Showing Posts For Lex Talionis.5396:
As for Necro minions, true they didn’t fix those(but they did give a fix to reanimator which everybody complained about).
People complained about reanimator for reasons other than the pet dying in 6 seconds – namely that the pet was useless for the purpose of dealing damage and ended up a liability in many situation where giving your opponents more targets (for spells to chain between) was actually detrimental to your wellbeing.
The necromancer thread was actually appealing for the removal of the trait entirely so they wouldn’t have to put up with the existence of the pet which locked them into combat.
I think that some of the disparity is fundamentally mechanical. Condition specs have little desirability in PvE because of stacking issues and the fact that conditions plain don’t work on many monsters which are bleed or burn immune – there’s even instances in dungeons where you have to destroy barricades or environmental objects which are unsurprisingly immune to all conditions (you’d think a ballista would burn).
GW2’s class roles do exist in the meta – I’ve never seen a ranger, ele or thief offer to tank, and tanking is often necessary in dungeons where ranged enemies 2-3 shot moderately geared light armour classes (CM Story mode comes to mind). I’d also be happier if Arenanet acknowledged that they’d be trying to balance support roles, so that perhaps +healing power might actually be a desirable stat some day.
I’m sorry, what measure of player skill are we talking about here if you’re saying that content just requires any old classes? Do people run dungeons with 5 thieves?
For a complete elimination of roles, 5 glass cannon berserker dps roles would have to be perfectly viable in PvE. The instant your party starts looking for someone to soak damage or someone who prioritises buffing the team over dps, you’ve created class roles. The entire point is that support and tanking are mutually exclusive with high dps.
And since when has condition damage’s armour-ignoring been a significant factor in PvE? Serious question. I haven’t come across the armour-monster that takes really low damage from any power build.
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The problem here is that GW2’s PvP balance changes ultimately end up affecting PvE.
Saying that they want to normalise damage roles runs contrary to asking for individuality in roles. Damage is damage, the only factors that change are speed of delivery (and the fact that condition damage stacks to a limit and ignores armour). Although this has a point in PvP, it’s usually irrelevant in PvE due to the drawn-out nature of fights. As a result, sustained damage is king except in situations where short time windows are given to do damage (which harms condition builds that are already suffering from lower desirability more). The other problem is that spike damage and sustained damage are buffed in almost exactly the same way, meaning that they are not necessarily mutually exclusive (see: Warrior).
Anet absolutely crushed this patch. they addressed almost everything i can think of that had been wrong with some of the professions i use, and the problems i’ve heard on the forums.
Necromancer pets.
“Tank vs spike vs physical DPS vs condie DPS. We want to keep making balance changes that allow all classes to have various builds they can use. We don’t want tanks dominating the game, and we don’t want spike builds dominating. It’s healthy to have multiple types of builds in the meta, so we’ll be improving the balance to facilitate a healthy meta.”
Now with specific regard to bringing your design philosophy into PvE:
1) Is the distinction meaningful between the 3 flavours of dps in PvE – and does this mean that support roles don’t exist as far as game balance is considered?
2) If we simplify all 3 flavours of dps into 1, would you say that rather than a holy trinity, ArenaNet has just created a holy duality?
About raiding it’s pretty much I would rather do this story an infinite number of times than ever do another raid.
The more times I do this story the more I see holes being filled in.
I can see that Phasing is either not being implemented in GW2 because either they don’t have the ability or they don’t want to. It’s clear when the inside of a building has to match the exact dimensions of the outside. I’ve seen in other mmos where 2 rooms can occupy the same XYZ axis in the game. Guild Wars 2 seems to not have this capability.
My point in talking about different sections of the game is why do you insist in posting on something you don’t like rather than posting on a forum that you do like. Things that you like are much more important and that is what you should focus on. Complaining is pointless if you don’t know how to fix it. A story is just that. Go to a forum you like and post how they could make you like it more.
And one more thing, my posts are debating your reasoning, not the message you seem to be hammering home.
I do know exactly how to fix the issue, which I’ve pointed out already: Hire a competent writing team, or failing that, learn from others. Plots of convenience are the absolute worst kind of narrative.
Expression of discontent with the way the personal story has been handled is important to me because Guild Wars 2 was MARKETED with an emphasis on the Personal Story and how decisions you made would be profound and meaningful. They were not. If you want to quibble about whether it is right to complain or not about dissatisfaction with the personal story, I suggest creating another thread.
I knew that was what you would say, but for me the story exists more in my head than in the game. This is the essence of role playing. They give you a starting point and then you choose how to interpret it and where to take it.
This game is designed to appeal to most people in a different way.
Story for those people who love story.
Dynamic Events for those that love a random chaotic feel.
Crafting is another community that has specific wants.
Some people play because they like the graphics.
Renown hearts are there for those that need direction in their gaming.The point of the game is to find what you enjoy and stick with it. Don’t start the game with expectations that X is going to be awesome or be upset that you didn’t like something. Pick what you like and stick with it. If you don’t like anything, it’s a free to play game, then don’t play.
This is exactly why I’m using clear examples from Guild Wars 2’s competitors. Guild Wars 2 does not exist in a vacuum and has clear competitors which offer products that deliver in a narrative which is (subjectively) less lacking than that of Guild Wars 2. This is exactly why you cannot use the “It’s the limitations of the engine” argument in this circumstance because saying “If you don’t like it, don’t play it” has no effect whatsoever on the point “Compared to some of the competitors in the MMO medium, Guild Wars 2’s personal story is egregious”. If I don’t like the smell of feces, I don’t have to smell them, but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s feces.
Your method of coping is tantamount to self-delusion and denial. If you wanted to present a reasonable counterpoint against my argument, you would argue by counterpoint to my presented evidence, rather than having to fabricate (read: pull out of your butt) excuses that do not have evidence behind them.
The problem is with your excuses, none of which are substantiated by evidence and all of which require a gross assumption that the future holds magical solutions to the existing plot and present even more holes – for example, Zhaitan doesn’t just have one eye. Why would killing one of his eyes completely blind him to the security of his mouth? Why would he even continue operations in an area where he was blinded? I presented many examples of when narrative could be furthered without using a “raid”, as you describe it. Why do you insist on pushing your untenable “raid” point?
Now if you want to be pointlessly optimistic, that is your prerogative to do so – but it does not detract from the points which I made.
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The story is still infinitely better than a story told by raiding.
We can’t talk game mechanics unless we know what this heavily modified Guild Wars 1 engine is capable of.
NPCs exclaiming that an attack was happening was put in place as a replacement for quest hubs. It was suppose to make you feel more active in the game.
I do not question a storyline that I did not write. I just think of what they could possibly have been thinking and go with that. I can’t see it completely from their point of view so I just have to accept that.
Before the mouth you kill an eye, I assume the eye died because Zhaitan was arrogant, “partially blinding Zhaitan”. This allowed us to strike at the mouth. After doing the story 4 times now and 2 other characters at least halfway through the story I can see the story as a whole. I found my favorite NPC during my 3rd play through and that would be Elli. 2 characters later I found the first story she appears in around level 30.Maybe they should put in a system that makes you lean towards npcs that you have had previous experiences with.
The home instance will be expanded on in the future.
I assume Apatia was probably the last of those 3 stories and needed a finale at 71.
You inform the bombers widow in one, and clean up a spy in the other.I also assume that Forgal, Tybalt and Sieran story is not done yet.
In the Pale Tree vision at 55 we clearly did not make it with them to Orr and because of that you see the members of Destiny’s Edge in disarray and Caithe fall into nightmare. Through speculation I see that we weren’t there and Destiny’s Edge failed to come together so the attack on Orr failed.
If you have to contrive excuses to defend the story, the storytelling has already failed.
This is an mmo, it’s not like a solo game where things can just change and stay that way. Eventually you will see the changes you made to the world through instances. The over world has to remain the same + new content for those that are just starting out.
The alternative to this in other mmos is raiding. The stories that are told through raiding are not worth mentioning. The guild wars 2 story is much better than any of those. The overworld in other mmos is even less memorable.
I completely disagree with your opinion. In fact, I don’t think you have played many MMORPGs at all.
1) World of Warcraft, for one, has had phasing technology since Wrath of the Lich King. If you have no idea what that is: http://www.wowwiki.com/Phasing – I’d also like to point out that it’s not unique to WoW. For example: City of Heroes used Phasing in the Going Rogue expansion, which had far better writing, plot, and character significance. When NPCs died, they stayed dead in the external world.
2) You present another false dilemma. The reason I specifically brought up The Secret World is because it has an extremely strong narrative without using raiding at all. Other games that can present compelling narrative include Final Fantasy XI and Aion, both of which I feel have more interesting stories than Guild Wars 2. Yet another example would be Star Wars, TOR.
Here is an example of how well TSW does it – using the fewest words to make the most of an impact for a minor quest NPC: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MzVRMculJq8
The problem with Guild Wars 2’s story is that it is insulting, poorly written, disjointed, shallow, inconsistent and banal.
Insulting – For the appalling lack of subtlety. “Oh no, the undead are attacking!” (Thank you very much, Mr Obvious. I was really afraid they’d be sitting around and playing contract bridge, or holding tupperware parties, but they’re attacking people! Quelle surprise!) Guild Wars 2’s plot is about as subtle as a brick of exposition to the face. To be honest, by the end of the storyline, I was half expecting NPCs that died to go “Oh no – I am dead!”
Poorly written – Guild Wars 2 has a plot of convenience that requires everyone in the world to be unfathomably stupid for it to work. Just a simple example – You find that the magical dragon with deus ex powers of convenience runs off magical artifact-sized batteries that have to be fed to a surrogate mouth in an area that is the exact opposite of “heavily defended” considering the strategic importance of such an organism. Conveniently, the magic dragon forgets the “how to teleport or stealth body parts to safety” powers it so happily demonstrated a few missions earlier in an underwater temple. Would that the players had such a short-term memory.
Disjointed – Guild Wars 2 requires you to be psychic in order to see characters from your early personal story turn up again later in the story. Given that the majority of the players are not psychic and probably did not pick that particular MCQ option, most late-game Orr NPCs are more of a “who the hell is this” experience than “oh, it’s that guy”. In the human storyline, you may foil a plan which ends up getting a large proportion of Divinity’s Reach poisoned anyway. The only place this poisoning event exists is in 1 NPC line in your home instance. That’s how important your event decisions are.
Shallow and Inconsistent – Guild Wars 2 has a disturbing tendency to drop events on you and attach far more emotional weight than they are actually worth. To this day, I have no idea why characters go back to Hoelbrak to talk about Crusader Apatia’s legend, the legend of a completely forgettable female “Norn NPC A” with an incredibly generic personality that blindly followed orders and died. Excuse me – 1) Do we actually have the time to do this, considering there’s a war going on and 2) Why didn’t we do this for Forgal?
Banal – Dear Destiny’s Edge: You sure have a lot of time to spend writing me psychic pigeon letters instead of pulling your act together. You might want to spend some time learning more important things, like “how to fight enemies” so that Logan doesn’t die in literally 3 seconds in Caduceus’ Manor, for example.
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While it’s true the game doesn’t offer any meaningful choices, I did imagine my character electing to stay and die with Sieran on Claw Island instead of being stuck with… He-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Interesting. Then I just stopped playing the personal story completely. Hell, it’s not like my character is actually my character. I don’t feel any attachment to that terminally stupid bundle of pixels. I suppose that’s also the reason it’s getting harder and harder to play the game at all, these days.
Anet’s problem with regard to that latter situation you raise is that there’s no emotional investment in any character other than your death-flagged mentor. An important narrative characteristic for someone to be a hero is that one has to be -unwilling- or at least go through personal sacrifice. Heroes have to be forged. We have to feel empathy before we can feel respect or sympathy.
Hence the problems work out like this:
1) Your character has paid the obligatory motivation tax by having his or her mentor die. What does Trahearne risk himself? What manner of duress does he experience? We’re expected to empathise with him for having some impossible geas which supposedly causes him significant emotional trauma? Trahearne makes no visible sacrifices.
This is why even though Rurik was annoying and an idiot, people don’t hate him halfway as much as Trahearne. Rurik paid the narrative sacrifice tax and gave up his kingdom and his fiancee.
2) Trahearne has done nothing worth of respect by the time you meet him. Instead, his combat abilities (it takes him 5 minutes to fight a single undead cow – and he loses) are laughable, he needs to be babysat, and we’re just told that he’s worthy of respect and therefore we should do so. As I’ve already said, telling is always less effective than showing in literature. To be fair, Destiny’s Edge has the exact same problem, and so do all the authority figures – Leadership and authority come with respect and talent. As a result, the player is guided to treat Trahearne with contempt.
3) Characters whip in and out of your personal story more often than you change your underpants. The decision to make story arcs arbitrary tiered standalone content in tiers of 10 mean that any character who is remotely interesting never gets character development because you’ll never see them again in a meaningful context after you outlevel their tier. Goodness knows you never see them outside Bizarro Personal Story World anyway – so talking about them might as well be as constructive as talking about your imaginary friends/pets that only you can see.
You know, as annoying and idiotic as Alesia (or other GW1 henchmen) was, at least she had a presence which I could share with friends (provided she wasn’t face-down in a poison swamp). I’d tell people “Hm, I’ll bring Livia and you bring Vekk”, for example. Heroes had presence outside of mission mode.
Guild Wars 2 originally had a companion system in early planning stages, but they scrapped it (probably because they realised TOR would probably do it better?).
The entire personal story exists in a separate dimension from the actual PvE world with a few shallow variables and flags dropped here and there in order to maintain the fiction of verisimilitude. Guild Wars 2 is essentially a MMO where nothing you do actually matters nor has an impact on the game – other than access to a “Members Only” area with limited function.
It offers no choice, just the illusion of choice thanks to gated content. Whatever you do in the game, the outcome is essentially the same. This removes much of the motivation for actually seeing the personal story on replays – you don’t forge your destiny as much as succumb to a scripted and inevitable fate.
Rationally speaking, it’s not always feasible to get a complex story done. But homogeneity of the storyline results in mass-produced interchangeable characters. I can choose to play a midget gnome, a not-an-elf-really, a furry cat or an obese giant, but the ultimate result is the same – Saints Row 3’s voice choices had more divergence in base personality than racial choices do. I miss Eye of the North and its true horizontal progression with PvE skills (and the title grind). I miss party dynamics and my AI companions. I miss having stories with actual dramatic effect rather than some shallow mentor-that-hits-all-the-contrived-death-flags and only turns up in the bizarro Personal Story dimension anyway.
And as for storytelling: I used to read Jeff Grubb’s DnD stories when growing up, but it’s apparent to me these days that he doesn’t have an iota of the talent Ragnar Tørnquist does. Thank you for destroying yet another illusion of my childhood. A good storyteller knows the value of subtlety and doesn’t shove facts down your throat and insult player intelligence, but no, Guild Wars 2 has to cater to the lowest common denominator by explaining kitten things and creating artificial MCQ situations instead of making choice selection active (I’d like to point out that The Secret World let you make player choice decisions without resorting to ridiculously contrived MCQ situations with 3 npcs staring at each other waiting for you to arrive).
A good storyteller doesn’t force-feed a narrative, he reveals. A good player doesn’t say “I want to do this” – he just does it and it’s your job to detect the decisions he made. Anet, I like you very much, but please force your writing team to play TSW.
Edit: I’d like to point out the biggest problem with GW2’s MCQ is that of the false dilemma. There were many, many situations where you’re presented a bunch of non-mutually exclusive options and yet you can’t go “Why can’t we just do ALL of them?”. Everyone is grotesquely mentally incompetent, including the asura. “Oh, I chose to join the Order of Whispers, so the Priory and Vigil agents will naturally refuse to help protect Queen Jennah” (Granted she’s completely useless and we’re expected to like her just-because.) – That suggests an appalling immaturity, spitefulness and pettiness within the 3 orders. What are they – squabbling vindictive children? Why is everyone so two-dimensional?
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The ball of light and visibility is a valid concern – one of the more annoying 5 second KDs in the game is the bomb skill from engineers who have a bad habit of placing it inside their character models or obscured by the PC’s huge furry charr butt, for example. Luckily, that one isn’t usually very dangerous.
I just don’t find that chain knockdown adds much to the game other than frustration – especially in situations like the Charr Fractal if all the ballistae decide to focus fire you instead of splitting their efforts (luckily, that KD is relatively short. Unluckily, it chains, and is usually fatal for non-heavy armour thanks to monsters).
I also don’t think it’s particularly good design to have a situation in which 1 hit from an ettin = death when fighting 2 of them because of chained KDs (a situation where your stamina will already be low from chain dodging). It’s quite preventable and ettins aren’t exactly the most difficult of monsters – but mistakes or latency happen, it’s a frustrating situation, and you may as well argue that we should all run around with 1 hp since we should be able to dodge every attack in the game.
Ultimately, I don’t think KD is a serious problem that cripples the game, but I do think it’s quite annoying and adds very little as it stands right now. That is all I wanted to say on the topic, and other people are perfectly entitled to voice how well-balanced and fun they think the KD mechanics in PvE in GW2 are if they disagree.
Try that : http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Stun_break
This isn’t a PvP concern. It’s a PvE one, where chain-KD happens more often than you can prevent it. One example – any long range stacked ballista/mortar effects that kb you halfway across the screen and will chain nicely into other enemy attacks. The ballista will fire at you at least 3-4 more times before your stun break comes off its CD, not to mention there’s vulnerability time inbetween dodging and some enemies don’t even give you the politeness of having a tell before their 5 second KD (the bandit steal abilities in Kessex are a good example).
Chain KD isn’t interactive and it isn’t fun.
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Lex Talionis.5396:In Guild Wars 2, the average length of a KD was 2 seconds, you couldn’t knock down a knocked-down target, and KD was still an extremely powerful interrupt mechanic which had to be used sparingly on monsters despite the fact you were roaming everywhere in 8 person parties. Why does it take so much longer to get up in Guild Wars 2? Did everyone suddenly get a lot fatter in the last few hundred years?
I think you meant in Guild Wars, not Guild Wars 2
Yes, I do. Mental slip. But the point still stands – We’re talking about a mechanic that was so strong that almost every warrior with a KD used Stonefist Insignias. just to get it from 2 seconds to 3 seconds, 4 second KDs were extremely powerful, and 5 and higher were almost unheard of outside of special PvE encounters based around them.
I don’t really see KD being any less strong in GW2, so why should chain-KD in PvE or KDs longer than 3 seconds be allowed to exist? They’re not fun at all.
As I’ve already said, the problem with Knockdown as a mechanic is that they’re either allowed to chain or they’re obnoxiously long. Centaur KDs (2-3 seconds) are fine. Enemy bandit Steal KD/KBs (5 seconds which 3 of them chain onto you with an instant cast which makes it difficult to dodge) are not. Not all KDs have a charge-up, and you can’t dodge many chain-kd attempts simply because the invincibility time on dodge runs out before you can dodge again. Ballistas are a good example of this.
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Given that Guild Wars 2 has no diminishing returns and overly strong CC is at best a PvP balance concern, I’m curious why enemy knockdowns in PvE have to last a mode of 5 seconds (as you can see from the duration all skills are disabled on your bars). The last few moments of knockdown aren’t particularly interesting nor compelling as I don’t find it very engaging nor interactive to see how many white numbers I can accumulate in 3 seconds.
My knockdowns certainly don’t last for 5 seconds, for one. Why should monsters’ ? Secondly, while you’re KDed, you aren’t immune to other knockdowns, so it’s perfectly possible to get chain-KDed to death or chain knocked-off a cliff. Some knockdowns aren’t even avoidable without stability (which isn’t common outside warriors, guardians and elites. Ever since you took it off Juggernaut, I’d like to point out the only options an Engineer has are to try to use one of a few stupid elites which don’t work reactively or to glug an elixir and pray you get the relevant effect) – such as the knockdowns off picking up explosive shot which are extremely annoying.
In Guild Wars 2, the average length of a KD was 2 seconds, you couldn’t knock down a knocked-down target, and KD was still an extremely powerful interrupt mechanic which had to be used sparingly on monsters despite the fact you were roaming everywhere in 8 person parties. Why does it take so much longer to get up in Guild Wars 2? Did everyone suddenly get a lot fatter in the last few hundred years?
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Please increase the cap to around 10-15 or add in smart targeting so that actual party members are prioritised. This buff is getting extremely frustrating, especially when pets are eating Light of Deliverance heals, or when applying run-speed shouts. On a similar note, please stop the Jade whatever in FotM from targeting ranger pets and wasting everyone’s time.