect. This kind of change would require other adjustments as well.
What would it look like? Well for example, each veteran, silver, champ, legendary enemy you say gives you a certain amount of tokens and/or coins upon completing the dungeon (perhaps partial rewards are viable upon defeat/party leaving). It wouldn’t be infinite. Discovering a certain place or opening a guarded treasure would reward additional tokens and/or coin. This way, the longer you spend in a dungeon (typically) and the more enemies you slay, the bigger your reward is.
I think you get the idea. The point is to encourage players to actually play the dungeon instead of run past everything! I believe running and stacking, while efficient, are issues with dungeons. The most recently dungeon has various ‘safety measures’ in place so you can’t run the bulk of it. While an improvement, it’s inching towards a dangerous scenario where Anet annoys players with their dungeons trying to make people participate.
tl;dr – Dungeon rewards should be tallied up at the end of the dungeons based on completion and enemies slain because dungeons are being ran, not played.
Thoughts?
I feel in general (there are exceptions), boons and conditions are weak. I would personally like to see both Conditions and Boons stack in duration AND intensity. This would require some balancing and other changes, but it makes them demand your attention combat. I have 5 stacks of Cripple on me? Well crap, I can’t even reach an enemy! I need help removing Cripple! He has 4 stacks of Protection/Aegis? Change targets, we deal too little damage to him! Those enemies degenerate HP? Come close, I have AoE Regeneration!
Similar to boons/conditions, Utility and Elite Skills, on average, should be 2-3 times more effective. (Most weapon skills would need little or no changing!) Whether this means lower cool down, higher damage, longer effect, etc… whatever that numerical change is, they need to be more effective. So, if I am a Guardian and I bring a few Stability skills, we’re basically not getting knocked down unless you figure out a way to get us out of my fields or disable me. (Basically, think of something your class can do, but you can do it indefinitely, provided there is a fair counter to that behavior.)
This is how you make the individual meaningful to a team composition and make each person matter, because as it is now, it doesn’t matter who I am or you are. I’ll change any random person with any random person because there isn’t enough distinction between people.
Final Thoughts
This is NOT an argument to bring back the trinity, but the fact is you need roles in a game like this, even if every role is a combat role. (Which totally sticks with Anet’s paradigm!) Otherwise, what other function is there besides DPS? Degeneration, snares, damage reduction, stability, ‘scouts’/speed, specific conditions or condition combos, boon/boon combos, etc… all could be viable builds IF skills/boons/conditions allowed it. This would create some true diversity.
In summary:
Enemy synergy + More effective skills/boons/conditions + more effective counters to skills/boons/conditions = more interesting PvE gameplay & people bringing more to the table than just another head.
We don’t need new skills just yet. We just need effective ones!
This is a big topic. Please read carefully before posting. I suspect the end result would require a pretty big overhaul, but I wanted to start a discussion regardless about some general points in combat.
There are a few areas where I think combat suffers. I feel the areas are:
-Enemy design (What enemies do, and how they work together against players)
-Conditions & Boons general ineffectiveness (save for a select few instances)
-Utility/Elite Skill general ineffectiveness
I’m not really good at articulating my thoughts in a clever and persuasive manner, so I going to try to appeal to your GW2 experiences to illustrate why I feel these systems are a bit flat. These are for PvE and my experience is from playing a Guardian exclusively:
1. A group of 3-5 people could clear probably 90% of the map or more by grabbing a random weapon, sticking together and pressing 1, 2, 1, 2, 1, 2, etc… the whole way through, occasionally dodging or using a heal.
2. It doesn’t matter what Utility Skills, Healing skill or Elite you use or in what order you use them in, in 90% of combat situations. A player who runs their fingers across their skill keys is only a little worse than a player who times their skills in most cases.
3. Most of your character is defined by their stats, which are passive numbers and not active abilities.
4. In most situations, it doesn’t matter what boons you’re facing or using. It doesn’t change how you play. (except for Stability in a number of cases)
5. You cannot reliably maintain or remove conditions/boons. (aka: counters!)
6. Conditions seem weak overall, despite a few CC ones being fairly powerful.
I see this as a big problem in the longevity of the game. Instead of trying to add new stuff as a band aide, I feel it’s better to take a look at the game’s base systems combat is built on.
Solution Possibility (for the sake of discussion!)
I’ll start with enemies because I feel they will be less of a touchy subject. In short, most enemies feel the same. (It’s not really until you see special enemies in dungeons that a few mechanics start to show, but it’s usually dodge the insta-kill attack or stay out of the AoE.) Sometimes enemies attack in a pattern or throw a powerful attack you roll from, but usually different enemies doesn’t mean fighting them differently.
Enemy synergy is lacking. For example, if we come across enemy A, we fight it one way. But what if enemy A and B were together? What ability does enemy B have that makes it different/unique/challenging to fight enemy A? Now what if enemy C is involved? Does this change how you approach them? Do you talk with your teammates on what Utility/Heal/Elite you should use to fight these monsters? This leads into the next part…
(edited by Flopjack.5314)
It could be I’m in the minority. My circle of friends agree that we thought they become a hassle due to the sheer amount of them.
for one, i would hate a heart that takes about 10-30 minutes, i don’t have time for that.
also, the problem isn’t how the hearts let you do stuff, it’s that ones it’s done the area is quite useless.
it’s also not a quest, you can get multiple quests in one town, a heart takes over the entire town and removes the use when done.
You can come back later to complete it, so it should be a non-issue for you. Point made about quests, though.
The point of heart is to bring you to areas to discover the Dynamic Events that occur there. Almost every heart in the game can be filled by completing Dynamic Event or two that occurs around it. Hearts were added late in development for this specific reason. Unfortunately people have consistently misunderstood their purpose because they come from the wrong kinds of games where quests are a thing. They aren’t in this game.
Events are more fun than Heart Quests. Events were toted as being the primary content in the game, but you are required to do Hearts if you want to complete stuff?
If their purpose was to bring you to areas of the map, why not have other events or your story bring you there? Because now your thinking is: “I have to complete all these Hearts. I can skip the events because I know they will repeat. Hearts work towards map completion but events do not.” Then once Hearst are done, you don’t have a compelling reason to go back and do events because you’re done with the area.
A smaller amount of Heart Quests could bring you to some of the events. Other events could require exploration. Weird, but you don’t need to have arrows or golden hearts to tell me to go somewhere. I will go on my own more often than not if I haven’t been there. Anet wouldn’t have much trouble getting players to go through a new map zone with , Points of Interest, Skill Points, Vistas, and Events. This is a compromise to still have Heart Quests, but make them more interesting.
This jumps into a cluster of other changes that are on my mind, but I think both conditions and boons should all stack in both duration and intensity. It would require some retooling of the game, but as it is now, when a given boon goes down, save for a few select ones, it doesn’t change how you play. You just power through everything. Same is fairly true for conditions as well.
Let’s talk about quest 1.1, aka Heart Quests.
Problem
I think Heart Quests are fairly tedious. There’s too many and too often you are doing very similar tasks as other Heart Quests, which is usually pretty mundane stuff. When I was about 50% completed with the map, I began to sigh when I saw a new zone with Heart Quests in them. Most players run alone and try to do them as fast as possible. This tells me that I’m not alone in my thinking.
Potential Solution
Not every inch of a map zone needs to be covered in Heart Quests. Instead of having 10-15 in an area, only have 1-3ish Heart Quests which are more involved in a given area. With only 1-3ish, they can be a little more grand, a little more thought out, and the completion of events can tie directly into completing Heart Quests. Heck, defeating a world boss could be an entire Heart Quest. You have to arrive at the right time, do the preceding events and it takes a good 10-30 minutes.
I’m also not a fan of getting Heart Quest rewards through the mail system. Have the NPC say things to me if I choose to go through their dialog tree but hand me my reward on the spot.
What does the community think about this?
I used the example of the 4 elementalist team in GW1.
Instead of the game designers deciding that class X has role Y, and can only do that role well. In GW1 designers allowed you to mix and match. I want that freedom again, instead of the designers deciding what the role for my class should be, I want the player to be able to decide he will make a thief that can tank and succeed.
The player chooses the role and the class can adapt to fill it, by becoming weaker in one area in order to gain strength in another.
You’re right, but it should be within a class to begin with. Think of it like sub-roles. The role of an Elementalist is (primarily) a damage dealer. But what side attributes do you want? If you go water, you may have slowing and healing effects. If you go Earth you may have blinding and defense effects. If you go fire, you abandon most secondary effects in favor of more damage.
Can’t Arena Net spend 10 minutes looking in a zone and see the bots for themselves? Just start banning them. If they were really concerned with bots they’d take a more hands on approach.
You say, class roles are unclear. I say classes should not have roles, players should have roles.
I’m not sure what you mean by that. Could you elaborate?
Also, skills should have the depth, not necessarily traits because traits are really transparent and quite frankly overly complex for the sake of adding depth to your game. You don’t need a million choices, just strong ones that differ greatly from each other. That being said, traits are a fine idea. I’m not saying they are bad.
So, a behavioral based counter system would work like this: Lets say you and your friend are Warrior and you’re fighting 50 little monsters. There’s only two of you, but you can dispatch these monsters quickly individually. Alas, there are simply too many of them. You die fighting heroically.
You try again, but this time around you bring an Elementalist with you. He spams a powerful single hit spell, but you died again, so it’s not necessarily about how many people you have. The third and final time he brings a powerful AoE spell. He uses the spell and kills half the group in a few seconds and your group takes care of the rest. You won the engagement not due to a damage type inflicting bonus damage, but due to a behavior of the spell, that behavior being that it covered a wide area. Now let’s reverse the situation.
Your next foes are just 5 in number, but they have really high armor and HP. The fast ticking damage of the AoE does very little damage against a high armored target, so this time around the Warrior’s ability to sunder high armored individual targets is critical for your success. The Elementalist pulls out that single target spell that does significantly more damage than an AoE spell to the single targets, ensuring that most points of damage are not blocked by their high armor rating as his own counter.
Other examples:
-An attack that fires a large, slow moving orb that damages multiple enemies in a row. Strong in choke points.
-A shield that blocks damage in 180 degree area.
-An attack that auto-targets 1 or more targets, splitting its damage among foes. Strong only when there are less foes; situational and no dependent on environment. (or could be)
-An area on the ground that snares enemies to allow kiting.
-Chain lightning.
Some of these kinds of things are in the game but with fairly weak effects. These examples are fairly straightforward, but hopefully illustrate my point. So what is the context of all of this in Guild Wars 2? Well, in Guild Wars 2 we have A LOT of monsters who are melee, but there are very few unique behaviors. We have quite a few who are ranged, but few behavior differences. Why?
Where is the boss that fires multiple beams of energy that spin around room making players move with the beams or rolling under them while attacking on the go? Where is the monster that you can jump on its head to stun it? Where are the monsters that are super fast that require snares to beat? Where are the damage patterns that we dodge? Where are the swarm of small monsters? Where are the behaviors that are anti-mage or anti-armor? Where are the skill and class behaviors to counter them? They’re only kind of there…
So, lets review the combat section:
-Monsters have too much health and usually have boring attack patterns.
-Class role identification is weak.
-Behavioral based countering is ideal for action oriented combat, but is lacking.
Last note on the combat thing: Remember the old games where you died in a hit or two? Contra 3, Super Mario world? They didn’t use damage systems, they used behavior systems. Enemies and attacks/powerups had differing behaviors, radically different actually, that changed the gameplay. I firmly believe Guild Wars 2 could benefit from researching these kinds of games. Stand on the shoulder of giants!
On to the last topic.
-Heart Quests-
There are too many Heart Quests. You can’t make them interesting because there are just too many. There are about 10-15 per area and I don’t look forward to doing them. I think 2-4 per area that are more thought out, larger, bigger rewards, longer completion requirements and more ways of completing them would be much better. Then you can really write in why they are there and what we’re doing to help the effort of the Heart Quest holder. That’s all I have to say in this area. (Aren’t you glad?!)
Again, I’m not saying these areas of Guild Wars 2 are terrible or even bad, but I think these are the areas where Guild Wars 2 can improve. This game would be GOD TIER if they worked on these areas, you hear me? FIT FOR THE GODS! … of Tyria. OK, open let the floodgates be opened.
(edited by Flopjack.5314)
In Guild Wars 1, it used the ever famous trinity that is now under oppression. The tune goes something like this: “We’ve all seen the trinity and we’re tired of it! Check out our new game where anyone can be any class and you can participate with any other person. No healer! Everyone is special!” At first, we welcome the idea of something new, however, I quickly realized the way Arena Net implemented this system blurs everyone. Here’s why.
Lets say we have a 5 man party. We have 2 Tanks, 1 Healer, 1 DPS and a DPS/healer hybrid. Fairly well rounded. We all know the roles of each of those class types well. The key element here is each person’s ROLE. If we were to remove one of those people, a key ROLE would be missing. Lets say you’re the DPS guy. We take you out, and now the team doesn’t have enough DPS to move around as smoothly or just plain dies. There’s a clear gap now, we NEED more damage. We can’t add in another Tank nor a Healer to replace his effect. That’s because his ROLE was clearly identified. That kind of game play structure is what makes you feel like you’re part of the team. If you do your role well, your team congratulates you (or they should!). It makes us feel important because we know without someone like YOU, the team is missing part of its foundation. Compare this with Guild Wars 2. Arena Net said anyone can be anything and it doesn’t matter. You can bring any class combination into dungeons and still win. That also means we can replace any class with any class and it wouldn’t matter? Well, technically it wouldn’t if any class combination can survive. That means roles are muddy.
This does NOT mean that Guild Wars 2 has no role identification, something that’s critical for class variation and interest. What I’m saying is it’s weaker than it should be. Now you may be thinking that they want to get rid of these kinds of roles. That’s partly true. What they want to get rid of is arbitrary roles set up by circumstances. In other words, you NEED a healer because the game is balanced that way. They want to replace it with skill based combat, but you need roles within this change. What they want is behavior based roles. More on this later… Let’s continue.
I’m going to expand further on this point with skills. It hits a similar vibe. In Guild Wars 1, you can roll strong and specific builds with just a handful of skills. If I had a Mesmer, I can cause considerable frustration with just 3 skills against an Elementalist. At the same time, I could use just a handful of skills with an Elementalist to cause super high damage, something no other class could do like the Ele. If you were a Monk and you brought a single skill, Guardian (Guild Wars 1 skill), you could avert potentially 50% of all attacks, which was a very powerful ability. For the most part (although arguably classes got muddied in Guild Wars 1), skills in each class had a noticeable and powerful effect given the proper circumstances. It’s what made customizing your skill bar so much fun and it’s what made Guild Wars 1 such a strong PvP game. It won two years in a row as the best PvP game if I’m not mistaken.
There’s a reason why Guild Wars 2 skills are not as powerful as Guild Wars 1 skills. It’s because there is no healer and they’ve put strong limitations on healing. After all, a fight cannot last forever and you don’t want to die in 2 seconds. This is an action based game where people are diving and hopping about, and this brings me to my final point about combat:
Behavior versus Numbers in the context of action oriented combat:
When they showed off the combat in Guild Wars 2, they had all kinds of diving and dodging and talked about how you can avoid any attack, which is true, but where are all the behavioral based counters? What is a behavioral based counter you ask? Well, lets have a little game design lesson:
Lets say you are a Fire Mage and you’re fighting an Assassin. You hit him with a couple of fire spells and kill him. You just countered him because you killed him with damage. Easy, right? That part is clear.
Now lets say he uses a +damageVsMage attack. He counters you because he had a modifier against you. This is true for all kinds of stuff, like Holy vs Undead, Physical vs Ice, Water vs Fire, or whatever. But this is old school and boring. It’s all a shortcut in truly skill based combat design (there’s a little room for this kind of stuff, but not a lot), which is what Guild Wars 2 is going for.
Continued on next post…
(edited by Flopjack.5314)
Yeah, I’m one of those guys. The guy that comes in and tries to tell everyone how it is. Well, I’m a little different from them actually. I’m not looking to be right. I’m looking to help the game. My experiences is with Guardian; my only character. I’ve played almost everything except the last mission with my group of friends. Also, let me preface everything by saying I like the game. I enjoy it a lot and it’s one of the best buys out there. OK? I. Like. Guild. Wars. T(w)o. But, I’m also a designer, and we love to improve things.
Contents:
1. Story
2. Combat & Skills (behavior in the context of action oriented combat)
3. Heart Quests
-Story-
First, I’m not a writer, but I’ve seen enough stories to know a few things. Also, I thought the Guild Wars 1 lore was pretty cool. I enjoyed it, and overall, the second game is still awesome. However, there’s an unneeded notion of this “personal story”. Hear me out:
MMOs are not single player games, and contrary to popular belief, we’re not special in this story. In the first Guild Wars, the player was more of a bystander and offered his opinion and the main characters were all NPC. In terms of storytelling, that is, if you want to tell a good story, that’s totally fine. You don’t have to make the players pivotal characters in an MMO, in fact, it’s a mistake to try to.
The problem lies with trying to have all kinds of decisions for (human) characters, trying to make everyone unique, while trying to tell an epic tale. This is storytelling 101: Don’t have too many characters because it’s impossible to make them all interesting. What we need is a good story, not a story that tries to please everyone, because then it just becomes bland. I paid attention to the story, but I don’t remember anything me or my friends did in their storylines, because everything we did had no effect on the actual main characters: Destiny’s Edge, Traherenrnrn… or however you spell the plant guy, and whoever else was involved. In MMOs, the players are the armies and the NPCs should be the main characters. Trying to reverse this creates an impossible barrier for good story telling. You’re not going to please everyone so don’t try. You’re better off making a strong story. Period.
This is the story Guild Wars needs, not the story players want!
-Combat & Skills- (This is a long section.)
Now then, I’m not particularly a story kind of guy, but I do enjoy good stories. I tend to focus on mechanics. I’m more of a designer, so here we go.
My first complaint is that monster have too much HP, in general. This is not always true, but it’s a concern. Consider the following. My friends and I are in a dungeon. We’re not dying but it takes a handful of minutes to best each enemy engagement. This is delaying us for no good reason and quite frankly, it gets boring to drill through high health enemies engaging us with the same patterns of attacks. This is especially true when you fight gold and purple star enemies. (around their portraits near their health bar) More on this later…
I want to draw attention to GW2 being an “action oriented” combat game, or whatever catch phrase they made for it. (which is good and all) Monsters, skills and the combat concept all tie in to one another. We’ll need to look at what made Guild Wars 1 successful with its skills before we go to combat. Stay with me here…
Continued on next post…
(edited by Flopjack.5314)
If I am ABOUT to start reviving you, then I’m clearly in sight. Most people would not warp at that point.
And the rest of your post supports my original post: People don’t realize others are coming to revive them, which mini-map icons would help.
I think you’re wrong on almost all accounts.
1. If people knew they were going to get up and didn’t have to warp spending money and potentially warping away from where they want to go, they will more likely stay. For the few that want to warp anyway, that’s fine. They can warp, but I’m willing to bet the majority of people will stay and allow to be helped. I’ve never seen anyone warp after someone started getting them up.
2. Armor doesn’t need to be repaired the moment you have a damaged piece (only when it’s broken).
Better yet, under the area’s name (or when hovering over the name with your mouse) show Points of Interest, Vistas, Hearts and Way Points with their #/# as well as the total percent. We just need the information we have access to when we are in an area when we aren’t in the area.
It doesn’t make sense to only see players when you’re down if you can see them all the time. It’s a non-intrusive way to allow players who want to go out of their way to help someone to do so, while allowing players like yourself, Aeson Thackery, to continue to help people only when it’s convenient.
There’s some you don’t agree with?
Game is fun, but I have these concerns:
1. Allow players to be seen on mini-maps.
If someone is down and they can’t see someone (me) coming to get them up, they will teleport away wasting my time and their coin. Additionally, we can see “hot spots” where lots of player activity is in an area and join in the fray during adventuring. Hopping into random things like these (sometimes not even spawned from an event) are a lot of fun. Mini-map player icons can be optional if others do not want it. It was built into GW1, why not GW2?
2. Specify attribute and skill description numbers.
What does toughness, precision or healing power actually do? I know it improves attributes, but I can’t tell how much. This goes double for skills. “Makes symbols larger” isn’t clear enough. Is it 2% larger? Does it cover the whole map? Guild Wars 1 was very specific (you had the option for more concise descriptions) in skills and attributes of things, but GW2 is not. We won’t be intimidated by numbers. Please put them there so we can make more educated decisions.
It’s difficult to understand how much health I’m getting on a skill (except for skills that give you health all at once). For example, Virtue of Resolve says:
Virtue: Regenerates health (how much? How often?)
“Passive Regeneration (3s): + Health”. (What does + Health mean?)
Healing: xxx (Is this total? Is this per tick? Per second?
I think you get the idea. The game seems to be littered with vague descriptions like these.
3. Why some (seemingly) random items account bound?
Maybe these have hidden and powerful secrets I don’t know, but things like bananas I simply can’t give or receive from my friends.
4. Allow us to customize the button that draws and pings the map.
Currently Left-Shift. We should be able to customize all controls.
5. Bugged skill points, but I’m sure has been mentioned multiple times. I think there’s four of them total last I heard.
6. We can’t type in other languages?
As I think of more or solutions come, I will update this thread. Thank you for your time!