5. Transmutation charges. Make money some other way. Having to pay to get charges to update my visual appearance is irritating because most progression in the game ultimately ends up being about appearance. I’d even be find with keeping the paywall in place up to level 80; but once we reach 80 we should be able to use the wardrobe feature fully without real money.
I think it should be kind of the other way around. When you’re level 80 you don’t get new gear every other day, so it’s ok if you can’t reskin it that often. It’s newer players /characters that can’t take advantage of the wardrobe feature because their gear get switched so often.
Even if healing scaled well, the demand for healing simply isn’t there in the game. Healing is a reactive ability, someone needs to be hurt before you can heal them, so what good does huge healing ability do you if there is never anyone hurt enough to need them?
What’s giving power to the “meta guys” is two things:
1. They dominate the only objective measure of how well you’re doing in PvE. Sure, you can have a personal preference for doing it some way over another, but in terms of actual metrics the only valid one in GW2 is how fast you can finish the dungeon, and how fast you can earn your gear. You simply can’t get around the fact that meta is the one way of doing things that is reals not feels. Every other approach can only ever say “I find this more fun”, when they can say “I do it the fastest”. Meeting a challenge simply happens to be part of the fun of a game for many people, and you can’t challenge someone to out-fun you, you can only challenge them to out-run you.
2. They are dedicated to winning and getting stuff done, so they are the ones who create guilds that consistently put together runs and get members geared and trained. Let’s face it, it’s people who are obsessed with optimization that make guilds that actually optimize the advancement of their members. There is a huge difference between a guild that runs a fractal or two when they feel like it and may or may not do guild missions and a guild that is in there consistently ever night getting people kitted. If you care about getting stuff done at all it’s the “meta-guys” that will go out of their way to help you, they will just expect you to play in a way that gets stuff done.
Asking “how will this not break the game?” when the game is already completely broken in the way only DPS gear is worth having and half the classes might as well be lepers for how welcome they are in dungeons is just silly. There needs to be more build diversity in the game, and unless you’re willing to wipe parties for not having enough healing or tanking, healing or tanking will just have to be able to be an asset to completion speed.
The “meta guys” are not the problem, the game is the problem. They crunched the numbers and the numbers said “the only objective measure of performance in the game completely excludes all support and defense geared characters”.
You could also make healing power scale significantly better but increase the cooldown on heal skills to make them a much more important choice. This would also place a greater play on various traits, skills, and sigils that provide passive healing. Adjust it so that they’re closer to how they updated condition damage; if you got no healing power it’s trivial, but as you ramp up on it the effects become greater.
I actually think it would make more sense if the personal healing skills had much shorter cooldowns but were much weaker. If you have to use them more often to self heal you gain a lot more time to do damage when someone else heals you.
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This isn’t hate for healing power, it’s people who like healing power saying that it needs help to be viable in high end play.
If ANet were to contrive mechanics that meant that someone passively absorbing hits and/or someone else throwing out healing and regeneration meant greater party damage than without them, they would be required.
Nobody is saying greater party damage, just equal party damage. If one supporter in a group of 5 could raise everyone’s DPS by 20%, and provide 20% of what a DPSer brings in by himself it’d even out with what you get with a full group of DPSers.
Is there a possibility that the meta might start trending toward including healers? Yea, there is. But it’s not like that is definitely a bad thing, afterall, right now the meta REQUIRES you to bring only DPS, to run only specific builds, and only bring specific classes.
The reality of guild wars is, they talk a lot about eliminating support and tanks so you can “play how you want” but in reality you don’t get to play how you want at all if you don’t want to play full zerker DPS.
Making mobs attack way faster (But deal lower damage) will make the game more like PVP and is like the number one suggestion since release to improve the PVE experience in the game.
You’re not wrong, but the whole point of the discussion is that support and defensive stats need to be useful without being required for survival, because when you make them required for survival you bring the trinity back.
The idea of trinity busting in GW2 basically comes down to the idea that survival is never dependent on your armor and healing. Since that makes the only objective measure of how well your build does in PvE how quickly you can defeat an enemy the devs should have built support and tanking roles around maintaining the groups damage, not a weird secondary way of surviving fights that costs you all your damage output.
I mean, ultimately what this comes down to is, when you strip away the aspect of being absolutely needed for content, what makes support and tanking fun?
The appeal of a support character is that you act indirectly, and rather that measuring your success by your own performance you’re measuring your success by how much happier other people are with their performance when you’re around.
The appeal of a tank character is that you defiantly stand in the way of anything enemies are throwing at you. You don’t dodge, you don’t run, you take the hits, laugh and say: “please sir, may I have another?” and then counterattack.
Both of those play styles are perfectly possible in the context of a game where they aren’t tied purely to survival, if ArenaNet only bothered to put their head to work a bit to make it happen.
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But that’s why everyone has a healing skill, and an Elementalist or Guardian in full DPS gear can still easily provide enough healing to counter the small amounts of damage you just take from random monsters.
The bottom line is, if you raise unavoidable damage to a level where it has to be countered by a dedicated healer you’ve basically just brought back the trinity. The idea here is to give support and tank players a role without making everyone else dependent on them, and that is best accomplished by having the consequence to less healing in the party or not having anyone to take the hits be lower damage, not death.
I don’t think the problem is really that you can’t heal for enough points, the problem is entirely with how much healing people actually need, which simply isn’t a whole lot unless they play carelessly.
Since many of the most damaging things in PvE also knock you down or stun you or otherwise make you weaker you can’t even make a good argument that by taking the damage you’re giving yourself more opportunity to dish it out.
There is simply no infinite demand for green numbers, which is why how much healing you can actually do really isn’t as important as whether or not you can deliver it in the exact moment where it’s needed, and how useful you are when it isn’t needed.
A character with high mitigation from protection already gains a greater benefit from healing, since any point you put on that person is that much harder to take away again because of the toughness. But what’s the point of generating huge healing in a game where you’re better off just dodging and then smacking the enemy with a 10k crit.
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A suggestion on a forum is one ant pushing an apple. If enough ants push in the same direction it might just move.
Also a thing to keep in mind, the average time from inception to implementation in the games industry is 2 years.
The issue is simply that the GW2 devs have retained the function of things like armor and healing 1 to 1 from games where damage is inevitable and haven’t given enough thought to how they can be useful in a game where damage is avoidable.
It’s the soft stat/hard stat duality. You get two kinds of stats in any game, soft stats and hard stats. Soft stats are stats the modify an aspect of the game the player has control over, while hard stats are stats that modify an aspect of the game the player doesn’t have control over.
In a normal MMO the player has neither control over how much damage they inflict, nor how much damage they take. The system calculates how hard you hit, and it calculates how hard you got hit.
In Guild Wars 2 however you can avoid getting hit in many situations, which means how much damage you take is no longer pure math, it’s up to you.
That means any stat that handles what happens when you receive damage just went from a hard stat to a soft stat. The game still handles it like a hard stat though, and that’s where the problem is.
The only way to ever fix this issue is to find ways to make Toughness, Vitality and Healing Power into hard stats again by giving them a function that comes into play independently of what the player does.
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Right now the way that most MMOs do collisions, and I’m assuming GW2 is no different, is to let your own computer figure out where the walls are based on the level files in your client, and then every so often send a little notification to the server saying “Here is where the player went, is that ok?” and the server goes “Yup, looks legit” or “Nah, I think he’s more over here”. This is why you experience warping when you have lag, that’s the server correcting where you are after not receiving updates for a while.
This is a very good system because it allows you to have mostly lag free and highly responsive movement that isn’t impacted by your latency, all while keeping the amount of network traffic required extremely low. The issue is that once you add collisions with other players this doesn’t work anymore, because your client can’t check whether or not you’ve run into another player until after the server has told you where that other player is. Your collision now depends on the verification process of all other players in the game, which means that anyone’s lag is now your problem. Even if nobody lags the fact that the server has to talk back and forth between people to make the collisions happen instead of just giving an occasional thumbs up to what you’re doing and showing an approximation of that on other peoples screens means a huge amount more network traffic. In a game without collisions you’d never even notice if the character you’re looking at does everything half a second later than the actual player inputs the actions, in a game with collisions however that kind of delay would immediately cause issues.
So in short, there are very specific technical reasons why characters don’t have collisions that unfortunately override any concerns on whether or not it would be mechanically beneficial to the game.
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When players are the thing trying to do damage to you you can’t rely on the idea that you’ll never get hit, so stats that help you after you’ve been hit suddenly become useful again.
None of the healing and survival stats in GW2 are actually bad, the problem is purely with the fact that in PvE getting hit in the first place means you failed to evade the damage. If they made it impossible to avoid the hits survival stats would instantly be useful, but you’d also force the trinity back.
The biggest problem with defensive stats and healing power is that taking damage in GW2 is a state of failure. The whole thing that busts the trinity in GW2 is that skilled players can avoid taking damage.
Because of this any stat or ability that are only useful after you have taken damage becomes less useful the more skill the player has. The only way to make all stats equally good is to give all of them a positive impact before the point of failure. Let them do good before the player screwed up, so they are useful for players who don’t screw up.
The thing to keep in mind that getting hit in GW2 is not inevitable, it’s a failure to evade. This is the fundamental change in GW2 that busts the trinity.
Because of that however, anything in the game that exclusively deals with what happens after you get hit diminishes in usefulness the more skillful the player becomes.
As a result any solution to making stats like Toughness or Healing Power useful has to move their impact before the point of failure. Let them do some good before the player messed up, instead of only afterward.
I don’t think a little more boon duration would fix the fact that you are trading three fourths of your potential damage for a stat that gives a poorly scaling bonus purely to reactive healing, but at least there are other people talking about this issue.
The way that this game currently simply assumes that everyone who wants to play support or tank is either a noob or some kind of primadonna who’s angry that people can do stuff without them and should just find another game is the biggest thing that turns me off from this game at this time. This is a superbly crafted game in pretty much every aspect other than the total lack of role diversity you encounter when you care at all about having a subjective measure of how well you’re doing.
The big thing that I want them to do is to implement systems that let supporters and tankers actually help the party do more damage. I completely support the idea that these characters should not be necessary to survive, but if that’s not their role then they need to be able to boost the party in other ways.
Give people some defensive abilities that scale on toughness, where if an enemy strikes them they can counterattack for big damage and stack some vulnerabilities. Suddenly there is a point to trying to be the guy who gets the enemies attention without having a game where if the enemy hits anyone else they die. It just takes a little rethinking on why the tank is taking the hits. He’s not taking them because he has to, he’s taking them because it fuels retaliatory abilities that can do damage and boost the potential of damage dealers in the party.
Same goes for healing. They just need to rethink why you need HP in the game. It’s a good thing they moved away from “You can’t avoid taking damage, if nobody puts the HP back you simply die” to a system where that isn’t necessary, but they simply didn’t create a new reason to put health back. What if they changed the paradigm to “Any health you aren’t losing by getting hit you can throw back at the enemy for more damage, and healing gives you health to spare!” Boom, healers are useful, DPS is useful, still no rigid dependency on each other.
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You can skillfully inflict damage by
- stacking 25 vuln, 25 might, fury
- line casting icebow4/meteor shower
- Using proper food/slaying potions/sigils/runes
- Paying attention to your damage modifiers (eg. warrior non full endurance = +10%, water attune on ele using conjures = +20%) and having a proper DPS rotationI’m willing to bet you do none of the above.
Open with Eruption and Arcane Brilliance blasts on a Lava Font, Summon Ice Bow, cycle to Air to stack 25 vulnerabilities with Glyph of Storms, cycle to Water to get the 20% damage bonus against vulnerable targets, 5, 4, 3, 2.
That is the highest burst rotation currently in the game. You can follow this to the letter in 90% of all boss fights. Guess what, no matter how well you follow this mantra, the damage you do still comes down to your stats. No amount of skill will ever get you past the fact that how hard you hit is a calculation, not a skill, and that’s why damage stats are always useful and defensive stats are not.
The problem is not everyone wants to play the way the OP wants to play so OP is mad and wants to change the game to better accommodate his needs justifying this by saying the game " is broken".
That’s a pretty funny attitude coming from someone who’s arguing that allowing more build diversity for the competitive end would break the game. It seems to me like you’re the one who doesn’t care how other people want to play the game, you just happen to like the status quo so you can claim everything is great rather than having to ask for change.
So support is doing everything that people expect you to do while dishing out damage and wearing full DPS gear?
Bottom line is the stat system is extremely one sided and broken. Simply declaring a few stats to be easymode stats doesn’t make it any better.
I mean let’s put it this way: If there was some way of very skillfully activating abilities to force them to crit you could just as well argue that precision is just a stat to make the game easier for people who do not have this skill by just randomly handing them crits.
But since there is only a way to skillfully avoid damage, and not a way to skillfully inflict it all defensive stats are relegated to training wheels while all the offensive stats are useful no matter how good you are.
That is badly designed, plain and simple.
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It doesn’t matter if they’re trading HP for damage since guess what – it’s still safer.
So basically your argument is “If something else than pure DPS was the best way to do things it would be bad!”. You don’t even know how much harder dungeons might get with the expansion but you’re complaining that they might get too easy if they actually made a decent variety of builds viable.
The support and defensive gear has its role – it is an in-game difficulty slider that players can adapt to their own skill level.
That’s not a role, that’s just looking down your nose at anyone who enjoys playing support or tanks simply because the devs in this game couldn’t manage to create a system where those things are still fun, useful and challenging without being required.
Playing support shouldn’t simply be the noob option, that’s an absolutely awful way to design build diversity.
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OP – to answer your “healing buff that increases DPS” question – here’s the situation as I see it.
They won’t do it because it’d make the game even easier by making parties even more effective. How?
A full 5 man zerker team has let’s say baseline healing capacity – let’s call that 0 healing for our demonstration. Let’s say their overall party dps can be summed up to the value of 5.
What you want is a dedicated healer that can buff teammates and thus the party does not lose dps.
In that case we’d have let’s say a hypothetical 4 zerker 1 healer setup.Their healing is now 1, and their damage is still 5 since the fact they are being healed by a healer is buffing their dps to a equal or similar level as a full 5 man zerker party.
So they have the same dps as a party but more healing meaning the game is EASIER and much more faceroll than before.So in essence – that’s why they won’t do it.
Your example doesn’t take into account that they are trading HP for the extra damage, so they need to go to -1 healing (create the need to heal) to get that +1 DPS, the healer just evens them out again.
This game revolves around active defenses. OP, you have played for a month, I’ve been playing for 2 years now, and you know what, I’m still finding new ways how to deal with certain situations with my main ele.
When I started, I was also intimidated by zerker gear, I started with knight + pvt, then when I got used to the class and the different encounters, I switched to zerkers. And you know what, what mattered when I changed gear was my situational awareness.
My issue isn’t with the play style of this game at all, in fact I enjoy that very much. My issue is with the fact that there are support and defensive stats in the game that give no benefit to the way the game actually does support and defense.
Building a character around Healing Power doesn’t in any way increase your ability to blast for buffs for example, so despite sacrificing easily three fourths of your potential DPS to be a support specialist, you aren’t any better at performing the support functions that are in constant demand. The only thing you’re better at is healing, which, as you rightly point out, isn’t part of the active defense gameplay, since healing is reactive.
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I think it’s not a good idea to dismiss the whole principle over possible pitfalls of implementation. There is no iron clad rule that says every ability you can toggle at will must be a skill for example. They could implement it in all kinds of ways.
The implementation could be something like giving everyone a second “overheal” health pool where if you heal someone who is sitting at 100% health thier health meter fills up even more with overheal that decays back down to base health pretty quickly , but buffs your damage output by up to 25% when overheal reaches your classes base health. Toughness makes your overheal decay slower, extra hitpoints beyond your baseline give you the potential to be overhealed to even greater increases in damage.
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What exactly are you arguing against? Against the idea that it would be nice to have a wide variety of builds be a potential part of a group that cares about their performance?
You’re acting like “I care about how well I do” is completely incompatible with “I want to have a choice of many roles” and anyone who cares about both should simply be ignored. Why?
I do not want them to implement the trinity.
I do want them to implement a system where stacking the support stats makes you just as useful to a group as bringing more DPS to the party.
The problem I see with this game is that it doesn’t use hitpoints in the right way for a game that wants to not make healers mandatory for survival.
In your standard MMO hitpoints are simply the countdown to being dead, you cannot avoid taking damage, and healers are needed to reset the clock so you can keep fighting. This system works, but it forces you to have a healer.
In GW2 they reimagined how healing is supposed to work in a way that is generally a step up from how normal MMOs work, because healers are no longer required. However, they didn’t reimagine how hitpoints work in a way that keeps healers useful. Using HP as the countdown to death in a game where you can stop the clock is not a good use of HP as a mechanic.
The key element that GW2 is missing for making survivability and support builds viable and welcome additions to a group without forcing them on people is to tie hitpoints more closely to your damage potential. Currently the only time your hitpoints impact your damage is when you are dead. This means as long as you can avoid getting killed you don’t need extra HP, armor, or healing.
The way that healing can become useful to a DPS player without forcing them to always have a healer is to make the hitpoints to damage relationship more fine grained, and put tools into the players hands to expend hitpoints for more damage.
If you can spend your hitpoints to inflict greater damage the game still has all the same emphasis on not getting hit in the first place, it rewards people with defensive stats by giving them more hitpoints to spend, and it creates a demand for healing without forcing you to always have a healer.
The trinity is bad because it makes you need a healer. This game is half way to breaking the trinity without making support players have no role at all, and I think it can go all the way.
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I don’t have a problem with it when someone wants to build a glass cannon, I just think it’s idiotic that the way the game currently works DPS stats synergize into absolute absurdity while defensive stats and particularly healing power are total garbage.
I mean you basically get three stats that flat out multiply on top of each other, and have no efficiency cap in the game, since there is no such thing as “overdamage”, and then you get a whole bunch of other stats that only have mild synergies if any that have a clear cap on their effectiveness, because for example all the healing in the world is completely worthless unless there is damage to heal. Demand for damage is infinite, demand for defense is not. In fact, the main reason why glass cannons are easily playable because demand for defense is very often zero.
The real question is: Why doesn’t ArenaNet care if someone doesn’t want to play a glass cannon?
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What I would like to see is some sort of Enrage mechanic to most if not all bosses which would give a proper place to those taking a front line in dungeons or wanting to support their party.
I don’t think making bosses get more and more dangerous as time goes on would make people any less hellbent on killing them as fast as possible.
I think what this game needs is an overcharge mechanic for all character classes where they can start burning their health pool to inflict more damage. If you can spike your damage by maybe 25% when you’re getting constant heals a party with a healer actually does more damage than a party without a healer. That way you get the best of both worlds, people get to optimize their runs without having to abandon all semblance of build diversity.
I’ve been playing for about a month now, got a character to level 80, started running dungeons and fractals, and basically I’m at the point where I feel like the character system in this game is just fundamentally broken.
Basically what I’ve noticed is that this game is completely infested with what I call the Berzerker Cult. It’s people who insist that absolutely no gear except berzerker gear has any value whatsoever, and people who have any kind of survivability stat or use healing are just terrible players who need those things because they aren’t good enough to avoid getting hit in the first place. Necromancers and Rangers are basically treated like lepers when it comes to dungeon runs because they have pets that can mess up stacks and simply don’t do enough damage. Most gear sets are completely worthless and nobody uses them at all. Apothecary or Nomad gear is considered downright laughable by most people. You can’t even buy half the prefixes from the dungeons, but nobody cares, because nobody uses them.
I don’t know if the devs saw the irony in calling their endgame content FOTM when indeed, unless your spec and gear is the Flavor Of the Month you don’t really go far in Fractals Of The Mist.
There are several things that are just fundamentally broken with the way this game works.
Giving people the option to stack healing power to the point where they are basically kitten for every other purpose is an absolute design fail in a game where healers are never needed. Why create the option? Purely to bait people and then smacking them down?
The game really fails to create a good dynamic between damage dealers and support characters. I understand that they didn’t want to have the trinity, and I fully support that, but a game doesn’t need to enforce the trinity to make playing a healer viable. All the game has to do to make playing a healer useful is to make sure that a damage dealer who is being healed can deal more damage!
There are no mechanics in the game that let you trade hitpoints for bigger damage, so there is no point in having a character that can put those hitpoints back in a party of good players. That is the most fundamental design oversight in this game, and it makes party composition extremely one sided. Maybe you can benefit from the odd banner or reflection wall here or there, and applying buffs is nice, but none of those things benefit from stacking the support stat in the game.
None of the fights are designed in such a way that exposing yourself to damage lets you dish it out better, and none of the abilities are designed in such a way that you can burn health to inflict more damage either. All of the boss moves that can really kill you can be avoided, and inflict so much damage that you can’t heal through them anyways.
The same goes for defensive stats. The only place where they are rally good is in PvP, because when you’re up against other players you can’t just dance around everything they throw at you like it’s a jumping puzzle. Too bad giant dragons and murderous demons don’t ever give anyone cause to think “maybe I can’t avoid getting hit all the time”.
I mean, sure, it does take a certain skill to run through a level 50 fractal in full DPS gear without getting hit. I won’t deny that that is an impressive feat. However, it is incredibly boring that there is basically one accepted way of doing that, and the entire PvE experience in this game boils down to letting yourself be molded into that one singular rigid pattern.
Why can’t the game have systems that make sure that a DPSer with the support of a healer can spike his damage enough to actually appreciate the heals?
Why can’t the game have enemies that can deal with people who sacrificed all survivability for more damage?