Guild Wars 2

Here’s their logic behind death and healing from the developers themselves.

http://gw2101.gtm.guildwars2.com/en/the-game/combat/healing-death/

“Why should we debuff you, take away experience or make you run around for 5 minutes as a ghost instead of playing the game?”

You see… death is an inconvenience… it’s a negative experience according to Arenanet.

I think the whole risk-reward concept is broken with downed-state.

It might take a tram 10 seconds to down an enemy player but their team-mates can revive them with a 1 second click.

That totally ruins the scale of a fight. Reviving is just too easy, especially for Guardians who can do it while fully immune.

Make reviving harder and take more time (especially with multiple players) and the problem becomes less of an issue.

Since this is a controversial topic, please don’t respond without reading this ENTIRE post, because there’s a good chance that your response will be addressed within the following. If it’s not, comment away – I’m all ears.

This topic has been discussed a number of times, and in my experience the community has actually been pretty split on the subject. It may not seem that way because most of the people who really hate the downed state have long ago walked away from these forums (and likely SPvP entirely) but I’m bringing it up again. Hoping for sincere, reasonably mature discussion on this topic.

The best way to look at the downed state objectively is to consider the pros and cons. I’ll start with the cons, and you guys can cover the pros, as none come to mind for me.

1) It makes 1 versus X fights impossible for the already disadvantaged party
If you are fighting two players on your own, chances of you winning are very slim, even if you outplay them considerably. You will not find time to execute a player when another player is focusing you, unless you’re fighting a pair of blind quadriplegics. Furthermore, the player you down will have numerous escapes or crowd controls you need to avoid in order to actually complete that execute. It’s just not going to happen. This removes variability in combat. If you’re outnumbered, more often than not your only option is to run.

2) It encourages (demands?) zerging
Might sound like the same point, but I want to further advance this by saying it actually affects the entire flow of the battle. Because of the revive system, the control your allies offer to protect you while you’re down, and the fact that some classes are exceedingly difficult to execute for one person…the best strategy is almost invariably to move as one big unit. This gets very stale, very fast and is a huge factor in that, “Wow, what a mess of entities and particle effects.” feeling that so many players express when they’re new to PvP (aside from the swarms of AI, but that’s another topic for another day).

3) It greatly limits build diversity
Long ago, before warriors were the monsters they are now, I played a glass cannon greatsword warrior. Using a well-placed knockdown, as much of hundred blades as could be channeled, and then a whirlwind, I could often drop a given target who wasn’t particularly using his dodges/cc/kiting options well. It was impossible for me to then execute them in a teamfight. If you are made of paper, standing still for that 1.5s cast is much harder than it is for a tank.
Currently, as I’m playing a much tankier build (like nearly every non-thief/mesmer in SPvP), I just sit in a teamfight all day and roll in points and glory. As a tank, getting those executes off is much easier. Sure, they teleport away, have friends to control me, or CC me themselves…but I can survive through these effects. For many classes, the downed state makes toughness/vitality in large quantities mandatory.

4) It slows the game down
Zybak mentioned this in a video on the subject from 2012 and the issue is still true, though he didn’t really give the needed details. The gameplay is very clunky with the downed state, and makes certain cooldowns mandatory for getting a kill in a teamfight situation. Often in a direct teamfight, you must activate a stability cooldown to make a kill happen. This makes kills overly dependent on these CDs because the downed state just requires you to commit too much to make a kill happen

5) It can last absurdly long, despite being a lot less fun than the actual gameplay
This is opinion based, as some of you might be just like, “Oh yeah, throwing rocks! Woo! Yeah rocks!” but I’m not the first to feel this way. Often times, because of how hard you can be to execute, you get stuck in the downed state for a long, long time. You just sit there, violently throwing rocks. You wish you could just die and get back into the game – playing your class and build as you designed and enjoy it. Alas, you get to sit on the ground throwing rocks.
It’s also not fun to fight against. For me, it robs me of the dramatic moment of the play that actually landed the kill. Maybe a clutch last-minute attack wins you a fight, but now you’re probably going to be downed as well, if you’re low, and you can just sit there and throw rocks at each other. Didn’t FFXIV get completely remade because their game had too much rock throwing?

6) It looks kind of stupid
I won’t go into a lot of detail here, but when you have a rifle, a giant sword, flaming waves of magical death, or a horde of undead abominations…looks pretty dumb when you have to run over and slowly perform a single punch to kill your opponent.

Pros – The ball is in your court, downed state lovers.

It’s a way of giving more power to greater numbers. You get downed and have more players you’ll have a higher chance of being ressed up by allies in a second (since the healing is so stupidly strong). This means the larger forces are even harder to take down. Don’t even get me started on rally mechanics. Why you would intentionally want to do this to this extent… idk.

The downed states are also highly unbalanced. Ele has the best downed state (prevents the first stomp attempts 100% of the time). Close behind are Mes/thief… then there is a large drop down to guard/ranger who at least get aoe interrupts on down… then another large drop down to war/eng/necro who are usually just free kills once downed since they can only interrupt a single player when downed.

This is rubbish. It’s 3 kitten skills (4th is a universal heal). Balance it.

It’s really sad to see, that 90% of the people posting here, is either screaming for rewards, cosmetics, gamemodes, buffs, nerfs or simply ’balance’. Gamemodes or rewards will not make the game more enjoyable - It will have the same stale combat that you’re used to. And screaming for buffs, nerfs og balance without any reasoning or suggestions behind, is literally just saying; "I want my profession to be stronger than the rest, so I can win with no effort".

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Anyways, here’s my questions for the stream.

1) How are you going to reintroduce skill into PvP? As of right now, PvP is all about spamming, AI and passives. Little to no skill involved.

2) Are you content with PvP having a Rock/Paper/Scissor balance? Like Diamond Skin completely countering condition professions.

3) Why do you continue to reduce the cooldown on lesser used skills, instead of prolonging the cooldown on the overpowered ones? Cooldown reduction leads to power-creep and a spammy meta.

4) Will we ever see some drastic changes to skills and balance? Like; reducing the damage of all autoattacks, redesigning all passive traits, changes to how condition damage is calculated, reintroduction of charged skills, etc.

5) Any plans to change the way conditions are currently used? What I mean is that, the best way to use conditions as of now, is simply applying as many as possible at any given moment. People don’t use conditions because of the debuff, but rather as a way of preventing burn/bleed from being removed.

Please do consider answering harder questions about mechanics and balance, instead of solely catering to those who scream for superficial changes. Thanks.

What is the stance on downed-state and how it impacts the dynamic of PvP combat in both sPvP and WvW?

Why doesn’t endure pain prevent point capture? “protect me” shout on ranger does. Invuln on guardian does. Stealth does. Stupid.

I really don’t like the concept of this idea. It detracts from teamwork and would discourage players from trying to survive as long as possible (ie ‘if I go down before my teammate, I get to rally and he dies’).

If i’ve said it once, i’ve said it like a dozen time.

Remove Downstate.

Tone down burst and bunker extremes. I know downstate was added so there would be no need for a healer, but hell, this game doesn’t need a healer even if there was no downstate. The problem is that they allowed this completely unasked for mechanic (name one other game that has this) so they could be unique, so it could add “depth” and “strategy.”

Well, its failed. Remove it. The community has said a billion and one times why its bad, and why it should be removed, the only reason people say its “good” is because the burst and bunker polars are so extreme, that it IS necessary to keep things on a somewhat even keel.

Ventilators are necessary to keep some people breathing. Does that make them good? Perhaps. But what would the ideal situation be? Not needing one.

Games like Dota2 and LoL (as much as I hate it) and even Awesomenauts have competitive PvP without the holy trinity. If this game wants to have a future, it needs to start taking notes from successful games.

snacktime.1082:

Down state is a mechanic to cap the power of highly skilled, experienced players. If power scaled with skill, then 10 mans would be wiping 60 man zergs. Ditto for aoe caps. A game that lets experienced/skilled players completely dominate would end up driving most people away, and become a niche game with a much smaller population.

The down state works quite well for what it was intended to do. It’s frustrating at times, but I’d rather see a game where the large majority of people can have fun and get in a win, then a game dominated just by the hardcore players.

What? A game that lets skilled and experienced players hold their own against multiple enemies would be such a travesty!

That’s basically what you’re saying. If I or anyone else am skilled enough to hold my own in a 1v3 then we deserve to win, those 3 deserve to be on the floor deader than roadkill. Even with friends in a 3v 8+ it’s already hard to win against odds like that but when downed state comes into the equation it just complicates things so much more.

We can down someone but when 2-5 people instantly jump on his body they res him faster than i can push F to even start the stomp.

And removing downed state won’t drive people away that’s a ridiculous thought. No body says " I play gw2 because of downed state" thats like saying “i play gw2 because i die all the time” If anything doing this will just bring back the better pvpers that anet chased away.

Darnis.4056:

Downstate is the best thing that ever happened to this game.. I can’t believe how people can’t understand that if there was no downstate Burst DPS builds wouldn’t even be run and this safety meta would become a Special olympics safety meta.

Can you believe that balance patches would still appear after downstate would be gone? But ofcourse its easier using ‘special olympics’ arguments and assuming it will suddenly be in tomorrow ruining the game.

At any rate i think a single toggle would help both sides of the argument. And when we get deathmatches i’d really really want the option there as well…but that is going to be a little more difficult.

I wish custom arenas had a downed state off toggle.

Downed-State is the safety net for bad players and gives the bigger numbers and even greater upper hand.

It’s broken and unfair in ways that have been expanded on before extensively and it is by far the worst feature in GW2, of that I am sure.

In fact playing without downed-state is what I look forward to most in coming MMOs.

Deimos Tel Arin.7391:

gw2 spvp needs more players before it has any remote chance to become a popular e-sports.

given how they allocate their resources into PvE, living stories (more PvE), gem store (PvE again) i say this is impossible. unless they change their monetization policies and focus on attracting more players to play gw2 sPvP.

until more players play gw2 sPvP, it will never become an e-spot.

some external references.
http://store.steampowered.com/stats/

Current Players | Peak Today – Game
231,589 | 509,107 – Dota 2
36,100 | 63,810 – Team Fortress 2
18,051 | 48,849 – Counter-Strike: Global Offensive

try achieving an average of 200k+ gw2 sPvP players per day.
then we talk about e-sports.

for comparison, Dota 2 has … lots of heroes, that plays differently, and are unplayable.

how many actual builds are playable for each of the 8 professions in guild wars 2? in sPvP i mean.

yes, having more players to draw from helps. the core issues though…

for this type of game, professions and combat are not good at all for any type of pvp, and is barley digestible in pve. there is so much more potential to make the core of this game better, but very little to no effort goes into making professions and combat a high quality aaa experience. until they start going back to the drawing board for professions, no one who cares about having a rich, deep, diverse, flexible, customizable, balanced… character system and wants a quality combat for the sake of combat experience, will ever take the game seriously.

No.

- Classes are absurdly far apart in terms of depth and risk/reward.
- Without sweetfx the game looks very gloomy/blurry which makes it hard to follow.
- Esports are usually kill oriented. Conquest isnt.
- Adding skyhammer shows they see this as a minigame and not as esports. Filled with trollish 1 shot possibilities. Fun but far from esports.

no

(Engineer Wish List)
Change skill 2 to Acid Bomb:
It can be countered by Immobilize/Cripple/Chill, not a disable or interrupt, rewards smart use of auto attack since its the only way to rotate

Throw Junk: Change chance for chill to immobilize, weakness to vuln

Immobilize is supported by other traits, vuln benefits power/crit engi

Personal Battering Ram: Make it transfer 2 conditions
the entire gadget type has no way to deal with non-movement conditions

Overcharged Shot: Change the self-knockback to a backwards leap like Acid Bomb

This will still move you backwards but not put you in a vunlerable position

Throw Mine: Change Remove Boon to Steal Boon if you are in the blast radius

Gadgets don’t get access to the defensive capabilities of the other skill type, this gives a gadget build access to protection, vigor, regen and stability through the enemy

Kit Refinement: Remove the global cooldown and give them different individual cooldowns, Global Cooldown makes this suck

Accelerant Packed Turrets: Move it to adept tier because there are not many adept traits that affect turrets in this trait tree

Performance Enhancement: Change it to 35 healing power for each stack of might, the conversion thing sucks skritt, and this can be countered by boon removal/steal

Rifled Barrel Turrets: Move it to master tier, this would not be worth 30pts even if turrets are made stronger.

Rocket (Rocket Turret Toolbelt): Daze for .1s

Empowering Adrenaline: Make it give 2s of quickness on the use of a gadget

Napalm Specialist: Increase bonus to 45%

Static Discharge: Make it shoot to your selected target, regardless of the toolbelt’s target. This often misses with skills that don’t target the enemy

Adrenal Implant: No negative effect when you gain quickness

Utility Goggles: Make it apply 3s of revealed to enemies in a 600 AoE

Mortar: Change to a kit, remove minimum range.
Stationary+Min Range makes it a bad skill

Armor Mods: Change it to 2s of protection on toolbelt use,
there are not enough traits that deal with the class mechanic

Flame Turret: Make it’s health/armor equal to current value of canine pets

Thumper Turret: Make it’s health/armor equal to current value of drake pets

Rifle/Rocket: Make it’s health/armor equal to current value of cat pets

Turrets do not last long enough to justify their cooldowns, their cooldowns are different so survivability should vary also

Automated Response: Change it from immunity to :copy any conditions you receive while under 25%hp to their sender

I think there should be things that deter condi spam but immunity is a little much. This will still deter condi burst but not render it useless.

Incendiary Powder: Change to burn on next attack after using a toolbelt skill

I’m going to try and be constructive with this post.

People will look at this quote and think it’s ridiculous, but it’s actually true. But that is also part of the problem.

The “burden of skill” is placed almost entirely on the defender in this game, and not on the offender.

Just like you have to skillfully react and deal with the spirit ranger’s passive procs, you also have very skillfully defend against damage in general.

Just watch Helseth play his mesmer for a few minutes and you can see this. For example, a thief pops out of nowhere and immediately begins unloading and drops him down to low health and he has to pop invulns and blinks at the right times, at lightning fast speeds just to SURVIVE the thief smashing his face on his keyboard.

After that he turns around and nearly 100-0’s someone with a greatsword combo from 1200 range away by pressing 3 buttons.

It’s like it takes like 5% skill to kill someone, and 95% skill to just survive the dmg coming at you. Maybe that’s balanced and works at high skill levels, but that wonky ratio isn’t that fun to play, especially for casuals.

It’s like League of Legends during the “bruiser meta” where a 5 bruiser team could completely faceroll their way to victory, while the other team had to have crazy skill/teamwork just to beat them. (Which coordinated Support heavy/kite teams could beat no problem).

That’s all I have to say, discuss.

EXPLOSIVES TRAIT-LINE
Forceful Explosives

• Now also affects the size of turret explosions including the Accelerant-Packed Turrets trait.
  • Also now increases the radius of [Mine Field] mines. Come on, ANet.

Accelerant-Packed Turrets

• Explosion radius increased from 120 to 180.

INVENTIONS TRAIT-LINE

Auto-tool Installation merged with Metal Plating to make new trait: Smart Metal

• Adept (Major)
• Reduces damage dealt to turrets. Turrets now heal over time.
• Damage reduction: 33%
• Healing percent: 5% of total hp
• Healing interval: every 5 seconds

Protective Shield trait removed and replaced with new trait: Sonic Overcharge

• Adept (Major)
• Activating a turret’s overcharge dazes and confuses foes adjacent to that turret.
• Daze: 1 second
• Confusion (3): 5 seconds
• Radius: 180

Elite Supplies trait removed. Rifled Turret Barrels moved to Master tier with added functionality and new name: Improved Schematics

• Master (Major)
• Turrets deal more damage, have increased range and recharge faster.
• Damage increase: 15%
• Range increase: 33%
• Recharge reduced: 20%

New trait: Elixir-Packed Turrets

• Master (Major)
• Turrets explode when killed. When your turrets explode, they cure 1 condition on allies in the area and create a healing field.
• Condition cure radius: 360
• Healing per pulse: 325
• Pulse: 1 second
• Healing field duration: 3 seconds
• Healing field radius: 240
• Combo Field: Light

New trait: Magnetic Overcharge

• Grandmaster (Major)
• Activating a turret’s overcharge now creates a magnetic shield around that turret that reflects projectiles.
• Shield duration: 3 seconds

TOOLS TRAIT-LINE
Deployable Turrets

• Turret skills use ground-targeting and arrive in supply crates that damage adjacent foes on impact.
• Damage: 408
• Radius: 180
  • Turrets now arrive on the battlefield akin to the [Supply Crate] skill instead of being a thrown projectile.

GW2 clutter is from obscene amounts of particle effects rather than the UI. I quite like the UI we got actually.

@ Red
Exactly the point I was trying to drive home. What Anet seems to forget is that competitive games don’t release monthly content to keep their players. The game works for itself to keep players. Make the gameplay a reward in itself. You dont need some complex reward system. If you can reward players for just learing to get better, they will play and keep playing. Thats what drives pvp and thats what drive esports

small suggestion: the person who was downed last will rally first. adds some small amount of counterplay for attacking team if they can take out a high-priority target, then “cover” that rally with another kill. it is also slightly easier to understand this way I think, since the spectator focus naturally shifts to the newer downed player. i suggested something similar before but it was a bit more complicated.

I’m not so against downed as I am the crazy downed abilities and rallying.

With that said the frequent excuse “downed is what allows burst builds not to pwn” is sorta ignorant and has no grounds for debate. The truth is most people who run burst builds also carry an ability that makes themselves unstoppable while stomping you…SD power engineers will use elixir S and thieves smoke field..etc etc.

So it does not stop this….it is not required for any other reason than it was a gimmicky thing that allowed team play and fun encounters in PVE that got ported over to SPVP along with many other pve designed features that simply are not healthy for spvp.

with that said….it wouldn’t be hard to make it less annoying and work better for the game. But i’m not sure we’ll ever see those changes as they FREQUENTLY go on about how they don’t want SPVP to be too different or PVE players coming over will get confused…..which, tbh is them basicly saying “we think our community is full of idiots”. Which hell might be true….I sure feel like one everytime I log in and waste my time in a few matches that require 5-10 minute ques that usually result in an afk on one of the teams anyway…so I can harvest some weird currency I have no use for and go up in a ladder system that has tons of exploitable problems and thus little meaning.

My view has always been that the downed state and dodge mechanic are too powerful in combat in comparison to the skills you have.

When it comes to the downed state, I at some point realised it was an integral part of combat and it was an expected part of it. To me, however, getting downed doesn’t feel heroic if it happens a lot. It should not be an expectation but an exception in my view. And this is were I felt it was not a good mechanic.

To me, being downed should be a warning that you are not playing your class right or are undergeared for your level, not a part of your tactics. And as it’s expected people often will just assume the problem is not themselves. I am really not against people having to learn something and the way downed works, gives me the feeling it gives people an excuse not to learn.

Cause of course if you are completely down, it’s the other players’ fault for not ressing you on time…

Some good points and examples have been added:

Calae: no punishment, i pretty much feel the same. I think something like a (at least) 15 second rally dizzieness would be appreciated by me. At the current state being downed with enough allies around simply has not enough impact on the battle.

Alissah: What you describe is a perfect example for:
- the hughe emphasis on burstdamage (without many good counter meassures), along with the disengagement potential some classes have
- and (Seras gives a good example for this as well) the imbalance of the downed skills between different classes

Imho the thread identifies some of the hughe balance problems gw2’s pvp has at the moment. I really would love to get some thoughts from anets pvpteam about the topics raised here (yeah wishful thinking…).

Edit: typo

TURRET OVERCHARGE ACTIVATION

• Utility skill turret overcharges can now be activated outside of combat (no longer require a target).

TURRET DURATIONS

• Turrets now each have individual durations. These durations dictate a respective turret’s maximum lifespan once placed on the battlefield. After a turret’s duration is up, it explodes automatically.
• The Engineer will have certain skills that reset a turret’s respective duration when they “strike” a turret. These skills include:
  • [Tool Kit]’s auto-attack skill: [Smack]
  • Rifle’s [Jump Shot]
  • Off-hand shield’s [Magnetic Inversion] and [Throw Shield] skills
  • Off-hand pistol’s [Glue Shot]
  • [Healing Turret]’s overcharge skill: [Cleansing Burst]
  • [Elixir B]’s tool-belt skill: [Toss Elixir B]

PICKING UP A TURRET

• Manually picking up a turret now greatly reduces that turret’s recharge. The recharge reduction varies by turret.

TURRET OVERCHARGES (OPTION 1)

• A utility skill turret’s overcharge now interrupts its respective turret’s current skill queue upon activation (it triggers immediately the second that you press the button).
• All utility skill turret overcharges now begin with a 1-second long mini-version (180 radius) of the Elementalist’s [Churning Earth] animation (only the rumbling earth animation; sans the explosion at the end) that occurs at the turret’s immediate location. Either this animation would be its own skill (an overcharge would queue two skills: the harmless charge-up animation, then followed by the actual overcharge skill), or all utility skill turret overcharges would have to be reworked to simply begin with the charge-up animation. During this charge-up animation, the turret is invulnerable to damage.

TURRET OVERCHARGES (OPTION 2)

• Utility skill turrets are now triple skill chains. Skill 1: [place the turret]; Skill 2: [Engage Overcharge]; Skill 3: [Overcharge].
• [Engage Overcharge] would function akin to the Ranger profession skill [Return to Me]. It breaks a turret’s target and performs the harmless charge-up animation. It also displays the same mini [Churning Earth] animation as described above. After using [Engage Overcharge], the turret remains inactive until the Engineer activates the [Overcharge]. In this case, the [Overcharge] is then directed at the Engineer’s current target if applicable (if no target is selected, the turret attacks the nearest target; if the attack doesn’t require a target, it simply activates as it normally would).
• A turret’s respective [Engage Overcharge] would inherit the recharge of that turret’s [Overcharge] skill.
• After using [Engage Overcharge], an Engineer has 5 seconds to use a turret’s [Overcharge] ability before it flips back to [Engage Overcharge] ([Engage Overcharge] begins recharging immediately after its use).
• Activating [Engage Overcharge] grants a turret 1 second of invulnerability.

HEALING TURRET
would remain unaffected by the changes listed above (it’s fine the way it is now).