Guild Wars 2

HOW OTHER MMOS RUIN IT or THE ENDLESS EXCUSE BRIGADE

A lot of people now know that the new traitwork has made alt leveling a painful, unrewarding slog for the first 80 levels or so. Especially in the pre-30 era. Anet has explained why they did this. Their idea is that, players were too busy being distracted by traits, so if we don’t give players traits, they’ll spend that whole time learning how to pull off epic combos with their skills. AKA: selective pressure is boredom.

Now, this doesn’t work in part because of human nature’s tendency to take the path of least resistance, but this is compounded by the expectations that…
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… other MMOs have instilled upon the gaming community. I’m talking, of course, about things such as the following:

#1: A 3 skill repetition that takes up the entirety of someone’s action chain.
#2: 80% of the game is end game, and leveling is just a time tax to get to the fun part.
#3: Classes will naturally level themselves out to fulfill their hard role (part of the 14/14/14/14/14/14 issue)
#4: All non DPS dedicated specs being a boring trudge through the muddy terrain that is conventional leveling.
#5: Terrible random number generators that range from 0 to maximum damage (in the hundreds).
#6: Endless gear tiers that trivialize content while simultaneously making things too hard to go forward.
#7: Cheaters…
#8: You’re supposed to face tank unavoidable deeps while other people support you.
#9: Maximum damage is achievable at distances, since melee fighting is reserved for other classes.

This is important, because if people come to GW2 with the experience or expectations of other MMOs in mind, then they will have over half a dozen legitimate excuses to shut their mind down, and just signet warrior through the entire leveling experience. Remember: the inspiration for players to learn in this game is boredom, so if they have any mindset other than “I should use this terrible time to learn everything about the class, including research other classes and how all the game mechanics work on different websites”, then they aren’t going to get anything out of it.

You’d be amazed how many people can play GW2 while simultaneously watching the bachelorette. They’ll grind themselves to level 80, and of course there isn’t anything in the overworld to discourage being a signet warrior, so they’ll never change. In order for a player to realize that active defense is king, you’ll have to fight against every single one of these preconceived notions about MMOs. Otherwise, players will learn nothing.

THE TROUBLING PRINCIPLES

Being both in college and been a college tutor, I’ve always had very strong opinions about the education system, primarily because I’ve been on both sides of the river. So, I tend to see what works and what doesn’t work.

Social Darwinism doesn’t work. Where as most instruction would go along the lines of “tell peeps da stuffz, yo”, social darwinism works through the philosophy of “Don’t tell, punish for not knowing”. In this case, the punishment is boredom through leveling then unexplained hostility from other players followed by unexplained failure. One particular professor I had (art appreciation) was proud of this, literally to the point of proclaiming “you should already know art!”, giving us open ended essay tests, and boasting about how ill will makes him a great professor.

The biggest problem is that the difficulty dissonance and community division drives away players. Without proper instruction, there’s nothing to differentiate between a call to learn vs. a call to stop playing the game and go do something else. The worst sensation anyone can ever have at a game is frustration, and that is exactly what difficulty dissonance causes.

I have to wonder what is so bad about just telling players how the game works, or how a class works. Anet refuses to touch this issue with a 10 foot pole.

Ashen.2907:

Completely agreed, except for the part of the current state of technology in GW2. The game includeshigh cyclical ROF machine pistols, automatic rifles with rates of fire not too dissimilar from modern assault weapons, flame throwers, grenades, and so on, not as exceptions but rather as defining aspects of the setting’s tech level.

I’m not too keen on the GW2 lore regarding firearms, but from a gameplay perspective it wouldn’t make for good design to have pistols and rifles reflect their equivalent speed. If you want to take the abilities of the classes literally, then we also have bows with homing and high explosive projectiles, and poisonous gasses.

This all exists in a universe where a stick can throw fire, the primary mode of transport between cities is wormholes, and autonomous robots are the norm. Arguing over the exact technological era of GW2 is kind of a moot point. Think of it this way: the rapid speed at which new technologies are being introduced hasn’t caused the bowman to die off yet. Rather, since bows are still prominent in the world, technology is being developed with bows, instead of against bows.

Other interesting trivia, the grenade was first invented at around 750 AD in Eastern Rome, and the flamethrower was invented (formally) in 672 AD. Yes, a lot of the techniques we have for modern warfare are the same stuff we’ve been using for over a thousand years. Other ancient weapons include biological warfare and chemical warfare.

Black Teagan.9215:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Black Teagan.9215:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Black Teagan.9215:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Corrupt boon takes entire stacks. Bountiful Theft only grabs 2 stacks. So, if you steal, you’ll end up with only 2 stacks of might. Also, you are being deliberately misleading by giving a thief the maximum possible benefits for steal, while also not giving the maximum possible benefits for corrupt boon.

1 stack of 2 boons;

Your enemy have 8 stacks of might and protection of 25(?) secs —> BT on your enemy --> Your enemy lost high 8 stacks of might and protection and you get 1 stack of might + protection, both for 5 secs.

Prove the wiki wrong?

Why I should? The wiki underpinned my post, but not yours.

Reading comprehension skills are a must. The wiki says that bountiful theft works exactly as I described.

You wrote BT steal two stacks and this is wrong. It steals 2 boons and give max 1 stack of every stolen boon to you, also if your enemy have 15 stacks of might, and no other boon, it will give you not more than 1 stack of might.

That is the different between your and my post

You said that it would remove all 8 stacks of might from an enemy. It does not. It takes only one stack from an enemy. Hence, why it is not comparable to corrupt boon in any sense of potency.

I’m a bit hesitant to support this suggestion.

The reason is quite simple. To a very large degree, CC is exactly as you describe it: an offensive measure. When a boss does a dangerous AoE attack, and one member of the team stops that attack, this means that the rest of the team can continue with their DPSing without having to dodge, run away, rez the downed, switch to range to heal, etc.

It is also defensive in nature, too. So, the suggestion of adding on extra damage to interrupts when an interrupts purpose is to do more damage overall is excessive.

I think the issue is that WvW is currently being used to fill the hole where GvG should be.

Fact is, a whole lot of people want to go 50 vs. 50 with all their best guild buddies, but don’t have a place to do it. So, they go to WvW, and get fed up with all the naughty server politics that GvG wouldn’t have.

Ashen.2907:

If you are looking at this from a technological perspective the real questions should not be, “where’s the crossbow,” but rather, “why is anyone enough of an idiot to use a bow in a setting where automatic firearms are fairly commonplace ?”

Bit of an interesting trivia, but the prevalence of firearms wasn’t due to their superiority on the field. The bow and arrow had several distinct advantages that put it well above the standard musket or pistol that was used.

*Faster to reload and fire.
*More accurate for seasoned archers.
*Easier to make arrows/bullets for.
*More reliable and less likely to jam/break.
*Easier to make bows from local materials.
*Could be fired reliably from longer ranges.
*Made little to no noise.

Once, when a general asked a native american chief why he didn’t switch to guns, the chief responded with “In the time it takes you to reload, I’ll have 3 arrows in the air”. I can’t find the particular source for that quote, though.

So, you’re probably wondering why, instead of bows and arrows, we use guns now? Well, the two advantages that guns had were just too important.

*Higher lethality on impact
*Much easier to learn a gun than a bow.

And that was it. To become a skilled archer, capable of hitting a bullseye from a football field away, you’d have to have grown up and used your bow your whole life. You can get a similar performance out of a rifleman in a few weeks training. So while it takes a lifetime to make an archer, it takes a month to make a rifleman.

GW2 takes place in the bridge between technology, where rifleman and bowman stand side by side. This overlooks sonic weaponry and laser cannons, which are also in the game, though.

Black Teagan.9215:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Black Teagan.9215:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Corrupt boon takes entire stacks. Bountiful Theft only grabs 2 stacks. So, if you steal, you’ll end up with only 2 stacks of might. Also, you are being deliberately misleading by giving a thief the maximum possible benefits for steal, while also not giving the maximum possible benefits for corrupt boon.

1 stack of 2 boons;

Your enemy have 8 stacks of might and protection of 25(?) secs —> BT on your enemy --> Your enemy lost high 8 stacks of might and protection and you get 1 stack of might + protection, both for 5 secs.

Prove the wiki wrong?

Why I should? The wiki underpinned my post, but not yours.

Reading comprehension skills are a must. The wiki says that bountiful theft works exactly as I described.

Black Teagan.9215:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Corrupt boon takes entire stacks. Bountiful Theft only grabs 2 stacks. So, if you steal, you’ll end up with only 2 stacks of might. Also, you are being deliberately misleading by giving a thief the maximum possible benefits for steal, while also not giving the maximum possible benefits for corrupt boon.

1 stack of 2 boons;

Your enemy have 8 stacks of might and protection of 25(?) secs —> BT on your enemy --> Your enemy lost high 8 stacks of might and protection and you get 1 stack of might + protection, both for 5 secs.

Prove the wiki wrong?

Stacking is simply when all players stand in one spot. Skills used don’t matter. LoS doesn’t matter. Builds don’t matter. Standing still doesn’t matter. Those problems(?) are actually separate issues, if they are indeed problems.

If you want to be legalistic about it, someone isn’t stacking when they can be considered standing “next to” a player, particularly when character models are not clipping in to each other. Likewise, due to the dynamic nature of combat, “stacking” must be a product of deliberate coordination, and not happenstance when several players happen to roll/evade into the same spot.

As said in my previous thread, stacking is mostly an issue of conveyance, presentation, and immersion. Also partly due to very basic mob design, but that’s more of a cause than an effect.

This actually isn’t the first MMO I’ve seen stacking in. RS had an open world PVP area, and what a lot of players would do is something called the “death dot”. The game had a grid like spacing, and would only render the player standing on top of any one place. Likewise, the player radar didn’t show depth. So, a lot of players would all stand on one spot, and just wait for someone to happen by. Then BOOM!, ambush by 20 players.

Boneheart.3561:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

You know, a lot of people like to think that there’s a great plan in the works. But anyone who is in charge knows they are flying by the seat of their pants.

Evidence?

Life.

Corrupt boon takes entire stacks. Bountiful Theft only grabs 2 stacks. So, if you steal, you’ll end up with only 2 stacks of might. Also, you are being deliberately misleading by giving a thief the maximum possible benefits for steal, while also not giving the maximum possible benefits for corrupt boon.

You know, a lot of people like to think that there’s a great plan in the works. But anyone who is in charge knows they are flying by the seat of their pants.

It’s not a penalty. It is a failure condition.

Their CC is in their turrets. If you engage the engi head on, you’ll get locked down and creamed. Usually, if an engi sets up, it is possible to crack down on the turrets before they can get a lot of CC off. Once the turrets are down, the Engi’s control and damage take a serious hit.

Foot in the Grave would be a really helpful trait. Otherwise, I haven’t been in PVP long enough to give much more advice.

Naevius.3185:

>>Without a difficult death system nothing is truly difficult in the game.

If I pose the problem “What is 2+2?”, it does not get harder just because I threaten to shoot you for a wrong answer. Your logic is flawed.

This. So much this. “Difficulty” in any challenge is how hard it is to pull it off. Severe punishments for failure don’t make things harder. They just discourage me from trying in the first place. Knowing that I failed is punishment enough.

There is an inverse proportionality between punishment and difficulty. If you make something punishing upon death, and make it really hard, no one will bother to play it. So, if you have severe punishments for death, you have to make death rare, and thus have to tone down the difficulty of the game.

I like the flip side: death is cheap, but the less costly death is, the more frequent you can make death. Low punishments means that it is possible to crank up the difficulty. Low punishments encourage me to try riskier things, like flying solo in dungeons. Low punishments let me try out new tactics, and even just have fun with everything. I can laugh about how horrible something went when I don’t have to spend a week grinding to get it all back.

If you want more stringent punishments, put them on yourself. Don’t put them on others.

I spend most of my time on the forums, writing stuffs.

Though right now I’m re-earning my money after I bought a new set of gear for my ele. Strength runes are expensive as hell now.

I wrote about this in detail awhile ago, but Faux covered a lot of things with his list.

The thing with stacking is that nearly everything in the game encourages stacking. These bosses aren’t big, with many being player sized. or smaller. If you try to get 5 people in melee range, it’ll be harder to not stack.

Azrael.4960:

The only zerk hate seems to be on the forums.

I see it a lot in game as well.

Anyway, this thread contributes very little to the whole zerk thing. The OP’s solution to the problem is to “solve the problem”. Particularly with the trinity. Somehow.

It is a bit more complicated than that. For one, the trinity sucks. Gear is about preference in play, not role in play. The roles are more subtle, and not based upon statistical fortitude.

Tim.6450:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

From a PVE perspective.

Warrior
Pros: Good bulk and passive regen, good might stacking, unique damage buffs. Decent cleanse when built for it.
Cons: Lack of unique support mechanics

What happened to banners? Empower Allies?

Last I checked, ghastly claws with axe training is roughly equal to dagger DPS, but only as long as ghastly claws is channeling. Once the channel is done, you end up taking a drop to DPS.

This would be acceptable, if Axe did something more useful.

I’ve found healing turret to be good for rezzing allies. The turret doesn’t overwrite your current action, so you can spam the cleanse while doing other things.

Particularly in grawl fractal. When I have to rez someone, I’ll pop the turret down, and have it constantly healing/cleansing me while I rez.

The whole thing just wreaks of bad design. If you make a boss with projectiles, then specifically make those projectiles avoid reflection, then maybe you shouldn’t have made the boss with projectiles in the first place.

Consistency is pretty important. When you have a skill that blocks attacks, but then throw a whole bunch of unblockable attacks into the game, then what good is the skill? Why not balance around people having blocks, instead of just making an attack unblockable?

From a PVE perspective.

Warrior
Pros: Good bulk and passive regen, good might stacking, unique damage buffs. Decent cleanse when built for it.
Cons: Lack of unique support mechanics

Guardian
Pros: A lot of projectile destruction/reflection, good boon support, good cleansing skills.
Cons: Glassy when things go wrong, light fields tend to overwrite more useful fields.

Engineer:
Pros: Can do nearly everything. Good combo fields and combo finishers. Powerful self buffer, and good at vulnerability stacking.
Cons: Hard to play, difficult to do high damage in, and weak to retaliation. Other people will hate you for playing engis.

Thief
Pros: Blinds and defensive utilities, stealth, and movement skills. High single target damage and CC.
Cons: Really glassy, utility becomes redundant with a second thief. No offensive buffs, and 900 maximum range.

Ranger:
Pros: Skill evades, a few unique buffs, and a few combo fields.
Cons: Pets. Melee weapons have awkward rooting mechanics, making them hard to play. People will hate you for playing ranger.

Ele:
Pros: Can do nearly anything, but not as much as engis. Great combo field + finisher synergy. Highest damaging class.
Cons: Glassiest class. Difficult to play.

Mesmer:
Pros: Unique utilities. Projectile reflection, and spots of cleanse and boon manipulation.
Cons: Low starting damage. Lacks buffs. Based around condi that is nigh useless in PVE. Ethereal fields overwrite more useful fields.

Necro
Pros: Massive bulk, decent boon manipulation, good movement debuffs and vulnerability.
Cons: Lack of melee cleave, lack of adequate range option, dark fields overwrite more useful fields, lack of finishers, high cooldowns on utilities. People will hate you for playing necro.

This is at a glance. This is not the full list of everything that a class can do, or every way to play them. If I were to rank the professions, I would list them as follows:

Top tier: (you’ll want more than one)
Ele, Guard

Mid Tier: (you’ll want at least one)
Engi, Thief, Mesmer, Warrior

Low Tier: (Charity cases and for lulz)
Ranger, Necro

haviz.1340:

What would happen with few epidemic necros chaining them in succession in wvw? Burst one target with condition bomb, then spread epidemic, then again and again.

Also, it’s not the issue whether they can remove the cap because they can’t. It’s only the issue of alternatives.

Pure awesomeness would happen. Just… pure awesomeness.

Seriously though, while epidemic makes for a good condi bomb, the fact is that in a zerg environment, condi cleanses and duration reduction are quite high. I run a terrormancer in WvW a lot, and it is rare for me to fire off a meaningful epidemic. If I pick out one sheep from the herd and try to pile on him, one of three things usually happens:

#1: This person dies before I can pull off a really potent epidemic. The more conditions that are on this person, the faster they die, after all.
#2: This person keeps cleansing my conditions, so I never really get to use epidemic.
#3: After I use epidemic, a warrior/guardian/ele/mesmer cleanses all of those conditions anyway.

Because of this, what I end up spreading around is usually a staff combo (staff 234). If I get in closer to use weakening shroud and grasping dead, I’ll get pulled, trained, or focused. If my enemy gets too close, they’ll get pulled or focused themselves, pushing the player away from the pack making epi moot.

Though if I have a coordinated team of necros, this might be easier to pull off. Epidemic is arguably the best argument for the cap, after all, since it is the only technique in the game that is a force multiplier. Of course, epidemic could be balanced in a capless environment to only move 25 stacks of conditions or something like that.

Alternative conditions might have the same issues, though. If epidemic can spread hemorrhaging, you’ll face the same beast with a different name.

I use battle and strength myself. Grenades do a whole lot of direct damage alongside of their condis, so I stack might up as high as I can get it. Once I hit 18 or so stacks of might by myself, the fun never ends.

I think I covered this a few times myself, but I the OP is right, 100%.

What so many people are used to is a system of negatives. The traditional trinity is based upon not being able to do things. DPS doesn’t do support and can’t survive, tanks don’t deal damage, and healers can’t do anything but heal. The system of negatives is restricting, and in being restrictive a player is punished for trying to hybrid gear, or hybrid equipment, because then they end up failing at both.

GW2 is mostly a system of positives. Zerker gives you additional damage, Soldier’s gives you additional survivability, Dire gives you an alternate means of damage, etc. I say “mostly” because there are many stat exchanges going on that I don’t like. But, the end result is, people aren’t used to being able to do everything, and their inability to see nuances causes them to only see a single role game.

haviz.1340:

Example of the boss fight with condition warrior where you can easily avoid most if not all of the damage: https://youtu.be/zyanxgG4bX4

This fight takes about 3 minutes as full dps build as well. Another example would be lupi. Fastest necro solo was achieved with condition build, not direct damage. Condition dealers lose their potential in group setting not only because of cap but also because direct damage dealers have more offensive buffs like vulnerability. It’s counter balanced by armour ignoring mechanics of conditions but only in pvp – mobs rarely use protection or have increased armour.

To reiterate, in solo settings or average team settings, one condition damage dealer isn’t far behind direct damage dealers. But if their potential was increased, pvp would be completely destroyed.

There’s a bit more than offensive buffs. Precision and ferocity act as a multiplier to power, making each point of power more efficient for damage overall. Malice has no such benefit, so it can never scale in any way but linearly. This is important when factoring in might: at max might, 875 malice is a static buff, whereas 875 power turns in to (at 55% crit chance and 210% crit rate) 1404 power, or about 60% more of an increase point per point.

Though conditions have a roughly the same doubling ratio (except burn, at 1312 malice) as power, the additional stats cause things to grow more out of proportion.

Anyway, I hear people saying that conditions would become OP in PVP if there was no cap, but I have yet to see any evidence of this. Back when I played in the dreaded condi meta as an engineer (only cleanse was healing turret), I rarely hit the cap of conditions. There are several reasons why, too:

#1: My CC would halt their attacks and combos, preventing them from landing.
#2: My blocks and evades would dodge many of their bursts, keeping condis low.
#3: I did have a cleanse that would help out in many occasions.
#4: Even in death, the accumulation of damage from multiple condi users would kill me before the cap was reached.
#5: I had teammates with group cleanses that would reduce the damage.

Unless I am getting epically trained, or hit the exact wrong spot with epidemic, the cap wasn’t an issue. Even when I played a terrormancer in sPVP, I think I capped someone once, and that was through condi transfer.

Point is, other players aren’t gigantic bags of HP like PVE enemies are. We are rather frail bags that have a lot of active defense, which causes the cap to rarely be an issue in play. If we remove the cap, there will still only be a handful of events that would ever cause us to hit more than 25 bleeds, and never an event that’ll cap out confusion or torment.

The same goes for WvW, too. The only time I ever hit the cap is when I get separated and condi bombed by several necros/engis. There, it wasn’t much of a difference between being separated out and DD bombed by warriors/guards/eles/thieves. I was dead in seconds with no hope of survival. Of course, playing an engi or necro, unless I was in a small group my condis just fell off of zergs, so the cap never came into play there, either.

Fenrir.3609:

stuff

Bloody hell, man. The reason why we number things is so we don’t have to fight with quote tags while nitpicking everything.

#1: The problem is that the assertion that survivability means something in regards to PVE balance is utterly false. PVE is balanced around mean kill speed and reward speed. If you want to factor in survival, then every single set in the game is already better than zerkers. Your nightmare of people running around killing things with tankier gear with more defensive tactics has been true since day one of the game.

The only difference is that, with dire gear the player has a heavy arbitrary redundancy factor, and in soldier gear they do not. Players “putting themselves in risk” is not an issue. At all.

#3: I am not understating the windup. Here’s a fine example particularly 1:26 in, where the team drops the boss in 11 seconds. This isn’t even a particularly good speed run group. When you are in a team where regular mobs die instantly, vets and silvers die in 5 seconds, and legendary mobs live for 20 seconds (or 12 with time warp), there is nothing more useless than a condi build. You get 4 attacks before an enemy is dead, and you can’t unload a full set of 25 bleeds + burn + poison + torment +confusion in 4 attacks.

Also, removing the cap doesn’t increase condi damage. It just makes condi damage fair, I.E. no more tyrannical oppression of a playstyle through unexplained mechanics, and no more discrimination based on coincidence alone.

The remainder of the post proves you don’t understand conditions: Conditions don’t “do” more damage because they tick away through active defenses. The difference between one attack that takes 0.7 seconds to activate and does 4000 damage immediately vs. another attack that takes 0.7 seconds to activate and does 1000 damage immediately with 3000 additional damage over 10 seconds is actually very little. The time you spend running around thinking “Oh look, I’m doing damage while running away! That makes me better!” is all really spent trying to catch up to the damage that direct DPS already did.

Likewise, you also can’t diagnose the problem. You’re spending all of your time hiding behind the cap due to an impractical and unfounded fear of conditions would somehow ruin the game, happy that players are randomly discriminated against in their playstyle. Never once have you thought “Gee, maybe if conditions are imbalanced, then we should remove the caps and balance conditions individually. That way, condi specs don’t get castrated for being in the same room as another condi spec”. No, instead you spend your time under the fallacy that getting 50 stacks of bleed at range is somehow more dangerous than getting hit 50 times at range.

You, sir, have no idea what is going on. I demand proof that you actually understand the issue, otherwise there is nothing more to gain from talking to you.

Soa Cirri.6012:

Rote memorization =/= skill.

If you want to split hairs… yeah, memorization isn’t skill. But then again, rote memorization of a path means greater performance overall.

Nearly all content in this game can be considered a puzzle. Once you know the trick to a boss, they become quite easy to deal with. If you know all the tricks to all the bosses, you become a “good player”.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/balance/To-clear-the-air-about-Berserker/first

I already made a thread about this before. The conclusions I came to are quite simple:

#1: The gear isn’t unbalanced. When comparing the survival time to damage output of different gear in the same build, something as bulky as soldiers can match zerker through sustained engagement time. Ergo, there must be another issue.
#2: Active defenses function without particular gear checks, working as a universal barrier of damage reduction.
#3: The increased kill speeds of zerker gear reduces the attacks of enemies, causing active defenses to be fully sufficient for defense.
#4: These facts are not in themselves “problems”. The problem comes from reward balancing, content balancing, and appeal to different gamers via multiple playstyles.

Because of this, I have to let out a big, angry eyed sigh every time someone suggests some draconian changes that make it so dodge doesn’t work anymore. That’s not fixing the problem, that’s just bashing it with a mallet until the thing is unrecognizable, and then belching “what problem!?” to critics.

The unfortunate thing is that the best solution to this problem, to make PVE harder in such a way that it discriminates more against glass cannons than other gear types. This has its own problems, namely that increased difficulty can drive away players, and people already have low expectations for the game, and that the PVE game currently doesn’t teach players how anything works.

It would also be really difficult to do, so it is not a perfect solution. But, the good news is, a lot of those problems are temporary.

I swear, I’m about to necro my old thread on the whole zerker issue so people could get it straight.

As for the OP’s suggestion:

#1: I run zerker in pugs. I shouldn’t be punished for my gear choice of other people happen to also make this choice.
#2: This suggestion would not stop coordinated groups, since they would still kill enemies before the buffs matter.
#3: This doesn’t make other gear choices better. It just discriminates against players for their gear choices.
#4: Zerker gear doesn’t cause anal retentive elitism. If you nerf the gear in some way, then you just make them discriminate because of other reasons.

The whole point of small AoE areas for boons is to encourage tactical use. If I could spam a skill and hit the whole map, then it is basically a no-brainer spam fest.

PVP balance is also a factor. Conquest is highly area based, and in order to encourage play and counterplay, these effects have a limited range. You know, for knockbacks, divide and conquer tactics, to create a dichotomy between a highly buffed group vs. mobile and less buffed groups, etc.

Though that is only one reason people stack. Mob grouping and control, focus of player damage, and coordination of enemy attacks are non-boon dependent reasons to stack.

I’m surprised no one has brought up a cycling of players. Fact is, a lot of older players get bored of the game and leave, and then new people buy the game and join up.

For the majority of dungeons, this has no noticeable affect, since the rate at which players enter and exit the dungeon maintains a steadily growing level of skill overall. But, for a select few dungeons, this has noticeable problems.

Cof1 is an example. Cof1 was run constantly for farms, causing players to get very good at the game. A series of nerfs later, and given enough time, all of the players who ran Cof1 frequently have left the game. New players coming in don’t have that rote memorization of the dungeon, so the overall skill declines.

That said, since I have been exclusively pugging since a few months after launch, there has been a noticeable increase in dungeon running skill in the majority of dungeons. This is because that, even though the old players leave, their discoveries and tactics live on. Newbs have more material to work off of, so they get better faster, and can innovate sooner.

As for dungeon success, the answer is that nearly every dungeon is run successfully the vast majority of the time. There are only a few exceptions:

TA Aether Path
COF2… or was it COF3? Whichever one has the area defense.
Arah, any path.

Note: My presence in the dungeon is probably directly affecting the outcome in a favorable manner.

Why? These dungeons don’t get a lot of press. Because no one runs these dungeons, no one is really experienced in these dungeons. Without this experience, all you get are undergeared newbs running face first into concepts they’ve never encountered before. That, or you get premade groups who are experienced with the dungeon, but don’t want to put up with newbs.

So, the newbs congeal into a pool and run the dungeon, have a horrible and failing experience, and then vow to never run it again. This means that the “experienced crowd” is a mere fraction of what it would normally be for these paths.

The dungeon difficulty had been fairly static for awhile, but with the recent ferocity change the earlier dungeons seem easier than ever. Note, this may again be personal influence, since zerker wrecks things so hard now that I’m considering soloing these dungeons out of convenience, but I am assuming that difficulty as a whole for anything sub CoF has dropped.

I always understood foods and buffs to be an intricate part of the build system for PVE and WvW. I pick out my food in the same way I pick out my traits and my gear. Heck, many of my builds count on food buffs to fill particular holes, such as getting higher precision on low precision builds, or getting extra condition duration on hybrid dam/con builds.

I’m not sure these changes had to deal with stacking. On one hand, the spider queen now does her AoE always. On the other hand, the golem in CoE is now easily stacked.

So… neutrality? Anyway, hidden updates are always a pain.

haviz.1340:

Condition warrior has similar dps as full dps build.

Are you sure about that? I recently read an evaluation on the damage output of necros and warriors, and the conclusion is that DPS warriors can output anywhere from 7k to 12k DPS.

Fenrir.3609:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

1. The fact that “zerkers can solo lupi” or that seasoned zerks don’t drop like flies due to active mitigation does not in fact address the issue that condi builds often have greater base “survive” and are in less direct danger then melee glass cannon builds.

2. I am aware how dps works and I am also aware of the “need for speed”.

3. With the correct wind up, against boss mobs, condi builds (some) can have a comparable dps and kill speed rate to direct damage when considering the solo environment. That is with greater survive. Without the cap the encounters would be ridiculous.

Now in a group situation that is not the case but should the dps cap be removed, then the damage in relation to the survive given by the gear/build would simply be too great, hence OP.

#1: That is pretty much true of every kind of gear that isn’t assassin/zerker/rampager. This also isn’t a problem. At all. There’s nothing wrong with being more durable than the least durable gear set up in the game.

#3: The windup is a severe limitation of the condi build which prevents condis from ever having the same DPS as direct damage builds. Removing the cap won’t ever change this. I fail to see how letting everyone do less damage and less DPS in more survivable gear will be “ridiculous”.

The reason why the zerker meta works is because passive defenses are useless in many regards. I already said that zerker (and by extensions, assassin and rampager) has less damage per effective HP than soldiers gear. This isn’t a problem, because currently the higher effective HP of soldier’s gear contributes nothing to the fight.

Also, the peak condi set everyone mentions is the Warrior, but the warrior causes its condi damage at melee, not range.

Having separate PVE/PVP is arguably what killed City of Heroes. There was a large culture shock between the two modes, since skills behaved nothing like between PVE and PVP. This change discouraged most people from PVP, which is one of the larger sustaining forces of an MMO.

The problem isn’t the skills. The problem is PVE doesn’t encourage their usage.

Osteg.8915:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

So, simple solution: give the defense event a chest, and give it the same daily flag the capture event does. That way, you can get your daily chest regardless of the status of the event.

Look at Melandru as example and compare 7 poor waves of mobs to the whole event chain. If there was the reward chest for the defense event, you would probably never do the capture one. It’s not the solution.

“Not doing the capture event” is not a problem.

Lishtenbird.2814:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

The problem is the rewards. The biggest reason why people want the defense to fail is because the defense event doesn’t give a daily chest. The capture event does.

So, simple solution: give the defense event a chest, and give it the same daily flag the capture event does. That way, you can get your daily chest regardless of the status of the event.

I rarely cared about the chest at these events actually, I did those events primarily for T5-T6 mats from bags dropped by spawning mobs.

You can get those from pretty much any event on orr. The only thing that separates plinx and grenth is the unique reward for grenth.

maha.7902:

opens map chat
hey guys we only had a small group but we were able to kill boom boom really fast
hey guys maybe we should spread out in small groups since the bosses seem to have less hp if you do that

*Noob sees people yelling to split up.
*Noob tries to kill champion with a few other noobs.
*Noob dies quickly and fails.
*Noob concludes guy in map chat is wrong.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Another thing that is a problem is the new language restraints, that arbitrarily limit player communication geographically. I once read a post that said the boss blitz is easy… if you have a coordinated team of commanders in multiple geographical locations so you could bypass the hidden interface problem that prevents players from talking to each other. Sure, it is easy, but it is utter bullkitten to have to fight the game interface just to do basic communication. I’m sure that language filter is meant to do “something”, but the detriment caused to the casual gamer means it is badly designed.

RemiRome.8495:

Seems like it prepared most of us here just fine.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

We don’t have that problem here, since the forums are full of a bunch of theorycrafters and perfectionists who go above and beyond in the game. But unless players are experimenting on golems, or talking with other theorcrafters, they won’t know about all these hidden limits.

Fenrir.3609:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

You do know that people solo Lupi in melee range in full zerker gear, right? Once you get good enough, enemies don’t drop you in melee range anymore.

And? You can also solo bosses as a condi spec. The fact that if you are good you can dodge, does not alter the fact that condi specs have distinct advantages in certain aspects (survive), advantages that would become OP should the condi cap be removed and groups able to apply insane damage whilst spaming condis with impunity.

There is a clear difference between sitting in melee range on a full glass cannon spec and using a condi build which is able to a) output very large damage, b) apply that damage from a point of greater safety than a melee zerk and c) use gear that allows for greater “tank” than the zerk.

Condi in no way needs a buff (if anything if you factor in pvp, it could be argued it needs nerfing) and the cap is in place for obvious reasons.

Welcome to the conversation. Let me fill you in.

The statement I was responding to was basically saying that, since berserker gear results in faster player death, that conditions balanced out their damage, both by prolonging damage after death, and by staying alive longer.

This, of course, is wrong on two accounts. First, berserker gear doesn’t always result in faster player death. No, the seasoned GW2 player can run around in glass cannon gear in full melee weapons, making the entirety of PVE their kitten. This is the one I addressed.

There is a second one I didn’t address, which is the fallacy of lingering damage being superior. For you see, the difference between one attack that takes 0.7 seconds to activate and does 4000 damage immediately vs. another attack that takes 0.7 seconds to activate and does 1000 damage immediately with 3000 additional damage over 10 seconds is actually very little. If you have two players doing these attacks, and they both die at the same time, they will end up doing the same damage. The player who does condition damage will have their attacks linger over time, but the fact is that this lingering damage is only gradually doling out the damage that direct DPS already did.

Now that you are caught up, I will respond to your idea:

The cap is not a necessary limit to contain the beast of condition damage. I have no record of Anet ever saying this. So far, Anet has only cited processing limitations in regards to the condition cap. This is because direct damage has a much higher capacity for DPS, and it does this in two ways. First, is simply having higher damage overall. As much as I love my rabid condi build on the necro, I can’t deny that the full zerker set just blows it away in damage.

The second is the rate of damage. Condition builds can have decent DPS, but this is predicated on being at the cap, which isn’t always an easy feat to achieve. Direct damage builds come out swinging with full force, but conditions need time to build up to their cap, and reach the point where they are replacing conditions as fast as they are applied. Even if condition damage were to be equal to power damage, conditions will always lag behind power because of the time it takes to build the conditions. In the long term, this can be nigh negligable. But in short term… a power builds can kill elites before condi builds can reach the cap.

Of course, I wonder what your basis for “OP” is. If you want to talk about the combination of damage and bulk, then you are way off base. Zerker isn’t the end all-beat all combination of damage and defense. In fact, soldiers actually has a higher combination of bulk and damage. So, why is it that everyone encourages zerker, despite soldier having higher damage per effective HP? That would be kill speed.

Kill speed equals faster rewards, and thus higher GPS (or gold per second), and condition specs will never outpace direct damage specs in kill speed, unless Anet removes the cap and increases enemy HP tenfold. Then, Epidemic’s force multiplication would make conditions more powerful.

Aidan Savage.2078:

Actually, most of the processing for condi damage you listed would only have to be done every time the last condition stack that player applied falls off.

• Source <-every time, but easy information to log as a binary/hex byte
• Duration <- every time, duration remaining is calculated by as simple as N— (perl abbreviation for N = N-1) every time the damage ticks, once N=0, the stack protocol (or whatever it’s called) would run
• Stack level <- For stacking conditions, every time stack level equals 26, the hash/array/whatever is shifted down by 1, with stack level 1 being “forgotten” and stack level 26 being undefined. Repeats every time stack level 26 is defined
• Duration level <- For non-stacking conditions (burning/poison/etc), if duration level equals 9, those conditions are ignored (according to wiki). Personally I find the duration stacking algorithm funky
• Damage <- calculated once and for per tick damage, then subsequent stacks pull this information from existing stacks on a “incoming source = existing source” basis. If there’s a state change of the source, gaining/losing might, gaining/losing corruption stacks, etc, etc, damage is then recalculated

And that’s basically the extent of it. Open world content, as it exists now, is not conducive in any fashion outside limited exceptions, to condi builds in group play. Dungeons, on the other, do not have the same excuse. So I truly question why the limits are not changed in dungeons to be more conducive to multiple condi builds in the same party.

edit: kitten ed out and posted without finishing it.

There’s a bit more to the source/damage than that. Existing conditions are dynamic to might and corruption, changing their damage in real time to changes in malice, so we know that the servers constantly pulls relevant player information in order to recalculate damage. The source is obviously stored as a hex value on the condition. But, it still has to process an operation to acquire relevant information from the source.

Likewise, multiple players applying conditions gives multiple sources, so if there is a source duplication system for condis, then it is largely ineffective at reducing any load.

But if conditions didn’t have to recalculate damage (and likewise, re-evaluate their source to do so), and instead had a static damage set on application that never changed, then this would reduce the processing needed. No more code to try and watch for changes from the source, no more code to calculate damage on the fly from these changes.

The only drawback I can think of is that event contribution via conditions would have to be reformed, but that seems like a minor point in the realm of balance.

maha.7902:

“these bosses seem to get harder when theres lots of us but die quicker when theres less of us”

that’s a pretty clear in-game cue. you will inevitably get someone who will say “we zerged boss X and it took us a year but when we did boss Y in a small group he died really quick”

therefore the logical conclusion is = don’t zerg bosses.

so no, the boss blitz isn’t an example of “guide dang it” at all.

Problem is, that isn’t true at all. The decrease in kill speed for the bosses has to do with a regression to the mean: the more players there are in a group, the closer monster death comes to average kill time. If a player is on the low end of the spectrum, whether by gear or skill, then they see only an increase in kill time from zergs. Let alone a decrease in effort to kill things.

RemiRome.8495:

Except there’s no Guide dang it at all.

You see 6 enemies. You see a timer. It’s not rocket science.

They are lazy and not interested. There’s no desire to learn.

edit: edit out the actual link for the love of god.

The problem isn’t the boss blitz. The problem is, the rest of the game doesn’t prepare players for the boss blitz, neither by the game’s mechanics nor by the require cooperation.

I will reference TV tropes in this post. Trope addicts, you have been warned.

Design necessitates function. Doors are designed to allow access to rooms while also shutting rooms off from other places. Coffee mugs have ceramic handles that are designed to let people lift and hold the mug without burning yourself. Etc.

Anything is bad design when it either
a)Doesn’t fulfill its function
b)Fulfills its function at a heavy detriment to the user.

For example, you know those extremely heavy doors that come out of nowhere and don’t make sense? Those are bad design, because you have to physically exert yourself heavily on what should be a minor inconvenience, and this is a heavy detriment to the injured or infirm. Or worse, a coffee mug with a metal handle and frame. The metal conducts the heat, meaning that no matter how you grab the mug, you’ll end up hurting yourself.

In game example, the original Liadri encounter was badly designed because a good portion of the difficulty was fake difficulty. I listed several complaints a long time ago, and interestingly enough Anet actually fixed a lot of those complaints with the more recent fight, making Liadri hard for the correct reasons now. That TV tropes article actually lists a lot of bad design choices in the sub categories.

Now, to get to the topic at hand, the boss blitz is an example of bad design. But… it is not the example of bad design that most players think it is. No, I agree with the OP that the mechanics are fine. But rather… another issue is at play. I call it a lack of proper education, but the trope term is Guide dang it!

A big issue I see with this game is that most of the game is based upon mechanics that aren’t clearly explained, factors that aren’t fully conveyed, or information that just isn’t supplied through readily available means. The thing with scaling is that nowhere in the game do they teach you about scaling. The thing with conditions is that nowhere in the game do they tell you how the caps work. There is no conveyance for how many players are at the other events. The regular player is running head first into a series of invisible walls.

We don’t have that problem here, since the forums are full of a bunch of theorycrafters and perfectionists who go above and beyond in the game. But unless players are experimenting on golems, or talking with other theorcrafters, they won’t know about all these hidden limits.

Another thing that is a problem is the new language restraints, that arbitrarily limit player communication geographically. I once read a post that said the boss blitz is easy… if you have a coordinated team of commanders in multiple geographical locations so you could bypass the hidden interface problem that prevents players from talking to each other. Sure, it is easy, but it is utter bullkitten to have to fight the game interface just to do basic communication. I’m sure that language filter is meant to do “something”, but the detriment caused to the casual gamer means it is badly designed.

You can muddy the prospects of bad design a bit, since the intention isn’t always clear. I mean, if Anet was sadistic and put the language limitation into the chat just to frustrate people, then it isn’t badly designed at all.

There’s always the initiative path. Read a guide or two, watch a video on how to do the path, and then gather your own team of dedicated newbs to trudge through the content.

It is a painful slog, but it works.

The problem is the rewards. The biggest reason why people want the defense to fail is because the defense event doesn’t give a daily chest. The capture event does.

So, simple solution: give the defense event a chest, and give it the same daily flag the capture event does. That way, you can get your daily chest regardless of the status of the event.

Aidan Savage.2078:

Xae Isareth.1364:

Why is this a problem?

A single zerker GS warrior can do 10k+ DPS under perfect conditions, on a heavy target. That’s 600k+ over a minute, putting your necro in the dust, and warriors aren’t even the top power DPS class.

Until whatever is being fought drops you to the dirt because you’re in melee range bringing your damage down to “nonexistent”. Even if a condi necro gets downed, they’re still dealing damage.

Now then, take your zerker garbage back to the class forums so we can bring the thread back to the discussion of how the game is crippling a perfectly viable playstyle because of arbitrary limits based on “processing” limits.

You do know that people solo Lupi in melee range in full zerker gear, right? Once you get good enough, enemies don’t drop you in melee range anymore.

Anyway, as I understand the OP’s suggestion, it would just make condi damage scale much higher per each individual stack once the cap is reached. This… might have issues of exponential growth in damage. Personally, I’d prefer the simpler approach.

The biggest problem with conditions in the game is computation. That is the only reason Anet has offered for the condition cap. With strict computational limits, you would think that Anet would design their conditions around this, but that is not what happened. Currently, for every tick of a condition, the game needs to do the following:

-identify the stack order of the condition
-identify the duration of that condition
-acquire the identity of the user of that condition
-acquire the stats of the user of that condition
-preform a calculation to get the damage of that condition
-subtract the damage of that condition from an enemy
-subtract from the duration of that condition
-calculate if the stack order of that condition has changed, and subtract from that order

And it has to perform these calculations anywhere from every quarter second for duration and intensity, to every second for each tick of the attack. Combine this with every condition a player can possibly be applying, and you get a monstrous amount of growth. A single necro can maintain 25 bleeds, 1 stack of burning, 3 to 4 stacks of poison, 5 stacks of torment, and combining this all means that there has to be 32 damage calculations every second, and 140 duration calculations every second.

Whereas whacking something in zerker gear does one to two damage calculations per second.

Now, there is a very large amount of this processing that seems just arbitrarily large. In particular, the part where the condition damage has to be recalculated for each tick. My idea is to change how the conditions are handled, so that instead of constantly re-acquiring player data to calculate damage, the damage of a condition is set once it is applied. This will change the new calculation to:

-Identify stack order
-Identify duration
-Subtract preset damage from enemy HP
-Subtract duration from that condition
-Calculate stack order

This takes out the largest processes of condi damage, which were acquiring player information and recalculating damage dynamically. If this change cuts the server load of conditions by half, then you could easily double the stack limit for these conditions. If it is cut by a third, then triple the stack limit. Then, the only real limit on conditions in regular play would be something like world bosses, where you get 30 players all attacking at once. But for the majority of dungeons and smaller scale content, the condition problem goes away.

Just gotta figure out something for the world bosses then.

I hate this illness of mine. A little window into the mystery of ME, I have severe unexplained stomach pains that wave in and out. Under a wave, my thinking is totally shot. Between then and now, I literally flooded my own bathroom because I lacked the sense to not flush over and over again.

So… big issue that probably should’ve been in a third post. There are a lot of people who want to have a tournament where large bodies of people fight each other. So, what can be done to have massive wars that are fair? I, one of many, simply recommend that Guild vs. Guild be put into the game in some manner. Trying to get WvW to be a legitimate competition is like putting a pig in a dress: it ain’t hot. Server identity is fading anyway, so now might be the time for guild identity.