Guild Wars 2

I don’t see a problem with speed-running per se. If it’s really a problem, all you gotta do is make trash mob and optional bosses worth it. For example, the game can stack up a buff on players for each veteran+ trash mob kill and give substantially better loot on boss kills and dungeon completion when the buff is at certain levels. If you’re mad at zerkers, just make the buff lose some stacks on down. Solution is kinda simple.

I think all that’s needed to fix Defiant is to make it a CC duration reduction that stacks intensity up to 100% with a duration, and any CC that would last less than a quarter second on a target with Unshakable after duration reduction should be completely nullified.

Players can CC a little bit and almost not notice, but constant CC is mitigated. If required in the case of knockbacks (which have no duration) the target with Unshakable could gain stability each stack over a certain number of stacks.

Nerfing Zerker straight away doesn’t do much for anyone except a vindictive few.

However, I can’t escape the thought that the game is better off with a more diverse mix of styles at the low, mid, and high echelons of gameplay than their absence.

Zerker doesn’t need a nerf. People are rightly and fairly playing the game to their potential with the rules as they stand. The rules just heavily favor zerkers, so change the rules before adjusting any class or role in particular.

Fact is, DPS gains the most from gear stats and Zerker gear gives the biggest bonus to DPS.

Fact is, Defiant as implemented today ruins control as a role.

Fact is, support as a role is not very strong at all, with any form of ability to mitigate damage for a team having relatively low uptimes (short duration, long cooldown).

Fact is, any means of helping players other than killing their targets quickly have very poor scaling.

These things need to be addressed in any solution to the DPS-only meta right now.

RyuDragnier.9476:

No, the current battle is fine…but ADD TO IT. He falls, then suddenly you and the party are pulled into the mists, where you fight the essence of him. You do a 1 minute curbstomp where he won’t take damage and devastates your party, only for your mentor to appear in death to give you the very thing you need to damage and resist Zhaitan. Cue epic battle with a humanoid form of Zhaitan, that has several phases. Upon his death, you have a tearful farewell with your mentor, and then are thrown back onto the airship, where there’s another cutscene before it gives you the “dungeon completed” thing.

In other words, make it so we know Zhaitan is dead because we killed basically his otherworldy essence/soul/whatever. It also gives us closure with our mentor and one hell of an epic battle.

That’s corny as all hell. Even cornier than the PS itself, which is saying something.

Wynne.3908:

Sirendor.1394:

Wynne.3908:

I just have this unsubstantiated belief/hope, that if you had five people with a well thought out, balanced build, go head-to-head against a DPS-first type build, given equal skill that the balanced will steamroll anyone anytime. Granted I have no proof of this. This is what GW1 taught me

The full DPS (condi included) will win so long as they have enough damage mitigation and enough group stuns. Take the incredible hammer warriors. I’m not going to lie, I played it… and it’s overpowered because it has a combo of superior damage, a lot of damage mitigation and disabling for enemies. I can run in a fight 1 v 3 and kill each one off without problems (even fought 1v4 in Team Arena and came out alive). The only thing that can stop me is stability for the opponents, and even then nobody will ever kill me unless I do something incredibly stupid.

Yeah but this isn’t GW1. I’m saying my Balanced team will outperform your DPS team everywhere in GW2, PvE/PvP/WvW. I just can’t prove it. On the other hand you can’t prove your case either.

You’d have to define “balanced” and “outperform” or we might as well just start talking about pogs or something for all the discussion will do.

Wynne.3908:

Now mobs in-game are another matter entirely. Being mostly a PvE/Dungeon guy myself I find it interesting that people are finding build diversity to be more flexible in WvW. If this is the case I’d have to point at poor enemy design in PvE rather than a lack of viable builds as the main reason OP is frustrated.

Encounters and Players are intertwined. There’s virtually no such thing as it being just an encounter problem: if the skills don’t fit the environment, it’s usually both that can be adjusted to encourage the desired effect.

In WvW, there are more builds because all the weaknesses of a person’s build can be washed away with simple numbers. Sub-optimal builds get herd immunity in WvW zerg combat.

Wynne.3908:

Your concept of how the combat system works is flawed:

It is, but because the roles are support/damage/control. Yet the principle point of the OP I find to be mostly accurate.

Wrong, but it’s an easy fix. Just add “simultaneously” to the above comment and you’ll find the combat is working as intended.

The best (as deemed by the community) PvE builds are all ones that can provide the most damage, while providing some particularly useful function in the bulk of the encounters, usually by increasing team DPS. They’re all DPS-forward. I don’t know of any prominent control-forward PvE builds, and only a handful of support-forward builds (might stacking Ele being the most prominent of the bunch).

If there are really three distinct roles rather than just useful abilities (most of which directly involve team-DPS) welded on to DPS-forward builds, then this game is absolutely not working as intended.

In WvW, there’s more flexibility in support-forward builds and even outright tanks, but still no control-forward builds. I won’t speak to sPvP because I don’t have enough experience to speak about it.

TheDaiBish.9735:

There’s no co-ordination in the Trinity for this reason: it doesn’t require people to be in sync, since you’re focusing only on what you’re doing.

I have to disagree here, and I think it’s because you and I have somewhat different concepts of co-ordination. Yet I still think there is significant co-ordination between the trinity roles. Aside of the fact that a player handling one task while another player handles another to complete a common, previously agreed-upon goal is by definition co-ordination, it appears you want something more dynamic than that. I think a lot of trinity games still have a level of that more dynamic co-ordination.

Yes tanks have to tank, but their job isn’t simply to roshambo with the target, they have to use their snap-aggro abilities as well, so they need to be aware of who and where the DPS and healing team members are. They need to be aware of their own life and use their SoS abilities on time, and communicate when they’re using them. For example: WoW Warrior’s Last Stand.

Healers do heal, and they mostly stare at their healing bars, but part of their role is condition cleansing and protection, which requires both positional and temporal understanding of what the DPS and Tanks are doing. An easy example is the typical AoE pack in WoW, where one needs to know who is AoEing, and importantly, who is going in first. They also need to move themselves out of the way while the DPS needs to control the AoE space as to not allow leakage into the healers. They also need to understand any abilities that may cause a disruption in healing and alert the targets that need to be healed to use their own SoS abilities.

DPS deals the damage. But they also have to coordinate CC and interrupts as needed. Often times, they’re the eyes of a raid as the tanks and healers are preoccupied. They often use CC to temporarily protect party members from random aggro, adds, or leaked enemies from an AoE pack, as the healers protect and heal whatever team member is likely to be assaulted next, and the tank scrambles to recover control.

Trinity allows for a basic level of role definition and execution. Tanks tank. Healers heal and develop complexes. DPS deals damage, pulls agro, and complains. But there’s a level of coordination between and within roles as players progress into more difficult content. A simple quest doesn’t require all of that. A lot of dungeons don’t. But the upper end of content absolutely requires more coordination rather than assist-targeting and mauling their DPS rotation.

While nothing really requires trinity design (or at least, I certainly don’t think so), trinity design helps define which of those tasks fall on each of the players while giving consistent progression and experience for a player through their chosen role. While it’s not necessary, it’s very useful in some ways. I do agree that technically games can work without it, but some of the function that trinity design provided still needs to be addressed in some way.

I’m only bringing this up because I think there are a lot of misconceptions about what trinity can and can’t do or did or didn’t allow. Even if GW2 said you needed at least one controller, one support, and the rest as DPS, but let anyone be any of the three on virtually any class, that would be a monstrous step up.

TheDaiBish.9735:

However, as I stated, I do feel encounter design is the biggest culprit.

Absolutely agree.

hey thanks for the clarification.

No problem! I enjoy the discussion.

1. I dont really knw what other games had in regards to rezzing so I cant really say. My only other MMO experience was EVE online.. In GW2 though, my group and I usually could rez dead party members up in combat through some strategizing and such (lure boss away, or shadow refuge etc), to which im happy with the way it is right now.

The misconception is that if a tank or healer died, the group died. Usually, though, that’s because they could never get the tank or healer back up and contributing. Most games blocked the use of resurrection skills in-combat, with limited ability to resurrect players during combat. For instance, in WoW, the tank may die to a boss, so the boss went stomping around for the next most threatening player to destroy. The trick was to in-combat resurrect the tank (in Wow, only 3 classes could do this in some form), then somehow get the boss back to the tank, which a few classes could do pretty easily. The tank then had a taunt ability, which instantly make the tank as threatening to the boss as the player with the highest threat level, and forced the boss to attack the tank. It wasn’t hard to recover most times: the developers of most trinity games just didn’t want the players to be able to.

That said, I’m comfortable with the way it is, but being able to resurrect any player at any time does contribute somewhat to the problem of the current DPS emphasis, which I too do not like.

3. Decoupling role from class is a good thing, i think most can agree to tht. and while heal warriors are cool thing (to me) I m still uncertain as to the need of a party member to be exclusively in one role, no matter what class/profession he’s performing that role in. i guess i prefer something with more..flexibility.
(……..or maybe specific roles like that means 1 character can have differing builds but with current BiS issue… ughh..nvm :P )

Role definition is simply about community and developer understanding that fosters player collaboration with and developer commitment to the supported styles of play in the game. That may sound minor, but is actually a big deal. In a game like GW2, a player wouldn’t need to be shackled to a role; a new role is what, 4 silver away?

I honestly think the game doesn’t need a true hard-line trinity, but trinity setups do provide some benefits to the players, and ANet needs to provide some of those benefits without actually instituting a trinity. They can do that by simply allowing the game to support the other styles of play without actually mandating their inclusion with the design of the content.

In trinity stuff, the loss of a crucial party member, the tank or healer could quickly lead to the whole party wiping, where as the Gw2 system allows the group to still perform even after losing a few members and possible recovering from those mishaps.

This isn’t really about trinity, but about an inability for most characters to resurrect other characters in combat. Tanks and healers both had the means to recover from an untimely demise once they were ressurected, but most games disallowed that ability.

Now I wonder, curious really… in trinity, as a healer or tank, these vital roles, im sure some would feel satisfied and proud of doing their intended roles, knowing that the group could not have made it without them. Not so in GW2, because ..well… if u die ur comrades can still soldier on, probably even win through while u lie dead on the floor. Not very glorious, i know.. So for trinity advocates, is that sense of importance is what is desired?

That’s part of it. I’m sure many people do take pride in excelling at their roles, as I did. What trinity did is clearly define what one is supposed to bring to the table and how it was to interact with the game; both players and NPCs alike. Players could be safely evaluated against what they were supposed to bring to an encounter, and it was the developer’s responsibility to make each class fulfill its role adequately.

Without trinity, it shifts the responsibility on what to evaluate and how on the playerbase, while the development team never has to commit to the viability of any role other than DPS being able to stand on its own in any type of content.

I personally like the gw2 system because i like flexibility. oh… and i hate waiting for specific classes when forming party :P

I like the GW2 system partly because waiting for specific classes got a little old, though I could deal with it. Mostly, though, I like it because a player’s conception of a character can fit more roles. Instead of marrying Warriors to a tank role, leaving DPS Warriors without a place or a voice, the decoupling allows a player to choose the style of their character reflected as the class (such as Warrior) and the role (Healer) which combines into a unique build (Shout Heal Warrior) which straight up doesn’t exist in other games.

I agree that the feeling of teamwork in PvE is very diminished compared to many other games in the genre, and needs to be fixed. In particular, control and support roles don’t seem to be effective for what one gives up to use them. It leads me to feel like anything other than maximum DPS is of limited use which causes all of my characters to essentially have the same goals and many have the same or similar optimal stat distributions for a particular type of content.

I don’t think Trinity is the answer here, though interestingly enough, Trinity in this game would be less damaging than in just about any other because every class can reasonably assume at least two roles comfortably and effectively in Guild Wars 2.

The problem seems to me to be a combination of quite a few factors:

• Most Combo Field and Finisher combinations aren’t worth the time it takes to execute them, so they are done almost at random with Water and Fire + Blast being the exceptions.
• Most control skills don’t last long and have a large cooldown which causes them to require a high DPS situation to be effective. Control doesn’t work well with control, while DPS works well with more DPS.
• Most healing weapon skills and utilities are very limited.
• Downstate gives every player the most coveted ability in Trinity games: mid-battle resurrection. With that, the penalty for going down is mitigated and even normalized whereas it would be a crippling event in Trinity games that would cause players to potentially think more defensively.
• Equipment improves DPS far more than healing, control, or support with the same stat expenditure.
• Encounter design often encourages killing the enemy as quickly as possible and fails to support any form of defensive strategy.
• It’s difficult to quickly grasp the effect a player’s support has on another player.
• To get an appreciable amount of healing, one must sacrifice significant amounts of DPS.
• Players are asked to rely upon dodge to survive; defensive stats and abilities still aren’t enough for many critical encounters.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not for changing all of those things dramatically; I even enjoy some of these features like dodges and downstate, but the combination of all of those things encourages players to feel that the best support is DPS, and the best control is more DPS.

TLDR: PvE Support builds that aren’t Hammer? PvE DPS builds that aren’t GS+Sw/F? Is Mace effective at all in PvE?

I always envisioned my Guardian being a little more defensive and with more support than my Warrior. Maybe with a Mace and Shield, maybe with a staff.

Then I tried the class.

Turns out both the Warrior and the Guardian classes really like the Greatsword (Warrior likes the Axe more), but for me the two play too similarly when built that way. So I’m looking for alternatives, preferably with more support.

GS + Sw/F is at bit too much like my Warrior’s GS/Axe+Mace. I know it’s not the same. It’s just not different enough.

Hammer + anything makes me sit in Hammer and is too… simple. Can’t really describe it, but not too fun, but not super boring.

Sw/F + anything really wants to be in Sword which is too boring.

Staff is good for Might and AoE trash.

So… Mace? Seems like it’s got some good stuff on paper, but the symbol isn’t that strong and the auto attack is slow. Is there a way to make this work?