Guild Wars 2

Ovalkvadratcylinder.9365:

I completely disagree with OP: There are some things you learn by playing this game, and one of them is that alot of skills are situational. Being able to swap skills instantly while out of combat is something alot of people rly like about gw2.

Well, i am completely casual player, and i do not swap my skills in PvE basically at all. And i hugely suspect that 95%+ of players dont swap skills at all. Why? Because if all skills are available you can choose all skills that are most comfortable and stick to them. My change make it impossible to stack all your bar with most comfortable skills, and thus incentivises changing skills and specs moreso than current system.

Ovalkvadratcylinder.9365:

Secondly, so yeah now you’ve narrowed down the amount of builds players can make. How does that increase the diversity? Making specs distinct by locking the skills into them is not a good thing.

According to math i did, number of choices stays almost the same.
And more than that, it actually increases diversity just like GW1 did. There you a)Could only pick skills from 2 chosen professions b) Most of the skills were very weak if you did not put points in assigned attribute. According to you all skills should be independent of attributes to make for more choice, but it would be wrong since then the attribute choice becomes less important.

Ovalkvadratcylinder.9365:

The diversity comes from being able to choose any skill from the skillpool of that profession.

I understand why you might feel this way, but you need to also make arguments.
Number of choices does little for diversity of gameplay. Quality of choice, i.e. impact of choice is what also matters. I argue that my change stikes much better balance of those two.

Ovalkvadratcylinder.9365:

The gap between effective (good) builds and less effective builds will increase. This because now players can not take that specific skill that counters another skill or effect.

That is funny, because the exact opposite is true. Look at this build. It goes into water/earth/arcana, but 3/5 skills on the bar are from other lanes.
Why is that? Because if you can make all the choices independent of each other, there is a best combination of the choices. But if choices are interdependent, then the choice of best spec does not allow to choose the best skill also. So you will not be able to cleanse yourself with fire and smash enemies with fire greatsword while enjoying sustainability and defense of water and earth specs.

Doam.8305:

No for the only thing this does is add a layer of restriction and remove a good deal of diversity from the game.

So, first of all, let’s discuss diversity. After my suggested change every character with 3 chosen specialisations (with elite or without) will have 4 healing skills, 16 utility skills(4 less than now) and 4 elite skills(1 more elite than now). If you do the math, the number of choices is almost the same. But that is only for 3 chosen specialisations. 10 ways to choose 3 core specialisations and we have much more options.

But let’s not forget about quality of choices! Because just the number is not always too important. And the quality rises dramatically, since if you are arcana/water/earth elementalist you can not now use distinctly fire or air skills, and you cant have a big fiery sword for your whim. So build choices are more distinct, and that increases diversity, not decreases it.

Doam.8305:

I disagree that any of the Pro’s you mention would actually be achieved with such a move.

Could you provide any argumentation as to why do you think that?

Doam.8305:

World of Warcraft did this and the end result ending up being nothing but mindless and trivial rotations with minimum effort.

I suppose you mean WoW locked skills behind specs. That is true, but the combat with trivial rotations was the meta in WoW when i played in WotLK, so the change did not do that exactly. And there are couple of differences. I suggest to lock skills behind specs and allow people mix and match specs to find the best combination. WoW just did 27 classes.

The Wizland.8435:

The issue is that at the moment, elites are powerful skills that can change the flow of a battle.

You are just repeating their advertising materials. You have to judge the game independently of what arena.net’s marketing department tells you.

There is not a single class in the game that will become OP and require major nerfs after proposed change. That is because elite skills are already balanced with cool downs.

And weapons DO serve this functions. They both are build-defining part of a character and they both majorly affect flow of the battle(choosing great sword over longbow changes flow of the battle).

It is theoretically possible that they use some specific hash of a character data as a seed for random number generation involved in loot drop calculation.

It is such a big bug though that i can’t believe it was not located for such long time.

TL;DR Replace elite skill slot with regular skill slot, add all elite skills into regular utility skills pool.

Guild wars 2 is a game about choice. Choice of play style, choice of outfits, choice of everything. So if we have a decision about game design, that gives players more choice without or with very little drawback we should make this decision. As of now elite skills are supposed to be super-powerful skills. The problem is, this does not mean that they deserve a special slot. They can easily be regular utility skills that are balanced with their cool downs(and they already are!)

Lets discuss reasons not to make this change:
1) Giving respect to GW1. Elite skills represented a build-defining choice, lets keep them.
Rebuttal: They did indeed represent a very important choice, and i can deeply appreciate the concept. But they do not represent a build-defining choice anymore. Do not be upset, because in GW2 we have weapons! They now serve a purpose of an elite skill from GW1 and serve it even better, since they define from half to 80%(elementalist) of skills on our bar
2) It will be OP!!
Rebuttal: Even after recent chronomancer reveal, that can potentially use every skill on their skill bar twice in a flash, i DO NOT SEE a character with full skill bar of elite skill as super powerful. So it will be ok.

What do you think?

Maybe it is too early to suggest changes to a system that was only announced one week ago, but i wanted to try anyway.

TL;DR Separate all skills into categories of 1 heal/4 utilities/1 elite based on specializations. You can use skills only from chosen specialization skill categories or core profession skill category.

My suggestion is to make every core skill in the game to belong to one of six groups – core group and one devoted to every specialization. Ideally every such group has 1 healing, 4 utilities and 1 elite skill.
Example: Elementalist
Core: all 6 glyphs
Fire:
1)TBD fire heal skill
2)Conjure Flame Axe
3)Cleansing Fire
4)Signer of Fire
5)TBD fire utility skill
6)Conjure Fiery Greatsword
Air:
1)Arcane Brilliance -> Static Recharge heal skill
2)Conjure Lightning Hammer
3)Lightning Flash
4)Signet of Air
5)TBD air utility skill
6)Tornado
Earth:
1)TBD earth heal skill
2)Conjure Earth Shield
3)Armor of Earth
4)Signer of Earth
5)TBD earth utility skill
6)TBD earth elite skill
Water:
1)Ether Renewal
2)Conjure Frost Bow
3)Mist Form
4)Signer of Water
5)TBD water utility skill
6)TBD water elite skill
Arcane:
1)Signer of Restoration
2)Arcane Blast
3)Arcane Wave
4)Arcane Power
5)Arcane Shield
6)TBD arcane elite skill

After that the character has to choose three specializations, and he can only use skills either from core group, or from one of the chosen specialization skills. This will help achieve several goals:
1)Make choice of specializations much more important for the build
2)Help with identification of the character: if i use Armor of Earth, that is because i made an investment of being this specific profession
3)Make design of specializations more elegant and enjoyable to think about
4)Make it easier to expand the system both in width and depth.
During specialization reveal stream developers said, that they have troubles with creating skills that have vague theme (such as general ranger skills rather than druid skills).
This change allows to add both new elite specializations that are consistent with specializations by design and add individual skills in existing specializations. In addition they will not have restrictions on mechanical nature of skills assigned to elite specializations, such as only wells for chronomancer.

Lets discuss pros and cons of this change:

Pros:
Increases the importance of available build choices
Makes specializations more consistent by design with their elite counterparts
Allows more creative freedom for developers to create skills, since they are combined thematically and not mechanically(i.e. as in dev’s version of specializations)
Can be easier expanded. Chronomancer specialization DOES NOT HAVE to only have wells as utilities. Possible to add individual skills to specific specializations or core set of skills
Can be implemented after HoT release, make HoT incorporated into it

Cons:
Reduces number of available builds
To make design consistent requires to make 36 core skills instead of current 27. Requires more dev time
It is somewhat tricky to adjust certain professions skills to evenly fit specializations.

What do you think, is it worth it to implement this system?
And please, do not use the argument “I use earth/water/arcana elementalist and your suggestion does not allow me to use Lightning Flash, so it sucks”. The purpose of suggestion is to improve the overall design and enjoyment of all the game, not the individual builds.

lordkrall.7241:

While it might be a slight hit against flexibility, it is worth pointing out that the new system will probably be much easier to balance.

The problem is that developers “balance” the game at most two times a year. Ease of balance is the last cause for concern, if of course developers are honest with themselves.

Hello, i wanted to share feedback on the trait/specialisation system as a casual player i.e. as a player that does not participate a whole lot in a challenging content.

TL;DR I want less traits that do random stuff with random cooldown with random chance on usage of arbitrary skills or upon satisfaction of arbitrary condition. I want traits that give strong synergies to weak by default combinations without overshadowing other traits.

Here is what i want from the trait system:
1)Clarity.
By clarity i mean the possibility to clearly understand what happens on the screen with other, but primarily with my character. This feature as of now is heavily diminished with the trait system, that consists of a huge number of passive bonuses, that happens randomly over obscure conditions with an arbitrary cooldown that we have no option to see. Ideally everything that happens on the battlefield should be a result of somebody somewhere pressing a button. This will also help the watcher experience, as he will have better idea of what is happening.

Example 1: Sharpened edges – ranger skirmishing adept
This skill gives ranger a chance on critical to inflict bleeding on target. What if instead it took three ranger weapons, e.g. shortbow, mh shord and mh axe, and gave the autoattack of these weapons a tooltip (on critical: inflict bleeding)?

Example 2: Earth’s embrace – elementalist earth adept
The problem with this trait is that it happens on passing a percentage of hp. That means that i as a casual player and people watching the game at an arbitrary moment of time will see an explosion of particle effects, and then a new countdown will go off, that prevents this from happening, but we dont have any way to see this cooldown going off.
The solution might be to make the trait like this:
on 25% of hp recharge equipped earth utility skill with maximum recharge time left. Cooldown 60 seconds.
Magnetic shield, Earth’s armor, earth signet.
It is not the best, since it happens at an arbitrary moment, but it is already better than what is now, and it is by default will have a place to show the recharge time – on the tooltip of equipped earth skills.

2)Satisfying bonuses.
By satisfying bonuses i mean bonuses that clearly affect my strategy on the battlefield in positive way, but on the other hand do not make me feel handicapped with the same weapon/utility if i do not take this trait.

Example 1: Lead the wind – ranger marksmanship grandmaster.
This is a fine trait, that has one flaw – it improves the longbow so much, that every build without this specialisation that dares to wield longbow will feel handicapped. So the longbow will no longer be an option for builds without this line, and this is not something desirable for a game trying to incentivise build diversity.

Solution: since the purpose of this skill is to increase longbow DPS against enemy groups, why not focus it on improving skill Barrage? Let this skill make Barrage toggleable, that means that you can toggle it on and off any time with a cooldown on retoggle 5 seconds, and the barrage will go on as long as you channel it.

Example 2: Vigorous shouts – warrior tactics grandmaster
This is an example of a trait that i call “utility bar locker”. Look at the metabattle. All the best builds have one thing in common: utility bar has 2-3 skills from one category: shoutwarrior, cantrip ele, deception thief, meditation guardian. The reason is because there are traits that improve one category of skills so much, that either you do not use this category at all, or you use all of them with the “utility bar locker”.

Solution is to make traits, that encourage build diversity, not limit it. For example, vigorous shout now do this:
Make offhand warhorn 4(charge), offhand axe 5(whirling axe) and offhand mace 4(crushing blow) give you a buff vigorous shout for 5 seconds. This buff is consumed after next shout, to reduce its cooldown by half and heal surrounding allies by 3k.
This way shout build does not have to have all shouts in the world, more than that you can utilise this trait completely with only 1-2 shouts.
And all traits, that reduce recharge times of weapons or traits should be either removed, or made baseline. They are a main example of “feeling handicapped” traits.

I hope this desires are shared by the community, and since you(the developers) want to simplify and clarify the game, then do it in places that really need it, rather than places that need it the least.

Hello, thanks for interesting blog post. Here are my questions in no particular order.

1) Are you open to the idea of changing major trait choice back to resemble current system, where you can choose 3 adept traits?
I believe this option allows for far more meaningful choice, because rather than choosing from 3 grandmaster traits you can choose to whether have a grandmaster trait at all, which is much more satisfying.

2) What is the purpose behind small trait/major trait alternation in the specialisation track? In my opinion this is a remnant of a current system that the new design can live without.

So instead of this alternation you can have two lines in the specialisation “brick”- one of minor traits, and one of major trait slots. This way you can have more or even less than exactly 3 minor traits (which can be usefull to provide more fullfilling experience with unlocking more things for new players) and all passive non-choosable bonuses will be clearly seen on the page of specialisation.

3) Since you have returned to the idea of “not more than one elite X” in the case of specialisations, are you open to the idea of giving players option to pick regular utility skill instead of elite skill?

I believe this will allow for far more meaningful choice of skill set, since rather than choosing what elite skill to have we will have in addition more impactful choice of whether to have elite skill at all.

DevonCarver.5370:

Both of the above things are ways to substantially change the necessity of tactics in the game and to make WvW more about well-organized groups. That’s something we still aim for when we make changes to the game.

I think that there is a big misconception about what needs to be done to WvW. To specify, there is no need to invest large amounts of resources to help well-organized groups. Why? Because well-organized groups are in advantage by default. The difference between well organized group and blob is the difference between character with consumables and 25 might + protection permanent upkeep and blank character. There is no need to incentivise play in organized groups more. (if you don’t agree, clarify why internally it was decided to focus on well-organized groups).
More than that, focus on well-organized groups promotes solo players to join these well-organized groups as a zerg tail just because you can’t achieve anything by yourself.

What needs to be done, is to invest resources to promote small groups in WvW. 1-5 players that can contribute to war in the mist and also get rewards.(i personally don’t care about rewards untill gameplay is fun, but others do, so…)
Don’t misinterprete me, large well-organized groups of players will still be powerful, just because they are well-organized. But if you don’t provide stuff to do to small groups, then all there is in the game are well-organized groups and zerg tails of these groups.

Tyler Chapman.1832:

Ele should technically be in a much better spot come the feature build.

Pretty anxious not gunna lie..

Hyping again?
Not going to fall for it again.

ChaosKirin.1328:

snip

If A.net really intented to deliver expansion’s worth of content, then after 1.5 years they would have delivered at least amount of content comparable to FACTIONS expansion. They did not though, despite the fact that they had 300 people instead of 50. Is it okay for me to consider you delusional?

sorudo.9054:

Goorman.7916:

By the way, did anyone notice skill system in ESO?
I mention it because a)It has more skill variety than GW2 and b)it is more similar to GW1 than GW2 is. I find it peculiar

in GW1 you can have about 20 skills within a few minutes, in ESO it takes hours before you finally get to 5 skills……..hardly similar….

Well, i did not say that eso is just like gw1, i said it has more similarities with gw1 than gw2 has

Seras.5702:

I agree that there needs to be a larger skill library. I think weapons need an extra set or 2 to choose from and double the utility skill options.

Also, it might be neat to have some common skills that everyone has access to, similar to the faction-based skills from EotN. Maybe we can unlock them at various key points in the personal story (but only until the personal portion ends and it becomes Trahearne’s story). One skill after 1st arc, one after 2nd arc, last skill after choosing Order. This would incentivize people to play their personal story.

I don’t want a larger number of skills at any one time, just a larger pool to choose from. WoW became overwhelming with a screen full of skills, potions, macros, and QoL buttons. GW was perfect with a huge library from which to pick your ideal 8.

I had an idea for skill customization. Every character has weapon skill bar and utility skill bar. From weapon skill bar player can choose 1 autoattack and 4 regular weapon skills, one of which can be elite weapon skill. From utility skill bar player can choose 1 healing skill and 4 utility skills, one of which can be elite.

The problem however rises with elementalist. Either they have to choose 5 bundles of 4 elemental skills on one weapon slot, or they have 20 weapon skills to customize at any given time, both options just do not feel right for me.

By the way, did anyone notice skill system in ESO?
I mention it because a)It has more skill variety than GW2 and b)it is more similar to GW1 than GW2 is. I find it peculiar

What i don’t like about ranger’s spirits is the fact, that they clutter the screen., while providing no purpose to the battleground other than aurabots(generally).
So i had a thought, what if instead of SUMMONING a spirit, spirit skills would IMBUE your pet with the spirit? This will achieve two purposes, reduce number of AI on the battlefield and increase number of interactions with pet(and this part is lacking right now).
What do you think about the suggestion? Obviously it will require trait remake, but i think the benefit is worth it.

Imagine if the developers could not “tweak” existing skills, lowering their cooldowns or increasing damage a bit, and the only thing they could do was to add new skills that counter existing ones.
What would happen with the game, what do you think? I believe it would have made the game much better, without this stupid number-tweaking metagame changes, but with substantial changes and a lot of existing counterplays and depth.

Agree. New telegraphs are way better, and they also come in triangular and rectangular versions (see marionette fight), it would be very pleasant to see these telegraphs added everywhere in the game, even in the PvP.

How is PVP involved in the problem of the berserker gear?
Berserkers is primarily pve problem, pvp has nothing to do with this.
Ergo your math is pointless.

I think that the problem lies in the fact, that players do not have any control over what overflow they go to. The solution might be the list of existing copies of the map, for example
Bloodtide Coast 1 – 240/250
Bloodtide Coast 2 – 150/250
Bloodtide Coast 3 – 50/250
Bloodtide Coast 4 – 50/250
And then the player chooses for himself, what copy does he want to go to.
Then the notion of overflow server is removed(every server is in a sense overflow), and the problem exists no more.

Chrispy.5641:

How does forcing you to play in one of three archtypes instead of play how you want increase build diversity?

Forcing people to choose on of the archtypes is the essence of build diversity. If you are not forced to choose and you play how you want, there are no builds at all.

Well, one thing that this suggestion does is it allows developers to create a lot of different skills for different playstyles. So what you call “limiting build diversity” i call “opportunity to create more interesting and useful skills”. I don’t see anything wrong with couple of weapons being dedicated to condition or support oriented builds, and being absolutely useless on other builds.

TLDR: that is not a drawback, but an opportunity for the developers to implement their vision.

The point of the suggestion is to make critical strike do specific things based on the skill. So shortbow autoattack’s critical strike will just apply more bleeding damage, but will not deal more raw damage, because of that Shortbow will lack power-precision-ferocity scaling, it will have condition damage-precision-ferocity scaling.

This will require to rethink the role of critical strikes in the game. If right now criticals provide ways to boost your raw damage output, after the suggested change it will have the role of “jack-of-all-trades” stat, that will moderately/randomly boost your performance in all part of the games.

Well, they probably will be above average at healing and condi damage, but don’t forget, that you have limited skill slots. In perfect situation you have to choose what utilities and weapons you want to use, ones that give good raw damage, or ones that give good condition damage. So even if on the first sight berserker is better at everything, in the end they would have to choose, what to be better at.

What they should do is to give every skill its own specific critical hit(based on precision) chance and its own specific critical effect(based on ferocity). So that damaging skills will have just increased damage based on ferocity, condition-based skills will have increased condition damage based on ferocity, and healing skills will have increased healing based on ferocity. This will solve the problem of multiplicative scaling of physical damage of Power-Precision-Ferocity, also introducing multiplicative scaling of conditions and healing.
TLDR: agree

Wanted to ask about critical damage/critical chance.
Right now critical damage and critical chance are shared stats, that means that any skill i play has the same chance to critically hit, and the same damage multiplier.
But power does not have the same property, every skill has own scaling parameters, and that makes sense.

What if instead of having character stats “critical chance” and “critical damage” we would have just two primary attribute precision and rage(for example), that would act as power to critical chance and critical damage of a skill? SO every skill would have its own critical chance and critical damage.
I see these cons and pros:
Cons:
This makes game slighlty harder to understand because of new mechanic and a little bit more slightly harder to understand because of increased variety.
Large tooltip size increase.
Pros:
This approach is more consistent(primary stats act the same)
This approach gives more flexibility in skill creation
This approach allows to finetune skills easily
This approach makes sense(rogues should have bigger crit chance than warriors with hammers)

What is your opinion on this approach? Are your changes similar to these, if not, how are they better? Imo i believe that the game should become deeper over the years, because you can’t keep the old crowd of invested people interested without providing deeper expirience, so this would be a fine change in my opinion.

As much as i don’t like current system, i believe your proposition does not solve the problem. And the problem is, that the developers moved from successful GW1 formula “passives affect skills, skills affect battlefield” to a more mainstream version “give the players a bunch of passives to play with”.
Why not go back to a good thing? Separate all skills of a certain class(even weapon skills) into 5 separate groups and make 7 tiers of each skill and each subsequent tier is unlocked when you invest 5 points into respective trait group. Then move all “random stuff that happens passively” to sigils and runes. Skill example : Ranger shortbow skill Crippling shot(school: wilderness survival) cooldown 14/13/12/11/10/9/8, Cripple 2, 2.5, 3, 3.5, 4, kitten etc. Damage: fixed.
This will fix the problems with current trait system and please old GW1 fans. Win-win i suppose.

Making templates cost real money? That is an embarassment even to suggest.
Make your mind TC. We want the developers to improve SPvP, but we don’t want to lose all of our dignity doing so. “Oh please let me buy at least this thing i want very much”. In the end, this is not the last game in the world.

Absolutely agree, it is important to have productive discussions about the direction the game is going.
For example, let’s talk about the “living world”. You talk about it all the time, and it is obvious that you consider it “the thing”, the killing feature of Guild Wars 2.However, players generally do not share this conviction, just because it was not very impressive so far. You can not make “living world” doubling or tripling the rate of content producing, instead of making it live you make it survive on life support machine. Just imagine the situation a couple years in the future, when you stop the development of your game. Will it still be living? Or will it become a dead wasteland? That’s the big difference between just making a lot of content and making the world truly alive.
A lot of players understand “living world” as some sort of “sandbox” style of gameplay, gameplay where the experience is created by the players, not by the game masters. But there were no signs of this so far, just the same old theme park, that is just not what “living world” is.
Could you explain your stance on the “living world”? What do you mean by it? And how is it different from the world, that just has a lot of content incoming for players to burn through?

Yes! Yes!
I wrote about this several months ago(that GW2 needs good resource system), and while i had another implementation in mind, making the endurance bar being a universal resource for defence and offence is the most obvious decision to make the combat better.
Also, let me add couple of points
1)To improve the game imo it is necessary to drastically remove all forms of passive interaction(healing, condition removal etc. etc.) between players, deliberately moving all of them to the skills. If the character cleansed conditions, that is because he had used skill. If ANYTHING happened in the game, that is because someone pressed a button.
Traits and other customization just change WHAT happens when player press certain buttons, but they do not do things by themselves. That is a design decision, that will remove a lot of things from the screen, while increasing the skill depth of the game. win-win.
2)Adding to the TC’s suggestion, give players two secondary attributes: Endurance amount and endurance regeneration, that they can customize through traits and equipment. Basic amount is 50 endurance and 5 endurance/second(half of the current) and maximum amount is 250 endurance and 15 endurance/second(1.5 – 2.5 of the current) Dodge and attacks cost about 50 endurance. Increasing the maximum endurance adds to the burst potential of the character, either defensive or offensive, and endurance regeneration adds to the sustainability of the character. This will add more interesting options while designing the character. Do you want our character to deal a lot of damage(berserker)? He will burn through his endurance very fast and won’t be able to replenish it any time soon.

Oraith.1732:

The only sad thing about this is that there are still posts about it. Don’t call the game mechanics “Lazy” because you are too lazy to do your research. Devs have responded via forums and livestreams about all of the points made in this topic.

Really?
What was done about mesmer’s clones through the year?
What was done with dodge’s frequency through the year?
What was done with low activation times of skills through the year?
What was done to passive effects that swarm in sigils, runes and traits through the year?

I think that you have found, that stat system in Guild wars 2 is crap and does not support most of stat combinations.
Healing power is useless by default
Precision, Power and Critical damage scales very well with each other, but ridiculously bad with other stats, for example condition damage.
Vitality and Toughness scale very badly, especially in PvE.

Your idea of Boon effectiveness is good btw, i have stumbled on it when i thought about the problem myself.
However your suggestion in your current state is not so good, partially because it makes the game inconsistent, conditions are now very different mechanically from boons. To be logically consistent you have to create also a stat called condition effectiveness etc. etc.

Sylentir.8913:

Another thing regarding the trinity:

As healer, I felt wonderful when I had a tank and some DPS. I was invincible, no one got to me, and things died.

When I didn’t have a tank and some DPS, I felt useless. I couldn’t survive, I couldn’t kill anything.

While feeling useful is nice, I’d much rather avoid feeling useless.

That is the problem with specific WoW’s implementation of roles. Arenanet could have implemented roles without letting them being useless in solo play.

The problems with Holy trinity are :
1)3 existing roles are unequally fun to play(healers are in general less fun to play)
2)3 existing roles are unequally needed in groups(in wow it is 1:1:3 or 2:5:18)
{P.S.
3)3 existing roles are unequally self-sustainable in solo play with DPS beating everybody else.}
These reasons create unequal distribution of the playerbase and all consequent problems everybody dislike so much.
That is it. There is nothing wrong with roles in mmos per se, you just need to implement them right. Instead of this Arena.net screwed it up (with a goal to popularize GW2) and made PVE a big zergfest.
They could have made 4 equally needed and equally interesting roles, they could have made 5 or 6, instead of that they did 1. Good job.

JonathanSharp.7094:

You can argue it’s different all you want to. But as the people actually DOING the work, you’re wrong. Nice theory crafting though!

We have 3 major factors impacting all work we do for balance: time, scope (the amount of balance work we have to do), and resources (in this case, available work hours). All 3 of these pull from a finite pool of resources, and all 3 have direct causal relationships. If you increase scope (do more splitting of skills), then you can increase scope. Period. This means you’re now putting more stress on the other 2 pieces of this puzzle: time and resources. You’ve made more work. So until we extend the normal day to 26 or 27 hours, or put more days in the year (which isn’t going to happen with the earth’s current distance from the sun and rotation) it’s simply not going to happen, or it’s going to degrade the quality of work you DO get out of your hours.

And it’s more work to balance the game types differently. It still takes time to implement those changes. It doesn’t save time just by not worrying about how the changes will impact the various game types.

You argue that to split skills you have to spend more time and resources, and that is obviously true.
However your choice as the developer is not to just spend more time or less time on balance, the choice is to make 3 bad game modes with shared set of rules spending less resources, or create 3 good game modes with appropriate sets of rules spending more resources.
For us, the players, it is obvious what you have chosen. In the end, it is skins and recreational stuff that bring you money, not the quality of fundamental game mechanics, so that is where your resources are going into.

P.S. And by “you” i mean A.net

Very good idea.
Hope developers will see it and will understand, why it is better than the current system.

The title says it all. ArenaNet is very good at monetizing content – put new skins in rng box, sell voting tokens etc. If you want more of this stuff – you can just buy all this merchandise, and it will say to the developers, that players want more of this stuff.
But if you(like me) want more features, not content, you have no other way than to whine on forums.
What if we had a system, where players can fund/choose new features for ArenaNet to develop in exchange for some bonuses associated with this feature?
For example i want to be able to make my own custom maps in sPvP(like in Team Fortress 2 for example). What if ArenaNet gave us opportunity to pay 1500 gems to fund this feature and month of custom server?
For example i want to have fully customisable UI.What if ArenaNet gave us opportunity to pay 1000 gems to fund this feature and get title “I see world my way”?
For example i want the guilds to be able to own castles and territory in the open world(and associated with this Guild Wars).What if ArenaNet gave us opportunity to pay 2000 gems to fund this feature and take consumable to buff my guild’s power temporarily?
What do you think about this?It could be implemented with RoadMap style(like in Planetside 2) + funding options.This would give ArenaNet more incentives to actually improve the game, not to create temporary content every two weeks.

First i want to remind everybody about the idea, that Pale Tree is a champion of the elder dragon.Basically that means that sylvari are dragon minions., and the sole reason sylvari are “good” is because of the centaur tablet.
However…
What if the tablet story is just a lie, made to persuade other races to believe in sylvari as allies?
What if the reason sylvari are working with the other races is to be an insider and to betray other five races?
What if Scarlet saw this and decided to break the established order(and the established order is the inevitable and repeatable destruction of everything that lives) and set all sylvari free from Pale Tree(who is dragon’s champion)?
I find this this idea extremely thrilling.What do you guys think about this?

I’ve watched two videos of this guy(about animations and about spam) and i absolutely agree with him.My primary character is a ranger, and ranger’s shortbow is just a mess.All skills are absolutely the same(considering the animations) impact is relatively low, animation time is relatively low, and you just mash all the buttons instead of thinking when using the skills.
(BTW, i have posted about this some time ago, so the idea that GW2 is spamfest is obvious.It is spamfest when it is 1v1, and it is even greater spamfest when it is 5v5 or 20v20 like in WvW)
Arenanet must fix this.And they also have to return castbars.It is the best solution to both improve gameplay and enjoyment from the game in general, the only obstacle is Arenanet’s stubborness.

The problem is that stat system is simplified to a point, where it hurts gameplay.
Power is a good stat, because every point in power increase your direct damage output by a certain amount based on your weapon.
Toughness is bad stat because every point in toughness does not increase your survival time by a certain amount, tougness is less and less important the more you accumulate.

Basically, i think that the most obvious solution is the right one.
And the most obvious solution is to combine almost all temporary and story driving content into one mission(GW1 style) every two weeks, then combine missions tied by story arcs into campaigns. NOONE will object this decision, and this will also give opportunity to a)keep track of past living story b)replay past living story as a mission.
Win-win.

I would suggest something like this:
Power: Increase damage
Malice: Increase condition power( combined condition damage and condition duration)
Precision: increase critical chance of skills
Wrath: increase critical effect of skills
Generosity: Increase boon power (combined healing power and boon duration)
Vitality: Increase health
Toughness: Reduce direct damage
Resilience: Reduce condition damage
Stamina: Increase maximum energy
Endurance: Increase energy regeneration

10 primary attributes.5*2, exactly what is needed for trait system, after removal of class-specific attribute, that can be easily transfered to minor traits.
Also i suggest to change types of damage
Types of damage (now)
1)Direct
2)Condition
Types of damage(suggested)
1)Direct(reduced by armor)
2)Condition(reduced by condition armor)
3)Pure
To make conditions similar to direct damage as a reliable source of damage.
And also remake critical hit idea, make it not a character-wide stat, but a skill-driven stat.Different skills crit chance/damage effect scale differently with precision/wrath, that gives more build options.
(As of now you can’t go with cond. damage + crit.damage, but if class has skills with high innate crit chance and crit effect that applies conditions and scale them with Wrath – you can!And it is cool.)

kitten , why am i even writing all of these?Dreams, dreams…

P.S.To TC, i believe that primary attributes giving one effect is an intentional design decision, that is not going to change.(primarily it was implemented because of side-kicking i suppose).So while adding extra attributes is okayish, giving existing attributes more effects is not akayish in a sense, that it is not going to be implemented even in a dream.

Maybe we will decide what is fun and what is not?

Racial identity is the last thing we should be worrying now.
The first is quality and consistency of the gameplay.
T-down.

I don’t think, that they will introduce RvR system into open world when they already have WvW. If you want RealmvsRealm improvement(and i want this improvement btw), it should be implemented in WvW.
However, i think that open world is perfectly suitable for GvG style of combat.For example War of Emperium(from RO) kind of thing, with castles in open world, that are contested once per week.

I would like the quality of existing weapons to be increased, instead of quantity.
Don’t get me wrong, i would like to have an option to use crossbow, but i think the most important feature to do is customisable weapon skills.

@Temariah, you do not know what you are talking about. Balancing the game is not about making skills “equally powerful” ( which washes out everything interesting from the system), it is about giving players interesting and powerful skills and counter skills to defend yourself from these powerful skills. If the developers had the option to give skills resource cost, they would have had opportunity to support the balance.Now they do not have it.
Look at successfull game called dota2. Almost every hero has something overpowered built into him, but that is what makes dota2 fun and interesting to play/watch.
Micromanaging resources is not an “inhibition” mechanic, it is a tool to give players choice how to spend their resource/what skills to use.Without this “inhibition” there is nothing in the game but spamfest.

And btw, i named activation time as a resource only because wiki states it is. I personally do not consider activation time a resource. So GW2 has 1-1.5 resources(CD/initiative), GW1 has 6.

@Kaizz, does it make the game fun, because you do not have to think what skills to use and can just spam all of them whenever you want?

I spotted a peculiar feature in GW1 / GW2 relationship.
GW1 skills have a lot of resource costs
http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Skill#note_1
Activation time, cooldown, energy cost,
Sacrifice, upkeep, overcast and adrenaline
They were pretty much shared between professions
( i mean that several profession combinations existed, that could have almost all of these resources in use )
And yet a.net struggled to keep all these skills balanced, despite they had so much tools(7 resources!) to balance them.

In GW2 skills have activation time, cooldown and at most 1 resource cost that cannot be shared between classes(initiative or adrenaline for example)
How do a.net developers hope to make skills interesting and balanced with 2-3 resources, if they could not(as they say) do that perfectly with 7 resources?

P.S. My suggestion is simple – make a full-featured resource from Gw2 energy.Just like energy was in GW1.This will greatly help both in skill balancing and keeping skills interesting.
Personally i do not see any drawbacks in this suggestions, only benefits.