Guild Wars 2

Ah, retaliation…

That wonderful boon that returns (some) damage back to your attacker when you get hit…

In a game that is designed for you to dodge hits or die from the attack…

One of the more wonderful dichotomies of the Guardian profession.

When I first started playing Guild Wars 2, I was all about retaliation and tried to take every trait that would either give me the boon or extend it. Unfortunately, this game revolves around blocks, blinds, and evades as ways to stay alive as even a heavy armor class just cannot take the hits that MoBs (particularly champions) dish out on a regular basis.

A good idea for another MMORPG though and possibly in WvW as well. Just not a great mechanic to return damage from an attack in a game designed around you not getting hit with an attack to stay alive.

zcearo.1897:

i use a shield everyday . . . perhaps it is not the shield that sucks ?

. . . food for thought anyways . . .

Sorry, but I use shield to, and have done so since the beta weekends and the head start of the game.

Shield is horrible.

I just like using it.

But it’s still horrible.

A Guardian should be able to use a shield in gw2 but it sucks. Can someone fix it?

I was asked to share this exchange…

me: Next month has update that introduces player housing, achievement rewards, a jumping puzzle where you fly and new pvp map.
C: I might have a house? Or is it guild house?
me: your house.
C: I want a norn house!
me: the first thing you can add to it is a quartz crystal node by finishing July’s event meta achievement.
C: I want a mounted head. No self respecting norn would have a house without some trophy animal hanging in it.
me: And new movement skills. Go fast skills for traveling. I think. Thats what it sounds like.
C: Does it say anything about taxidermy house decor?
I have a theme going here. ^^_
me: im sure there will be a head of some sort you can get eventually.
You might be able to get yourself a drake head.
C: Yaaaahhhh
C: And plaques. I need plaques to chronicle my deeds. Since I can’t have a hall of monuments. Tell them! Tell the forums!!
C: You know once I have a house I’ll never leave it.
Especially if I can put stuff in it.
me: I think you have to play the game to earn things to put in your house.
C: Figures.
me: Like, you may need to complete the Drake slayer achievement to get the Drake head. So you’ll have to go out and get them.
C: I can slay me some drakes.

There you have it. She has been logging on less and less for the last few months, because dungeons and puzzles weren’t her thing. But this update has reinvigorated interest. …I hope you end up having wall mounted drake heads.

Aeonblade.8709:

Zepidel.5349:

Log in and chop down 5 trees, salvage some junk i had to go get off low level mobs, maybe do a boring easy dungeon, and talk to the laurel vendor. I then receive my anet issued 1 laurel per day. Then Proceed to find a group for fractals a dungeon I have run 9001 times so I can have a shot at a ring and my anet issued 1 pristine relic per day. Look down at my keyboard and think well guess i have no reason to be online anymore till tomorrow, but hey in 2 months ill have a piece of jewelry that is 5% better than the one that took me 5 minutes to get.

This is the endgame in GW2… doing dailies. Who would of thought a company could take one of the worst things introduced in world of warcraft and build a game around it.

Are they ever going to make this game interesting past leveling up and exploring?

Incoming legion of fanboys to tell you this game isn’t for you and you are playing it wrong.

To answer your question: Maybe, but we the players have to keep being vocal about how displeased most of us are with the end game.

Maybe if this was RIFT or AION etc… This game IS the sequel to Guild Wars, how can a game claim to be sequel yet emulate nothing but lore from the original? I would of been happy with them re creating GW1 on this engine and adding an expansion worth of content on top of that. They would of had to have done 1/4th the work and would have 4x the game they have now.

The problem with a 0.02% drop chance is, its friendly for multi-million player games, but very unfriendly to the individual. It means hundreds of ppl will get it, but not you…

Abbehemoth.2471:

Care to explain what depth is from you perspective? Same for the OP, what do you mean by depth?

There had been already tons of thread about the subject.

And they always follow the same pattern :

- OP tells he’s bored with current state of combat mechanics
- people will tell him that he doesn’t know the subtelties
- OP says he does, backing up with facts
- then people will say they don’t want more skill slots
- one guy will say that you don’t necessarly need more skill slots to add depth, that you can for example add several skills to chose per slot, like utilities. Or have more intrications between skills (with traits).
- then people will say they like the current state of combat anyway
- others will say they don’t
- thread dies because nobody has a clue about what the devs will do about it

… and the constant :

- still no word about combat mechanics evolution from devs themselves

Here are a bunch of threads created on this exact topic :

http://forum-en.guildwars2.com/forum/game/gw2/Expanding-on-the-current-skill-system

http://forum-en.guildwars2.com/forum/game/gw2/This-game-needs-more-skills

http://forum-en.guildwars2.com/forum/game/gw2/Slots-1-5-I-m-seriously-baffled

http://forum-en.guildwars2.com/forum/game/gw2/In-my-view-combat-is-the-weakest-part-of-this-game

http://forum-en.guildwars2.com/forum/game/gw2/It-s-not-about-the-shape-of-the-sword

http://forum-en.guildwars2.com/forum/game/gw2/GW2-Depth-of-Combat-Discussion

And one I created a looooooong time ago, to show how the problem was already foreseeable in November ’12 :

http://forum-en.guildwars2.com/forum/game/gw2/Will-Combat-Mechanics-be-deeper

But as long as we won’t have any detailed plan from ANet (like the ones they used to write during development ….), we will be going full circle with threads like this popping up here and then.

The question was even asked during Chris Whiteside’s AMA on Reddit, couldn’t answer at the time, hinting at some future AMA about this subject. But we never got it.

Let’s get this straight, people. Everyone who doesn’t want raids are obviously scared because of how other games have done them. You all have seen Guild Wars 2, and we know how differently they do things.

Why are we asking for raids or dungeons that allow more people? Because guild that have a active community have nothing to do together, especially if they are a PvE endgame guild. The guild has to split up and do easy dungeons in groups of five. Sure, meta events need a revamp, but I don’t see them becoming harder since everyone is allowed.

We need raids for guilds on the PvE endgame side, that are looking for a large group challenge other than those events. There doesn’t have the be better gear, just skins, like dungeons. They could revamp dungeons and make them harder, but that still doesn’t bring more guild members together like raiding does.

ColinJohanson.2394:

On our goals for 2013 will be evaluating all of the bosses and creatures in the game, from open world to dungeons, to try and make them more exciting and fun to fight against.

In general if anything has a really high health pool, it needs to have unique abilities to make it exciting for the entire time, or actually change abilities/tactics as it goes down in health to ensure it stays fun and exciting to fight against.

We realize there are a number of bosses in the game, from the open world to instances that all can be more fun to fight than they are now. We’ll be tackling that this year in part of our goal to make our core game as strong as possible.

I really could not be more disappointed with world-boss encounters. Take, for example, the event to defeat Tequatl the Sunless.

Tequatl has a few tools at his disposal: an AOE fear, the environmental “fingers” which are supposed to throw melee characters away from Tequatl, summoned bone walls to defend Tequatl from ranged attacks, and dangerous bloated creeper minions that advance on the player’s position.

On a player’s side, there’s the option of attacking Tequatl or its various defenses (the bone walls, the “fingers”, and the minions), and we’re charged with manning and protecting turrets as well as the Asura “mega laser” (which must spend several minutes recharging between shots), in addition to defending turret repair crews.

All in all, it sounds like the stage is set for one epic battle where players are scrambling to tackle the crisis of the moment, making use of a variety of tools to overcome a variety of obstacles in a tricky battle.

In reality, it’s five minutes of a zerg of players attacking Tequatl’s big toe and nothing else.

I look at World of Warcraft’s “Onyxia” dragon encounter, which at this point is ridiculously old from an MMO technology perspective, and I find myself wondering how content so dated and simple can be executed so brilliantly when compared to the boss fights in GW2. Content-wise, ArenaNet kicks so much tail in so many areas, and so I know the effort and desire is there. But when it comes to these boss fights.. I just don’t get it. It’s like you made the mistake of believing players would take the required steps to make these encounters interesting themselves as long as you left the tools laying around to do so, rather than realizing players will always stick with whatever method works easiest. In this case, it’s beating on a dragon’s toe with the weapon they already have in their hands.

If you don’t want encounters like Tequatl the Sunless to boil down to a zerg of players attacking a dragon’s toe for five minutes, you need to flat out prevent them from doing so. If you want them to use the other toys in the playground, you have to force them to do so. Players are never going to make the encounter difficult or epic for you. You have to design it in a way that it can only be epic and nothing else.

I doubt I’m telling you anything you don’t already know. But, ugh, these world encounters need serious help quickly.

The argument here is that there needs to be a gold sink, to counteract inflation. Gold sinks are generally things that all players need to partake in to indiscriminately drain gold out of the money supply. My main gripe with GW2’s waypoint system is that it is meant to replace mounts and manual travel, but at the same time they overpriced it to the point that most people have an adversity to using it to travel (e.g. using Heart of the Mists to Lion’s Arch just to skimp on travel fees).

The problem is, high travel costs are currently discouraging people from going to low-traffic areas because it would cost them money to just hang out in random places. Most players with average amounts of gold will feel this way, and the only opponents of this are the moneybags with 100g+ that wouldn’t even be phased at shelling out a few gold in travel fees.

In a more liberal political sense, I argue that the ability to travel is a right, not a luxury or privilege for those with money. It’s integral for gameplay to the point that I would advocate for Anet to find a better goldsink than waypoints.

Wards are supposed to be a unique skill of Guardians and I agree they are mostly useless and suffer from a lot of issues that further degrade them.

Line of Warding and Ring of Warding take way too long to activate. They need the activation time to be almost instant. The 1 second activation time on Line of Warding means that it is almost guaranteed to be interrupted or miss the enemy. You have to use it so preemptively that you lose some of the duration and enemies can dodge it. Likewise the 3/4 second activation time on Ring of Warding is so slow that if you use it while on top of an enemy they still have enough time to walk out of the radius. The whole point of Ring of Warding to to trap enemies in with the Guardian to keep the enemy off of allies.

In PvE Wards suffer from all bosses being immune to the knockback due to the Defiant boon. This same issue occurs in PvP when facing enemies with Stability. When facing Defiant mobs and Stable players the Wards only act as a Combo Field. I think Wards should deal damage to anyone that passes through the Wards. This would make the 5th skill on Hammer and Staff useful during boss fights. It would also make the skills not be completely negated by Stability when looking at all of the other issues faced by Wards.

I am not sure if there has been an official response from ANet about Wards being dodged through, I personally think this has to be a bug, otherwise there is no point to them. I can understand dodging out of range before the Ward has been created but to dodge out of Ring of Warding or through Line of Warding when they have been laid down makes the skills worthless. I also do not think Leap skills should allow you to pass through them since they would have to Leap through a wall. If Wards can trap the Ghosts of Ascalon then I see no reason why it should not trap teleporting enemies also. Stability should be the only way through the Ward.

As for traits I do find it sad that there are 5 traits for Spirit Weapons and 5 traits for Symbols which are two of our profession defining skills but we don’t have any traits related to our Wards. I would like to see a trait that causes our Wards to Burn enemies that pass through the Ward and also change our Wards from Light Fields into Fire Fields. Guardians have 10 Light Fields and only 2 Fire Fields from skills. That is not including the 2 traits that produce 2 more Light Fields. It would be very nice to have the option to convert 2 of our Light Fields into Fire Fields so that we can produce a variety of Fields. As a class known for it’s support it would be beneficial to be able to produce more Combo Fields in order to better support our allies.

*A bit off topic but I am also of the opinion that the skill Sanctuary should be the ultimate “ward” and thus Defiant and Stable enemies should not be able to pass through the dome.