Guild Wars 2

Every time I look for armor on the Trading Post I find it really annoying and time consuming when I have to look through all three types of armor (Light, Medium, Heavy) when obviously one character can only use one of the three…I’m not sure if this has been suggested before, but I think it would cut a lot of time out of looking for armor on the Trading Post if there was a Light, Medium, or Heavy filter under Armor.

HO-HUM, just an UN-CLEVER way to force another mounts thread into the forums. {:-þ

It has been mentioned before, but if someone who doesn’t discriminate explains it, this might make more sense.

The thing with GW2 is that nearly all of the defense in this game is “active”. What this means is, defending yourself isn’t really about an armor rating, or a HP bar. It is about recognizing enemy tells, blocking and blinding those attacks, maintaining distance, strafing, and dodging. Other MMOs invoke passive defense, where everything is determined by your stats beforehand.

Because of this, the roles played by any character isn’t too limited on their stat distribution. A guardian can reflect and block just as well in full zerker as well as they can in full PVT gear. But rather, the “role” they play is based on the utilities and traits they have at their disposal. This is a bit jarring, since this is different from both other MMOs, and from sPVP/WvW mode in this same game.

As for the reasons why it is different, there are several reasons:

1)In PVP, your opponent will always have relatively high sustained damage, so things such as effective HP and the overall damage to durability ratio come into play. In PVE, enemies have strong but slow and telegraphed moves. This means that in PVP active defense only avoids some damage, whereas in PVE it neutralizes nearly all of it.

A)This is also why healing is more important in PVP. Whereas you can dodge nearly everything in PVE, if you can’t dodge then you’ll never heal the massive amount of damage done. But in PVP, since you can’t dodge everything and damage is sustained, the healing contributes meaningfully to your overall health.

B)This is also why durability is important. With active defense stopping so much less, you’ll rely on your stats a lot more. The sacrifice for greater damage is meaningful, since an opponent can do comparably greater damage to your HP bar than you do to him if built right.

2)PVP objectives aren’t about killing your opponent. In sPVP, it is about point control and secondary scoring mechanics. Sure, killing helps, but it isn’t necessary to progress. In WvW, it is about group movement, siege, and holding towers/keeps (which don’t go by normal combat rules), so again it isn’t necessary to kill your opponents as much as it is to drive them off. But in PVE, it is all about death, killing enemies, and more death. So, offense became the name of the game.

3)You fully heal after fights. In games where you don’t, defensive stats and healing are important for long term sustainability, but in this game you get a clean slate for merely ending the fight. With active defense being important and limited, the faster an enemy goes down, the less damage they do and the quicker you can heal up. Because of this, DPS gear is both offensive and defensive in one.

4)The game is designed with close ratios between offense and durability. In some games, one player can have 10 to 20 times the effective HP of another character, and some characters can have 5 or 10 times the damage. In this game, the scales kitten much smaller (for example, only looking at gear + 300 Power/Prec/Crit damage and ignoring sigils/runes/trait abilities, berserker only does 50% more damage than soldiers), and this allows for players to have diverse builds while still being relatively effective. This diversity doesn’t punish players for any glaring flaws in group composition, so players are free to go full DPS without fear of being completely one shot by everything.

When you add all of these things together, you get a perfect storm that focuses on damage above all else. Ultimately, I would like to see this storm remedied, and this is most easily done by making PVE more like PVP. Put in enemies that have high sustained damage and attack frequently with quick AoEs and cleaves, have objectives that are explicitly not about killing enemies, and you’ll see build diversity become much more useful.