Guild Wars 2

Spankert.7514:

Some bosses have WAY too much hp. We are easily better as a team than these bosses and the only threat they impose is a time threat, this is incredibly boring and discourages people from doing dungeons.

This is incredibly important.

Durzlla.6295:

Has anyone here stopped to think, “Maybe the ascended armors stats only kick in while in the fractals of the mists instance so you can actually make it through some of the later levels….”?

That implies that this is a good thing.

Gurt.9368:

They haven’t. In a skill based game, any play that could result in a benefit for your team should result in a benefit for your team, provided it is not counter-played by an opposing team.

This is the core issue with randomness – the reward to a play is not proportional to the utility value of a play.

Using Toss Elixir S when you see an ally about to get punted off a cliff has some utility – the sum of the utility of it giving stealth (e.g. no utility) and it giving stability (e.g. 1 utility, as an arbitrary number), or 0.5 (arbitrary) utility value. (Utility such as this certainly cannot be calculated and compared so easily, but the principle stands.) But if you use Toss Elixir S in that situation, you never actually get that 0.5 utility value – you either get a reward above it (stability – 1 utility) or below it (stealth – no utility).

It might be a smaller gap in value – getting Fury might be better than getting Might by a small margin; or it might be a bigger gap – getting Plague underwater on Elixir X as a predominantly Power engineer, for example. Nevertheless – while often useful for making casuals squeal and stay interested with artificial ‘dynamism’, it simply is not useful for competition, whether it be competitive PvE (speed clears, for example) or PvP.

I think it’s important to phrase it like this because it takes sentiment (e.g. ‘getting stealth when you need stability is bullkitten’) out of the way.

—

Additionally, even if the random effects were like you described -

Gurt.9368:

…what I am saying is that all elixirs should have a clear situation to be used in despite their randomness.

- random skills would still be actually more boring in usage than nonrandom skills, simply because nonrandom skills have specific effects that can be applied to specific situations, while random skills can only hope to have high utility in “general” situations.

To use the utility-value idea above – let us take Toss Elixir S again. Toss Elixir S really only has high utility when both the effects are desirable. When Stealth is desirable (e.g. has utility) but Stability is not (has no utility), the overall utility of the skill goes down; the same is true for the reverse. This renders skills with random elements generally caged to vague “general” usages, i.e. “I kind of want to live longer so I pop Elixir H”, over “I will pop Elixir H in anticipation of a spike because it will give me Protection”, etc etc., when more specific usages tend to be interesting (e.g. a clutch Stealth on a stunned ally, etc.)

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Redfeather.6401:

One can write an entire essay using strength in numbers to persuade people that the current randomness of elixirs is acceptable. But it doesn’t change the context in which those skills exist, and it doesn’t change how inappropriate their function is within that context.

On the other hand, there have been essays written on the opposite, why artificial randomness is unacceptable, at least for competitive play. I’ve written one, at least. Randomness is a poor substitute for truly interesting mechanics and serves to cover up bad skill design.

We must, however, think about who ArenaNet is trying to cater to, and why — it may well not benefit them, the game, or even us, if we were to remove artificial randomness, because – imagine a spectator of a match who has minimal knowledge of the metagame. If Guild Wars 2 were to be a game with no artificial randomness but incredible depth, the players’ choices may seem entirely alien to him/her, which can well turn him/her off the competitive aspect of the game; but if Guild Wars 2 were to have somewhat less depth but had things like crits, at least the casual spectator could go “OH LOOK CRITS OH MY GOD”.

It would be even better if it were easily toggleable between the standard and this one (didn’t try out, so I have no idea if it’s easily toggleable).

It would be a great feature that I know many people would love.