(edited by Geren.1945)
Showing Posts For Geren.1945:
I got into the game a bit late and really started leveling my first character (Norn Guardian!) during the Xmas holidays and I have to say my experience has been very close to Deadcell’s; most of the areas are rather empty and the chat remains dead for hours on end (Desolation server).
Not only does this make it feel like you’re playing a single-player game, it also makes some of the events really annoying or exceedingly difficult, when there’s no one else around. This problem is made ever worse by the ridiculously fast respawn rates some areas seem to have.
I mean I’ve enjoyed the game for the most part, I even like the event system as a concept, but there’s no getting around the fact that it relies heavily on having highly populated low level areas. In any case, I doubt January patch will be a make or break for me, since I’m not even at 80 with my first character, so there’s still plenty of stuff for me to see.
(edited by Geren.1945)
i dnt see how exactly 12 ppl shooting at boss for 15 minutes is gonna be different from 5 man shooting at boss for 15 minutes?
Ehm, just to state the obvious, but then you could, eh, have more people playing together at once? You know, like having something to do together as a guild (or at least larger portion of it at once)? That’s one of the primary reasons why I enjoy/enjoyed raiding in other MMOs: you get to interact with more people at once, laugh together over mumble/ventrilo etc.
Sure you can log on to mumble and chat with guildies with everyone just soloing / doing their own thing, but it isn’t quite the same. Besides isn’t the basic idea of playing together to, uh, play together?
(edited by Geren.1945)
I’ve actually been wondering about that. They go on and on about “horizontal” progress than slap 80 frigging levels to the game right from the get go. I mean most MMOs don’t have that high level caps until after like their third or fourth expansion.
Dont support this- sorry but the holy trinity actually required no real tactics what so ever…played many mmos in my life and action oriented combat will always require more skill and teamwork …
Sorry, didn’t realize it was opposites day.
Not having the trinity results in total, chaotic combat with absolutely zero strategy required and no tactics applied. That’s what we have here in GW2 here now.
Team combat is all but non-existent. It’s a joke of an MMO.
Not totally related, but an fps with no combat roles what so ever has tons of strategy and tactics required in order to hold rooms, clear hallways, and reach objectives.
There isn’t a tank, healer, and dps in counter strike but there are tons of strategies in that game if you want to use them (even if most just zerg a spot)
So positioning and team coordination are still around in non-role oriented combat.
Yet amusingly enough, there are many team based FPS games with classes like Battlefield 3 or PlanetSide 2, which also have medics, who can essentially do what a healers do in MMOs, ie. run around healing team mates and bringing them back up when they go down. Incidentally, it’s also very fun and rewarding to do, and especially in BF3, where teamplay is rewarded at every turn, medics are commonly seen on top of the scoreboard, often with only a few actual kills.
I’d like to be a medic in GW2 as well, but GW2 says no and tells me to just hit stuff instead.
(edited by Geren.1945)
The point is with most effects so ridiculously short in length, you might as well not bother with em’, since they won’t probably make much of a difference and your time could probably be better spent just smashing stuff in the face instead.
This was pretty standard in GW1, too. If you had a good prot/condition setup, that usually took care of damage until heavy sustained stuff flooded in.
Someone earlier posted that they liked the lack of a trinity because, even in GW1, they had a hard time finding groups because their warrior had such a hard time getting taken by groups— people wanted set classes, and that was it. I can confirm that; I started as a monk but switched to rit/mo and then ele/rit and ele/mo to heal; elementalists in particular have massive pools of energy so can use the huge heals over and over that monks usually can’t.
This was a build developed by eles to counter the fact that they became ineffective in hard mode (so no one wanted to take them) due to elemental resistances ramping up. However, despite being just as effective as a monk (as I’d played one for years), I couldn’t get taken by a group! It didn’t matter that it was just as effective in PvP, PvE, even if I explained it, people wanted certain classes with certain builds and that was all because they did not understand the depth of the system, only that ‘this build is the best’ without knowing why.
I miss healing, but I don’t miss those attitudes. Or most WoW pugs’ attitudes toward healers, which is basically ‘if I stand in it and die it’s your fault’ and ‘if you are OOM because I am standing in bad, it is your fault’. And yet, if no one died, DPS congratulated themselves and had a bad attitude if I felt accomplished, too.
Monks on GW1 got that crap, and you know what we did? Refused to pug. Almost ALL of us. It actually caused a huge kerfuffle and ground stuff to a halt.
I don’t know if folks realise what they’re asking for.
Congratulations, you just described mostly every PUG experience in most MMOs since the dawn of time. Now if only there was a thing where you gathered a group of people together, whom with you could play on a regular basis, where everyone knew each other and appreciated what others were doing. We could call them something like… guilds!
Also, what you described is not by any means de facto trinity mechanics, it’s just bad design plain and simple. Nowhere in the Bible does it say “And God spake and his command was thus: there shalt be only one healer class and only healer class there shalt be. He shalt reign supreme upon the others and no other class shalt desire take his place.”
For the last time, before bowing out of this mass of stupidity, hyperbole and oversimplification that this thread is: having distinct roles does not equal gameplay where a tank stands still soaking damage, while the healer keeps him topped up and DPS chops away. In fact hardly any of the modern trinity based games are even close to such oversimplified scenarios anymore. Also, there is absolutely no need to have just one or two tank/healer classes, on the contrary, most modern MMOs have multiple classes able to fill those roles and have their unique mechanics and approaches to them.
(edited by Geren.1945)
One thing that completely escapes me is how everyone seems to think GW2’s current system of dodging and spanking is somehow mutually exclusive with having some sort of specific roles. You do realise that they could just as easily keep players dodging, managing boons and conditions AND have dedicated healers and tanks? Wouldn’t it be TRUE diversity if you had multiple ways of approaching an encounter, multiple roles, flexibility and yet have the ability for people to specialise as well?
How would it work? VERY easily. You could have essentially four modes for each class: current way of things, let’s just call it Balance spec where you have a mix of self heals, utility and DPS, then have a DPS mode, where you get more DPS while sacrificing healing and survivability and finally separate tank and healer specs, where you gain survivability and healing ability respectively, at the cost of DPS ability. That way, you’d never find yourself in a situation where you’re lacking some key class, but you’d also have multiple ways of approaching the encounters. Instead of penalising me for wanting to play a healer, the game would just be like “Ok son, go do your thing and have fun!”.
I suppose I’ll be in the minority, when I say I agree with the OP. The thing people seem to be completely missing is the fact some people (yours truly included) like playing healers, tanks or other support classes. In fact one of my biggest grievances with GW2 is that I want to be a healer, but the game does not want me to be one. I’m perfectly content letting others shine, quietly supporting them, boosting their damage, keeping them up or disabling the enemy, but GW2 insist that I’m right there spewing out as much DPS as possible or I’ll be “useless” to the group.
Then again, I suppose the people most vehemently opposed to “trinity” are probably people who generally play DPS classes in said MMOs. It’s pure statistics mostly, since DPS classes are usually most numerous and thus also “least wanted” in groups, so it’s understandable that they like the whole “everyone’s DPS” approach.
Also, there is more than one way to skin a cat and having trinity mechanics doesn’t mean you have to have pure trinity class system. You could have a completely classless system that still had trinity mechanics at heart, where anyone or everyone could take healing skills or tanking skills. In fact one of my favourite trinity implementations of recent years was Rift, where each class could essentially do everything, but you could also specialise in a single role if you wanted. Too bad the game failed in other areas.
What could happen, in the completely hypothetical situation that Anet decided that they want to make it possible for people like me to play their beloved healers, tanks or general support? Well most of the mechanics are already in game, all it would really require is boosting healing output, shortening cooldowns, increasing mitigation and making blocking more important etc. Also, to say that it would drastically change the core PVE mechanics is a bit strange, since by all accounts there isn’t a whole lot of endgame PVE content to begin with, so they could just start implementing the stuff in future content.
So there you have it. I personally like having well defined class roles, I like playing pure support and consequently, I’m not really enjoying GW2 as much as I could be, which is a kitten shame, because in other areas like UI, general fluidity of gameplay, crafting mechanics, dynamic events etc., it’s simply light years ahead the competition.
(edited by Geren.1945)