Guild Wars 2

Apparently using memorised rotations doesn’t require skill when all players have the same output, but suddenly does require skill when they have different output.

Also, rofl at Orr being too hard. It was slightly difficult back at launch when the tp wasn’t up yet and all my gear at 70 was a mix of level 50-60 whites and blues so I couldn’t deal or take any damage and I couldn’t even kite due to the larger number of ranged mobs, but with level appropriate gear the only difference to any other zone was that you couldn’t dps race every mob, just most of them.

PvE cannot provide a skill based way to do anything, ever. Even in ‘challenging’ PvE you’re still just grinding, not for RNG drops but for tidbits of mechanical knowledge that act as the ‘ingredients’ in the ‘recipe’ for a method to clear the content. Since AI can’t think, the only way to make these tidbits not immediately obvious is to make them based on trial and error.

If you want some ego stroking thing to swing around, you already missed the WTS qualifiers.

Not only should there never be new tiers of gear but ascended should be removed from the game or converted to a purely horizontal form of progression.

Being able to build only 2 types of infantry doesn’t seem like enough for serious strategic decision making. It would seem to me that you would need access to at least 3 different units that rock-paper-scissors each other for the rts elements to be deep enough for competitive play e.g. bombers are invisible and can break the gates, sentries can strip invis and kill the bombers, shock troopers can kill the sentries and bombers can sneak past the shock troopers.

I’d like to hear the pvp team’s thoughts on the matter.

I used to enjoy levelling, but then I took a trait revamp to one knee and an NPE to the other. Instant 80 for me.

Making defending involve fighting players instead of sitting around waiting to fight with siege against siege would be a more rewarding defence experience.

Lothirieth.3408:

Brother Grimm.5176:

Actually, using the term “game balance” when talking about PvE is kind of chuckle worthy (as the PvE side of the game has very few “difficult” parts).

I don’t think it’s very chuckle worthy when you consider things like the state of necromancers in PvE vs sPvP.

Necro is only useless if you are trying to set a world record for the amount of game time to complete a run and only because any time cost at all makes something useless when doing that. If you are instead trying to optimise loot gains per unit of real time, which the vast majority of pvers are doing, the time cost of using a necro is less than the time cost of kicking them and finding a ‘better’ class. It’s unlikely that pugs play close enough to optimal for necro to even have a time cost.

In the end, the entire game is balanced around spvp because it’s the only content in the entire game where balance is relevant.

EotM is the skyham of wvw. It’s full of pvers and uplvls because wvwers realised that there was no hope for the map ever hosting a good fight.

Lightning Rod is an ele trait that causes damage and weakness whenever you hit a mob with a hard cc attack. Mordrem Menders are unsteady, meaning they can suffer a minor knockback whenever they get hit. It turns out that knocking a mob back due to unsteady counts as you hitting them with a cc and procs lightning rod. Lightning rod does damage itself and so it can also knock them back, proccing another lightning rod. The result? Instant death, sometimes.

HARDOFREADING.7298:

What class has the highest Auto Attack Damage?

Definitely not longbow ranger.
>.>

It’s pretty good damage for its range but that’s all.

Olvendred.3027:

No actual gameplay or balance support for this suggestion… just “rifles are supposed to shoot further than bows and grenades”?

Let’s not.

Kill shot has 1500 range and the rifle has quite low dps compared to most 1200 range weapons so there is some gameplay support for it.

Edit: it’s also a bottom tier weapon that isn’t used in any content so it could use a buff.

If servers have more coverage, they get more points. If servers get more points they get higher ranked. If servers get higher ranked they fight other high rank servers that likely have similar amounts of coverage. If servers fights servers with similar coverage everyone gets to have fights.

This is the purpose of the score. Don’t treat it like something competitive because it isn’t and can’t ever be.

Even with aoe caps the best defence against any attack is always not being in it. Pug blobs are often incredibly inefficient (I’m talking less than 10% here) partly because they aren’t coordinated enough to work within the aoe caps. They can’t focus their damage enough to actually down people instead of just hurting them and most of their support is being wasted and missing the people that actually need it.

If there were no aoe caps a queue blob would be nigh invincible to anything less than another queue blob, with the result being mostly down to chance rather than anything resembling good gameplay.

I’m mostly referring to the people linking attacks that cause confusion as though they’re even slightly relevant to the topic.

Confusion vs a zerg? Hilarious. The only thing it’ll do is get cleared before it does anything worthwhile or reversed to more retaliation.

People wasting time ressing deads is the best thing that could possibly happen if you’re up against a blob. Not only have you killed a bunch of the enemy but even more of them are willingly removing themselves from the fight in order to become stationary targets that you can just bomb.

If anyone actually successfully resses someone from dead then you weren’t really outplaying them at all.

Subdue.5479

Actually most activities in the game have their intrinsic rewards, and dailies just added AP on top of that. So to say you’re not getting rewarded is simply untrue. That said, chances are what you were doing was earning you less AP per day than what you could earn for a fraction of the time now. Honestly though, I would hope whatever you were doing was fun for you, not just for the AP.

My point is that before I could do what is fun and get AP for it, now if I want to get daily AP I have to do things that are not fun. This means I have to choose one or the other where previously I could choose both.

Subdue.5479:

Rewards =/= content. They didn’t remove content; they reallocated rewards. You can do everything you were doing before exactly the way you were doing it before. Nothing is stopping you from doing that.

The difference is that I used to be able to choose which content I was rewarded by to much higher extent than I can now. Dailies like kills, events, leveller, recycler, skill point accumulator, interrupter, dodger, reviver, condition applier and condition remover could be progressed virtually anywhere in the game. The new dailies, on the other hand, require me to choose between having fun or being rewarded, which is not a good choice.

I see the new dailies as a case of dumbing things down. Just making something require less investment isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but the new dailies are significantly less fun than the old dailies specifically because I could complete the old dailies by doing the content I chose. Now the reward has been split into two with part of it being awarded simply for logging in, which is obviously uninteresting and the other part being awarded for doing very specific tasks that I at least would not do if I wasn’t getting something out of it.

Basically, it makes the dailies feel less like something that you get for playing how you want and more into a list of chores.

A better way to abuse fixed damage against copper than condi would be to spam lots of dark fields for everyone to launch projectiles through, since the lifesteal from projectiles does about 300 damage. Running lifesteal food would also be good.

Anet refuses to announce anything so… nothing.

lordkrall.7241:

Yeah, and based on the reactions on these forums to any sort of change I for one would never say who come up with the suggestions, seeing as that would basically paint a massive bullseye on those people.

Where was the rage when WXP became account bound?
Where was the rage when double downed names turned grey?
Where was the rage when queues were made visible?

Those were good changes and the benefits of those changes were obvious. The changes coming up are bad changes and the negative impacts are also obvious. No white swords means more PVD, even the people defending it are doing so by saying it will allow them to capture towers and keeps from a larger server through PVD.

PPK does not incentivise winning fights, it incentivises staying alive at all costs. Blobs already play like this and PPK can only make it worse. It is also perfectly reasonable to assume that PPK will still give the larger server more points, though potentially not as large a margin as PPT.

So we’re getting one change that makes it easier to avoid fights and another that makes avoiding fights more important. How can this possibly improve a PVP game mode?

Duke Nukem.6783:

wow thanks for spitting on the concept of moral ambiguity, there is no such thing as right and wrong

What moral ambiguity? Faolain is 100%, moustache-twirling, card-carrying Evil™.

If I counted all the ones that got to 80 before deletion it would be 7 but I only have 2 currently.

This episode suffers from a severe case of Star Wars Prequels Syndrome™, where events in the story don’t follow logically from what is happening, but rather just jump to whatever is required for continuity with the established canon.

Caithe and Faolain don’t make sense as a couple because Faolain’s sole character trait is ‘horrible person’. Faolain’s grievance with the Pale Tree makes no sense because we’ve never seen any signs of the Pale Tree having ever put any pressure on anyone ‘to be perfect’. It more sounds like ‘I want to be a moustache-twirling villain but she won’t let me!!! Wahhhhhhhh!!!’

The achievements were low quality as well. Several times you can be disqualified for cheap reasons while a long way into a mission that has several unskippable cutscenes and Unforgiving Infiltration is just Invisible Infiltration with checkpoints, which is seriously lazy.

Yargesh.4965:

oxtred.7658:

You miss the subtle difference between lenght and difficulty. The fights are doable by my dog playing a naked mesmer with scepter mainhand only. You’re all assuming miku is talking about difficulty, because you probably all thought you were da best ending that ls. However, he’s speaking about the nullification of more than half a profession from a mechanic oversight.

He also showed via the video that this was not the case.

The way speedruns work is that you first work out exactly what conditions will produce the fastest time, then you reset hundreds of times until those conditions actually occur. A speedrun video has almost nothing in common with normal gameplay.

I doubt anyone bad enough that they have to go to eotm to win fights is smart enough to figure out where the enemy blob is.

A reminder: there will never be good fights in eotm because eotm is pve.

Dalanor.5387:

Coldtart.4785:

PvE is incapable of ever requiring skill so it’s pointless to change it.

Which team did you participate in the most recent dungeon tournaments?

Did any of those players have to play mindgames against the AI?

‘Nerf mindless zerg farming.’

So that we can instead go mindless solo farming, mindless dungeon farming or mindless eotm farming? Nothing will ever stop pve from being mindless.

PvE is incapable of ever requiring skill so it’s pointless to change it.

Imagine for a moment, that channelled skills went on full cooldown when interrupted and thief had an interrupt with no cooldown at all, thieves might never worry about being hit by channels again. :D:D:D:D

The whole point of PPT is to match servers with similar populations, not to be a competitive scoring system. PPT play hasn’t died, it was never alive to begin with.

sephiroth.4217:

this is a troll thread right?

Reverse psychology.

White knight harder.

I don’t remember the exact number but I had a look before to determine which of the trait unlocks you are objectively better off buying rather than unlocking. I determined that around half were absolutely no question, you are guaranteed to be better off buying it, and about a quarter were borderline, only being worth unlocking if you were already going to do the content regardless.

“Guardian has everything” except a reason to use it in tournaments. =D

I wonder what would change if blasting fire fields gave area fire shield.

Grimreaper.5370:

A good player will not use their instant skills in a way that will easily be predicted.

Correct, but a good opponent will still be able to recognise when and why that instant skill is being used and predict it anyway. In the end, it depends on which player is able to out mind-game the other. Telegraphed skills don’t leave any room for mind-games. If every game changing skill was telegraphed the only reason anyone would get hit by them is because they ran out of dodges, and you can be sure it would be fairly simple to memorise ahead of time which skills you should save your dodges for.

Chapell.1346:

I mean, i use stealth i stalk them at their back (cos only amateur thief will steal in front of his prey) i wait till stealth depleted and timed my steal and they can evade such insta cast skill? Huehuehue.
where is the element of surprise?

In other words, you’ll do the ‘obvious best move’, get out-predicted and whiff both stealth and steal because it was obvious. That would only work against someone that isn’t aware of that play. I think most people can count to 3 seconds.

The whole point of prediction is that I don’t need to be able to see what you are doing right now because I already worked out what you will most likely do a moment ago.

If you’ve ever played a fighting game at a reasonably competitive level you would’ve already experienced prediction based gameplay. The majority of moves in fighting games are just too fast to react to. You always have to be thinking 2 steps ahead to have a chance of winning such a game. With telegraphed attacks, on the other hand, you don’t have to think about what your opponent might do or even what he is doing. You can just look at the screen and the game will tell you what he’s doing, and if the game has told you what your opponent is doing, it’s also told you how to respond.

http://www.sirlin.net/ptw-book/7-spies-of-the-mind
http://www.sirlin.net/articles/solvability

Menzies The Heretic.3415:

Prediction = skill

Instant casts without animations can’t be predicted. Free dodge baits with WASD

OP has a point

Prediction works because player actions are not random. There is always a reason why any player uses any given move. If you understand why a player does a certain move, you can understand when he will want to do that move.

I play from Australia so me having less than 250ms ping is considered amazing. There are plenty of attacks that should be slow enough to react to that simply aren’t at my latency, but I don’t need the game to tell me what my opponent is about to do. If they don’t match my mindgames, they will tell me what they’re about to do.

I’ve had times when I’ve dodged steal from the same thief 3 times in a row. That isn’t random dodging; I knew he wanted to use steal on me when I pressed dodge. He wasn’t playing on the same level I was and so, to me, his instant cast steal was as easy to see coming as a pve mob’s attack.

Wouldn’t it be great if, instead of thinking while playing, you could just let the game tell you what to do?!?!?!

Prediction = skill.
Reaction = not skill.

There should be open field, strategic objectives similar to what’s in eotm so that ppt play in general, defending included, revolves more around actually fighting players and less around fighting doors and siege.

Apparently it’s not okay for a 3.75s stationary cast to be the most powerful skill in the game. >.>

The only problem I have with healing signet is that it’s one of those signets that takes the form:

Passive: Do A Thing.
Active: Do The Same Thing.

This is boring because one of those effects is invariably better than the other. In this case, the passive.

Death perception is not even close to being the reason why an organised wvw group would run a necro. It’s certainly good, but I wouldn’t even call it an auto-take, let alone overpowered.

Really there should be more sources of player detection, not less. The easier it is for players to find each other, the more fights there are. I’ve seen the obs sentry turrets used for that purpose in eotm before, but being eotm the resulting ‘fights’ were fights in name only.

Blackie.3912:

It’ll be like 5 points per kill. Get over it. Not that big of a deal lol. Dying isn’t that big of a deal, it takes 30 seconds to get back out there and rek someone else.

5 points per kill would mean your entire team across all 4 maps only has to make 9.23 kills per minute to get more points than permanently holding 695 ppt.

Berk.8561:

…I’ll throw myself into a fight that I know I can’t win just to see how long I can stay up and to make things more interesting for my opponents. I’ll charge into a fight outnumbered or I might stay in a lord’s room when the wall goes down.

I like the lack of any sort of death penalty in wvw for exactly this reason. PPK would make avoiding dying at all costs a superior option in a large number of cases, which is the last thing you want in a pvp mode.

If they really were mindless, you could walk all over them with even a mediocre organised group 1/3rd their size.

Get better at zerg-busting.

The only open field area is north of needle, which has the randomly respawning autocannons of doom.

Better AI is just an illusion. All AI is programmed to lose. If they weren’t, they wouldn’t lose. Nothing you do with the AI will fundamentally change how people kill them.