Showing Posts For Jin Saotome.5320:
Orr still had people because you could get candy corn, bags and such from Orr mobs and nodes. The crafting items were still useful and such, so was the karma and everything else.
Currently, you can only get the new crafting material in the new area, and the new gear (while marginally better) can only be obtained from the dungeon (though you can craft the backpiece in the mystic forge so not all hope is lost… I guess). This means that if you want to “complete” your character, or have the competitive edge (in WvWvW), you need to be in the new area as the old areas don’t really have any benefits (other than farming for gold, maybe).
No one doing dragon fights.
No one doing old dungeons.
No one doing events in Orr zones.
People asking for 80s in full exotics for Fractal runs.
All that damage in so little time.
Same thing applies to DS, please try to backstab any of the bosses and get back to me, try to apply your strategy to Ornstein and Smough, Gwyndolin, Sif, any of the new DLC bosses, etc. It doesn’t work at all. The only one that you can easily parry is Gwyn and the whole fight is designed for him to be a huge pushover (dying old man). The enemies don’t even do the same thing according to the position, the enemies will kick your shields (thus breaking your guard), dodge your attacks, counter, parry, will try to knock you off ledges, they will attack you from range (if ranged, just like GW2). Attacking enemy shields will get you easily killed. Approaching the enemies properly and proper positioning is using different tactics for different situations. Let’s not completely ignore that a 3 warrior and 2 guardian setup can just brute force it’s way through most of the dungeons, bosses included with no issues. No, having to move out of red circles is not “changing your strategy” which is the bulk of movement in most dungeons anyway.
Your whole comparison to King’s Field is well…silly. First of all, Demon’s Souls is a spiritual successor to King’s Field and it borrows from the atmosphere, music, design and…that’s it. Dark Souls went back and instead of having a hub like in DeS, it has an open world. This is what proper sequels do though, they take from the original and improve and build on it which is exactly what both DeS and DaS have done. It’s not an old game ported to a new environment, that’s some serious grasping at straws right there.
The combat is a whole other beast and king’s field doesn’t have most of the mechanics that are present in demon’s and dark souls, making the comparison invalid in that area. Comparing a game with first person combat where the sword swings are clearly FPS style (where the way the weapon swings isn’t necessarily tied to how it hits, similar to how the elder scroll games handle their combat) and they’re fat bullets with short range to a game whose combat and weapons all have proper hit-boxes and a bunch of other mechanics tied to them for movement, etc.
As to what can GW2 learn from DS in general? How about making enemies that can actually kill you instead of having most fights consist of enemies with huge HP bars where you flail at them for 5 minutes straight with little chance of actually dying unless you’re asleep on your keyboard and your drool is magically making your character jump off to its death. Playing musical chairs and dodging the absolutely obvious “insta-down” attacks is Zzzzzzzz.
Part 2
2) Here’s the thing about video game difficulty and patterns… that’s how enemy intelligence currently works. All of it, in every single game ever with zero exceptions. It doesn’t really matter how you go about it, the “intelligence” is scripted and follows only the variables that are coded into the game. This is a processing power limitation more than anything, we currently do not have the hardware to due true AI, or any complex scripting that won’t cripple your performance when applied to the scale that an MMO needs. With that said, even Dark Souls manages to give enemies attacks that they will rarely use normally, but will trigger under specific circumstances throwing a bit of a curve ball at you at times and punishing you accordingly if you fail to avoid it. Now GW2 does have some things going on for it but they’re implemented poorly and affect you in varying degrees depending on how close you like to stand to enemies. I’d like for the special effects overall to be made much cleaner and enemy calls to be a tad more noticeable, now this isn’t really a problem if you run a melee heavy group but if you have a lot of spells going on this can be an issue for the smaller and faster attacks. You are on fire, the boss is on fire, there’s purple butterflies all over, you have rain falling, stuff erupting from the ground, bunch of circles on the ground and even zoomed in you go “I can’t see a kitten thing!”.
Ultimately the better game will have have a good mix of both pattern recognition and tactical adaptation, the problem is that these things once figured out lose a lot of the challenge (and then the tactics kind of just become pattern recognition and memorization anyway) and that’s something that is pretty hard to fix at the moment due to said hardware limitations mentioned earlier. Maybe in 100 years MMOs won’t be like this, who knows…
Like I mentioned earlier, I would take Vindictus bosses over the current GW2 bosses though, or hell even a middle ground between both would be more than fine. While it’s a lot of pattern recognition, you still need good reaction, preparation and knowledge of all your moves and the boss’ attacks otherwise you will get wrecked even if you are higher level.
Done.
I can’t quote for whatever reason so @LordByron
The following is more of a general reply with some added points as well as addressing the points (or at least trying to)
1) I wasn’t going to touch on this but Dark Souls and Demon’s Souls has barely any artificial difficulty as very few instances will straight up instantly kill you (and moves that do you can see coming from a mile away in most cases) that are not the player’s fault. In fact, you can blaze through the game with any weapon/armor/stat combination (you are also told how to execute every single combat related skill within a few minutes of the game, said mechanics don’t change at all either so they’re nice and constant) as long as you’re careful and understand the mechanics which is not only about pattern recognition but also involves tactics and preparation before hand as simply trying to rush through won’t work a majority of the time. Movement (or movement speed) isn’t an issue, and neither is attacking/defending. The game gives you all the tools you need to avoid ALL damage regardless of where it’s coming from and who is throwing it your way. Actually, Demon’s and Dark Souls are so good about this that they threw out the whole “all weapons of the same type attack the same” (this is basically how builds work in the game along with armor/stat combinations) out the window and instead each weapon tends to have its own move set (some with bigger variations than others).
This leads to interesting combinations even among the same weapon types where some weapons are better for thrusting, some are better for piercing, others are better at slashing, then add elemental types, etc, etc even though they’re all part of the same family (must be noted that none of this information is even remotely required to advance through the game but it is stuff to do once you hit the meta-gameplay stages after your first or 2nd playthrough) and as a result you can get quite creative on how you approach enemies. Same thing for magic, casters start out much weaker than melee but still very doable. Archery is the weakest by far but it has it’s advantages, specially against stationary bosses provided that you bring the right arrow type to the fight or enough arrows (pulling can be quite useful in GW2 as well, specially if you have a bunch of people that are new in the group. The dungeon takes longer but it’s easier for players to familiarize themselves with the attacks this way), which means that knowledge and tactics are being applied to every encounter as well as preparation before hand should you want to.
*It is possible to completely ignore almost every single game mechanic in the games and just brute force your way through it (heavy armor, spells to increase damage resistance, high poise, high stability shields, elemental greatswords) which to no one’s surprised also works with a good number of classes in GW2.
I honestly can’t say the same thing about the combat in GW2 for PvE (PvP is a whole different monster), specially when it comes to ranged combat and targeted skills. Melee combat is much better about this as you can usually use regular movement to avoid attacks (not dodging) due to melee range limitations. Ranged combat in the other hand has quite a bit of tracking on it, making single target spells not really evadable via movement unless the projectile is ridiculously slow. This puts GW2 in this weird half-action/half-classic MMO target and press hotkey middle ground gameplay (which a lot of people like and is sure as hell a nice improvement from your typical western MMO, but can be improved even further) where you’re like “Well I could just move out of the way but that projectile clearly has GPS on it or something so I’ll just sit here and take those things like a big boy” so it becomes less about avoiding all damage to just avoiding the big attacks that will surely down you.
Cont.
Man, so many logical fallacies in these threads. Absolutely hilarious.
On to the dungeons, bosses in general are just terrible and do nothing but stay (almost) still and swing to literally the closest guy. That’s exactly what tanking is, they just made it so it is almost impossible to restore your health to full in a very fast manner consistently thus forcing you to move around for a few seconds or rolling out of the way to give you time to heal… big whoop.
When it comes to dungeon bosses actually trying to kill you, Vindictus did a much better job at that, it also does a better job at not having you rely on a holy trinity to get stuff done. Too bad everything but the bosses is mind-numbingly tedious.
Well it looks like a lot of gamers are even worse than PS1 levels of AI, which goes to speak as to how utterly terrible games (and players) have gotten lately when a series that follows a “take it slow, pay attention, wait for opening” approach to combat still manages to be some of the more challenging stuff in recent times.
I thoroughly enjoyed the few lines that Apprentice Valda delivers.
“Holy crap, a Norn with a regular voice!”
I’ve been playing engineer since I purchased the game, and just recently started playing an elementalist. They have a lot of in common really… high utility/support capable and versatility, with a sincere inability to finish any fight without playing keyboard piano. I would often become aggravated when I would hit an area where there are 3 or 4 mobs, usually in a tight corridor, that turns into an intense fight for my life… i know I can win…. eventually…. but often it takes so long to take them down that the first of them I picked off start respawning and joining the fight as the last of them are going down. Throw in a veteran or two and it can quickly turn into the eternal battleground….
And then….
A warrior walks through… pushes three buttons and downs them all on his way to casually mine an ore node.
Engineers playing the piano to kill stuff? Certainly not in GW2 (unless you reaaaaaaally wanted to). Bomb Kit and Grenade kit is basically spam 1 and drop multiple mobs at once (specially true when you get grenadier) with ease on top of having perma vigor and swiftness. Even elixir gun gives you a move set which makes you almost impossible to kill while pretty much staying out of range of many strong attacks the majority of the time.
Yes you can plod along and kill mobs one by one faster on a warrior but as an elementalist you can gather up 5 or more and aoe all of them down at the same time. Personnely I prefer the ele method.
One by one? Why would you even do that? Axe and greatsword attacks are (mostly) AoE so you can just get multiple mobs and shred them at all the same time with no issue at all.
The ability to do damage in water attunement, even if it means having to sacrifice most of my healing/utility effectiveness to do so (via traits).
I wanted to play a water/lightning themed ele but that went down the drain extremely fast.
In WoW the weapon’s “cast time” is the weapon speed. In fact, pretty sure warriors in WoW (at least I did) used an attack speed timer mod for properly timing mortal strike with their normal attack (for burst), and using the bar so “on next strike” attacks could be timed better. It’s really not all that different minus the very first auto attack.
This is pretty annoying. Grass, flowers, small bushes, random non-interactable objects (things that you can walk through) obstruct flame blast a lot.
I remember doing soloing this particular veteran giant crab (result of some hylek trying a potion and the crab taking too much) and that area that you have to fight the crab is horrible. Was getting obstructed so much there, even a couple of times where there was nothing between the crab and myself.
Projectile should be a bit faster IMO, if the mob doesn’t have reduced mobility they tend to recover from 3 fast enough that the AoE blast from 2 simply doesn’t connect. Not an issue with slower enemies but pretty common with faster ones. That or the knock back giving a 1s cripple/immobilize (maybe even .5s) would help this combo quite a bit.
Having to rely on the belt skill for “guaranteed” burning with a flamethrower seems a bit silly as well but eh that’s more of a balance issue I suppose.
Pretty sure this is barbaric armor. Level 75 crafted.
If you guys seriously think that most classes are remotely good underwater then you haven’t tried an Engineer with Grenade Kit underwater. Every class should get grenade kit when underwater, it is seriously that good.