Guild Wars 2

Best idea… don’t have season2.

I’m creating this thread here for now, because the most people will see it and I want to include as many people as possible in the discussion. The purpose of this thread is to share ideas using art (concept or otherwise), or other pictures to share what you want with the community, and ArenaNet developers alike so that they may potentially draw inspiration from our ideas & also get a good sense of where their player-base stands on the types of looks we want for our characters.

PLEASE keep the discussion civil, and open minded as many of us are bound to have different tastes and opinions so please be respectful

Everyone is welcome to join in the discussion, you do not have to post art if you don’t want to, but please do be constructive and descriptive.

We cannot expect everyone to be a deeply talented concept artist who wants to openly share their own works in our conversation so please don’t be shocked and bewildered when we post art and designs from other games & forms of media as a source of inspiration. I think it goes without saying that you are more than welcome to share your own pieces with the community as well if you wish to.

My first contribution is an idea for a mesmer-friendly set using concept art from AION’s bard class.

Rofl, Ok in case Anet ever actually reads this post.

Let me clear a few things up for you.

If you’re going to increase Pet HP, one of the area’s you want to increase it in, Is the bloody area with massive stacks of people AOEing, in otherwords..World vs World.

Also

Ranger Pets •Juvenile Jungle Stalker •Mighty Roar: Increased the might duration from 10 seconds to 15 seconds. Reduced the recharge from 30 seconds to 25 seconds.

The reason this ability isn’t used has little to do with the Recharge or Duration of the Ability, If you bothered to ask us before making these pitiful changes we’d be able to tell you what is wrong with it. The reason no one uses this ability is because the abilities cast time is bloody 3 seconds. So Not only do I have to stand near that bloody pet for 3 seconds, I got to waste way more potential DPS casting the ability then I gain from it.

•Juvenile Brown Bear •Shake It Off: This skill will now remove two conditions from nearby allies.

Again, While its an improvement, No one is going to slot this pet to remove 2 conditions on a 25 second cooldown, if it was 3 or 4 People might of slotted this pet and took the DPS loss.. otherwise no…Its not worth it.

•Juvenile Black Bear •Enfeebling Roar: Reduced the recharge from 45 seconds to 40 seconds.

This is not a buff, No one is going to slot the Black Bear because we already have far better ways to get Weakness. Dropping the cooldown by 5 seconds is not a buff, does not improve the utility of the pet, and is bloody sad you thought it was.

•Juvenile Blue Moa •Protecting Screech: Reduced the recharge from 40 seconds to 30 seconds.

Again, You didn’t improve the utility of this pet like you talked about, This is not an improvement, The reason these pets aren’t be used isn’t because the cooldown of the abilities, but because the Heal that these pet do is completely unreliable, which is why you would take them in the first place

•Juvenile Red Moa •Furious Screech: Reduced the recharge from 30 seconds to 25 seconds.

This will probably get used in a dungeon, It won’t be used anywhere else

•Juvenile Cave Spider •Weakening Venom: Increased the vulnerability from 1 stack for 5 seconds to 3 stacks for 10 seconds.

sadly, you probably think that the 3 stacks from 1 stack is a massive buff and that’s why this pet is now better, When in reality the only actual useful buff you did was increasing it from 5 seconds to 10 seconds to give us better Condition Cover

•Juvenile Fern Hound •Regenerate: This will now also heal nearby allies for 1000 base and up to 1350 when traited with Compassion Training.

Actual Buff I suppose, Till you realize it has a huge cast time, and is annoying to get off like most pet abilities

•Juvenile Hawk •Lacerating Slash: Hawk and Eagle now have separate cooldowns for this skill.

Now only if using Lacerating Slash was an actual DPS increase over the pet auto attacking

•Juvenile Lynx •Rending Pounce: This skill’s tooltip now displays the correct amount of bleeding applied.

Great…

Treborlavok.3504:

[…] ppl like goals.

I never have a lot of faith when a post opens with a fallacy.

When has goal-oriented stuff ever been mutually inclusive of grind? I’ll bring up Saints Row IV again — I completed that easily, and I had fun with it. My “goal” was experiencing more of the story, and seeing what fun toys they’d throw at me next. Grind is an excuse for proper content.

Yes, people like goals, but only poor, brainwashed sots think they genuinely enjoy grind. With a quality game, you can have goal-oriented gameplay with no grind at all. The grind in Guild Wars 2 is just to disguise the copy-pasted content. It’s a known scientific fact that operant conditioning works on us, so it’s a pretty cheap shot to use it in place of actually making your game fun. And that it works so successfully that it’ll have people like you defending it?

That’s depressing.

Treborlavok.3504:

Vertical progression is how the big games have survived this long.

Then explain why many ancient FPS games, even older than WoW, have gotten by without it. This is a fallacy, because you’re assuming that grind is essential to an MMO having a long life. Correlation does not equal causation.

Treborlavok.3504:

You don’t need to be a basement dweller to succeed in gw2.

That was never the argument. You’re creating a straw-man here because you’re building constructs to argue against which are easier for you to combat.

The argument is that ArenaNet claims that casual players can be on equal footing with everyone else. Yet the reality of the matter is that in order to grind for Ascended, you would have to be a no-lifer, a basement dweller with nothing else to do other than play the game. In the sporadic periods a normal person would play Guild Wars 2, they’d probably not see an Ascended weapon before 2015, and that’s being generous.

This means that there’s content that’s locked out from them, just because they don’t have the time to grind that a basement dweller does. And the content is designed in such a way that it’s inaccessible unless you have the key to pass it, the cheat, as I described. And instead of just obtaining the cheat, you have to spend a nontrivial portion of your life grinding for it. You have to grind for a cheat to bypass an otherwise impossible segment of the game.

If the game was skill-based, then you wouldn’t have sections that would be impossible to bypass without a cheat (gear).

You know, it’s funny. Jet Set Willy on the ZX Spectrum was never completed, so there was a room you could never get past. Up until that point, you could play the game with your wits and skills alone. What if you had to replay the game 500,000 times before you could get a cheat to move onto other sections of the game?

That’s what MMOs (including GW2) are doing, and it’s unacceptable.

Treborlavok.3504:

Noone is forcing us to get ascended/legendary items/weapons.

Except for the content that requires it, you mean? Do you like shooting yourself in the foot?

Treborlavok.3504:

It still comes down to skill level, not stats.

If that’s true, then please enlighten me, what non-gear related skills are involved in playing GW2? I’m very interested. Please elaborate!

You were probably hoping that this would be a throwaway point that wouldn’t be picked up on, but I’m calling you out. I want you to tell me exactly what skills you’re talking about.

Treborlavok.3504:

I highly doubt gw2 would’ve kept even half it’s player base if they never introduced ascended items and new content.

So, grinding and new content are mutually inclusive, now?

That explains why the content of most single player games is riddled with grind that takes months upon months to even come near to completing! …oh, wait. Single player games aren’t like that at all!

Now, let’s drop the silly inclusive comments, shall we?

Treborlavok.3504:

Ppl woildve gotten bored having nothing to strive for in a game.

You’re turning a video game, a source of entertainment, into work. Oh, you poor thing, you actually believe what you’re saying, don’t you?

Then this must mean that I need to ‘strive for’ something when I sit down to watch a movie, or read a book, or listen to music. Perhaps I need to push a button on my TV 5,000 times before I can watch a show. That’s how it should be, right?

That’s what GW2 is, pushing a button on your TV 5,000 times before you can sit down to enjoy a show.

Treborlavok.3504:

You max out and then your at a level playing field… Then what…

Then new content is brought out to justify money being put into the game. Most games do that with DLCs. You might have heard of them.

Guild Wars 1 did just fine doing that, and it’s still alive, kicking, and healthy.

Jatacid.3725:

If they didn’t have ascended gear, or even legendaries for that matter. EVERYone even casual players. Would complain about the lack of end game gearing.

This is false.

Jatacid.3725:

If Guild Wars 2 released with the Ascended tier in place, there wouldn’t be anyone complaining about it.

This is false.

Jatacid.3725:

Exotics just simply don’t cut it for that ’I’ve reached the last tier’ feeling.

For you perhaps.

Jatacid.3725:

They explicitly said they wouldn’t add tiers above this -

Source please.

Jatacid.3725:

Tell the devs what you want out of end game

We want there to not be an ascended tier. We want Anet to return to the original intent where grinding would be restricted to cosmetic items and characters would have max stat gear by level 80. Those complaints that you are complaining about (nice bit of hypocrisy there) are doing exactly what you claim…telling the devs what we want out of end game.

Aberrant.6749:

Khalic.3561:

The point is that there’s no difference between one system and the other. There is no inherent imbalance. Their intent does not change that. There is no “fix” to be made, when nothing is broken.

Whether they remove or keep the current functionality is their choice to make. But it seems entirely unnecessary.

If one player has an advantage when using the bug then there is an imbalance…

Guard killer/def are also imbalanced (IMO) but it’s not a bug.

That doesn’t make the first or the second imbalance not exist, but from a game design POV there is a large difference between the two. The prior shouldn’t exist in the first place, the latter is in need of adjustment.

There’s no difference between this and not using a piece of food. The player who chooses not to use a piece of equipment that is extremely accessible is creating a disadvantage for themselves. That does not mean that the equipment is imbalanced.

But it’s obvious at this point that neither of us is going to convince the other.

This is sickening. You guys just love watering down the game.

Most WvW players have given up complaining and realized Anet is going to do nothing about it. I’ll speak with action. Any future game that Anet or related companies release, I will not be buying it. That’s how I operate. If I have a bad experience with a gaming company, I don’t invest money in them. Plain and Simple.

Quit trying to push your playstyle on other people.

their pvp balance is ruining the game
an slowly Killing it…

The worst part is its also the usual kick in the face to pve players….like saying “we don t care of you…you are not esport”

Yesterday tried cof….
Warriors didn t lose much dps at all. and guardian was untouched….
Mesmer suffered a HUGE nerf to survivability that was already lacking and what did they get in Exchange?

Illussions HP
Really? did anet learn anything from rangers pet?
they still get oneshot because in PVE nothing can be facetanked….

Elementalist?
Sure it deserved a dps nerf in PvE and a survivabbility nerf along it.

Makes sense……

And the worst part is they said they wouldn t go for strong nerf and still every patch they throw the most severe nerf ever seen in a game randomly for us to TEST in their place

I disagree with the blanket nerf to pet damage for Rangers.

I still dislike that there is not enough separation between PvP balance and PvE balance.

I dislike that the idea of balance is to nerf to the lowest rung on the pole rather than picking a baseline of a working build and bringing the rest of the builds up to par.

PsionicDingo.2065:

Did this all come to light because of bunkers?

This is what I assumed as well. I wouldn’t be against the change if they take the damage away from the pet and invest it directly in the ranger, otherwise they’re just reducing our DPS. The bunker build is admittedly overbearingly strong on account of how much DPS the pets represent in the class equation. I’m sorry guys, but you shouldn’t be able to spec for pure bunker survival, enjoy our wealth of evasions and insane mobility, and still get massive player-finishing DPS in the same package. However, if that is a problem with the ranger, then it’s only on account of how much is fundamentally wrong with the pets themselves. They account for 50% and quite likely more of our total potential DPS in spite of the fact that in PvE they’re worthless half the time due to aggressive and overwhelming AoE. They’re dead for an entire minute and a few of our class functions such as condition pulling put the pets in harm as well. But who cares about dungeons, right??? I’m being sarcastic but truthfully it only makes us terrible situational DPS and nothing more. These problems aren’t an issue in SPvP or roaming in W3, however. Pets in this element are formidable opponents who are often hard to counter, especially when the ranger is stacking control conditions. Basically, there has never been a good reason outside of dungeons or W3 zerging to invest in the ranger itself for direct damage output – especially when the developers themselves stated that as rangers we’re forced to play around our class mechanic. “Bonding with our pets” and all that sort of nonsense. But it means that the ranger itself suffers with insignificance in gameplay.

Simply put, there are overwhelming diminishing returns and crappy coefficients with power that it makes it practically worthless for the ranger to spec into damage. It’s a losing battle to try and shift the damage output to the ranger side of the class. Believe me, I’ve tried. We can spec for condition damage and duration and stack cripples, poison, and bleeding while our pets go for the kill for us. It’s that or nothing. What else is there? Trapping? Just a variation of the same build except perhaps the only one where the ranger we play actually gets to command a larger portion of the damage in a fight. Anyways, it’s ridiculous but that’s how they wanted the game for us rangers… and yet now they’re finally nerfing the pet damage. Can you make up your minds, ANet?

Hopefully they do indeed review the overall balance of the class and adjust the perimeters and traits as necessary to bring more player-directed output to the ranger itself. The class sorely needs it and it would go a long way towards giving a sense of purpose and significance to the action behind the mechanics that the player gets to ACTUALLY CONTROL. We shouldn’t simply be forced into a build that sets up opponents for our pets to take down. However… this is Anet after all. Keep your fingers crossed but don’t get your hopes up either. They do good some of the time (greatsword balancing + lightning reflexes cooldown reduction) but it’s like Russian roulette. Who knows what is going to happen. :-[

Spvp would be fun if it we needed to fight players not just hold certain spots the longest

So, and here me out because this involves logic which we know doesn’t exist in videogames, but thinking about it, I feel like there is a really simple solution to the longbow auto attack:

As the enemy gets closer to you, you fire faster.

See, logically, it makes sense because the closer somebody is, the less time it would be taking to aim shots, and the less time the arrow would spend in the air, so you would be refiring faster as they get closer. Secondly, it would balance out how poor the damage is up close. Not that it is supposed to be a close range weapon, but it would allow the auto attack to still maintain pressure, while rapid fire still being the better close range option due to superior refire speed.

What I’m thinking is this:
Long range: 1.2-1.25s aka what it is now.
Intermediate range: .9s or about 1/3 faster. Also, this kind of matches the damage scaling between ranges.
Short range: .75-.8s

Also, this would make it stronger than crossfire auto attack, which would mean that there would finally be some distinction between the weapons as to what intended purpose they serve (and how well they actually perform it).

Thoughts? I’m aware that there are improvement threads all the time, but I don’t believe something of this sort has been mentioned, so I’m hoping it gets some feedback/attention.

Overall, the Thief needs to be looked at in Guild Wars 2. The style of play it brings to the table reduces complex decision making for the thief and to counter stealth as their class mechanic leads it to the best burst in the game while simultaneously making them almost unkillable at the press of a button. As it stands now, Thieves don’t get kills through skill, it’s simply mechanics that allow them to pick up kills. Players play PVP because they don’t want to play simply against mechanics. PVPers want skill to be the defining characteristic of their fights. Bring depth and skill to the class and to people reacting to the class. Of course, changing the stealth durations will require more balancing with class survivability, damage, and traits. As I have outlined, the class reduces complex decisions for all players involved and that simply is not good game design. Please go back to the drawing board and take another look at the Thief class.

If you read this far, thank you! You’re a trooper. I know it was lengthy but game balance is very complex and understanding the fundamentals is important. Thanks so much for your time and I hope you learned something.

Guild Wars 2 could go to this model, but it would take massive rebalancing. I don’t think it’s viable as every class is meant to be able to do everything. As you can see, lots of emphasis is put on deciding WHY, WHEN, and HOW to implement stealth in your game. As Anet seems to have bolted on stealth to jump on the bandwagon, they missed out on a great deal of this planning phase. So what could Anet do?

Of the two things that Anet could do, normalizing and lowering stealth durations is the best option. In my opinion the Mesmer is very well balanced as far as stealth. It simply acts as a way to throw off your enemy for a second, reposition yourself a bit, and reengage while possibly dodging a spell. If you engaged something you shouldn’t have then it probably won’t save you. Their stealths sit at around 3 seconds (the best amount of time in my opinion, they should all be exactly 3) and their elite is 5 seconds and does nothing but stealth. They also get no bonuses when stealthing which keeps it from becoming even more unbalanced. Remove the ability to increase stealth duration and it would be perfect. The low time means that you can’t use stealth to endlessly to analyze potential targets and completely ignore fights that you can’t win. Low duration also reduces the amount of time you’re able to wait out your burst potential. Abusing stealthed movement is at a minimum with low duration and makes it only useful for slight repositioning not outright quitting a fight. It still gives the first strike advantage, but as I’ll discuss below allows for more tactical decisions and skill from both players. This makes short untargetability, first strike, and repositioning the benefits of stealth and still makes it very powerful.

Increasing the number of untargeted spells is a great way to mitigate stealth’s benefits to a simply deceptive role. Smite is a MOBA with only untargeted spells. Everything is a skill shot. They have one character, Loki, who has a relatively short stealth. He can really only use it for escape juking and quick engagements from the jungle because if you try to use it in full view of your enemy they will just CC where you disappeared from and hit you with everything anyways. This brings a great tactical element to stealth and AOEs as it gives you the ability to make more decisions in response to a stealth. In Guild Wars 2 there are two things preventing this from being viable at mitigating stealth. Dodge rolling in stealth and delayed AOEs. Very few AOE spells are instant cast making the ability to react to a stealth and hit them quickly impossible. On top of that dodge rolling makes it so that you can just avoid the AOE and stay stealthed. The best way to balance this is to make dodge break stealth. This plays out very nicely on the battlefield in regards to short stealths.

Let’s say a Mesmer decides to hit her torch 4 and enters a 3 second stealth. The enemy has a few options. Blow a defensive cool down and absorb the burst, try to hit the Mesmer with AOE to deal damage or CC to keep pressure on, if they have stealth they can stealth second and just get to have the first strike advantage when the Mesmer leaves stealth, or do nothing and absorb the re-engagement or let the Mesmer leave combat but have their cool downs up for the next time they need them. Let’s say the enemy decides to blow an AOE and drops it right on the Mesmer’s head. Now the Mesmer has a decision to make. Do I blow the dodge roll, leaving stealth and allowing the enemy to have the first strike advantage while I finish my roll animation or do I eat the damage? With long stealths the defensive buff duration won’t last long enough, the CC / damage will be impossible to follow up on, and the enemy can just walk away regardless. There’s no skill or branching decision making to be had. I could easily give more examples of decision making that long stealths eliminate but good skilled and complex decisions that short stealths add.

As you can see this branching decision making adds a lot of skill and complexity to PVP, something that is very good. However, this assumes that stealths have low durations and dodge rolls be adjusted to only allow the dodging of one spell (in this case the AOE) and not complete invulnerability during the entire roll. However, even if the dodge animation makes them completely invulnerable like is currently the case the enemy still baited out a dodge roll making that one less available to them later. I have several issues with dodge as currently implemented however but that’s another story. Let’s leave it at I think all buffs to endurance pool size and regeneration should be removed from everything and it should be normalized amongst all classes and dodge should only stop one attack when you hit the button choosing amongst the first to hit you.

As you can see, stealth can easily reduce the skill level of classes and reduce meaningful skilled choices players can make to adapt to it. Especially in Guild Wars 2, stealth can make it so you win fights by mechanics, not by skill. So how do you balance stealth in a game with all these massive advantages it gives? It’s very logical and quite simple. I’m going to refer to three examples I feel are extremely well balanced stealth mechanics in PVP games: The Mesmer, EVE online, and Smite:

• Remove stealth or do not include stealth
• Remove the ability to do anything useful after stealth
• Design your game with rock, paper, scissors balance
• Keep stealths short in duration
• Increase the number of untargeted spells

The first is the most obvious. Just don’t have stealth in your game. Stealth is such a powerful mechanic and designers really need to see the role very clearly for stealth before including it. Don’t just include stealth because it’s the hip thing to do. Including stealth in a game is by no means going to increase the reception of it. Quite the opposite is true if it unbalances the game in some way. Also, make sure if you do decide to include stealth make sure your engine can handle it properly and it’s not buggy. There’s a lot of complex things code wise that stealth needs to do in a game. If your game simply cannot handle stealth from a base perspective, think of another way to fill the niche your game needs. This is rather impractical in Guild wars 2 as the design team has already committed to using stealth. However, they could make stealth simply turn the Thief shadowy and make him untargetable but still visible. This would make them still susceptible to AOEs but still give them the ability to mitigate most kill strike burst damage. This could make for a very interesting and balanced alternative in my mind, but still shouldn’t have more than a 5s duration on non-elite skills.

Removing the ability to do anything useful after stealth means quite simply you only want it to be used for scouting purposes. Trying to make a high damage low survivability class stealth is completely impractical. Make it so they can burst a target quickly and it becomes a one sided fight of “can the stealth character choose their targets properly.” Make the stealth class do too little damage and the enemy simply turns around after being engaged and guts them like a fish. The balance line is so razor thin it’s best to avoid it altogether. Having stealth characters do no damage isn’t practical for a lot of games but games with big open worlds, sandbox games, and other creative uses can often make use of a pure scouting or support role. It could be tweaked to make sure the class that can stealth can only use support functions like CC or buffing friendly players. This has the added benefit of increasing communication and team play as the stealth class generally cannot solo kill anything but can be a force multiplier for their team. If you want a great example of well balanced stealth support and scouting, EVE online does is splendidly with 3 different classes of stealth craft. One class can only really scout enemy systems, the other can do fairly decent CC but very low damage, and the third is only good for fleet logistical purposes. This is impractical for Guild Wars 2.

Another from the design perspective, balance your game in a rock, paper, scissors fashion. Make it so stealth characters counter something, but something hard counters stealth characters. You see this in MOBAs frequently and some RPGs. I think it’s good balance as it emphasizes team composition, positioning, and sticking together much more but other players dislike it. It promotes strategy at the cost of reactionary tactics. What you’ll often see is warrior characters having decent CC and physical mitigation, but low maneuverability and mage characters doing high armor ignoring damage but with low escape and survivability. What ends up happening is if a rogue engages a warrior the warrior brushes off most of the rogue’s damage and caves his skull in with CC and damage. If the rogue stealths up to a mage he can gut the mage in a matter of seconds leaving the mage with little defense. Mages by contrast do heavy damage to the warrior as most of their damage is unmitigated. You can throw in other things like support characters and objectives to make sure the team is focused on supporting each other instead of running around mindlessly TDMing each other. This has the added factor of increasing balance. If the rogue gets a huge buff for some reason teams need only to increase the number of warriors to compensate which then makes mages more viable etc.

Movement and positioning can often be the key between winning and losing a battle in most game types be it PVP, PVE, what have you. When you stealth the enemy has no idea what direction you’re moving in but you can still see theirs. This creates a huge disparity in what the non-stealthed player can do to mitigate what you can do. This highly favors mechanics instead of skilled gameplay. At best, they can see you off in the distance, watch you stealth, and move away from you preventing you from gaining much distance on them. At worst, during a melee combat the stealth character gets a huge advantage to peel from combat if they are losing since they can just move in the opposite direction the enemy is or makes it so they can stick to a fleeing target with no hope of the fleeing target landing CC because the stealth character can’t be targeted. It also could allow a stealth character to stealth out of view of a player and close the gap between you two without the player being able to do anything to mitigate this gap closing. Again, being unable to mitigate this means the mechanic not only requires less skill to use but promotes less skilled gameplay from opponents as well.

First strike advantage is absolutely gigantic in any game. Entire classes and spells are built around mitigating first strike advantage for the simple reason that classes like thieves and rogues exist. The element of surprise gives even the most skilled opponents a couple seconds of disparity which can be devastating. If the stealth class has any CC this becomes even worse. The stealth character can strike, CC, and strike a few times more before the enemy gets any chance to do anything reasonable. If the stealth is short this is generally negligible as the opponent can predict when you will come out of stealth more accurately and take appropriate measures to counter your opening. However, it does still provide a fairly solid benefit even with short stealths. Being able to press a button and gain the first strike advantage also mitigates skilled usage however it does allow for the defending player to make skill based decisions which could then take adapting to. I’ll discuss this a bit more later.

Untargetability is obviously a gigantic advantage. This is what allows stealth characters to have the first strike advantage, gives them the ability to avoid CC, and allows them to escape things other classes are simply incapable of. Couple this with the ability to avoid being seen and it makes even untargeted AOE spells incredibly hard to land. Without the invisibility part untargetability is still strong but it can be mitigated by AOE CC and AOE damage. Untargetability itself allows for very skilled play with short durations to interrupt spiking combos, dodge or anticipate important CC from enemies, and mitigate ambush burst on squisher characters. With long durations and invisibility it basically provides invulnerability for the entire duration of the stealth and again, reduces the impact on skilled decisions and instead emphasizes mechanics.

Scouting undetected can be gigantic in certain games. Games like EVE online have entire squads dedicated to reconnaissance because in war, knowledge is power. In MOBAs stealth generally gives a huge advantage to scouting as well as knowing enemy movement can make the difference between lost assets or a defended push. The lower the sight lines, game importance on knowing enemy movements or compositions, and size of the combat maps can make or break undetected scouting as a mechanic. At short durations of stealth, undetected scouting becomes almost impossible. From a game design perspective at the inception of the game developers need to analyze what emphasis they want to put on scouting. Measures like EVE online’s inability to target enemy players for several seconds after stealth or stealth ships’ inability to do substantial damage can put heavy emphasis on balanced scouting and supporting without impacting balance in combat situations. This is one of the few instances permastealth can be easily balanced.

Stealth is a relatively new addition to gaming. It seems like every MMO from Shooters, Space games, RPGs, MMOs, and MOBAs all have to have stealth these days. In this post I’m going to analyze why stealth is an inherently unbalanced mechanic and why should generally be avoided in games in the future unless there is a specific purpose for it instead of being bolted onto any genre and trying to balance it afterwards.

First off, let’s visit stealth as a mechanic. We’ve all seen it. You enter stealth becoming invisible for a time and then reappear under set conditions be it time, action, or something else. However, stealth gives a TON of benefits, both tangible and intangible that need to be considered during balance. The longer the stealth is, the larger most of these benefits become and often the more uncounterable the benefits become. This uncounterability of players while in stealths lends itself to use of mechanics instead of skilled decision based gameplay. So let’s analyze these pieces one by one:

• Time to analyze your enemy
• Cooldown reduction
• Movement closing
• First strike advantage
• Untargetability
• Scouting undetected

When a PVP battle starts several things happen in a very short span of time. What a player does the first few seconds of combat can determine how good they are as a player. Let’s say you see your enemy off in the distance. You now have a few seconds to determine their class, look at their armor and weapons, analyze their buffs, and from there try to determine how their character is built and if you could handle their build in your current build. This can make or break a good player. Engaging an opponent when they are built to counter your build is suicide, but if you guess wrong at their build they can send you a haymaker in combat that you weren’t expecting and force you to adapt.

The challenge and fun of PVP begins at first contact. The less information that is outright given to you but clearly displayed on the enemy the better, but that’s a topic for another time. Stealth breaks the initial period of analyzing, theorizing, and preparing for the coming battle. One party gets to analyze the other often for large amounts of time while the other can have no idea of the existence of the other. The stealth character gets the ability to almost perfectly select targets they know they can kill. It skews the initial planning phase of the battle drastically in the stealth characters favor with no more than the push of a button. This removes a huge skill aspect of PVP and greatly favors mechanics over skill-based gameplay.

Along the same lines, during combat you often have to adapt to enemy tactics and strategies. Giving yourself a big time out during combat is a gigantic advantage. However, with stealth, this also applies to your enemy. This can be a wash in instances where there’s not a mechanical advantage to having a slight breather. However, in games where a stealth class has lots of front loaded damage this is a dramatic advantage. Not only do you get to take a breather and plan your next move but you also get to sit out all your cool downs and apply more front loaded damage again. It essentially removes the detriment of burst damage which is generally high cool downs.

The longer stealth is the more it lessens the number of decisions opponent can make for how to deal with it as well. So if the enemy has no important decisions to make while the character who is stealthing does, this creates an even greater informational advantage. I’ll say this multiple times, but again this points to a mechanical advantage instead of skilled gameplay.

In my opinion, Spirits aren’t fixed until I can safely put them on my bar without a single point in Nature Magic.

Sigh, this sugarcoating of all the issues the ranger has is starting to become more irratating than the good old complaining.

Robert Hrouda.1327:

Edit:
I’ve gotten in some trouble before about giving hints and releasing info early… so I’m going to leave that up to the people in charge if they want to do those things :x

… Anet is quite possibly the most paranoid MMO developer I’ve run across when it comes to ANY sort of early hints about releases. I mean, compare it to other MMOs where potential changes are released and discussed weeks or months in advance, and balance feedback is actually taken into account..

Maybe I’m just spoiled by CCP’s practices. Pity about their community…

The more I stick around this forum, the more I start to see that most of the really competent rangers have left this class…

It’s really starting to be a class predominantly occupied by people who are too motivated in reinforcing their own view of rangers being great just because they’re not totally useless.

Pigs F2 ability needs to hack like Steal from Thieves, were it replaces the F2 with whatever they picked up.

Think about how much utility is present in what the Pigs currently have, and realize no one uses it because the awful nature at which Pigs f2 is designed currently around.

This is one of the main problems with Rangers currently, we have a lot of Stuff that should be on our class shoved onto our pets in a kitten manner with no thought to usability, and people wonder why we’re not as good as other classes.

Aridia.3042:

This should be the effect for Signet of the Hunt when you use it.

Speed for passive. Slow stealth for active.

I agree. But not slow stealth. Immobile stealth. Something like up to 10-20 seconds or until you move.

A bit more damage in a few attacks is not useful enough to lose the speed, but if you can stealth in place for a long time unless you move, there may be no reason to run at all.

Run to a corner, hide on it. Ding. No need to run. And a reason for people to stick around searching in keeps after conquering them is always neat. That is always fun.