Guild Wars 2

Two pieces of feedback:

1.) Whenever I ran a dungeon, and had to use a waypoint during a fight, it wasn’t because I was trying to game the system, it was because we had to due to reasons I’m going to state below.

2.) The big complaint regarding the dungeons is that you guys designed a new trinity around damage, support, and control. This trinity was made perfectly clear as the alternative in design to the common tank/healer/DPS trinity that other MMO’s sport. However, with the dungeons, you take that trinity… then made most of their bosses control immune and most support on a long cool down. What does this do? It relegates two roles in their trinity, and shoves everyone into a damage role.

Until this is fixed? You’re going to continue having problems with number one, and continue to make me feel that I have to respec my control/defense warrior into a DPS role. That’s a shame, because according to everything that your development team was writing before the game was launched, his control build should be perfectly viable.

miya.5160:

I gave you a hint, and you still became that guy.

I don’t how what why I don’t even what just happened where am I?

I was being sarcastic. Just take the sentence I wrote before, “Sarcasm,” and take the opposite to be my intention.

I know.. I took it as sarcasm and responded to it as Sarcasm.

Text: It sucks for communicating tone and stuff. I meant no disrespect at all.

miya.5160:

Final Fantasy XIV, Diablo 3, and Star Wars: The Old Republic ignored their initial feedback, and they did fine.

Sarcasm. Don’t be that guy.

Well, in terms of sales.. they did, and so is Guild Wars 2, once again, in terms of sales. However, Guild Wars 2 is not Diablo III in a sense that it’s not a game that you only sell once then forget about. If they want to keep maintaining a player base? They need to listen to feedback and improve upon what they’ve started.

If they don’t do that? Well… SW:ToR is a great example. Their subscriber base fell in half after half a year, and is continuing to drop.

Leiloni.7951:

I’m not sure we should even have a reverse CC buff though. When you had tanks, they kept the mob controlled. Without them, it’s up to the rest of us. Without proper usage of CC, how are we supposed to keep the mob under control? What are we to do when the CC wears off and he goes after a group member hoping to one shot them? We need to be able to keep a fight under control for the entire duration of the fight if we work together as a group properly. CC is already short so it already requires people to work together.

You have given us so many tools to work with, why don’t you let us use them. No one likes the seeming chaotic nature of fights right now. If you let people control the fights using skill and teamwork, then people would enjoy it a lot more. But right now, players for the most part, feel very helpless. I think honestly that is the root of the problems people have.

You have a very good point! I agree with you.

No game grows through complacency. We should all understand that constructive feedback and developer interaction help a game become better, not worse. Everyone should also understand that there is no “wrong”, so long as someone can provide a good, well constructed, adult and intelligent reason for their argument.

If everyone can demonstrate that in their arguments? And the devs don’t respond with complete and total defensiveness? We will see things improve for everyone, not get worse. There are ways to make these experiences better without removing the challenge that they seek to maintain in their game.

Alright, people are saying to post some more suggestions… so i’ll post more suggestions!

1.) Give mobs the same mobility that you see often in the overland content, where they will… run away, chase after group members, etc, sometimes seemingly randomly. What will this do? Give Warriors, for example, who spec into more crowd control and support/buff orientations something more to do during trash fights, and introduce that notion of cooperation again. Mob chasing a group member? I’ll snare it so he can get away, bringing him to turn toward me so I can time a block. Synergizing abilities. Giving me full access to my spec. These are things that I mentioned are lacking.

2.) Instead of having the Stability Buff on Boss Mobs, where you’re chipping away layers of CC Immunity to get to CC “for real”, add in diminishing returns. IE: If he’s snared once, then the snare effect diminishes until it becomes immune for a brief point in time. What will this do? Require coordination of effects, so that it isn’t just a button mash to try to break open a CC opportunity. It will also allow people who have chosen specific roles to perform those chosen roles should they coordinate with their group.

3.) Remove the seemingly random knockback and fear effects from trash. It’s not fun, and it’s not hard. Find some other way to inflate the challenge level.

And lastly…

4.) Recognize that massive HP Pools, near one shot abilities, and anything related do not equate to “Challenge”.

I’m sure there are other things that have been brought up in this thread, but this is at least a start.

Gies.3824:

/sigh Can we just get these guys a rant sub-forum? Every time I open one of these threads I say to myself “Sweet lets have a talk, maybe I can point somethings out that will help.” Yet, a lot of the time, I just get “Dungeon mob killing me, change mechanics.” Perhaps, which mobs are doing this to you, or even just the dungeon these mobs in would lead to a lot more productive conversations and possibly changes. Such as “X mob in X zone is really annoying, anyone have any tips? Or is the mob just super annoyingly designed?”

I did list possible changes, and we survived the dungeon without needing to repair at all. Nothing to do with “The mobs are just killing me.” No need for tips either… because we were… successful.

I’m commenting overall about the design of the dungeons themselves, and the disconnect that they have with the game’s seeming design philosophy.

Guild Wars 2 was billed, to me, as a game that was finally going to forgo the trinity; a game that embraced a new kind of cooperation with group crowd control effects, support, and damage with mobility heavily mixed in.

With that understood… I want to know exactly why all of the dungeons suddenly take that philosophy and not only throw it clear out the window, but smash it, obliterate it, and set it ablaze; along with half the house in the process going up in smoke. Yes… it’s that bad.

Dungeon mobs don’t behave in ways that encourage anything but tank and spank tactics. Boss mobs are near entirely immune to crowd control, rendering half of certain classes weapon sets and abilities completely and totally useless. Creatures throw off control effects and knockbacks regularly without any tell, thus nullifying the need for Stability at all. Damage amounts are off the wall, with large durations between auto attack and, once again, no tell; making it extremely difficult if not impossible to time blocks. All this together leads to an experience that encourages mindless tactics; stacking defense and damage, spamming abilities, and zerging to finish battles.

Why? Because there is nothing that these mobs do that at all encourages us to be careful and skilled with our abilities. There are no visual tells, no need for quick reflexes, and no reason whatsoever to spec for anything other than pure defensive or pure damage… because when someone finally gets to a mob that you can time your abilities right, and use visual information to help defeat the boss… said boss becomes immune to those abilities entirely.

It’s frustrating. Extremely frustrating. I have never seen a bigger disconnect from the primary design philosophy, and the way that these dungeons are designed. It’s like the combat designers put something together sans the notion of the “holy trinity”, and yet the dungeons themselves forgot about that entirely.

My friends and I managed to complete a dungeon or two without any trouble. We didn’t have anyone end up naked or broken beyond repair. However, we all noticed the same thing… the mobs behavior? The immunity to abilities? It’s a serious problem. I myself as a warrior who was building specifically to help crowd control and play slightly defensively found myself near useless during boss battles; unable to stop bosses from chasing my friends or time blocks due to the lack of visual information. What does this reduce me to? Someone who spams the “1” key to do a bit of damage, or swaps to the brainless rifle to range attack and add to the DPS pool.

… and isn’t that what you guys were trying to avoid when putting this game together? Isn’t that what the MMO Manifesto proudly proclaimed you were wanting to get rid of?

I’ve never been more frustrated with a dungeon experience in my over 10+ years of MMO gaming. This needs to be fixed. Dungeons are one of the primary reasons I play games like this; cooperative, five to six man group experiences, and that which i’ve run thus far has been nothing short of an extreme disappointment.

Make crowd control useful. Improve the visual cues for people that use active blocking (i’m not asking that you make it terribly easy, just give us SOMETHING). Make mobs behave in ways that challenge the playerbase to work together instead of making them just HIT hard and have BOATLOADS of HP. Do SOMETHING. ANYTHING. Because this is just… bad. It’s terribly bad. And it’s really taking away from a game that has a metric boatload of promise. As it is, I can’t really justify staying if this is what the majority of the dungeon experiences are going to be like.

Find this happening on both my laptop, which is running an integrated audio chip, and my desktop, which is running a soundblaster. Both have the latest drivers.

What happens is this… and its most common right after either zoning into a new area, or once a lot of action starts happening on the screen… the audio will stop playing in tandem with player actions like weapon swings, particles, jumping, etc… becoming near silent.

Then, after the event disperses, or you’re in the zone for long enough, you’ll start hearing a random explosion here, a random jump sound effect there, another random weapon swing grunt…

… before it finally catches up.

It’s kinda obnoxious. Takes a bit of the immersion factor out of the game.