Guild Wars 2

Calae.1738:

It appears to me that developers respond to the lowest common denominator having the loudest voice. Stealth is not a new idea; it’s a borrowed idea.

Developers are like normal people. They fall into patterns and tend to not question how things work or why they work a certain way. Ideas are simply borrowed from the people who invented them.

Triple A game design in a nutshell.

Smooth Penguin.5294:

Stealth was already nerfed. This was due to an unbalanced “perma-stealth” Thief troll build. Now with that said, let’s breakdown your complaints one by one:

• Time to analyze your enemy
This is done before a Thief or Mes goes into stealth. If the target is squishy, you attack. If it’s a Guardian, you run away. Simple.

• Cooldown reduction
This was the nerf. No more perma-stealth trolling.

• Movement closing
Part of the purpose of being stealthed. You can run away or move in for a hit. Nothing wrong here.

• First strike advantage
Part of the purpose of being stealthed. You can run away or move in for a hit. Nothing wrong here.

• Untargetability
Part of the purpose of being stealthed. You can run away or move in for a hit. Nothing wrong here.

• Scouting undetected
Part of the purpose of being stealthed. You can run away or move in for a hit. Nothing wrong here.

Summary – Stealth is a part of the game. If you’re unable to come up with effective strategies to counter it, it doesn’t mean it’s unbalanced or broken. It means you need to get better. There are many ways to counter a Thief or Mes, but being that I play both, I won’t discuss them (for fear of people learning how to kill me).

Only you fail to note how “the purpose of stealth” is bad to begin with. Stealth offers too many advantages while not giving an appropriate balance of disadvantages. “The purpose of stealth” has nothing to do with it. The purpose is wrong to begin with. It’s designed to be ezmode for the stealther. All I learned from your post was that you like easy kills, you have no interest in balance(for fear of people learning how to kill you), and you have no idea what you’re talking about.

It appears to me that developers respond to the lowest common denominator having the loudest voice. Stealth is not a new idea; it’s a borrowed idea.

Developers are like normal people. They fall into patterns and tend to not question how things work or why they work a certain way. Ideas are simply borrowed from the people who invented them.

I agree that stealth doesn’t provide skill based game play. However; keep in mind the audience that you’re trying to convey this discussion to. They generally don’t like to think.

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.

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.

Shortbow was perfectly balanced as it was, and now we are getting nerfed for what? Trickshot is completely useless, the projectile is too slow and it doesn’t even require a dodge to evade it, sidestepping does the trick.

What is the reasoning behind this nerf? I have played thief for a long time, and I have yet to hear a single complaint about SB. Mug nerf is fine by me, change on flanking strike is awesome, but really, couldn’t we just get a damage nerf (which is also not needed I think, but ok), or make it hit one less target? Because now we are hitting nothing. At least increase the projectile speed then.

Alphonse.4356:

It seems pretty obvious that anet has its own idea of how this game has to be played. Since I don’t like this decision, I’ll just let it go. I did the same with personal story and jumping puzzles. As soon as I can find a better game, I’ll be gone in a heartbeat.

The one comment I will make is that in a game that is supposed to support “play the way you enjoy to play”, the few stubborn hold outs of old school thinking are just all the more mindless. The game is actually more “play the way you want to play, unless we decide that some content has to be played our way, in which case we will do everything in our power to ensure you play it exactly as intended, because you really shouldn’t be able to play your way all the time, or our game will be seen as easy mode and our egos as game designers will suffer and designers from other companies will make fun of us, which will make us sad, even though those other developers would die to have a game as successful as ours”.

I actually think that should be the official mission statement moving forward…

third time since I started playing that no new builds have become viable

so

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BJEvhi2OlEY

Because this game is massive letdown from GW1 in every single aspect except pve?

Why is there no arenas in a game made by ARENAnet?

With a title such as Guildwars, it would seem obvious to include battles between guilds. I’ve yet to understand why one of the most popular game modes in GW was cut from the second game. I have heard that there would be issues with the current combat system working for a GvG type match. That does not however imply that game content should be excluded, rather, it implies that there is a flaw in the battle system itself. I believe that GvG could be possible so long as the format of the battle was altered, as well as addition of skills for both weapon and utility slots to allow for more variety in combat.
In the first Guildwars, there was the flag capturing objective which was generally located in the center of the main battlefield which was used to increase the moral of a team. However, one objective would not be practical in Guildwars 2 because that would result in one large brawl at the center of the map and would likely be the determining factor for the match, unless perhaps it was a close fight between the two opposing teams. Instead there should be a blend of objectives. The ones that are present in the pvp arenas as of now are great examples: a flag stand (from the original Guildwars), capturable points, slaying certain NPC’s, the presence of a guild lord, and so on. These could be blended into a single game type on a fairly large arena, preferably set in Guild Halls (another part of the original Guildwars that should have been passed down to the second game), which would allow for more strategy within the game type.
I’ll now briefly touch on the battle system that is present in Guildwars 2 which is, more than anything else, responsible for GvG’s incompatibility with GW2. From what I can tell, the complication comes from two parts of the battle system: the lack of a support class and the lack of diversity that comes from the pre-set weapon skills and small amount of utility skills given to each class.
I believe that each problem has the same solution; by simply adding a wider variety of both attack and support skills for each class and allowing players to construct “builds” in addition to the current ability to alter their traits, the problem of support classes and diversity could be solved. It is understood that Arena Net chose to make Guildwars 2 the way they had so that it would be a more playable game for everyone, however this only allows limited diversity between characters and makes it more difficult to separate a good player from a more exceptional one. Providing more freedom to the classes and how their skills are set could only benefit the community of Guildwars. As of now, the only way to truly support an ally is to either attack those who are attacking them, or to cast an area of effect skill in their vicinity, such as a shout or a field spell. There are very few skills that can be directly cast on an ally to aid them in a fight. This is a problem in competitive play, and really doesn’t allow teammates to work optimally with one another which takes away from the overall pvp experience.
Currently there is a not a particularly broad choice of player vs. player game types, and there are now even fewer due to the removal of Paid Tournaments. The addition of Guild vs. Guild would be an update that has been much awaited for, and appreciated by a vast majority of pvp regulars. The only way for GvG to be a conceivable player vs. player game type is to create both a setting and battle system that allows for greater strategic planning than is currently available in GW2. Guild vs. Guild was never simply a fight between two guilds; it was a battle of skill, and even more strategy, which ultimately was the reason for its success as a competitive game type, and is more than an adequate reason for reapplying it to Guildwars 2.

marnick.4305:

Dr Ritter.1327:

THe last three updates have been horrible 10 minute content, supposedly being “teaser” content leading up to the finale.

If this update doesn’t deliver then my faith is lost in this game and company

Faith is for the catholic church, not a company/game. Companies want your money and you vote with your wallet. Faith, they don’t care about.

faith
/f?TH/
Noun
Complete trust or confidence in someone or something.

A company that wants you to keep playing their game (active populations are healthy for MMOs regardless of their business model) and continue to spend money in their store (that’s how they make bank) probably cares a great deal about your trust and confidence in them as developers to deliver content you want to play.

MMOs are a time investment as well as a financial one. If players aren’t getting the experience they desire (and they don’t see a trend in the updates and added content which shows content they desire is coming any time soon) it’s quite easy to give up on the game, and ArenaNet doesn’t want that. If I can get a more rewarding experience for my time from another game (or hobby) it makes little sense to stick around.

Personally I’ve enjoyed Flame and Frost so far. I’m completely on board with the view that the content took way too long to pick up speed and the first two months of “content” were barely worth playing, I’m glad we are getting a dungeon to finish it off. Hopefully an expansion or more frequent and meatier content updates on the horizon for the next six months, tiny bits of content like this one every four months probably isn’t enough to keep many people interested in an MMO long term, especially when so much content is temporary.

THe last three updates have been horrible 10 minute content, supposedly being “teaser” content leading up to the finale.

If this update doesn’t deliver then my faith is lost in this game and company

Nefandi.3051:

My shouts warrior

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kLCI5Z78Z3c

I do not need to stick with the zerg, yet I also don’t expect to single hand groups. On the other hands, I can easily escape from groups not so big 5~7 and while in the zerg I normally can escape.

No offense but whats the point of linking some wvw stuff? That’s another step down in terms of skill compared to hot join spvp.

WvW = the greater number wins and is so imbalanced you can’t survive outside a zerg as anything other than a thief/mes/bunker Ele. Basing your warrior opinion off WvW is invalid as its biggest weakness – lack of healing and survivability – is made up for by the fact that you’re in an ENORMOUS group of people.

And as Albundy said, being an immobilise machine for your group/zerg is just the lowest style of play. Warriors that call themselves valuable because they lock down people for their team. Get people in 1v1 and let’s see how valuable it really is.

Robert Hrouda.1327:

Fiontar.4695:

I hope the other things you’ve been working on aren’t more “fun” improvements to dungeons and world PvE mobs. So far, you’ve proven the existence of “anti-fun” as a real property and your pursuit of it has been disconcerting! (It’s probably not a good sign to have some fans breath a sigh of relief to learn that the new dungeon was not created by the Dungeon Team…) ;P

What someone defines as fun is often different from what another person calls fun. I’m sorry our dungeon work has not appealed to you and others, but there is an audience for what we do. My hope is that in the future, we can build something that appeals to you and other folks currently not on board with our dungeon content, while still staying true to the people who have enjoyed our content thus far. Bridging that gap is not an easy process, but I am confident that such things are not impossible feats

The problem is that you took the lowest level dungeon and made it a nightmare for people new to dungeons. Supposedly this was to make dungeons “more fun”, but it had the opposite effect for many. Do some people find higher difficulty dungeons fun? Of course they do, but that’s why most game developers add an expert mode to their dungeons, rather than forcing the heightened difficulty on everyone.

We also heard how steps were being taken to make world encounters “more fun”. Well, the changes to the Krait vets and champs is not fun, at all. It has actually created the sad situation were people are just completely bypassing events where these new mechanics are evident.

The thing I find most odd about the strategy on dungeon development in this game is that the game completely lends itself to scalable difficulty levels for dungeons. The mechanisms for all sorts of scaling are in place. It makes the decision to redesign dungeons to be even tougher by default, rather than adding Expert Mode, even more perplexing.

To be honest, even difficulty levels for dungeons doesn’t take the obvious potential of the game far enough. Due to the way loot is distributed in the game, with each character having their own loot rolls, rather than sharing a group loot pool, there really isn’t any reason why Dungeons shouldn’t be designed to scale for smaller groups than five people. In other games, someone able to solo or duo a dungeon meant for five people would allow that person or duo to walk away with a dis-ordinate amount of loot. In GW2, that isn’t an issue. (This makes tuning of dungeons to prevent solo/duo action, at any cost, very confusing, since these people aren’t able to earn more loot than they would doing the dungeon with a group and will almost certainly spend a lot more time completing said dungeon than they would have in a competent group).

To sum up, a. please stop working on making world encounters “more fun”, if the Krait changes are an example of what you have in mind and b. it would be better to see you guys spend time on broadening the appeal of dungeons by allowing difficulty tiers and scaling for less than 5 people, rather than obsessing over finding ways to prevent people from finding ways to enjoy dungeons that you didn’t intend, but are otherwise harmless.

Because the game’s idea of challenge is to kill you in one hit, and thus the grand majority of actually threatening enemies renders defensive stats completely worthless. Healing power scales poorly and but power/precision/crit damage scale off each other. Do the math.

Also, thanks to the 25 stack condition cap, power builds have an inherent advantage, not to mention condition builds suck against objects.

Then again, one could ask why people even bother with some classes, and that would be because this is a game.

Also every dungeon can be completed by teams of only berserker + on a lot of weapons most of you’re dps come from auto attack.

MatthewMedina.5419:

It’s true that other monthly achievements were set lower, but we made this higher specifically because there are a finite number of these, they do not move, and they respawn quickly.

While I agree with most of your post, on this, we disagree. If you can only pick up the salvage item ONCE PER ACCOUNT PER DAY, it really does not matter if it spawns every 30 seconds. For all practical purposes, the periscopes spawn ONCE per day per location.

First order of business remove diminishing returns

Ensure all events have a worthwhile reward for the time invested, in relation to dungenons and other content. Example, comparing how long it takes to run AC with Jormag, then the rewards, the second seems pointless once you have done it a couple of times.

It doesn’t mean exotics need to grow from trees, just getting atleast a single rare in every major chest – or atleast something worthwhile, would increase player incentive and lower a lot of the negative feedback at so many events when people spend half an hour to get a couple of blues. I still have no clue why this has been set the way it is now.

OliverT.9021:

An effectively efficient run on p1 typically logs me around 6 mins. The speed run of 15 mins is more than double my timing. This may seem very little but when used in the context of farming for a legendary or some exotic weapon (which requires some crazy 350 charged lodestones or 500 powerful blood) where 400 hours needed are concerned, doubling that would mean 800 hours.

Had to quote this.
See, others in this thread can be so quick to call players things like small brained or idiots… without thinking why people do these runs in the first place. If anet didn’t put such ridiculous RNG on precursors, the droprate of lodestones and some other mats then there would be no need to go to these lengths in order to farm for the required gold. These same posters probably think the farmers find doing this more fun than hanging out with guildies doing some random thing for kittens and giggles.

Apologists being apologetic?
Thought so.

You guys don’t even know how hard simin used to be. It basically required five full zerk players with impeccable timing and teamwork. Now it’s a cakewalk, huh? Shame. It devalues the Dungeon Master title enormously.

Hes so easy :|
Phase one, range him and kill the grubs

Phase 2
see red circles dodge out of them.

You’ve not done the Simin fight. That’s closer to impossible. Much, much closer.