Guild Wars 2

I like the principles behind felesan.9587’s list, and I would strongly support that kind of implementation.

As for specific instances, the only personal negative experience I’ve had has been trying to complete Devouring the Brand in Iron Marches with a friend of mine, which resulted in multiple days trying and several bug reports due to the frequent issues with that meta event that can cause it to hang at various stages. If I remember correctly we actually had to finally get a taxi to another map instance to get it finished (and then we had to recruit a few other people for assistance). It was pretty embarrassing for me since I had recruited him into the game on the promise of accessibility and reliability.

As to the broader issues, there really has to be a happy medium between the current top-heavy system, which is meant to appeal to new players, and the old system, which by design’s own admission was far more appealing to veteran players. I appreciate that you can’t make content fair for one group of players that has access to full trait trees and another that doesn’t, but remember that in addition to converting new players you also have a major source of recurring revenue in your vets, and while you certainly want to reward someone for his box purchase with a smooth first leveling experience, you don’t want to make him feel punished for buying that extra character slot once he’s on his third or fourth alt.

My view is that even in the current system, there are no new systems being introduced past level 30, when traits are introduced. For even brand new players the fundamentals of traits are going to be mastered within five or ten levels at most. The tiers themselves don’t actually require any new or different understanding with respect to traits, especially since by the time the player has hit 60 (as it is now), he or she has had a long time to play with different builds and experience the nuances of his or her trait lines, made longer still by the fact that he or she only has 6 points to work with.

Sure, the new player is still unlocking skills at 60, but as with traits there’s not a new system being introduced with those later skills—only different variations within the current systems. Further, right or wrong, the skills a player is unlocking at the upper levels are frequently being unlocked for completion or variety rather than for experimentation, as the player has already settled on the style of play that he or she prefers. That may suggest that many skills need work, but there’s no faster solution for that problem than there is for traits.

I’d like to see all traits moved forward, so that the second tier opens up at 40 or 45 and the final tier opens at 50 or 60, with corresponding trait point awards to make the tiers accessible. Then at the genuinely higher levels players can spend their time working with builds that are full or near full (and honestly I think it would be better for players both new and old to have their full allocation of trait points by 70).

For that matter, leaving a window of ten to twenty levels of no new content could pave the way for the introduction of new horizontal progression systems or for reworks of current systems that are level-gated (such as systems currently found only in items, where higher rarity is only available at higher levels). At upper levels you could go a long way just focusing players on understanding what different stat combinations mean and what varying runes and sigils contribute, and the way you avoid the mechanics overload problem is by blocking off the competing mechanics into different level blocks (skills ~1-35, traits ~30-70, equipment ~68-80).

And that’s not even addressing the possibility of totally new mechanics we haven’t seen before, such as skill customization (as per World of Warcraft’s glyphs or Diablo III’s skill runes, for instance), which could have a major impact on player enthusiasm and build diversity without an overwhelming development investment and which would naturally belong at higher levels of play.

Whatever you do, though, remember that new players that stick around are only new the first time around. They’re returning players from then on, and if a returning player is going to level 8 characters to 80—as many of us have—he or she doesn’t want to wait until the end of the journey to get the things that could best be used to make the journey more enjoyable.

I think Staff absolutely suffers from readability issues, and that makes it extremely unsatisfying to play, especially compared to the level of power it actually has.

Personally I’d like to see Chilblains re-tuned to be more similar to its GW1 counterpart—targeted AOE chill with boon strip and poison field, 8-10 second cooldown. Mark of Blood’s effects should just become part of the remaining two marks (and the dodge trait), freeing up another slot for a new skill on a lowish (4-6s) cooldown.

On the other hand, Marks are good for area denial, but don’t feel as good as they actually are. You could leave the staff alone mechanically (and therein leave its identity as the Mark weapon intact), but you need to do some work to make it more fun to use without altering its effectiveness in either direction.

First Marks need to be more readable by both the user and the opponent. That means some major graphical changes to the indicators, so you know exactly which mark you’re looking at if you’re deciding to eat it or not, even without staring at the ground and consulting the wiki mid-combat.

Further, the traits need to be consolidated so that you don’t have to devote four different traits across multiple lines to maximize your weapon effectiveness. Compare that to the other staff users who only devote one trait to the staff—Guardian in particular even gets extra weapons in the same trait! Sure, that one trait doesn’t max staff effectiveness for the other professions either, but unlike Symbols, Clones, Phantasms, or element-specific skills, Marks are exclusively staff skills. The only other place they even appear is on the Lich elite. If you’re taking Mark traits, you’re actually taking staff traits, and so they need to be in the appropriate lines and pared down accordingly (the same thing really needs to be done for Minions as well). Personally I don’t think it would be out of line to ask that untraited Marks build life force, for instance, and that one trait alone enlarge their area, increase their damage, and make them unblockable, while another reduces recharge.

Finally, no matter what happens to Marks, the staff auto needs to feel more responsive, because it’s the only identity the staff has other than the black circle on the ground. The attack speed needs to go up while aftercast goes down, projectile speed needs to be faster, all while total DPS remains the same. Whenever I switch to my staff I feel like I have to wait for the minigun to wind up before I can actually start firing. This is the same thing that needs to happen to DS auto as well, by the way. No damage increase—just a QOL improvement (that would also have the effect of making it altogether harder in PVP/WVW for enemies to outright negate large chunks of damage just by dodging autos).

I realize Necros are supposed to feel paced and deliberative in their attacks, but right now by and large they feel sluggish (apart from dagger autos), and the Staff is a major culprit. I don’t have a problem with slow, hard hits, but they need to be somewhere other than the auto-attack if the auto-attack is the only direct attack I have on the weapon.

Honestly we don’t need a new elite minion. We need the current elite minion to learn how to swim (so it doesn’t despawn whenever we get a toe wet). A different elite minion would at best go on cooldown when the non-environment appropriate minion despawns, or at worst take up an elite slot (while other professions get new elites that don’t just fix an issue). Maybe give it a different ability underwater, but teach the kitten thing how to swim.

On a somewhat broader scale, I really wish there was a resource-efficient way to generate swarms in the way that GW1 necros could. I know this has been beaten to death for two years now, but even if it required some heavy trait investment, I’d like to see necros not in lich form with twelve minions. Alas.

roamzero.9486:

Ranking from most to least:
Ranger – Not really wanted in pve, pretty crappy in wvw, and slightly subpar in spvp, most of the buffs needed are to pet handling, longbow and GS power playstyle.

Engineer – Needs a niche in WvW zerg fighting and PVE, also borderline OP in low-mid level spvp. Everything not condition-build related should be looked at.

Mesmer – Like Engineer, needs more variety in zergs, mostly fine in PVE, needs a better role in spvp. Anet really needs to be careful not to make them even more ridiculous in 1v1 pvp situations though, PU Mesmers definitely do not need to be made stronger.

Warrior – Fine in PVE, borderline OP in spvp and wvw. Too much access to min-maxing its intended weaknesses, and the sustain buff they got should have been accompanied by a mobility nerf.

Necromancer – Necromancer’s PVE gameplay primarily needs to be looked at, it needs somekind of cleaving power.

Thief – Mostly minor issues. There still isn’t a viable P/P spec. S/d might be a little too strong in spvp, slightly more counters to stealth might be needed, otherwise fine.

Elementalist – Have a strong role in every aspect of the game, would be nice to see RtL unnerfed a little though. Celestial eles might be a little too strong, would be nice to see conjured weapons looked at more.

Guardian – Strong everywhere, like Eles. Would be nice to see a viable condition build out of them, getting closer. Would be nice to see more escape options for non-zerging in wvw (something like Necros flesh wurm utility-wise).

I had to come here just to say how much I agree here. You really nailed it. Even if I might not agree with your particular order, everything you’ve said about the professions’ respective strengths and weaknesses is true.

These kinds of conversations are always frustrating for me because I see many people championing their profession of choice and never abandoning that lens when evaluating the others. Part of it is just personal advocacy, but I think that kind of thinking is also reinforced by the current balanced state of the game. That is, right now and barring a few outliers, the professions are actually pretty well-balanced across all game modes.

The problem is that the strengths and weaknesses don’t tend to be reciprocal: Necros are strong in zerg WvW, decent in structured PVP, and sub-par in dungeon PVE. On the other hand, thieves are great at structured PVP and solo or small group WVW, good at PVE, but lousy at zerg WVW. So which class needs more work?

Well they both need work, but they need it in different areas, and it’s very difficult to actually compare them as whole classes. PVE players say necros desperately need buffs (and they do, in PVE), while people on the receiving end of the necro menace in WVW decry any hint of necro improvements. The professions at the bottom of the list, not surprisingly, are thus the ones that are good all around (Ele and Guard), but the difference between Ele and War DPS in a speed-running group is pretty minimal, and as roamzero rightly notes, Engineers are an absolute nuisance in PVP, especially anywhere other than organized high level play.

The important thing I hope people take away from this exercise is that this is not a ranking of least OP to most OP, but an effort to organize classes so that ANet has a good idea of what the community’s experiences and collective data represent. We want all professions to be like guardians and elementalists: good at everything. That doesn’t mean that nobody needs nerfs or everything should be homogenized.

But it does mean that if we want to see parity across professions, we have to abandon the perfectly natural dread that comes with the suggestion that one’s nemesis class is going to see buffs.

Huh. Well, thanks for explaining the current situation. I just wanted to chime in and say that this is something I’m interested in—that is, it’s worth it to me for you guys to devote some resources to figuring out a long-term solution to this issue. If that means developing new tech for how maps/instances/etc., are stored, compressed, distributed, etc., that’s something that’s worth doing.

I gotta be honest: ESO’s phasing is pretty impressive. I realize GW2’s infrastructure has a little age on ESO’s, but I’d absolutely be willing to give up a few gigs of hard drive for consistency. I’m afraid to say what I’d be willing to give up for the Nightmare Tower. a lot. probably too much. …

Anyway, even apart from the past PS and S1/2 issues, having the maps and instances be a little more modular could go a long way toward enabling you guys to develop more dynamic content with lasting consequences without disrupting open world play. You could actually show the repairs to LA happening in segments without having to build a dozen different whole Lion’s Arches. You could also do all kinds of tricks with the brand (or other dragon-of-choice corruptions)—either expanding or receding depending on player participation and success in events, for example.

I’ve no technical expertise whatsoever, but this seems like a problem that could actually be a gateway to some cool new features down the line, and unless I’m way off base, that should make it worth solving.

In any event, thanks for letting us know what’s up.

8/10 will play again.

That said, I want to echo some of the earlier sentiments people have raised, both good and bad. On one hand, I like Scarlet a lot better dead than alive, and not for the obvious reasons. The epilogue to this episode put a real point to the tragedy of her character and filled her out in a way that I’m not sure could have been as effective before her death. Complexity in hindsight is a good device, and I approve, particularly in this context. Maybe you’re band-aiding oversights in character development that should have happened in S1, but the execution is pretty smart. It makes me wish I’d paid a little more attention during S1, and that’s a tall order.

The zone is good, if cramped—and I don’t mean the sheer size, which is adequate. I mean six meters of sand to cross with a gimmick does not a wasteland make. You don’t need to give me an hour long walk across an ocean of sand, but I feel like the expansiveness of Maguuma could have better been portrayed with some clever lighting and particles instead of big rock walls on the other sides of the quicksand moats. To put a finer point on what I mean: the zone is a good size to play, but it needs to look bigger. If, however, you’re saving sand that stretches out infinitely for the crystal desert, I can totally accept that. If you’re not, though, you should.

Movement gimmicks suck. Bundles suck. There, I said it.

Finally I want to repeat something adroit some others have said: I do not like having words put in my character’s mouth, but there’s a way to do that without making me roll my eyes. Now part of it is just being clever. There are plenty of solid story-heavy roleplaying games that have had silent protagonists, but even if you need me to relay things to the biconics, the things I’m relaying should be bare-bones and immersive—just enough to move the story along. Let me read between the lines and imprint my own emotions and opinions.

For example: My necromancer couldn’t give two kittens about Kasmeer. He doesn’t give a kitten that she’s a noble, a mesmer, or whether she’s kittening Marjory, Taimi, or Moonboy for all I know. Now I don’t need a dialogue option that says, “Hey, Kasmeer, you can go kitten yourself,” but I also don’t want it assumed for me that I’m interested in her origins or that I have stereotypical Charr opinions about human nobility or religion. You don’t have to account for every possible variation, but you at least have to account for the possibility that the majority opinion of the (in this case, Charr) population isn’t shared by every furball wandering around Tyria. Give me an option that says, “Not interested,” whenever she starts babbling about court, even if it ends the conversation.

Anyway, on the whole, I’d say that this is nonetheless the best story implementation since the very early sections of the release Personal Story (and speaking of which, you should really introduce branching points that depend, like in the PS, on things about my character that I decide and that pre-date the start of the game, rather than just letting me choose whether I like Jim’s or Bob’s shorts better). Further, the biconics were actually likeable, more or less, if somewhat flat. In terms of gameplay elements, nothing terribly special, but then I don’t expect a Nightmare Tower every two weeks.

Keep it coming!

Kaiyanwan.8521:

Remember the Manifesto?

I remember.

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My leveling companion and I were talking the last few days about some of the Skyrim mods that we’ve experienced. I haven’t played in a while and he was recommending some stuff that he liked, in particular Realistic Needs and Frostfall, both because of the immersion aspects.

That’s a tricky subject in MMOs, but I can’t help but think that in the Shiverpeaks, some opportunities have been missed (and could similarly be missed in the Desert, if and when it’s ever released/available).

I certainly don’t want my GW2 avatar to be able to starve, freeze to death, etc., but I think there’s a balance between un-manageable survival immersion which really doesn’t fit the style of GW2 and environmental design that promotes the goals of the game in the context of the area where the player is. Sandstorms are a must, and they need to reduce visibility. Also, the zones need to be very, very, very large, with open spaces that are genuinely deserted. I don’t need to be able to run for an hour without running into a mob, but I want to be able to get a little disoriented if I don’t keep an eye on the map. I would actually be fine with the map not working at all in certain areas, but I realize that’s probably a bridge too far.

Finally, just wanted to add another plug for Breath of Fire. III and IV both had excellent, immersive desert environments for their times. Navigating by stars in BOF III is one of my fondest memories as a young gamer.

II don’t recall any of the late game content for GW1 being any larger than the standard party size for the majority of the game. Barring some of the Prophecies content, wasn’t everything designed for the eight-man?

That said, we do not need raids. I do not want my ability to collect nine warm bodies to be an impediment to my ability to explore content. There are already enough barriers to entry, and really, a stack of ten is functionally indistinguishable from a stack of five. Do we need new challenging content? Sure. But adding more players doesn’t make the content better, elite, or more difficult.

I would love to see some content that has more unique mechanics, such as a Phoenix Cave style dungeon with multiple paths—but you can do that with one party; split them into one group of three and one of two, or better yet, have five solo paths that require communication at set intervals.

In my admittedly limited experience it’s never been the principles so much as the implementation when it came to roles. Frankly I like the Control-Damage-Support trinity because it’s a broadening of the old trinity across all classes. Even in EQ, Enchanters and Warriors were basically doing the same job in different ways, and Clerics were necessary only because nobody else had access to healing.

Well, here, everybody (theoretically) has access to support, control, and damage, and that should absolutely remain. It should never be (or have been) the case that Guardians always do more support, but only that they do it in the Guardian way.

The problem is that the roles aren’t pronounced. Guardians, Warriors, and Elementalists stand out because other classes aren’t as good as they are at particular tasks. But we’re often not even talking about support, control, or damage in the abstract; instead we’re talking about the tasks that are perceived as necessary, and here is where the implementation hasn’t worked. Some versions of these roles are just more valuable: we don’t need a tank or a mezzer. We need might stacks, so we need Fire fields and Blast finishers. To further complicate things, the meta could abruptly change at any given time, meaning that profession value will change as tasks change, rather than roles.

Suppose in the next patch most bosses are given faster, weaker attacks as adroitly suggested by Blood Red Arachnid. Suddenly the entire meta shifts to address that change. When it finally settles, who knows which classes are going to be popular and which aren’t. Compare that to the entire lifespan of EQ, DAOC, WOW, COX, or literally any other game with hard-coded roles: there’s no patch in the history of WOW that made Warriors undesirable. You always need a tank. So if you’re not bringing a Warrior, it’s only because you’re bringing a Druid, Pally, or Death Knight instead. But in GW2 (and forgive me a little hyperbole), it’s entirely conceivable that the white summer could eventually end and Guardians would no longer always be in demand, because Guardians aren’t defined by a role but by the tasks they perform to fill it. It’s only in comparison to the other professions’ abilities to perform those tasks that are perceived to be valuable that the profession has value to a party.

You don’t fix the problem by making Thieves better tanks (or worse, suggesting that thieves should never be tanking). You fix it by making thief tanking something that players want, which might involve changes to thieves, changes to tankable content, or both.

To do this, the ponies all need a lot of tricks, because there’s no way to anticipate which tricks are the ones that your fickle player base will want. But everybody needs a Portal Entre/Exeunt to hang his hat on, and preferably multiples—that is, something that, like easy access to Fire Fields—he can offer up as a task which is a unique contribution to a particular type of content. Where we’re at right now, some professions just have nothing of value to offer. Damage doesn’t count; neither does “support” or “control”. Those are abstractions that are hard to define and articulate. And that’s fine: The last thing I want is a game in which people are getting turned away because “we already have two Eles as supports.”

But the current game really isn’t any better than that. The main hurdle that’s kept me from experiencing more dungeon content is the social barrier of entry; I just don’t want to be a burden. Giving my profession of choice pre-defined roles in which he excels isn’t going to change that. Giving me something I can put on the table, however—“I can make you guys hit harder” or “I can let us skip x”—that’s something I can use.

A lot of moving parts here, so I kind of doubt the tech exists in the game to do this. That said, I’ll say what we’re all thinking. What a great idea:

kitten Skyhammer.

Not happening. Might we something new on July 1? Even something big? Sure. Nothing’s out of the question. But as much as I’d like to see ANet pull a Beyonce (and even she was subject to plenty of evidence-based rumors and speculation prior to the surprise album release), that kind of expectation just isn’t reasonable.

I can’t find it in myself to muster the effort to explain why this kind of stunt is unlikely (in large part due to eye-roll worthy posts from the likes of Aleglast), but the dire predictions in this thread so far all hearken to the fact that surprise releases are completely counter-intuitive. I want a Tengu Ritualist as much as the next guy, but dropping something like that in the next patch cycle means that either the devs have been lying about their development processes (e.g., statements along the lines that creating a map from scratch takes a year) or, less likely, they have the most secure and air-tight development installation in the industry.

So plenty of zeroes between the decimal and the one. Not impossible, but not likely at all. What’s considerably more likely is that some time in the next thirty days there will be an announcement about upcoming content (which also probably won’t include a new race or profession, but here I’ll admit I’m just being pessimistic). And it’s a lot more likely that the announcement(s) will be consistent with prior statements rather than contrary. I do expect those new maps over the next few months, probably permanent and probably mostly geared for 80’s. I also expect some balance work and, sure, even a few surprises, hopefully some completely out of left field.

But a new race? My 5g says no (because I’m poor, not because I’m not confident). Any takers?

One of the major issues with this implementation (that many have already implied) is that a player can’t begin mastering his or her profession until well after he or she reaches 80. I may love a particular build as I’m leveling, but since I don’t get Grandmaster traits until 80, and then frequently have to unlock the particular traits from 80 content, I may spend a lot of time at 80 unlocking traits that go with my leveling build only to find out I don’t like them in practice or, worse, that my build is completely ineffective, at which point I basically have to start over with learning my traits, to say nothing of the time I spend actually learning how a full build performs with proper equipment.

This is in large part a result of the difficulty gap among leveling content, Orr meta events, and explorable dungeons (that is, I’m not likely to know how to play my profession in progressively more difficult content when I hit 80 anyway). The real problem is that many players won’t even realize that there’s a problem. Because they haven’t been pressured to learn, they might not even be able to appreciate that Trait X could turn their experience from a living hell into loads of fun (two or three Mesmer traits come to mind). In essence, this system introduces another knowledge tax on new players. Mind you, the old system wasn’t stellar either (since it penalized bad decisions on traits with the reset cost and thus discouraged experimentation), but we’re not seeing actual improvement on this front.

That said, I feel like there are some good qualities to the change. I have a friend who has just started playing a few weeks ago. At the time of writing he’s a level 36 Mesmer. He and I have spent a lot (relatively speaking) of time talking Traits, and he has a very different perspective than I do by virtue of having never been exposed to the old system. He actually has things to look forward to as he levels past 30 that aren’t just level gates. For example, to get Deceptive Evasion he has to hit 62 and complete a story step. So he’s looking forward to 62 because I’ve hyped up that that trait is a game changer for a certain play style that I particularly enjoy. It also incentivizes him to go through the personal story steps, whereas when I was leveling my Mesmer all I had to do was hit 40 and pony up some cash.

The 22-level gap notwithstanding, the new system isn’t qualitatively worse on that front. In fact it’s probably better (again, gap notwithstanding). Of course, that gap is everything, because having GM traits at 60 as opposed to 80 means 20 levels of experimentation, and I think that needs to be restored.

For example, gain one trait point at 30, then another starting at 33 and again every three levels until 51, then 2 points each at 54, 57, and 60. Unlock Master traits at 40 and GM traits at 50. There’s your 14 points, and you’ve got character progression and growth until 60.

What about 60 to 80? Well, you’ve already got the actual trait unlocking, although some of those absolutely need to be fixed and moved to lower level content, but frankly I wouldn’t be opposed to introducing other growth paths and metrics for high level characters. Spreading out the trait acquisition doesn’t actually fix the dearth of meaningful character development choices. It just spreads those choices more thinly.

I’m a little short on ideas that could be implemented for the last 20 levels, but I think something tied to the old GW1 Ascension process might be worth looking at—maybe something having to do with role specialization (some kind of control, support, or damage focus that isn’t stat based [so as to avoid the Berserker problem])? That’s beside the point, though.

The point is that the current trait implementation, apart from making the first 80 levels of leveling a bit of a slog, runs contrary to one of the fundamental principles behind the game’s design, namely, that the leveling game is the game. Instead, now we have a game that, by virtue of the top-heavy nature of traits, effectively doesn’t begin until 80. And that’s no good.

I’m going to chime in here as well, as it was an issue I’d actually forgotten about until I recently dusted my necro off and picked him back up.

Frankly I can’t even see why it would be too damaging to just let the Axe cleave up to 600 range. Necros need all the help they can get at the moment, and I’m not optimistic about the prospect of new weapons coming onto the scene any time soon. Are there really any balance concerns that remain legitimate after considering the relatively poor performance of necros in general? Just let it be a buff.

… Also… Kusarigamas are always awesome.

I would keep it.

Then I would sleep on it, have a crisis of conscience, and send it back.

But I’d really want to keep it.

(continued from prior post)

If, on the other hand, I’m way off here, and dead wrong about your reasoning, well hey, you know, you can say that too. I’m not a game designer, but I’m educated enough to understand an explanation about design decisions if I’m given one. Hell, that’s what you guys did through your entire pre-release development, iteration after iteration, and it bought you a fantastic community with all the adoration a well-oiled hype train can deliver.

Mr. Whiteside’s response, though, to say nothing of Ms. Murdock’s (how’d she draw the short straw on that one? You guys knew full well what the reaction would be; seems like you could have prepared), doesn’t answer the fundamental why question. In fact we have no idea what your expansion philosophy is. Not every three months: well, fine, but why not every three months? If an expansion’s worth of progression increases means this, to say nothing of the balance consequences for non-expansion content, then why couldn’t you keep up the same development pace? —and if this nets you a positive financial outcome, why wouldn’t you? If an expansion means more challenging content, and more challenging content means better gear, then doesn’t that mean you have to treadmill if you’re going to release expansions? It seems like that’s the only logical outcome.

I don’t ask all this to attempt to corner you guys, and as I said, this is not an industry that I work in, so I don’t presume to have any inside insight on what makes good, bad, balanced, unbalanced, challenging, or progressive content. But the answers to these questions are all implicit assumptions in the way you’ve handled this release so far—and they’re all bad. You could do some damage control if you’re willing, and if somebody higher up has a thumb on the mic, well I strongly encourage you to bang on some doors and get the lines opened up, because this thread is only getting fatter.

I’m not interested in being lied to. I’m not so cynical as to think that this has been the plan from the start, but neither am I so naive as to buy what you’re selling about your goals and your vision at the moment. It’s not that the principles are going out the window so much as that you’re not acknowledging the fact and giving us direct, honest answers about why. If you can’t, you can’t, but that’s not much consolation as far as my pocket book is concerned.

Well at least there’s a response. I’m still polite enough to acknowledge it, and I even appreciate the fact that, judging from the regularity of your blog posts, for you guys, one day is a pretty quick turnaround, so I mean no sarcasm when I say kudos for getting somebody out front.

That said, I feel like we’re having a FFXIV moment here when it comes to your responses. People are talking across the table, but even though you’re reading what we say, you’re not really understanding why this is a big deal, and more importantly, you’re not owning what’s becoming clearer and clearer that you’ve decided was a mistake.

You can say oops, you know. It’s alright; those of us who are angry can’t really do any more than zip our money bags at the moment, and we’d respect you if you showed a little contrition. Frankly, that would hold a lot more weight with those of us who are furious right now than saying what your goals are or aren’t now that we can actually compare your words to your product. Just come out and say “Look, we screwed up. We made exotics way too easy to get, and it turns out that that means people don’t stick around and put money in the bags like we need them to. We’ve got to backpedal here and fix it in order to keep things in the black. We can’t really take everybody’s exotics away or beef up the crafting recipes, so instead we’re throwing in an extra tier and making it a lot harder to finish so people will keep playing the game and spending cash. It’s the ceiling for this level cap, and we promise we won’t change it again until we do an expansion because it’s designed to take you until expansion time to complete.”

I have a strong suspicion that that’s exactly what’s going on here, and dressing up an abandonment or principle doesn’t make it something other than an abandonment of principle. If you’ve made a business decision that the principle wasn’t profitable, you can just say so. I promise a lot of us are actually intelligent enough to understand how business works, and I’m a lot more amenable to having a conversation about what’s in the company’s financial interest than to being told that new content somehow merits a change that has nothing whatever to do with the game on a mechanical level (i.e., if you can balance content for Ascended+Infused, you can balance it for Exotic).

Most importantly, being honest and open about this kind of stuff would get me to actually consider investing more money into this game. At the moment, frankly, that option remains off the table for me as it does for many others among us. Aside from that, being forthcoming about this kind of stuff is good for the industry as a whole, not to mention good for your company and your parent company in the long run. I assure you you don’t want this to be the last word for a lot of players about ANet or NCsoft. There are players out there who don’t do business with SOE at all today because of things that company’s agents did and said ten years ago in an MMO.

(continued in an additional post further down)

bcbully.7289:

Omega.1473:

bcbully.7289:

maybe if you people complaining would have bought some gems, this wouldn’t have happened.

People have obviously been buying gems and a lot of them if you read the financial reports that they gave for NCSoft investors.

No, this isn’t because of the core audience not paying up. This is because P.O.S no-lifers spent 1000 hours in the game since launch and are now complaining because they’ve done everything in the game faster than any development team can hope to keep up with. Now those whiny MMO addicts have twisted the one game that didn’t pander to them.

I read the report. It did not separate out cash shop revenue. It showed GW2 making around 3 mill won (or w/e) more than B&S, 13 mill more than Aion, 20mill more than Lineage 1&2.

The thing is all these games offer some form of sub and will surpass GW2 launch sales quickly. Maybe by the end of this yeah in B&S and Aion’s case. On top of that Anet is still in the red.

Much more needs to be spent in the case shop, and people need to be happy doing it. The forst step is to get them staying in game longer. Thus the new progression system. Remember we still haven’t heard how the cash shop will play into this.

I think this is at least partially a fair assessment of the situation. Through the whole evening I’ve had a kind of impending dread to the effect of: “It looks like this experiment didn’t work out after all.” There’s probably a revenue angle, and I’m not so naive as to think there wasn’t plenty of marketing research and probably some focus testing that led to a conclusion that “We need these kind of players to play and spend money, because they’re the ones who’ll spend most, and this is about money.” —Honestly, not a bad thing in and of itself; after all, this is business. From a purely economics perspective, the sensible thing is to toss players like me to the curb now that I’ve already paid my entry fee, and try to trade me in for players who are suckers for the cash shop scams. Good luck competing for those players, though.

I had planned to just stand back after making my peace here, but I want to take a moment to clarify something about my position and what I think fairly represents the position of some of the other bereaved players here.

There are a few issues at stake in this change that are problematic from a balance perspective.

First: What difference will 10-15 points in a given stat make (from a full set of ascended gear which will come as they finish this abomination’s release timeline)? Probably none in the overwhelming vast majority of cases. When it will matter is when you’re in WvW and 50 hit points is the difference between winning or losing an engagement. Then it makes all the difference in the world, because in exactly that scenario—rare though it may be—having the better gear is the determining factor rather than skill. That’s unacceptable at any level of frequency. There are also plenty of social stigma issues, as others have mentioned.

Secondly: This is progression, like people have been asking for; isn’t that a good thing? No; no it’s not. I will actually concede that the game is in need of some new features; in fact I was posting to that effect on reddit earlier today. A gear grind is not that, though. The issue isn’t really even that new gear is coming out. It’s the breach of trust.

The problem here is that ANet could insist wholeheartedly after this change that Ascended is the top level of gear, there will be multiple ways to get it, etc., and whatever else they feel they need to say for damage control, but this comes after they’ve abandoned the principles they outlined when development began, and more importantly, after they’ve been paid for the game and the paradigm they presented in both time and money.

Finally: You can’t really quit this game (edit: and by quit, I mean send a metric to them immediately that tells them you’re not giving them anymore—they have to wait until they can compare your playing and spending habits with previous data). There’s no sub. I can stop playing today and play again in six months if I want. Those of us who are furious about this announcement aren’t all canceling because there’s nothing to cancel; that’s not what this is really about. But money talks, and I’m not going to financially support an enterprise that’s going to be developed in a way I frankly don’t agree with. I regret only that I can’t recoup my original investment in this game, because I frankly feel defrauded, and I use that in the strictest sense.

Bait and switch. I’d say it breaks my heart, but frankly, it’s a little late for that; I just don’t have the energy anymore.

Gear grinding has come to GW2. Congratulations to all of you kittenes that asked for it.

I have some choice words for ANet right now, but the bottom line is that you people betrayed every single one of us who championed what you told us you stood for, and we followed this game because we believed in the vision you claimed to uphold. Apparently, though, as it turns out, you’re completely full of kitten.

Despite my instincts I kept quiet until this blog post came out, and despite my hopes, it confirms every negative expectation people have expressed.

Legendaries going forward are going to be ascended-level now? Cool. Yeah, that’s great. Until you put in the next level grade up.

I’m sure this set of changes will bring in all that cash you’re thinking it will. I’m sure it’ll increase your player retention ten-fold.

My wallet is closed.

Very generous of you, glad to throw my hat in.

SWEET JESUS!

I might have just become an engineer main, as this was my major (and it was major) grievance with the profession. Time will tell, but in the mean time, SQUEE!

Really, thanks guys. This is totally awesome.

I use GS/Staff almost exclusively. I recently tried to switch to Sword-Focus just to inject some variety into my playstyle, but I dropped it after an hour and went to get another staff. My Mesmer just hit sixty and runs 0/20/0/0/30 with extra bouncing and dodgy clones (and recently self-shatter). I also always pack Mirror Images and Decoy, so I’m a lot more restrained by my Mind Wrack and Cry of Frustration cooldowns (which at 30 Illusions isn’t terribly long) than by my ability to generate illusions.

In my admittedly limited experience, with this build at least, the key is balancing cooldowns between burst and survivability. Long duration or frequently recurring instances of Immobilize is the only thing I ever have trouble with (assuming I’m not playing sloppily). I have multiple stun breaks for the rest, and my last Utility is usually Feedback so I have an option to deal with mobs that prefer to stay at range without having to LOS them.

I’ve had a hard time getting comfortable with the sword since I can’t use the leap as an opener, but I’ve never had an issue with GS1 slowing me down when the mobs are in melee, and I don’t really feel any pressure to always kite. I’m almost always doing something else anyway. As people have already said, Elasticity is a monster with Mirror Blade and Winds (and Siren’s Call when you need it), and since Mirror summons a clone it benefits from the cdr from the Illusion tree. Part of my preference for this build and these weapons arises from my deep abiding conviction that mobility is everything, and the sword is antithetical to that. Yeah, you get the phenomenal Distortion ability, but I don’t want to have to think about being in range all the time. In a big fight I’m swapping weapons almost every time it comes off cooldown anyway, hitting Mind Wrack and Cry whenever they’re off cooldown (unless a phantasm hasn’t gotten it’s first attack off, in which case I might wait for that to finish first), and dodging any time a blow is coming my way unless it will waste a clone. So I spend most of my time just barely out of melee range (but in range of my Storm and self-bounces), and I put out a very satisfying amount of AOE.

So, is it possible to refine the OP’s suggestion into something that can be stomached by those of us who love what DAOC was about but could never ever entertain the possibility of making an alt or inviting a new friend to play on its servers? I think so. In order to make a progression system that I believe the company would even consider, it would have to satisfy their design principles as well as a few general principles of good design. That means that it doesn’t impair accessibility for new players, it promotes intra-World cooperation instead of competition, it minimizes power creep, and it encourages community-building and maintenance. Here is an example paradigm to illustrate what I’m advocating:

• Players gain ranks in WvW in a similar fashion to the way they gain ranks in sPVP. Mechanically I have no idea how this might work, as I’ve never actually tried to break down the glory numbers. I’m willing to stipulate that ANet could do this in a workable fashion without batting an eye.
• Rank has no inherent statistical effect.
• As a player gains rank, he/she may allocate points coordinate with his WR in a tree similar to the trait tree. He/she also gains titles at set intervals.
• Unlike the trait tree, however the WR tree is a hard exponential curve, so that early points come fast, but become more and more sparce as the player obtains a cumulatively higher amount. This adds long-term progression to the system without hindering accessibility. If a 0.01% percent bonus is the only available bonus left to get, it starts to look really good, and five months of regular play doesn’t seem like a bad investment if you’re enjoying the game.
• Points allocated in the WR tree gain the player access to abilities. Abilities are non-cumulative and may be slotted, similarly to the way traits and skills are slotted; they may be passive or active. I’ll leave that to the professionals to work out. This is just an example, after all.
• ALL (this is important) abilities gained through WR are GTAOEs/auras/walls/etc. that effect all friendly players in the vicinity (about the range of Guardian virtues I think, but happy to defer again). To emphasize, by all I mean no damage abilities, no utilities, no mobility buffs, no range buffs, no debuffs, no conditions. All flat statistic buffs—not even boons. Why? Because the minute you do something else you’ve created a balance nightmare in which profession synergy can dictate builds, team composition, and cooperation in WvW. Basically you’ve reintroduced the sub-class problem.
• NONE of the abilities gained through WR have any beneficial value greater than half the current value available to a defender as a result of influence-purchased guild upgrades in the Art of War panel. This value is arbitrary because it’s a place I know ANet has already decided the numbers are okay.
• All Art of War stat upgrades have their values cut in half. This means there’s a hard cap on WvW bonuses, and the availability of the stats are split between guilds and individuals; frankly I think this is an exceptional change, as it allows players who don’t belong to those guilds but may end up defending a fortification to gain some benefit even if the guild neglects to invest in its land holdings.
• No player can ever have a cumulative benefit greater than the present total benefit of Art of War upgrades, no matter how many high WR characters are nearby (e.g., you never ever get more than +10% Healing and/or +40 Precision). Again, hard cap at work. Organized teams can arrange their slots to minimize waste.
• Really cool profession-unique visual effects for WR abilities. A +20 Power bonus isn’t quite as awesome as a Reaver bomb, but there’s a good kitten reason Reaver bomb isn’t in this game. You give the player a strong visual cue to make him feel good about himself and let the enemy team know what’s up.

That’s an example. I have no idea whether the system would be good, bad, rewarding, enjoyable, or a total mechanical nightmare with a server-choking lag trainwreck to boot. But it solves some of the problems that some alternatives have, and I mean it to stand for the principles that need to be considered. I always fall back to Rawls when I talk game mechanics for some reason: If you didn’t know whether you would have these abilities or whether they would be on your team or the other team, what would you want them to look like?

Of course, there’s another question that has to be asked too: Is this a solution in need of a problem? I think progression is meritorious as a design goal, but I know not everyone may agree. After all, if you’re happy collecting heads, you don’t need a carrot for that. But personally, the fact that I like my head collection doesn’t mean I wouldn’t also enjoy collecting heads in a world in which the head-taking community will give me a promotion for taking heads.

I’m going to jump on the bandwagon here and agree that it’s generally a horrible idea to make future performance a function of previous performance or otherwise reward success in WvW with power.

However! I will gladly concede that a little progression isn’t necessarily a bad thing, especially if the progression is predominately lateral instead of vertical and all vertical gains are minimal. The Badges of Honor economy, although unreliable, at least represents a type of this progression. I would be in favor of a similar but more linear individual progression, and I think it’s fair to draw a line between “what does my character look like?” and “what does my character do?”

Secondly, while the OP’s numbers are obscene, I frankly wouldn’t be opposed to marginal stat gains over the life of a character. This isn’t because I’m personally in favor of this, but because the game already has this in place. Currently, these gains are obtained on a (defending) guild basis, but not individual (I’m relying on the wiki for this information, as I can’t log in atm). I think it would be disingenuous to suggest that this doesn’t create the same barrier-to-entry problems as the OP’s suggestions taken to their logical far end-points. After all, a new player to WvW is unlikely to belong to a guild that can burn large amounts of influence improving its defense of a fortification it possesses. Nevertheless, the ability is there, however marginal and inefficient. This to me seems like a tacit admission by ANet that there’s a realm, however narrow, in which these kinds of things aren’t unfair. Of course, if you think that no vertical progression is acceptable in PVP, that’s an absolutely valid position; I would question, though, why if you hold that position you aren’t raising pitchforks and torches and protesting the influence bonuses for WvW (and if you did during beta and I missed that crusade, props to you for putting your money where your mouth is).

I like the idea of implementing something because gamers have a certain drive to reach goals. We measure our success with milestones; it’s hard-wired into our culture, and this isn’t something that’s merely the product of the MMO-style Skinner box. We keep score, we categorize levels and mark progress. There’s frankly no legitimate argument for this game to have more than 20-30 experience levels than progression, and during beta the developers said explicitly that they tiered traits and skills so it would give a sense of progression. There’s nothing wrong with that. The question is a scale and direction question.

As much as I despise CCP as a company (Monacle-gate! WE REMEMBER!) and large portions of the PVP community on Eve, the designers did a spectacular job of structuring long-term progression without creating a barrier to entry (that game’s barrier of entry was a different issue altogether) because the progression is frequently lateral, and beyond a certain threshold, with a given setup your gains per time investment are extremely inefficient.

Stopped reading after the personal insults. Sorry you can’t handle my criticism. You’re the one lobbying for something; you have the duty to make the case. I tried to be entertaining, and then I tried to be logical, and that got me nowhere, so now I’m just going to be blunt: It’s not in the game, and it’s never going to be in the game. Tough break. If you’re not happy about it, play another game. That’s all.

I didn’t comment on your other ideas because they’re easy, and while I’m sympathetic that you might be a relative newcomer to the game, you didn’t do your due diligence in considering the possibility that all of your suggestions have been hashed out (to oblivion) during development and the beta; accordingly it’s hard for me to rule out the outside possibility that you’re just trolling. In any event:

• They’ve already stated they’re working on PVP ladders and a ranking system.
• 5-man explorable mode dungeons represent the most difficult content in the game; they’ve stated before that they do not intend to support dungeon content for larger groups.
• There is a hard cap on stats, and they’ve stated they don’t intend to implement anything resembling a gear treadmill, no matter how marginal the stat increases.
• Capture point PVP was chosen as the format because it’s the easiest to balance, and having only one format makes balance analysis and decision-making easier (e.g., a professions can’t end up OP in one format, UP in another, and thus unbalancable).

As for your second reply: You’re speculating that you can come up with an open-world PK system that’s consensual, fair, not susceptible to griefing, etc. You know what that sounds like? WvW. The fact that you don’t get to do that on top of bystanders is a deliberate choice.

Notwithstanding that, though, I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt, and pose you a few questions that I’m sure you can answer:

What do you do with level scaling?
What about players on the edges of a level-scaled zone who might cross a border or fight on a border?
What about players who flag only in optimum circumstances in the presence of other flagged players in order to ambush them (e.g., wait until a flagged player is low health in a PVP encounter, and only then flag to kill him)?
What about players tea-bagging other players to provoke them to flag?
Can you flag on or off any time you’re out of combat?
If you can, what about players who abuse that system?
If you can’t, what about players who are denied the ability to PVP/not PVP based on whatever restriction you put in place?
Should flagging have a cooldown (it might prevent these abuses, after all)?
If it should, how long is the cooldown?
What about players who abuse that system?
What about players who are restricted by the cooldown but no longer want to be flagged? Vice versa?
What about players abusing terrain or training mobs onto other players prior to flagging?
What about players who report players for things in PK?
For that matter, spell out the rules for PK with respect to player conduct towards other players.
What about trash talking?
What about armor damage from defeat?
What about players pressuring other players to opt-into the system?
What about players ostracizing players who have opted out from other content (e.g., can’t find a dungeon group on this server because I won’t flag)?
Should players have rewards specific to PK? What are they?
What about PK loot? Same as WvW loot? Different?
Does that have consequences for the game economy?

Had enough? Answer all those and I should be ready with another twenty or so.

The point is, open world PVP hasn’t been included for a whole litany of reasons, and personally I think they’re all good reasons, and I don’t think the players are going to come up with a better way to solve all the problems than ANet did. Just because you slap a consent switch on it that players can turn on or off does not absolve you, the developer, of the responsibility for dealing with all the fringe cases and freeing the system of any potential, however remote, for abuse, unless you’re willing to concede fairness, community cohesion, and accessibility in favor of player liberty and the griefing that comes with it. ANet wasn’t willing to make that concession, and many of us think it was the right call.

Get a cat.

Now hear me out! I know what you’re thinking: “But, X! Cats are messy sometimes, and you have to take care of them, and they’re not even in the game!” I know, I know, but just consider what I’m proposing here. With a cat (or if a cat isn’t feasible in your life situation, you could also get the same results with another small pet, such as a ferret, or in some situations, even a baby or small child), you can experience all of the meaningful opportunities to be ambushed and instantly slushified that you’re missing from open-world PVP. Think of the possibilities!

Your cat will jump in your lap sometimes, and when it does, you’ll be distracted at just the right moment from whatever you were doing. You might find that you suddenly have to run away from a PVE fight you were winning. You might just narrowly dodge something that would have certainly killed you.

Sometimes your cat will jump on your keyboard, causing your character to run in circles or spam meaningless abilities at no one, just like if you were crowd controlled in open-world PVP. Your cat will walk in front of your monitor and simulate status effects like blindness.

Your cat might vomit behind you, and cause you to even have to get up and leave the computer altogether during a meaningful dynamic event, giving your poor character no opportunity whatsoever to respond to the threats of the environment!

In fact, if you’re lucky, your cat might even chew through your computer cables and cause all kinds of calamity for you! By the time you get that mess straightened out, you’ll be dead for sure! It’s a perfect simulation of an open-world PVP encounter.

With a cat, you’ll constantly be looking over your shoulder. —your real shoulder! What could be more immersive for the hardcore open-world PVP’er who always wants to be on his toes? You’ll live in constant fear of the possibility that your cat might ruin your gaming experience and that of your friends through its nefarious hijinks, and there will be no escape for you from the ever-present threat of cat-induced character death. It’s a perfect simulation of the thrill of open-world PVP: you have the constant threat of instant, catastrophic avatar life failure, and responding to the cat threats requires the same amount of in-game skill as 99% of all open-world PVP encounters with none of the nasty drawbacks, such as ruining the play experience of someone who prefers to game cat-free.

So get a cat. I promise, if you’re just looking for an extra thrill to your gaming experience, or you just want to make things a little more challenging for yourself, a cat will enhance your gaming experience at least a hundred-fold. If that’s still not the level of ever-present threat you’re looking for, well, you can always get more cats. And while your character is in perpetual danger of instant, unavoidable death, you won’t be inconveniencing anybody else except for your friends. It’s a win-win!

If, on the other hand, what you’re REALLY looking for is an opportunity to make the game miserable for other people without their consent, then GW2 is indeed not for you, and we’re glad to see you go. >)

I’m going to repeat a post I made a few years ago over on mmorpg.com (which site I absolutely do not recommend or endorse) on the subject of open world PVP, as it represents my last word on the subject, and it seems relevant here. Some minor edits.

“I want to be afraid that any second I could be assasinated [sic] and have to be on my guard.” —paraphrased, supra

No one likes getting ganked. No one. It’s not fun, and if you say you like open-world PVP because you have to look over your shoulder constantly for fear of dying unexpectedly, then I’m inclined to call you a liar.

But rather than do that, I suppose I can concede that, perhaps, for a certain segment of the population, the threat of ambush, at least as an abstraction, adds another element of gameplay. Maybe, for whatever reason, rational or not, you’re someone who just likes having to occasionally make … let’s say “tactical” decisions (e.g., running away, logging onto a main, crying to your guild, quitting for a few hours, etc.). Because after all, this isn’t really about just wanting to grief the hell out of the other guy, right? Of course not; it’s the thrill of always being in jeopardy. For those of you who bemoan the absence of open-world PVP because it takes that thrill away from you, even though I don’t understand, my heart goes out to you.

Well, if you’re one of those people, I know you must be pretty upset that people can’t come and insta-gib you during your leveling efforts in GW2. But don’t write the game off yet! Even though it looks like right now open-world PVP is off the table, I think that if we all work together, we can come up with a meaningful remedy for this breach in the community. I’m going to suggest to you a way that I think you can still experience the thrill of constant danger that comes from open-world PVP that you’re looking for, without ruining the game experience of the other players. Remember, this isn’t about griefing people, because I know that’s really not what this is about. You want the thrill of the risk, right? Well don’t give up on GW2, because I think I have a solution for you.

What about a trait or signet that caused you to passively gain LF while also out of combat (when out of Death Shroud)? —Maybe not at the rate you gain health out of combat, but a non-zero amount. Would it justify a utility slot or a trait slot? I agree that allowing a Necro to start every fight in DS is a tricky proposition, but I can recount times on my Necro (tanky bleed+conditions build w/ scepter-dagger/staff) that I’ve started a fight with a full LF bar and lost a 1v1 despite it, and other times when I’ve been outright butchered in large part because I didn’t start the fight with enough LF (not that I was the one initiating the fight), despite the fact that I had no way to adjust for that possibility.

I think the point I’m trying to make, at its bare bones, is that I dislike the idea of “If your Elite is on cooldown, you die,” and with few exceptions, I don’t think the game is balanced around that; it shouldn’t be. Similarly, I dislike the proposition “If you have no LF, you die.” That’s certainly not a fair summation of necro balance by any means, but it’s a factor, and while I dislike the converse just as much (“If you have full LF, you win”), I feel like the chance-based nature of having or not having LF at the outset of a fight should be less of a factor in determining outcomes as currently implemented. Sure, a decent necro in the present environment is trying to never exhaust his supply of LF unless he has no choice, but I’m not really concerned about incidents in which fights are being strung together in sequence. My issue is the scenario in which the necro survives an onslaught, leaves the point (or keep), and gets into another fight 90 seconds later, out of LF. —being out of LF isn’t the problem so much as the fact that during the 90 seconds of travel leading up to the ambush, the Necro had no way to bring his DS abilities back on line.

Anyway, like I said before, this is food for thought; I’m not advocating for changes by any means, or even suggesting I dislike the current system. I have a lot of fun on my necro. But it’s a good conversation to have.

EDIT: Signet of Undeath isn’t what I’m talking about. The problem isn’t LF management in combat—that’s basically fine. It’s LF state between combats.

… Why don’t they start every fight with a full Life Force bar? I mean as a design decision, why not automatically fill Life Force whenever the Necro leaves combat? I mean, I appreciate the gameplay involved in managing Life Force acquisition and the economics of time with respect to being in Death Shroud, but outside of Elite Skill cooldowns (and some of the Guardian utilities, like Sanctuary, which was elite in beta), I don’t know of any other mechanic that gives a player a disadvantage in a fight (or strips him of an advantage) besides Death Shroud. Adrenaline drains out of combat anyway, so I think there’s a notion that the default state of a Warrior coming to combat should be no adrenaline; Ranger pets auto-revive now too, but what’s the default state for a Necromancer? Some variable amount of Life Force between 0 and 100%? That seems a little chancy, the overall dynamic nature of PVP notwithstanding.

I can see the problems with Necros trying to run to force combat to break so they could get the bar to fill up, but that’s really no different from any other profession breaking it for health. And the cooldown parity between other profession mechanics seems to already be in the DS skills, rather than the bar (with the exception, maybe, of the Guardian and Mesmer F4’s).

I’m not really lobbying for a change here, but I think it’s an interesting question, and I’d love to hear the thought process behind this from the developers responsible, since I think overall the Necro needs looking at. Maybe ultimately that doesn’t lead to buffs, but a look can’t hurt.

Playing to Win

I’m just going to leave this here.

…

Actually no I’m not. Or at least, not by itself. That article (or series of articles, if you browse around Sirlin’s site) should be required reading for anyone who wants to PVP in any game, ever. Regardless of where you stand on balance in this particular game, and regardless of what you think about what else I have to say, if you read the rest of this post at all, I strongly recommend you take five minutes and at least look at the article.

For people getting rolled by other professions, you must at least consider the possibility that what you’re perceiving as an imbalance is less a result of the game design than of your own unwillingness to devote the energy to overcoming the profession/build/etc. that’s beating you. That may be a high cost; in the case of Mesmers, I’ll gladly concede that the profession demands a great amount of concentration, spatial awareness, and quick-thinking from its opponents, moreso than most others, and it’s an open question whether those demands make the profession unfair. Moreover, some builds naturally have a harder time against other builds, especially as your traits and skills get more specialized (e.g., anti-condition guardian). But before you determine that a matchup is patently unwinnable, I think you owe yourself a duty to make sure that you’ve taken your efforts as far as they can go, reasonably or otherwise. For your profession/build of choice, what does it take for you to beat the profession that gives you the most trouble? Why aren’t you doing that?

I don’t presume to have a high-level view of sPVP in this game, and a lot of you guys have no doubt played a lot more PVP than I have. It’s entirely possible that Mesmers, Thieves, and Guardians will see nerfs—maybe as soon as in tonight’s update. But whether that happens or not, that’s not going to be the end of this conversation, because the nature of inter-class balance is that somebody’s always going to be on top. Hopefully the disparity between the best class and the worst class will be small—the point of patching is to close that margin, after all—but it’s never going to go away without homogenizing all eight professions.

Once the dust settles and the Mesmers, Thieves, and Guardians are all left in crumpled heaps at the feet of Balthazar, someone’s going to raise the banner to topple the Warriors, Rangers, and Engineers. Once they’ve been nerfed, it’ll be the Black Summer for a while, and after that age, Elementalists will reign supreme. Until they’re nerfed.

In the mean time, however, all the players that are actually improving in PVP, getting better at their chosen professions, and making their marks in the growing esports communities will be improving their strategies and weathering the tides of balance changes not unaffected, but at least undaunted. These guys learned how to consistently interrupt Moa Morph long before it was nerfed. They never had any trouble sticking to the real Mesmer even back when he had three illusions and his phantasms did damage. They learned how to punish thieves for heartseekering one too many times, and they always packed an extra set of weapons so they could switch to conditions if a fight demanded it. They didn’t bat an eye when the guardians got their healing cut in half, and they already knew how to handle conditions, so they never missed a beat when the necros were 7 out of every 10 players in PVP for a while there.

If you want to complain, there’ll never be a shortage of other professions to complain about, and there will always be a matchup that’s unfavorable for your chosen playstyle—in fact, there’ll be several at any given time. But you can’t take it for granted that the balance team is going to fix something you perceive to be unfair, and the meta that exists right this second is almost certainly not going to exist in a month, nerfs or no nerfs. There’s always going to be something that makes you angry, especially in PVP, and if it’s not Moa Morph, it’ll be something else. You must accept the fact that, at least right this second, the game is actually the way it is, and if you want to play Guild Wars 2, you have to actually play Guild Wars 2, and not some other game you made up in your head in which all bugs are fixed, all enemy moves are perfectly telegraphed, and you’re always more skilled than the other guy.

I know this comes across sounding high-handed, and honestly I’m not sure how I could make it sound more conciliatory and still get the point across, but this issue I believe is the gateway from this conversation to the one we’d all rather be having about balance, and the one that ArenaNet’s developers have already been having for some time now.

I’m against WOW-style mounts—the use-this-item-for-model-change-and-speed-buff mounts. I am not, however, against mounts being implemented with gameplay or being permitted as a type of long-distance travel where that makes sense—so something like the old-fashioned DAOC mounts, if anything (the ones on rails—there’s no need for something so outdated, you say, and I agree), and that only in certain areas of the game where long-distance travel is necessary and waypoints aren’t an option.

If it turns out most of the Crystal Desert is a dune-sea wasteland, for instance, then I think it would be acceptable to have mounts be a way for players to navigate between the pockets of explorable content or between Tyria and Elona—like the worms from Nightfall. You have your free-roaming mount in a certain zone between Zone A and Zone B, with its own set of skills and its own type of gameplay, with certain places to dismount and remount safely (lest you lose your mount and die in the desert). One thing I am absolutely not in favor of is magical appearing mounts, where three seconds after blowing on a horn a mighty steed appears in a puff of smoke. Tired of that. You get your mount at a stable unless you have a legitimate reason to summon it (undead mount, fine; maybe even an illusionary mount or a mount that doubles as a ranger pet, but that’s about it), and when you dismount, your mount becomes a friendly NPC subject to attack that will follow you around (or wander off) unless hobbled or returned to the stable. It takes three seconds to mount—if your mount is standing right beside you—and if your mount is out of earshot and unhobbled, you might as well kiss it goodbye, and good luck explaining it to the owner when you get back to the stable (or replacing it if you actually bought the thing).

The point I’m trying to make is that there are plenty of robust, interesting systems for implementing mounts that ANet could pursue if it wanted to. But it would probably be easier not to, and the demand for mounts as a collectible is a product of MMO gaming culture more than in-game demand, beside which it has no relation to the game lore. I appreciate the desire for an on-demand speed boost, but the game is specifically designed around not having that, and I don’t expect it to change. Mounts make sense in Tyria because there’s some ground to cover. Fifteen-hundred different types of mounts don’t.

In future expansions, as more continents become available—larger continents, with greater distances between their points of interest—mounts as legitimate, long-term permanent travel devices might make sense, but the five racial city-states and LA have maybe ten square miles among them, and that’s probably being generous. That’s a three hour walk from where you live if you take your time. That’s not suggesting that an MMO should be implementing real-world distances and speeds in its game—we don’t have that kind of time to play—but only that even if you account for some compression of distance, there’s no escaping the fact that if you’re walking from LA to DR, it never feels like you need a horse.

I’d be for a mild penalty in hotjoin, getting stricter as games get more serious in tournaments. Can’t join a new game for two to five minutes or thereabouts. At the very least, I’d support making someone ineligible to join a different game until the one he or she left has finished; if nothing else this would incentivize people to stay and try to eke out a few glory, even if a win is impossible. [And besides, if you’re legitimately leaving the game for another reason—switching to PVE/WVW, logging off, etc.—then the penalty will be gone by the time you decide to sPVP again.]

To be fair, I also believe there should be certain auto-lose conditions; for example, if a 500 point game has a 350+ point margin, the team that’s behind should have the option to resign. Moreover, if half of your team leaves the game in a short span of time, you should be able to resign, but that’s another issue.

I just left a game in which after the first two team fights, my team went from eight to three in about ten seconds. Over the rest of the game a half dozen new people joined and immediately left.

As the system is currently, there’s no incentive not to leave if conditions are unfavorable. Someone earlier made a list of seemingly ridiculous qualifications for leaving, but I can’t blame anyone for doing that. That’s playing to win.

Incentivize players to finish games, even losing games, and disincentivize leaving by whatever means will get the job done. There are other things sPVP could use in terms of glory economy balancing (a winning bonus being the prime culprit), but this is the one that, at least in my experience, decides the vast majority of matches.

EoNxBoNx.9213:

Xhieron.2168:

than these changes:

• Replaced half of the Mesmer and Thief utility skills with new skills.
• New profession mechanic for Mesmers: _
• Guardian healing reduced by 40%.

This right here, this is what you call balance changes? Nerfing Guardian healing by 40%., and removing half of the utility skills for two classes? I am so glad you are not a game designer, holy kitten.

… Again, read the whole post please. In fact, in this case, I’d settle for you just reading the whole sentence.

LiliOups.5327:

just STOP with your crying posts already
they already nerfed my thief

l2p your class and stop whining…i do get 2-3 shot by warriors i dont cry or whine about it,i suggest to do the same.

enough with ppl crying for nerf everytime they get owned or cant beat another class just because they sucks.

Who exactly are you talking to? Did you read my post or the first reply before yours? I appreciate that it’s a long post and you might not want to read the whole thing, but please don’t respond if you can’t be bothered. If you’d read it you would understand that I do not think nerfs are appropriate, desirable, or even needed; the whole point of the post was to suggest that the problem is a perception problem—not a balance problem.

What would you change about mesmers to balance them, if you’re one of the people claiming they’re unbalanced in PVP? Or thieves? Or hell, guardians for that matter? I personally can’t articulate a number of changes for thieves or mesmers that would make them less frustrating to play against than they currently are without completely stripping them of their identities. If a Mesmer isn’t confusing to play against, what kind of Mesmer is he? If a thief isn’t assassinating people, why have him on the team?

This is because I believe it is a principle of (or should be, if it’s not; I’m not a game designer) PVP that the characters are not only balanced with respect to each other but also balanced internally. You can’t take Shaco’s Deceive away without making him useless. This isn’t because Deceive is fundamentally broken or not, but because the rest of Shaco’s kit is balanced around Deceive being there. Similarly, thieves and mesmers are balanced around the fact that they have access to the mechanics that are so frustrating to deal with.

What are you going to do to balance mesmers? Get rid of illusions?! Going to restore order to PVP by getting rid of thief shadowstep and stealth? These professions are slippery, but their slipperyness is something they’ve had implemented to their design as a substitute for tankiness or some other version of active or passive survivability. If you nerf thief and mesmer damage across the board by 30%, you’ll still have people complaining about them, because I don’t feel like this is really a question of balance, and it’s not a question of risk-reward or skill level either. I suspect, at its foundation, it’s mostly player frustration, but I won’t put words into people’s mouths if I can help it.

Someone has rightly said that thieves and mesmers received some buffs since BWE3; this seems to be the case, but honestly, I didn’t play a mesmer or thief in BWE3, so I can’t say for sure. I’d be willing to listen, though, and would ask: which changes made the thieves and mesmers OP?

I can tell you which changes made the elementalists UP, if that turns out to be the case: probably the damage nerfs to many of the elementalist’s cornerstone abilities, like for instance the arcane nukes. Hard, concrete number examples—easy to adjust. You can’t adjust playstyle, however, and I would advocate that the mesmer, thief, and yes, guardian playstyles are things that shouldn’t be tampered with.

If Confusion does too much damage according to the metrics ANet has at its disposal, nerf it, by all means. If Haste+Signet+Backstab is doing too much damage, tone it down, absolutely. If you’re going to take my mobility away, though, then I want some heavy armor, because I’m not willing to concede that the profession I play is overpowered just because it’s popular or just because other players don’t enjoy playing against it. It’s PVP after all.

I feel like this is one of those instances where if balance is implicated at all, buffs are appropriate rather than nerfs, as buffs can be done (here—not in general) in a way that’s measurable according to the data available to ANet, or at least made in ways in which one can observe their success subsequent to implementation, and nerfs can’t, this due to the scope of implementation (i.e., if you want to nerf Mesmers and Thieves so people don’t hate them anymore, you’ve got to gut them and overhaul their profession mechanics; you can buff the struggling professions with a few lines of patch notes, mechanical or otherwise). It’s a lot easier to make and then evaluate the following changes (for example!):

• Entering Death Shroud, Spectral Walk (on ending or upon Severing), and Necrotic Traversal will break targeting (if they don’t already).
• Arcane skills (and probably other skills) damage increased by 15%.
• Static Shield now grants 4s of Stability.

than these changes:

• Replaced half of the Mesmer and Thief utility skills with new skills.
• New profession mechanic for Mesmers: _
• Guardian healing reduced by 40%.

Thanks anybody who bothered to read the whole thing; I’ll leave a few questions to hopefully further the point.

What would you nerf on a thief to make rangers the best roamer in the game? What would you buff on a ranger? Which is a better change? Should either be made?

Who is the next best profession at treb control after Mesmer? How far behind is it and why?

WARNING: Incoming wall of text. Sorry; got a lot to say.

Full disclosure first: I play a Mesmer main.

This is an attempt to respond to a lot of the threads that have been creeping up about profession balance, in particular these three professions.

With respect to thieves and mesmers, I feel like a lot of the frustration players are experiencing is the result of the choices in the way the professions were designed; that’s not, however, a statement of power in itself, and I feel like it’s no more common for players to want to substitute personal frustration for objective balance issues here than in any other game. League of Legends is the other game that I play regularly, so I’m going to use some analogies there. Thieves are Shaco (if you don’t play LOL, Shaco is a character who stealths with a shadowstep, fears, and does very strong single-target damage): reasonably high learning curve, squishy, balanced, but extremely frustrating to play against. As a consequence of this, at lower ELOs, Shaco is frequently banned—not because people think Shaco will swing the game for the team that gets him but because they just don’t want to have to deal with the risk of him being over there. Shaco being in the game on the enemy team demands that players adjust the way they play to accommodate the fact that he’s there, and many players (perhaps justifiably so) don’t want to put forth the mental effort to do so.

Mesmers are Kassadin, Leblanc, or Ezreal. For the uninitiated, these champions are high damage characters with self-relocation abilities. They aren’t really unbalanced either (Ezreal is in a good spot at the time of posting, but that’s probably a meta issue seeing as he’s had no buffs for a long time), but they’re extremely frustrating to play against because it’s difficult to retaliate against them. Kassadin and Ezreal are frequent bans at different ELOs for the same reason Shaco is at lower ELO. The champs aren’t unbalanced—people just don’t want to have to adapt to them.

Here’s the application: Should you have to adjust the way you think about the game mechanics to deal with a particular profession? Alternatively, is it balanced for some professions to require more concentration than others when engaging them? I don’t have an answer to this question, but I think it’s worth noting that it’s not the same question as “Is this profession more powerful (i.e., better in PVP—I don’t just mean damage) than another?”

I will gladly admit that there is a learning curve to dealing with thieves and mesmers in particular. Guardians less so since I feel like their power emerges more from the nature of capture point PVP than actual profession design (brick wall wins capture points), but I’m willing to concede that guardians frustrating for other reasons (compare, for instance, Malphite or Nautilus). With respect to thieves and mesmers, target dropping in particular is a very nasty mechanic to contend with, and I think it shouldn’t be limited to these two professions.

However, I’m not sure how you deal with any perceived imbalance when it comes to utility without fundamentally altering the things that give the profession its identity. Here’s a little hypothetical. Let’s suppose, hypothetically that warriors are overpowered and mesmers are overpowered. Take a look at the following changes:

• Hundred Blades damage reduced by 20%.
• Decoy no longer stealths the caster.

The damage of Hundred Blades is a number that’s easily measurable, quantifiable, and incorporated into a set of data about warrior performance in PVP. Just like Heartseeker, the team can take a look at the damage and adjust if something is out of line. The decoy change, however, has no numbers. Its a mechanic change; it theoretically reduces the frustration an enemy will experience when dealing with a mesmer who uses Decoy (or, alternatively, ensures mesmers won’t use Decoy in PVP anymore), but there’s no way to authentically verify that effect. You can track who’se using Decoy before and after, and kill/death rates for people on both sides, so you can tell if Mesmers perform better or worse after the change—but you have no way to measure if players feel the change improved balance or not.

Yes, Mesmer is fine.

As for the details, well: What EasymodeX said.

I also love my Mesmer. It took me 30 levels to get to a point I could actually play it worth a kitten, though. I’m for continuing quality of life changes like the GS change (which was phenomenal), but I’m immensely frustrated by the people lobbying for complete mechanics overhauls—some of them blatantly trolling. And I make a distinction between that and just asking for bug fixing, timing improvements, and the like. It really is a breath of fresh air to be able to jump on a thread like this and show some appreciation, and I hope that by it the powers that be see that most of us are very happy with the profession as it is. I am.

I am utterly exhausted by the lobbying to make the Mesmer something other than it is. It seems like every Tom, kitten, and Harry is convinced he can do a better job designing and balancing an entire profession mechanic after playing this game for a few weeks than the entire ArenaNet development team could over five years of professional development. What’s almost as frustrating to me is the abiding dread that the company might cave to this pressure despite the fact that they did an exceptional job and most of us Mesmers are delighted with the profession.

It’s that dread that keeps me watching this forum with suspicion and annoyance and animates me to pop my head in from time to time to encourage whatever unfortunate staff member is tasked with keeping up with us: Mesmers are fine. The people wanting to gut the profession in no way represent me or the rest of us.

I have ideas for the profession too, of course, but they come from a strong conviction that the profession isn’t broken. I’d love to see dual pistols (along with greataxes and rifles), and if we were to see utility skills that gave us off-mechanic pets, that’d be neat, but I believe this is stuff for content expansions. I’d love to see some QOL changes, sure, and balance is an ongoing process in a game like this, but I would strenuously object to an overhaul of the illusion/shatter mechanic.

While I agree with your analysis insofar that the question is one of uptime, I believe you’re ignoring a crucial part of the equation, by which I mean shatters. The fact that your build focuses on phantasms does not remove the shatter skills from your bar, and I think it’s fair to expect that in your low-uptime scenario, any good Mesmer is going to be shattering his phantasms rather than letting them die. So while he may not get perfect results on his shatters, his phantasms aren’t a total loss.

I’ll gladly concede that there are issues with post-shatter, pre-arrival illusion death, and I feel that’s an area that could use looking at. However, the fact that a smart player can turn sustained phantasm damage into regular burst damage (and utility, as appropriate) has to be considered in determining effective dps of phantasms in a long engagement. The comparison should be one between phantasm damage in a high uptime environment (plus final shatter) and phantasm damage and regular shatter damage (with clones, as necessary) in a low uptime environment. I suspect these numbers are closer than you might think, even assuming one-sided traits.

I agree with the idea of unlocking Mantra charges from the mechanic at large and setting them on a case by case basis, though I’m not sure which numbers would be most fair for each skill. I suspect, however, that this was already considered during development, and they went another direction for unknown reasons.

I feel like the best thing we could see first would be some input from development about where Mantras are based on their data, to wit, what portion of Mesmer builds use Mantras, how many are seeing use and in what environments/contexts, how frequently they’re actually being fired during combat and succeeding or being interrupted, etc. That would at least give us a better picture of how Mesmer players are actually playing, regardless of their presence or absence in this discussion.

I’m not sure how I feel about these suggestions because I didn’t play enough Mesmer during beta, but I do know that right now the mantras can’t compete with most of the other utility skills, at least for me, so I’d be in favor of them getting looked at.

Personally, when I first heard of them, I immediately thought of the old DAOC Warlock mechanic. I know this isn’t quite the same thing—but it wouldn’t take much to get there, and the philosophy is the same (pay an up front casting time cost for a later instant spell with devastating—and customizable—results). I’ll gladly concede, however, that the game climate is very different now, so Mantras may be as close an iteration as this generation of games will tolerate. And, after all, Mesmers already inherited the Theurgist mechanic. I can dream though.

I also wholeheartedly disagree with the OP. Minion bombing in GW1 was a completely different experience from the GW2 Mesmer. Also… Spiteful Spirit was an indeed awesome skill, and I’d love to see its like again—on necros, where it belongs. The Mesmer as it exists in GW2 is still capable of all the stuff that made it rewarding in GW1—interrupts, punishment, disables, etc. It does these things differently—but so does every other profession that’s made the transition. While I’m genuinely sympathetic if you feel the illusion mechanic is a thematic departure, it’s far from useless, and it’s not getting an overhaul. If you absolutely can’t stand to take the time to master it—which, to be fair, is no easier feat than mastering the GW1 Mesmer—then you should probably just play something you find more enjoyable. There are plenty of us over here who think this profession is immensely fun, and we wouldn’t change it.

I also agree with Lctl about the shatter lag, and either of those fixes would be fine. On one hand I don’t think it would be balanceable to have the shatters happen instantly (and, consequently, unavoidably), but on the other, having the illusions become invulnerable during the death charge is unfair as well (especially if someone believes a clone is the Mesmer at the time). I’m not sure if there’s a fix to this problem, but it hasn’t been game-breaking to me in sPVP—yet anyway. Perhaps make them do an adjusted portion (30-75%?) of the shatter effect to their target if they’re killed en route (assuming the target doesn’t evade)? I’m not sure.

I’m sorry a lot of people apparently don’t enjoy the profession. Fortunately, there are seven others that are also loads of fun and have each their own individual mechanics. So if you don’t like illusions, I assure you there’s an alternative profession you can play that has just the pet or non-pet mechanic you’re looking for.

That said, let me take this opportunity to say I LOVE MY MESMER. I say that not just to be contrary but to provide the less vitriolic viewpoint espoused by those of us who think the profession mechanic is perfectly fine.

My Mesmer just hit 35 this evening, and only in the last few levels have I begun to feel like I’m getting a grasp on how to take advantage of him. Believe me, the levels between about ten and thirty are pretty rough, and there were times I got frustrated and played something else for a few levels. I expect more rough patches before 80 as well. But I couldn’t stay away, and a key reason for that was the time currency aspect of the shatter mechanic—the juggling of illusion living damage and shatter burst damage with the expected life of the mob in order to maximize efficiency. It, to me, is immensely satisfying gameplay, and I would strongly object to any major changes to the fundamental mechanics of the profession. Balance changes? Fine. Usability tweaks and bug fixes? Of course; the GS change was a Godsend.

But if I wanted a conventional pet I’d play a ranger. I just don’t understand where the hostility comes from. How can you be invested in the profession enough to care and yet lobby that it be turned into another profession? If you think it’s a departure from the GW1 Mesmer by having AI-assisted mechanics, I guess I see your point thematically, but having played both, I feel like this is at least as faithful a successor as the other direct descendent professions: we got the interrupts, the punishment play, the ability disables, and the spikes. The only thing we’re missing is energy denial, and it’s not in the game at all. And Lord have mercy, we’re slippery.

Are there things I’d change about illusions? Sure. The way stats are allocated is trying at times, and I could see shifting some power from traits to baseline. Adding some default (i.e., non-traited) functionality for clones that instantly die would be a welcome addition, as would anything that incentivized good shattering in a mobile environment (e.g., a trait that would reduce phantasm skill cooldown if they’re shattered within .5 seconds prior to their target’s death). And who wouldn’t love more on-demand AOE?

But this conflation between illusions and every other pet in the history of MMOs is getting a little ridiculous. Someone pointed out earlier that the closest analogy is the DAOC Theurgists, and I couldn’t agree more. The “pets” are walking damage/utility delivery systems—not NPC allies. If you want to be taken seriously in the conversation that needs to happen about overall inter-profession balance, the least you can do is show a basic understanding of what this profession is and is not. And if it’s not for you, accept that you’re the one who needs to find a way to play the game that makes you happy—not all us mesmers.

Well this is a bandwagon I can get on, if for no other reason to say that I support this as a future weapon. Rifles too, when it comes time to expand weapon availability per expansions and what not. —and great axes.

Hear hear; kittens for all!

I just wanted to hop on here and throw out a huge thank you to the folks who got the Greatsword changes out for tonight’s update. It’s a tremendous difference, and I really couldn’t go far enough to express my gratitude. The profession still needs some playability tweaks and QOL stuff, but I’m 100% behind the company’s balance philosophy, so I’m willing to wait and see.

That said, THANKS. Greatsword feels like it should.

If you hadn’t read:

Mesmer

• Deception: Movement now allowed after casting underwater.
• Spatial Surge: Improved responsiveness.
• Mind Stab: Improved responsiveness.

My only request would be that Mind Wrack consistently do its damage when the original target has already died if it was activated prior to that target’s death.