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It comes down more to how most difficult encounters work in this game. There is very little “damage noise” in the game where you just take a small but predictable amount of damage that you can’t really avoid, but tank/heal through. Most of the things that really hurt you are big hits that you can see coming,but that need to be avoided no matter how well armored you are.
Even in open world content the encounters that are actually hard are the ones that can knock you down or immobilize you somehow so that you can’t defend against incoming hits anymore (Like Veteran Orrean noble for example). Having a ton of HP oftentimes simply doesn’t work against this because the enemies that can pull it off can do it so often that all your abilities that prevent it, including dodges will be expended in short order. The only way to get out of a fight like that is to kill the enemies before you are out of countermoves. That’s simply easier with extreme damage at your command.
Tome
Two handed weapon that takes the appearance of a large book, folio or scroll. The abilities of the tome have a heavy focus on delivering effects at long range. Many of the abilities of the tome would increase in power the further way you are from the target, and have cast times. Tome wielders are support characters, acting as a type of magical artillery. They don’t perform well when pressured or set upon, but can rain down effects of incredible power if left alone.
Spec ideas:
Wizard Elementalist: Your control of the natural world is unrivaled by none, though the speed at which you do it is.
Siegemaster Engineer: Creates powerful emplacements and calls down artillery with his collection of blueprints and maps.
Ritualist Necromancer: Creates a ritual site that will grow more powerful as it spreads decay and unearths ever more gruesome horrors.
Spear (not a stupid underwater spear)
One handed, thrusting/throwing weapon. Takes the shape of a pilum or javelin. The spears abilities are most effective at keeping enemies at arms length, and develop their full potential in a phalanx with other characters when wielded by defensive characters (Think spartans / romans). Spears have well above average melee range. Spears can be thrown at enemies to weaken them before they enter melee range. They can also be used to perform braces, which is a sustained cone attack that punishes any enemy approaching from that side severely and knocks them away, letting you hold a line.
Spec ideas:
Phalanx Warrior: Stands tall and lets no enemy get past. Nothing can get near this guy without getting a spear between the ribs
Ambusher Ranger: Uses great knowledge of natural toxins to deliver long and short range attacks with a spear that make it hard for enemies to get away.
Controller
Off-hand device taking all manner of shapes from magical rods, hypnosis pendulums, whistles, whips to aetherized RC controllers or game pads. This weapon summons pets as appropriate for the class wielding it, and delivers all its effects through this agent. Depending on what class uses it these abilities can summon one or multiple pets.
Spec ideas:
Mastermind Thief: You control an entire gang of cowardly lowlifes (Skritt?) that can strike from the shadows at your behest but run just as fast.
Facetaker Mesmer: You can not just clone yourself, but also create powerful clones of your enemies that fight for you.
Mistcaller Guardian: The spirits of the most fanatical members of your order fight on from beyond the doors of death.
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To me all of the greatswords in the game look like they are drastically oversized and would be impossible to wield for a real human.
I don’t mind because it’s a fantasy game. The one thing I would like to see a bit more of would be huge, powerful looking rifles that look like they have the capability of automatic fire or shooting out specialty munitions. Something with an under-barrel bola launcher maybe.
You get downed all the time in zerker gear, it just doesn’t matter because as long as you keep tagging enemies for a rally the quick kill speed of your party will ensure you get back up faster than you could even be revived most of the time.
If you play Elementalist and have the extra lava font while downed your DPS actually goes up if you periodically go down while in a group of enemies.
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The whole raid organization is about maximizing DPS. Yes, your tanks – individually, as a character – want to be as tanky as needed (important choice of word!) and your healers want to be as healer as needed or enough to replace yet another healer.
Of course doing as much damage as possible is ultimately the goal for any group that no longer has survival concerns, but then, this whole topic is about one idea of how more support oriented characters could be used to feed any excess healing they have into the parties damage instead and thereby make them part of the damage stack while preserving the need to retain your health so it goes to damage rather than purely keeping you alive.
You’re claiming that because every gear combo isn’t meta everywhere the system is broken. That’s simply not true.
Oh please. When practically everyone in the game uses one type of gear above all other, when the runes and sigils that go with that gear cost 10+ gold a pop while others languish at 5 silver, when half the dungeons in the game are mostly ignored because they don’t give the right gear to be worth grinding, when you can persistently find a large section of the community unhappy with that state of affairs, there is definitely something broken.
The game gives you only two hard choices where you have to invest significant time into changing to something else. (and even these aren’t very hard by most standards) These two are the choice of class and the choice of gear. On both of these, the ones where balance should be most important, ANet dropped the ball and introduced whole classes that can’t ever be part of an ideal group, as well as whole gear sets that hamstring the player.
Another thing to consider is that they made absolutely no effort to label things or educate players. If you explore the game on your own, and don’t look up everything ahead of time there is absolutely nothing in the game except for other players that will tell you right out which choices are good for what. It presents all of them equally. The only indication you ever get of some things being better for certain purposes than others is that you can’t even earn some gear sets like Cleric from the dungeon vendor, but then they do sell you Magi’s which is an even worse set to run dungeons in, so even that is no solid indication to stay away from certain stats.
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That’s a big exaggeration. Full soldier’s is something like half the damage of full berserker’s, which doesn’t match your claim that giving up 10% of your damage could cut in half your damage.
IIRC the numbers I got were like, full zerker gets you up to around 4.6k effective power which is about double the 2.3k that full soldier’s has.
That’s an extremely hinky calculation because you aren’t taking into account that power itself is a multiplicative stat that factors into the base damage of an attack together with its damage coefficient. Crit and crit severity doesn’t come into play until after base damage is established.
And surprisingly, everyone optimizes for maximum damage output in those. Who would have thought? :P
That’s hardly true.
Sure, if you play a DPS character in a standard MMO maximizing damage is what you try to do, but for one, there are classes that aren’t DPS that actually have a place in the game, and secondly, in the vast majority of MMOs gear isn’t treated as a build choice. There is simply a certain set of gear associated with your class, going so far as to have a special set of gear for every class for every tier of progression. Top tier sets are going to include armor and hitpoints as deemed appropriate by the devs for that level of play as well as whatever damage and sustain stats are on it.
Those games never give you a choice of 20 different gear sets except 19 of them are wrong. You simply get gear that works for your class, and if your class happens to specialize in damage then that gear will help you do damage.
One thing any lame WoW clone does way better than this game is definitely that you can’t kitten your character and set back your gear progression by weeks because you thought the devs gave you a choice for a reason. You just get whatever gear set says your class’ name on it and it works, no BS, no traps, just a game being honest about the fact that you don’t really have a choice.
It’s simply not like they couldn’t have done it that way in this game too. They could have just made every stat work on every skill and leave it up to the specializations to set what a character is good at at the moment. That would have been a much more elegant solution that wouldn’t leave thousands of people confused and frustrated. They chose to present people with a choice, so they owe it to us to make the choices valid.
Ultimately if they don’t fix it so making choices about gear is actually a valuable part of the game and not just something that frustrates and misleads people then they should just remove gear sets and go with the same system that other MMOs are using.
Your gear simply comes with ability power which gives a bonus to the magnitude of all abilities, a critical effect power which sets the chance of all random effects your build has, bonus hitpoints as appropriate for that level of gear, and some interesting set bonuses here or there.
If the devs can’t handle balancing the system they created they just have to go to the easy default that doesn’t lead to discussions like this because nobody feels like they are being teased with fake choices.
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Fully trinity MMOs have active defenses and CCs too, or allow you to kite enemies around with slows to avoid damage. It’s compltely silly to say that those things existing means the game designers intended for healing to be worthless to performance oriented players.
The problem is that the ratio of stats on your character does not determine the ratio of their effect.
Let’s say you have 50% of your stats invested in damage stats, you would think that that comes out to half as much damage as someone who has all their stats aligned for damage. But in reality it comes out to much less, because the stats don’t simply add up, they multiply.
That’s the main reason why sets that are only partially focused on damage perform so much worse in that department. This is the huge trap with gear in this game. In most games there are diminishing returns on stacking all the same stat so that more hybrid gear has a reason to exist. In this game just surrendering 10% of your damage stats will already dump your damage by twice that.
I don’t doubt that there will always be a “best way” to do things, I just happen to think that the best possible group should be one that includes characters that aren’t focused on raw damage, because that way people who like playing those kinds of characters are not categorically excluded from ever being part of a high performing group like they are now.
The fact that a singular best way to do things has crystallized out of all the options in the game and it points toward using just one single gear set and one particular set of builds shows that those things aren’t balanced.
When it comes to DPS ultra-specialization is highly rewarded, with every other type of gameplay it’s punished severely. That simply can’t be the intention of the devs. If they had wanted to develop a game where those styles of gameplay don’t exist at all they simply would have built the game from the ground up to never even lead anyone astray with build options and gear options that indicate that you should be allowed to do things that way.
Again making damage have diminishing returns isn’t whats needed either.
Here’s a hint, players need to adapt and stop thinking this is a trinity based combat system.
Damage is fine, support is fine, condi’s are more than fine. What’s not fine is the user.
Sorry, but when literally everyone is using exactly the same gear there is serious imbalance in the game. The way damage stats scale is currently really out of hand, completely regardless of where everything else in the game is at.
I stopped right there because there is no role for a healer to play in GW2. That’s not how the game is conceived.
There are a ton of healing skills and HoT proportionally adds more of them than the game ever had before. There is also a whole healing stat that seriously eats into your gear. I just don’t see this happening at Arena net:
Lead Designer: “Hey, what’s with all these things that let you build for healing? Our game isn’t about healing!”
Combat Designer: “Woops, butterfingers!”
Lead Designer: “Oh well, ship it I guess.”
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Yea, any idea that simply gives defensive stats bigger numbers won’t help, since the problem is that you don’t need even the numbers you can currently get. It would just completely screw up any PvP balance where defensive stats already have their place because in PvP damage can’t be simply avoided.
Making damage have some kind of diminishing returns that makes overall damage output scale more proportionally to the stats your gear would be nice. It’s simply not right that even just running 25% less damage stats than someone else can already kitten near cut your damage in half.
Putting healing power together with boon duration would be nice, since then at least if you have some healing power you can provide the standard boon support that is much more appreciated than healing anyways a little better.
The way I see it:
There are plenty of ways of rendering support without healing that nobody sees as game breaking or required.
Their power is not tied to wearing support focused gear, meaning there are no real support specialists.
There are far more mechanics for restoring hitpoints than for applying buffs/debuffs.
It makes sense to bring the green numbers full circle by letting them do the things that people like from supporters and away from just being a reactionary move to taking damage.
I’m just not sure how they can change the content to raise the demand for healing without making healers mandatory to complete the content, which is what, I think, we all agree should not happen.
First of all, don’t tell people to do math to disprove your math if you haven’t actually shown your math. That’s just silly.
Secondly, how the stats balance out on paper is largelyirrelevant, because it’s ultimately not how good each individual stat is that causes the biggest issue, but what the demand for that stats contribution to the party is. How much healing a group needs is ultimately more important than how much healing gear can provide, because there is no benefit to having more than that.
The one thing that does have an infinite demand is damage, and because of that any character that doesn’t inflict enough damage isn’t welcome in performance oriented groups.
Thirdly, if you’ve done calculations you should have no problem understanding that because of the multiplicative nature of the three main damage stats, the ratio of damage stats vs. defensive stats on your gear doesn’t actually reflect the ratio of real damage vs. survivability in the game. If half your gear is damage stats you’re not doing half as much damage as someone who’s running full damage gear, you’re in fact doing much, much less damage.
Not in general but the problem is that Support Skills are 90% bound to Utility and Elite Skills and not at attributes. You can run in berserker gear and can support your whole team, the only help is boon duration and this attrbute scales horrible on equip.
This is an apt description of the problem I think. It’s not that there is no supporting in the game, it’s that if you invested the hours and days necessary to get a set of gear that should in theory make you a support specialist all you get is the cold shoulder from any team that doesn’t want to take an hour to clear a fractal or dungeon.
The amount of damage you have to give up to have healing and defensive stats is obscenely huge because of how damage stats multiply on top of each other, so the damage scale itself is way out of whack.
I don’t think the audience for MMOs is shrinking so much as it was artificially inflated before.
In 2005 or so there really weren’t a lot of games that let you log into an account that kept track of your ratings and progress and play through competitive or co-op content with a group of friends. If you wanted that kind of experience an MMO was practically the only place to go to.
For example, if you were someone who played nothing but WoW Battlegrounds or Arenas there really was never any reason for you to play an MMORPG to get what you really wanted out of the game. Now that you can play something like LoL to get that kind of competitive play without a monthly fee, leveling, farming mobs and what not tacked on, why wouldn’t you?
I personally see this trend as a good thing, because as MMORPGs are shedding players who were never actually there for the RPG part we’re hopefully going to see more open world sandbox games again that really focus in on the roleplay aspect, rather than trying to capture a bunch of adjacent audiences that now have their own games.
So if XP is used to buy masteries in HoT, does that mean that all the old players who have a stack of 100 tomes sitting around will simply instantly be maxed out?
Well then let’s do a few fractals together. If you really have such a hard time believing someone could understand and enjoy playing the game the way it is right now and still hope to see it expanded to include more play styles in the future, maybe seeing is believing.
I play an Elementalist in full berzerker gear, have reached fractal level 19, got my first 30 AR squared away and a full set of ascended acessories. I think that’s a pretty solid accomplishment for just around a month and a half into the game. In fact it’s probably indicative of spending a little too much time in the game.
I’m not ignorant to what’s going on in the game. I play with people who are deep into the meta and don’t really see any significant hickups in plodding on all the way to PRL50. 30AR is a bit of a hurdle you have to get over, but it’s going to happen eventually. The road to doing the hardest content in this game isn’t awfully long or difficult. Give me another month and I’ll be there, no problem. All the content in this game that actually takes years of playing to get to is just stuff like building a legendary or putting together super rare collections, and that’s not because you have to be super knowledgeable but simply because they are behind a crapload of grinding and time-gated progress.
So, sorry to say, but there really isn’t all that much deep mystery in the game for me. I’ve charted my course to fotm50, it just takes a while to get there. I know I’ll get there because I’m taking my journey there with a great guild of willing guides who have taken the same path there.
It’s because I’m perfectly willing to play the game the way it currently works, and have no problem appreciating that side of it that I don’t particularly care for all these people insinuating all sorts of things about how I’m just some idiot in clerics gear who’s mad because nobody is ever hurting for a healer. Sorry, nope, my main is a full zerker Ele and when it comes to fractals the only reason I haven’t done a 50 yet is that it takes time to build up the gear for it.
It’s precisely because I learned all the meta that I’m convinced the game is a bit one note at the top of the stack. I abandoned my idea of playing healing support for the time being because it wasn’t compatible with high level play, but that doesn’t mean I can’t hope that it won’t be part of challenging content and gameplay in the future.
If you want more good ideas on the forum you need to raise the level of discussion. Way too often people simply start railing against some strawman of what people saying for three pages instead of actually discussing anything. They are always more interested in telling people why they are wrong than learn about why they think the way they do.
The biggest hindrance to productive discussion is all the people who want to stop the discussion from taking place at all.
It does feel too much like a win-win situation for heal stat. Either you boost DPS, or you save the life of your team. There’s no risk to that play really so it should NOT be as rewarding as full blown DPS by a long shot.
You can’t have it both ways though where people insist that defense and healing should never be a factor in completing content but at the same time then say that if your party was able to muster high damage while having healing or defense they would somehow be overpowered. That’s simply a double standard at that point.
That makes no sense. You don’t go to the doctor’s and ask for antibiotics when you aren’t sick. You don’t put your arms in casts when they aren’t broken. You don’t go for healing when you have nothing to be healed.
It only makes no sense because you insist on thinking of hitpoints as broken arms and serious illnesses. Maybe it’s more like your character’s resolve or stress level. Giving a pep talk before a big game makes just as much sense as talking your team back up after a defeat.
For that matter, are we seriously having a realism discussion in a game where you venture into an ever shifting maze of quantum realities when you need new magic pants?
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I think the problem is rewarding healing is like rewarding people to play bad.
I always found this point of view to be rather myopic.
It’s not entirely wrong in a game where you can actually avoid taking damage though. Healing is reactive, which means you need to be hurt before healing can be effective. The reason why healing isn’t a sign of playing badly in standard MMOs is because you can’t avoid damage in them. In GW2 you can however.
That’s one of the main reasons why I think in order to make healing really fit with GW2s sensibilities throwing healing at people needs to be a positive thing even if they aren’t taking damage.
Listening only to people who have already stuck around for years isn’t how you expand a game’s audience, it’s how you create a stagnant and elitist community that is so off-putting to new arrivals that the game can’t grow. The second an MMO stops growing it starts dying.
1. I find it amusing how you come in here after playing for 1 month and demand the game be changed to better fit your vision and suit your tastes better and still somehow we’re the entitled and self important ones – not you.
2. It’s not about some people not being “not allowed” to have fun – their fun ruins my fun. And they came to the wrong place to have fun in the first place if they wanted to have “fun” in the traditional MMO way.
1. I’m dismissing any viewpoints out of hand. You’re the one trying to tell people whether or not they are allowed to have an opinion based on how long they have been here or how they like to play the game.
2. If you cannot enjoy yourself if people with other play styles have as much opportunity to get into groups as you, you’re the problem, not those people.
Also stop acting as though you’re speaking on ANet’s behalf when you’re telling people whether or not they are “in the right game”.
Damage stats multiplying on top of themselves is a problem, that’s true. Defensive stats cost exactly the same point by point in your stat budget, but since they don’t multiply with each other their ultimate effect cannot ever be equally great.
That’s not the full story though, because even if healing power, toughness and vitality were much more powerful and scaled exponentially the same way that offensive stats do, they still become meaningless the second you dodge an attack or are sitting at full health. There is simply no such thing as too much damage, but there is such a thing as too much healing, and as it currently stands you hit too much healing long before you ever have to worry about making healing power scale better.
Healing runes, sigils and traits are only in the minority if you count them against all other runes, sigils and traits. Count them against things that give a benefit to blinding, blocking, reflecing or dodging and you’ll find that the game has an overwhelming bent toward healing in the support category. Let’s not forget that healing is the only support mechanic that has an entire stat and gear sets devoted to it either.
Saying that only one rune “directly affects outgoing healing” by completely ignoring all runes that provide you with healing power is an extremely dishonest definition of what constitutes directly affecting healing as well.
From my perspective the biggest issue with signets is simply that the trait that makes them become awesome all around is stuck in a fringe spec between two other traits that are way better if you’ve committed to using earth at all.
The primary support mechanic for multiple classes is providing heals, it’s also the only method of support that has it’s own associated stat, runes and sigils.
If that all didn’t exist and was replaced with specs that throw around blindness and reflects and other active support abilities, and you could spec your character up to specialize in those, yea, I would be with you completely.
However, the reality is, the majority of support mechanics in the game are focused on healing, we are getting even MORE healing abilities with Heart of Thorns, and that just kind of makes me think that just maybe healing should be good for something.
The game is so easy because of people insisting that they need to be able to beat anything without a single point invested in defense. Just food for thought.
Maybe there need to be more ways to trade excess DPS for better protection just like there need to be more ways to trade excess healing for more damage. It’s not like my one idea is the single thing that bring perfect balance to non-trinity MMOs. Ultimately the way to actually make all classes useful without making the game too easy or making certain party comps required though is to look for ways in which the thing you want to do can be applied to filling different needs.
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Other than it was promised to Guild Wars 1 vets who supported the game by playing, purchasing and word of mouth to other people, I wouldn’t really care. However the fact that they were to be unique, exclusive rewards to the Guild Wars 1 players and now being handed out to anyone who bought a $10 discount version, doesn’t sit so well with me.
I just checked my steam, and it would take a ~$30-40 investment (depending on if I buy the trilogy or just the base game), plus several hours of playing a game I have no real interest in for me to get that armor.
I have absolutely no interest in trying to take anything away from people who want to show their accomplishments in the first game, my interest is purely in having some armor that lets my Elementalist look even remotely like a soldier in a war with apocalyptic dragons and not some frilly ponce. The heritage pants/boots just seem to hit that spot the best in my eyes.
So it’s desperate if one wants to try to preserve the parts of the game that make them fun for them?
You see, I’m trying to propose systems that let more people get to enjoy the game without making the play style that many people currently enjoy impossible.
The main thing I got back for this attempt is about 1 page worth of people saying I want to install the trinity, which I don’t, a slew of ad hominem, people saying that giving any validity at all to other play styles is a deal breaker for them, and people acting as though because they like the current state of things they can speak on ANet’s behalf when they tell people to simply leave.
A whole bunch of play styles currently have no useful role at all in PvE content except maybe being regarded as “training wheels”. Arguing against attempts to make things a little more equal, because you think the mere idea of a healer being useful to a group is a worse imposition on you than not ever being able to be part of performance oriented play is to them, basically just shows a huge amount of entitlement and self importance on your part.
So yea, thinking that being on equal footing with support players is worse for you than not being allowed in serious groups at all is for them is kind of ridiculous. Your whole argument basically is: “If someone else gets to have the same thing as me then the thing I have is somehow worse because of that!”, which it simply isn’t. The whole reason I made this topic is to discuss ways in which healers and tanks can be useful to a group without making an all DPS approach impossible.
When you argue against someone asking for parity you’re simply not arguing for DPS. You’re only arguing against Support and Tanks as though it’s simply impossible for everyone to have fun and because of that some people must not be allowed to have fun.
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I would love to be able to get the heritage armor without having to buy a whole other game. Light armors that aren’t some crazy frilly fashion show are in extremely short supply.
Having some meaningful carryover for people who really played the hell out of the first game is great an all, but it doesn’t seem right to hold one of the only practical looking armor skins hostage that way.
You’re not wrong, I’m just saying that it’s not entirely without merit to have a signet that when activated produces a big burst of its standard effect. Especially for characters with Written in Stone it’s a huge boost to that signets effectiveness.
This becomes a problem when both the passive and active do the same thing (such as signet of restoration having a pure heal for both its passive and active) because one of those effects will always be better than the other, meaning you should always either leave it on passive or activate it on cooldown.
It’s situational though. If you’re going to die unless you get a chunk of health on the spot instead of being able to watch it trickle in activating it becomes useful. Also signet of restoration becomes basically twice as powerful if you have Written in Stone because then you get the full benefit of both healing options.
That said, yea, signets are obnoxious. You practically need Written in Stone to really enjoy having them on your bar, because even if you do intend to use them in both modes situationally, it’s too much of a guess whether or not the combined benefit of the next 30 seconds of the passive are better or whatever you gain from the active. Written in Stone is in a fringe spec that doesn’t offer much else that is useful, so signets are doomed to mostly getting used in only one mode.
Overloads simply need to do things we cannot already do plenty without them. As long as they just do things that we can already do there’s only 2 options how it will play out if overloads are worth casting:
- Ele is balanced without overloads (and tempest) but overpowered with them.
- Ele is underpowered with overloads and balanced with them.If they did stuff we couldn’t do without them (retaliation, converting conditions into boons, aoe daze, aegis) they would be much more balancable.
The cost for having them is a spec line, and IMO it’s the only well designed spec line that has a profound impact on how you play.
So I would argue the issue isn’t with overload, but with how lackluster all the other Elementalist specs are. None of them are so gameplay defining that they actually clash with Tempest and make you think hard about whether you want to fit them in your spec instead unless overloads are simply not worth it.
I would really like to see Ele-specs be more about how you play the class. Arcane for people who like to rapidly switch between elements, Tempest for people who like to stay in one element and work it to a big fulmination. We have this weird element thing going that completely ignores that for the Elementalist the individual elements are not their play style. You use all the elements. What defines your play style is whether you support at range or get up close and personal. Whether you inflict conditions or direct damage. Whether you like to primarily have a support role or a damage role.
If they changed the spec trees to all be more meaningful than just grazing them for % increases to your damage it wouldn’t be such a cut and dry affair of simply calculating out what is best.
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You guys sound incredibly desperate to preserve the status quo. I guess we’ll see what Heart of Thorns brings. I wonder if you’ll be just as nasty to the devs if they happen to bring support and defense a little more to the front in PvE.
I really dislike tempest as a spec line. Not because it’s bad, in fact it’s amazing, but because it’s basically a no brainer spec.
Why would you ever not use this? The current spec lines for the elementalist are so haphazard and unimpressive that for the most part you’re just picking traits because they don’t suck, not because they unlock some kind of interesting internal synergy that runs through your entire build. The one thing that makes the elementalist good is having obscenely powerful base abilities, and the Tempest line just adds even more powerful abilities at the cost of what? A few lame traits that were never playstyle defining in the first place?
It simply doesn’t make sense to have a spec that all by itself makes every single element more powerful than it becomes when you augment it with its own spec line. A lot of the biggest reasons to rapidly switch elements even become obsolete by it.
Now don’t get me wrong, I love the stuff the Tempest does, and I don’t want them to nerf it. It just feels like the Tempest shouldn’t even be a spec because of how natural it feels as an extention to the Elementalist core gameplay, while the spec lines the Elementalist currently has have never felt particularly satisfying or gameplay defining.
I’m sure the myriads of healing abilities, healing sigils, healing trait lines and full set of healing utilities that’s coming in with the new class are just some kind of mistake that happened while ANet was making the game for you and only you.
I mean, that is the only logical explanation right? Afterall it’s not like any game ever has self important elitists talking down to anyone who’s asking for a little more parity in the performance of different play-styles. Every time anything is buffed or nerfed or changed in any way it must be a mistake, because clearly the game was made exclusively for the people who liked things the way they were.
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No game will make everyone happy all of the time.
Yup, which is why devs shouldn’t listen to people who feel entitled to have their wishes met to the degree where a compromise with what anyone else wants is unacceptable to them.
Some classes getting more beta's than others
in Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns
Posted by: Aetrion.8295
Well, at least warriors can rightfully say that they are alpha as kitten right now.
If your stance is that healers cannot be allowed to be useful to a group without breaking what you consider to be a good balance solution for the game there is really no argument to be had.
It comes down to a matter of taste. I prefer games where people can play defense and support oriented characters, you seem to prefer games where only offensive characters exist.
There is simply no way to argue with someone who has such a radical stance that they can’t entertain the notion of a compromise. If you cannot be happy with the game unless the usefulness of tanks and healers is absolute zero then the devs should simply ignore you in my opinion, because you cannot be happy unless other people are unhappy. You cannot contribute to a discussion if your only point is that the other side of the discussion must cease to exist.
(edited by Aetrion.8295)
You still haven’t bothered to read anything that I’ve actually said about how to increase the demand without making it required have you?
Increasing the effectiveness of healing power and defensive stats without increasing the demand for them doesn’t help anything. There is a practical cutoff point where more healing simply doesn’t give more survivability. You can’t heal yourself if you haven’t taken damage. That’s the whole reason why I’m saying HP needs to be used for more, so that there is actually a point to being able to generate more of it than the little you need to counteract incoming damage.
Also:
…Accusations of D&D overloaded “with stuff”. …And Pathfinder isn’t.
Did I say pathfinder was less overloaded? Seriously…
I think 3.5 is actually one of the worst balanced versions of D&D, because it’s just so completely overloaded with stuff. Pathfinder is a lot closer to what that system should have been as an evolution of what they had before.
So basically let’s people do 90% of berserker dps while having more healing and more tankiness – so easier encounters get even easier.
Where you would previously get 1 shot as a zerker and have the chance of wiping – no more issues – go 90% damage and with the benefit of the extra toughness and healing you can make 2-3 more mistakes ensuring you never have trouble with the content again.
You’re making up the 90% number, not me. Because damage stats multiply with each other rather than simply adding up having 10% more DPS stats in your stat budget gives you a significantly bigger increase in DPS than just 10%.
Not that I’d expect you to understand this or care about it because it seems more and more that you’re not actually here to do anything other than just berate people who don’t share your “the game is awesome as it is” viewpoint.
What i’m wondering is if you’ll apologize for your behavior when heart of thorns comes out and things aren’t as they are anymore.
This is absurd and wrong.
People who have top-tier performance runs have requirements – sure but the game doesn’t. People do.
Please, find me where I said the game should have requirements. You just do max DPS to strawmen don’t you?
But isn’t having comparable dps to a fully dps geared character while still being really tanky and healy absurd?
I mean – why go full dps and have 100% damage and 0% sustain when you can go tank/healer and have let’s say 80-100% damage and 70-80% sustain.
No it isn’t absurd, because there is no ceiling to the usefulness of damage unless investing straight into damage eventually has diminishing returns.
As it currently stands damage increases exponentially as you stack more damage stats, and since you can always use more damage there absolutely no good reason to not go all the way with it.
If a character that sacrifices a little damage gets a substantial payoff in other areas however it introduces diminishing returns to straight stacking and thereby actually creates a reason to not stack straight damage. Stacking into a single direction should get less and less effective the further you go, not more and more as it currently is.
The fact that currently adding the slightest amount of other stats than damage into your build penalizes you to a huge degree on the damage because of how every damage stat is a multiplier is what’s absurd.
Guild wars 2 isn’t any less restrictive than trinity games in many aspects if you actually care about performance.
That’s the point where all these anti-trinity arguments fall to pieces. People who care about top performance have gear, class and build requirements anyways, having a healer requirement wouldn’t change anything for how they do things because all a healer is is a build, class and gear.
That’s exactly why in order to actually make the game as free as possible the ideal group should be a mixed group. You should be able to run the content with any comp, but the best compositions should be as diverse as possible so that no character is ever categorically excluded from being part of a best comp group.
What the game should be is:
- Make any character you want
- Look for a group that is best comp when it includes your character
- If you can’t find that you can still do the content with other people who couldn’t find the best partners for their character.
What the game currently is:
- If you roll the wrong class or gear you cannot ever be best comp
- If you are the right class, look for a group that is best comp.
- If you are not the right class there is no point in even looking for the best possible group mates
(edited by Aetrion.8295)
What kind of “archetypes” are you losing if you remove the trinity?
Pretty much any character who isn’t primarily a fighter is lost. MMOs have already trimmed class variety down to practically nothing with their overemphasis on combat and enforced party size and so on.
In Ultima Online someones character could be a seamstress who fights with a tame walrus. Sure, that wasn’t a very powerful character, but because the game didn’t enforce strict 5 member groups or instanced dungeons that were specifically balanced to require an exact number of powerful characters there wasn’t any problem with taking that character along on an adventure regardless. That was actual freedom to play how you want.
I’m not saying UO was better in every regard, but you’d have to be bonkers to not realize just how many possible characters have become lost, and how GW2 is happily hacking away at what little variety remains. The only thing they still have to do is allow you to switch your class just like you can switch masteries and there will be absolutely no actual character left in the characters.
It’s pathetic that you only get to pick from eight (soon to be nine) pre-packaged types of characters that cannot receive any lasting customization beyond that and have had their ideal builds determined by the meta mathletes before most people even got to experiment. We are way off the mark when it comes to actually letting people play the way they want.
What no MMORPG has is the requirement for specific stats to solve these kinds of encounters because that would make them forced. For example, if traps can only be disabled by a Thief, then a dungeon with loads of traps will REQUIRE a Thief to progress. Which goes against the main principle of the game, play how you want.
It doesn’t have to require a thief if disabling the traps isn’t the only way to advance.
Maybe the traps sound an alarm that summons guards, and simply beating up the guards gets you through just the same. Not having a thief doesn’t stop you from completing the dungeon, but if you do have a thief it goes quicker and the thief gets to enjoy leveraging their unique skills.
(edited by Aetrion.8295)