Guild Wars 2

Whilst GW2 never had the disastrous launch that FF14 had, nevertheless it was a disappointment to many people and never lived up to its true potential, nor the legacy of the first Guild Wars.

The shame of it is, GW2 is not a terrible game, which means there’s little incentive to fix the very serious and fundamental problems the game has. FF14 was a total wreck, and that was enough to force Square to bow their heads and remake it into FF14:ARR. Sure, you may or may not like the type of game FF14:ARR is, (I don’t, really) but from everything I’ve heard, it’s fulfilled its potential and the people that like that kind of thing really think it’s a great game.

Now that we have “Living World Season 2” coming, it’s maybe a good time to think about an expansion pack or reboot, that really FIXES the problems that have been there from day 1.

Sure, you might care about these things less or more or not at all, but I’m pretty sure everyone agree that “There’s room for improvement here.”

- Combat needs an overhaul.
Currently GW2 is an unhappy hybrid between action games and MMOs.

On the action side, the mechanics are too shallow, and there isn’t a proper risk/reward system in place. Even something as simple as “Powerful attacks and defensive skills use endurance too”, would mean that you have to make the difficult choice between using your endurance on offense, or saving it for dodging/defense. Rather than just hitting every skill on cooldown 90% of the time.
Also, too many of the traits are passive, minor and invisible. It would be much better if (like Diablo 3), choosing traits produced visible and game-changing alterations to how some of your skills worked. (eg. The elementalist trait Evasive Arcana is a good one.)

On the MMO side, there isn’t much depth in the way players cooperate in battle at the moment. Support skills are usually PBAoEs, that encourage everyone to stack on a single point (which is silly on many levels) and there aren’t any meaningful Roles.
ANet needs to rework a lot of the skills and traits so that they have strengths and weaknesses that depend/interact with your team. For example, give each class some support skills (ie. skills that heal/benefit others) that are very strong, but have a casting time that is interrupted by any attack. Then add more skills to every class that can knockdown/knockback the enemy and create projectile shields.
So, without pigeonholing any class to a role, we can allow players to build defensive and supporting roles, in addition to the usual offense.

There’s a whole bunch of other stuff, but I’ll just list them quickly since it’s already a wall of text.
- Enemy AI also needs a lot of work.
- Some fundamental features are missing from PvP and WvW – Like observer mode, build templates, etc.
- The metagame mechanics of WvW is quite broken. When the best rewards come from karma trains rather than epic combat, your Epic Combat mode is not designed properly.
-The personal/living story system, and the story of the game, is not sustainable. Personally I think it would be much better if you weren’t Saving The World, and instead Personal Stories could be shorter episodes about your character, like “My quest to find my sister who was captured by a circus and the adventures I had along the way.” There’s a potential for a huge variety of such Personal Stories, whereas you can only really Save The World a couple of times before it gets really silly.

Anyways, time for a reboot.

As a player coming from fighting games and action games, MMO combat has always felt really bad to me.

GW2 is a bit more actiony than traditional MMOs, but I don’t think it really captures the mechanics that make fighting/action games work well.

One of the big things that’s missing from combat, is a strong connection between risk and reward, offense vs. punishment.

In a fighting game, there’s a naturally flowing tradeoff between offense and vulnerability. (To make things deeper, the most critical vulnerability is being predictable.)

I can do nothing and block all day, and I will be very safe. However, it’s impossible to defend perfectly, so eventually I will be whittled down, especially if the opponent feels no threat and is free to do whatever he wants to crack my shell.

In order to perform any sort of offense at all, I have to leave my shell and make myself open to attacks. And in order to perform more powerful or useful attacks, I often make myself more vulnerable to more powerful attacks. (eg. a heavy attack takes longer to recover, which means it can be punished with slower, heavier attacks before I can block in time.)

However, a fighting game model (where getting hit will result in your character being stunned) probably wouldn’t work in an MMO, because of multiple players on both sides.

So we need to find another way to create vulnerability when attempting offense

At the moment, there’s a pretty weak link between offense and vulnerability in this game. Even if I blow all my offensive cooldowns in my spike combo (and you dodge), I still have 2 dodges and all my defensive cooldowns available. The only exception might be Thief’s Initiative mechanic, which I will take inspiration from.

My idea: Link offense, dodging and defense together via the Endurance bar.
Basically:
- Reduce damage of autoattacks dramatically. Autoattacks are now the “jabs” of the game ie. safe and weak.

- Every weapon set has at least 2 very powerful attack skills, that require & consume one bar of endurance when used.

- Powerful defensive skills (esp. those that grant evade, invul, heal, etc) also require & consume one bar of endurance. Dodges still consume one bar.

- Increase number of endurance bars to 4.

- The most powerful attacks work similarly to Dragon’s Tooth: they are difficult to land on a mobile player. But at the same time, they also work similarly to 100 Blades: they root you in place for a while (cancellable via dodge.)

- Reduce all forms of passive healing.
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With this idea, I’m hoping to connect Reward (doing damage to the enemy) with Risk (running out of endurance and being unable to use dodges/defensive skills.)

I’m hoping for fights to slow down (less spam because your powerful attacks leave you vulnerable) but also more intense – when a mistake is made, it can be punished severely and end the fight.

This sounds like a big change that will never, ever happen, but I think the serious flaws in GW2’s half-MMO/half-Action combat cannot be resolved without some fundamental changes. I hope the designers will think courageously and deeply on these issues.

Feel free to discuss my particular suggestion, or your own thoughts on the mechanics of Risk vs. Reward in combat.

Edit: Further thoughts in this post:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/pvp/pvp/Offense-vs-punishment-risk-vs-reward/3010633