Guild Wars 2

Arenanet realized long ago that they made a huge design mistake by eliminating specialized roles from their game. They did this with the hope that it would push some new creative direction to generate content that was not beholden to healing, tanking, or dps.

This did not happen. Because it can not happen. The only way to design difficult content that doesn’t require specialized roles is to design a game with different mechanics. If you want to build world class top end content in a game that operates on health bars, resource management, damage, and hotkey skills, you have just designed yourself into a corner regarding what types of activities you have available for distribution in such high end content.

Even though I’m sure there’s people at Arenanet that would like to correct this mistake, and shave off the last bit of metal that’s keeping their masterpiece from perfection by bringing about a more distributed set of group roles, they cannot.

Their marketing was so successful against the very idea of “The evil dirty holy trinity” that the community they have fostered considers it heresy. Literally. Just the suggestion that “Dedicated healers are a good thing for content development” brings down a torrent of “GO BACK TO WOW YOU STUPID HOLY TRINITY LOVER THIS GAME IS ABOUT SKYYYYLLLLLLZZZZZ!!!!!!!!!”.

And there in lies the problem. The backlash they would expect from fixing the only thing wrong with this ABSOLUTE MASTERPIECE OF A GAME, ( but still, something so wrong it breaks everything else in terms of group content) would be so terrible, Galileo would feel sorry for them.

(for those of you that don’t know, Galileo was the first person to openly admit the planet earth was round, and was branded a heretic by the catholic church for going against it’s teaching, and spouting his satanic lies.)

It’s too bad. I’ll play the single player stuff and any WvW pvp stuff that pops up for sure. But just like most people that are actually good at MMO’s, the group content is and always will be crap.

Zalladi.4652:

Could you be a little more specific on these “issues”?

On one note, fractals are receiving a huge update with Heart of Thorns.

If you’re not going to design your game for tank / healer / dps, don’t bother designing “dungeons” much less raids.

Seriously. The entire point of dungeons, the whole idea of designing dungeons and raids for a game, was that it required a healer a tank and some dps. Without that there’s no point.

It’s like a movie with no story and one explosion after another with no explanation of what is going on and why we should care. It’s there, that’s great, but what purpose does it serve?

If all I’m going to be doing is dodging ground effects and spamming weapon skills while self healing, I don’t need to go into a dungeon for that. That’s all I do in the game period.

StrangerDanger.3496:

I really don’t see how 10 man (raids? seems a bit small for a"raid") dungeon is going to scratch anyones itch for Raids.

Raids typically are the pinnacle of coordinated group efforts where everyone has an exact role to play, and needs to play that role near perfect for the instance to go well.

This game specializes in everyone running around DPS’ing stuff. There are no set healers or agro tanks really…those some can occasionally fill that roll slightly, for a short time.

Really I get why they are doing this, just I don’t think its going to be executed in a manner that will satisfy anyone who takes a break from this game to raid in another game.

They should be piling on content that is coordinated with how this game plays. Make more epic, insane, difficult, world events, designed for masses of people to complete…make some of those even more coordinated ect.

You cant have a proper raid when you lack the trinity. Skyforge did this (little know game that came out recently) and lacks a trinity system (less so than this game) and it was just coordinated DPS targeting…as you cant really do much more than that.

UNLESS…they have special items in the raid that actually allow someone to become a tank and healer (like a healing staff on the ground and a tank shield, that bestow unique skills for whoever equips them) which would be cheesy imo

The problem with all of this is that it can’t possibly be difficult. If an encounter is going to be designed for this game, it must be possible to complete the encounter with any combination of anything. No one is responsible for anything but DPS.

Like, in other games you can make a boss that will one shot anyone but a tank. If anyone but the tank gets hit by the boss, it’s probably a wipe. It turns into a tight rope walk with fire popping up every now and again, and eagles swooping in to try to knock you off.

In GW2 no boss can do more damage than any given character is able to tank / self heal. That’s why pve is and always will be a joke.

You can try to put jump puzzles in, or gliders, or force us to /dance on a sparkling pony as it rides the sky to never never land, it doesn’t matter.

No risk, no interdependence, no gear upgrades, no point.

They should have gone with persistent open world land ownership and construction with a political system and world pvp or something.

Guild wars 2 is just not built for dungeons / raids.

Probably been said already but..

Without a division of labors no content will ever be difficult. We all know what the three basic activities are in these kinds of games, and GW2 is based on these same three activities.

Solo content is a challenge that can be surmounted alone by anyone regardless of which of these three activities they specialize in. It’s not dangerous, because the challenge is balanced for all.

Group content requires these three activites to be distributed, and through that distribution of labor the group can handle a much greater challenge. For instance, five DPS can’t complete a dungeon, but one tank, one healer and three DPS have no problem.

Unless you’re guild wars 2. Because there is no clear distribution of labor no challenge can ever be presented that requires it.

The only thing they can possibly do is ground effects.

I kind of wish they didn’t even bother with this “LOOK WE HAVE RAIDS NOW!” It’s just going to make them look like fools two days after launch when it’s been cleared a million times because entire groups of the top dps class / build zerked their face across the keyboard…

Again.