Guild Wars 2

LanceHavenbay.2067:

To Izman, I totally agree about the dps thing. Honestly, I’m seeing that if I tank down even a little, it makes a big difference on whether or not you win. Sure, both of your skills are now recharging, but you can take more damage. So you are ahead of the game. That’s just my personal opinion, and not something a really care about at this point. It is mi·nute in comparison to the horrible slow skills…

I’m undecided on the Holy Trinity. I mean, everything in life requires a little of everything. But… If Arenanet was to really try to step away from the Trinity, their first move is going to have to be lowering the skill recharge. Because with such a high recharge, the gameplay becomes stagnant, and is no longer a game of skill. It is now a horribly recreated trinity, using makeshift roles that are meant to be multipurposed, but cannot hold together properly.

To be able to adapt to combat, we need to be able to react quickly. We cannot do so if we spend 2-minutes waiting for our skills to recharge. It takes less than 10 seconds to die.

If Arenanet doesn’t take care of this, I honestly see dungeons becoming nothing more than an ugly trinity. PvE seems to be partially unaffected, because lets face it. PvE is easy as eff. The entire game was a glorified walk in the park, imo. I never had a challenge. I not once lost an event, unless it was a group event that I tried to solo. The events do not change, blah blah blah, different thread. I’ll post it when I finish writing up all the flaws. >.>

For sure. In its current state, GW2 is an ugly trinity, and I agree with your thoughts on lower cool downs.

A summary post:

Currently, Dynamic Events and Story-mode Dungeons are working fine with the current system. Arena net pretty much accomplished this well with their standpoint on team composition (“players should bring the player, not the class”)

However, their view of the “end game” (Exploration Dungeons) is massively flawed. Skills take way too long to recharge, which means any means of defense (ex. Lightning Reflexes) can only be used once before falling over, etc.

A good team is one that lets health bars drop, and then picks up allies while fighting: creating nothing more than mindless zerg while people are on resurrection patrol.

An overview of my opinion:

- redo the weapon skill system: make the left side of the bar customizable
- lower cool downs on utility skills
- traits should dramatically change your character, not +5% damage
- increase the current weapon selection (no 2H axe? really?)

And a big one:

- Create roles. Skill, in RPGs is either based on tactics, character planning, team planning, or a mix of all three. Nothing else separates you from your opponent.

In Guild Wars 2, character planning is gone because everyone inherits the same weapons, and it’s painfully obvious which weapons should invest in power, or condition damage. Traits are just drops in the pond of your character, and don’t do much.

Team planning is gone. “Bring the player, not the class” sums it up perfectly— you should be able to clear a dungeon with 5 rangers just as effectively as a well-rounded team. Utilities are too inconvenient cool-down-wise to effectively craft teams around them, and enemies simply have too much life to reward coordination.

Example: Fresh level 30 with my brother and friend. We go into AC Story with the goal of pulling a heavy-trap initiation, to weaken the enemies and create some combo fields for allies. What happened? We set up traps, pulled mobs, and the full-trap combo literally scratched them. It just didn’t do enough damage, and the combo fields lasted for only a few seconds. All that planning did nothing, and the fight resumed into a health-bar-attrition war lasting a few minutes.

That leaves tactics, which, getting ahead of myself, was answered in the previous section as well. Planning is unrewarding.

How Arena.net intended the roles: DPS, Support, Control
How it ended up: DPS, DPS, DPS

I apologize for the rant, but these are my current thoughts about the game. Feel free to rake me and discuss.

Lance, I must say that I completely agree with your view. Guild Wars 2’s combat is flat-out stale.

Guild Wars 2 needs to throw away the predetermined 5 weapon skills and needs to lower the cool down on utility skills.

As well, Traits need to dramatically change a character, not just augment with bonuses like +5% ranged damage, increased defense when you roll, etc. Currently, traits do little to change the play style of a character.

Throwing all characters into a blended role of DPS is also dumb. Because Arena.net wanted to destroy the need of finding healers and specific roles, they effectively destroyed all means of team composition. Some people may argue that this isn’t a bad thing, but in terms of Explorer Mode in dungeons, it’s a very bad thing. Explorer mode is going to require certain characters to go support, to go utility. Support is healing and damage negation (see: protection + healing monks), and the only class that does this effectively is Guardians.

In case you don’t see what I’m getting at, in the end all forms of “end game” (explorer dungeons) rely on the fact that you will need a specific team makeup, which means, eventually, that you will require plate-wearing melee players to take some damage, squishy ranged to DPS, and guardians to protect your allies. Sounds familiar?

Guild Wars 2 cannot escape the holy trinity in its current state. The only effective non-support-Guardian strategy is to all out DPS the boss and roll effectively. That’s it. Every form of defense (aside from rolling) is on a 40+ second cool down, and has an active time of no more than 5 seconds. It’s shallow, boring, and frustrating.

I want to see Guild Wars 2’s combat change. In it’s current installment, it’s just not fun to play.

It’s amazing how strongly people react to criticism.

Coming from a 2005 GW1 player, I would have to agree with most of your points:

1) Dynamic Events

Some of them are painfully boring. Smack a boss for 5 minutes is a big one. As well, a good portion of the Dynamic Events seem to have no effect on the world at all.

However, I do appreciate that they are trying to move away from the standard quests and break the mold, even though it’s not at its best.

2) Skills

I completely and utterly agree. Coming from even just GW1 Prophecies, I couldn’t help but feel like there was at least 10x more customization than GW2.

This is probably because Arena.net wants an easier time balancing PvP instead of creating a more interesting experience. As well, it’s completely transparent that Arena.net is trying to be more like a MOBA (Dota/LoL/HoN) than trying to be an MMO.

This doesn’t work though: no one wants to play the same skill set for hundreds of hours.

3) Trading Post, etc

Player to Player trading should be implemented I think (at LEAST a Cash on Delivery), but this isn’t the biggest deal for me.

“WvWvW is stupid for melee (you just get blown up), but sort of fun for ranged classes

Use the trinity – your system looks good on paper, but it’s a disaster in practice (anyone that’s done exploration mode dungeons can attest to this)

Dungeon grinds are inane

Exploration modes are frustrating, not challenging"

I’m a huge Guild Wars 2 & 1 fan, and this is very true.

Explorer modes are simply zerg the boss, die in 2 hits, run back. Nothing fun about that, and I don’t think coordination or skill can really fix it. You just simply do not have enough endurance to dodge when each enemy attack brings you down 1/3 hp (at least) and every defensive skill is on a 30+ second cool down.

Sadly, due to the hype for this game, your criticism is going to be met with passionate fanboys defending this game to the death.

The biggest thing for me would be the transition from Guild Wars 1 to Guild Wars 2.

Many of my IRL friends and Guild mates agree that Guild Wars 1 was more enticing to play because you could customize all 8 slots to make very specific and unique builds.

Essentially, in the current system, one’s play style does not change past level 10. This means players are playing the exact same characters from levels 10 – 80.

(Note: I picked level 10 because that’s the approximate level when I maxed all my weapon skills)

As well, utility skills add little to no customization aside from very few. Playing a Ranged DPS Ranger, I simply have 2 buffs (Quickening Zephyr and the Bleeding active) with Lightning Reflexes and Rampage as One. However, these skills do nothing to actually change my play style, and many of my attempted “builds” have had a similar feeling.

What I would like to see (maybe not soon, but in the future) would be a way to customize the left side of the bar. Make hundreds of skills like in Guild Wars 1, so unique builds can start to flourish and players feel attached to their own creation.

However, the skill quality of Guild Wars 2 is a lot more flashy, which means developing hundreds of skills would be painful. Nevertheless, I feel like Guild Wars 2 is trying to be a MOBA instead of trying to be the sequel to Guild Wars 1, where skill was determined by strategy, planning, and coordination.

I hope later expansions and patches release to make this combat less stale.

Currently level 5X, I notice that AC and CM give the exact same experience reward regardless of level.

I think that’s a bit silly, considering AC takes longer than CM and it’s less rewarding?

I think Dungeons should give a set 40-50% experience.