Fun fact: This thread has more views than most of the recent patch notes.
My actual newbie friend, unlike the hypothetical newbie you’re all advocating for, doesn’t care about any of that stuff yet. Because she is a newbie.
The trait unlocks annoy VETERANS. WE the VETERANS want a little bit of change in how the traits are unlocked for OUR alts.
The new unlocks system doesn’t affect newbies because they are TOO NEW. They’ve got plenty of other stuff to learn about the game. And in the case of my friend, the leveling system seems to be helping her learn about the game in paced increments without overwhelming her.
This is not about newbies. It’s about veterans. Please keep the arguments about how the trait system affects veterans. There are plenty of valid arguments about how the trait system inconveniences veterans.
Except it isn’t. Most veterans have the skill points and gold saved up to just eat the cost without any problems. It’s a hassle, and a cost that’s really high for those interested in a lot of crafting, but not unreasonable.
And your anecdotal instance of one newbie you know not knowing or caring as a means of dismissing other evidence is not adequate. I’ve recruited over a dozen people to this game since the trait change, and not one of them has stayed for longer than a week after reaching level 80 (or even if they got that far) on the basis that this new system denied them the ability to properly play/build their character when desired because of the overly-high cost of purchasing traits and the difficulty or simple disinterest in doing many of the tasks.
You’re “one newbie friend” might only be accepting of the system on the sheer principle that they do not know about it. Otherwise, it’s a massive deterrent and many newer players are actively disgusted with the system and are not coming back for more because of it entirely.
There is clearly a lot of negativity aimed at this system from both new and veteran players. It’s overwhelming. I’ve also never met a player who saw the new system as an improvement, either, or a new player who felt like being locked out of traits/utilities/elites was better for his experience because he felt overwhelmed.
There’s no adequate defense for this system. It NEEDS to be removed/reworked for the benefit of GW2 in general. If you support the game and its health, you support a change. Defending it doesn’t improve or negate the reality of a genuinely bad situation.
Thread TL;DR:
A couple of people argue with many, many, many logical fallacies and far too much anecdotal support for their radicalized views about the current status of the effectiveness of certain gear types and diversity within fully-optimized PvE dungeon strategies, and whether the concept of optimization is toxic, interspersed so often by ignored, genuinely high-quality posts which actually address the real problems pertaining to the subject and prove said arguments futile.
This thread is seriously pointless as it’s gotten nowhere and will never get anywhere as mentioned by many of those previous intelligent posts.
Vote for thread closure.
They should just remove stats from gear and traits entirely or make everything Celestial.
Then everything comes down to your own skill and what skills you bring along with you.
No more “Must be zerker”! Now it’s “Must be good”!
That idea won’t fly. If there’s no diversity, people won’t play the game.
I play these games to build my characters in very specific ways. So far in every MMO I’ve played over the past decade, I’ve either been accredited with creating the “next best build” or have created and play it long before it was popularized by someone else.
By removing diversity, you seriously reduce the number of interested players, especially veterans, who wish to change their characters to better reflect the roles they wish to play. I know that if everything was changed to celestial, I would not even log in upon reading the announcement and would just uninstall the game as a whole unless reverted. Not to mention that this game was sold, hyped, and marketed on the sheer principle that it offered more diversity than pretty much every other game out there.
As I’ve iterated in many of my previous posts, meta strategies come from a game system being figured out like the parameters to a function, and from the optimization of those parameter inputs for the highest possible output. To get rid of a metagame? Infinite parameters (physically impossible), or one, in which case there is only one strategy to build the meta off of – which itself is counter-productive to the goal seeing as the goal of eliminating meta-strategies is to remove the single-optimized output, thus accomplishing the exact opposite of the goal in mind.
I go into further detail in this post of mine:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/This-Meta-has-to-end/page/18#post4621524
this discussion feels meaningless
Meta = optimum play style dont means zerker even so it is in most cases. Buff a gear a new Meta will come.
I feel more ppl come here to look for a shoulder to talk about there bad dunguon expierence where they be kicked for comming with non optimal gear .
I myself had the worsed runs with non meta groups not bcs they play bad but bcs they dont understand the encounter and blameing ppl very fast for dying in a fight which would be over in 2 min with meta team but 15 minutes in a non meta where I was the only zerk and other proudly posting there Cleric gear and telling me to tank as a Guard…
So all in all Meta or not all we want is fun dunguon encounters whith interessting boss mechanics and a lot movement.
Do we want a certain class in a certain gear to do a dunguon? No but this is what could happen if we force anet to make more gear types be meta.
then u get your 20 minutes waiting for a Normad Ele and a Condition Guard
You sir are one of the few who seem to understand this concept and that why the problem lies entirely with dungeon design being based solely upon draining health bars; if dungeons weren’t only about killing fast, then we’d see pretty much all complaints stop.
There should be deadly shortcut methods created to allow for tanks and support players to get their party to bypass the content in the same time as it would for a full-DPS party to kill their way through. Some encounters should require say, a monster or boss to be required to be at low health rather than killed and then tanked for a period of time such that all berserker all the time may struggle and need to reset from accidentally killing the target. There are many systems that could be employed here as a resolution to encourage more diverse play.
If berserker was truly a game-breaking meta strategy, it would be universal to all content types. I assure you that WvW and PvP do not depend on berserker builds, and that in many cases, full-DPS is sub-optimal in both of these formats outside of very, very niche builds and strategies.
The lack of swords promotes smaller scale groups to be able to attack objectives without having a huge blob rain down on them, unless the enemy sets scouts in locations to defend. Any server who has a lot of dedicated wvw’ers already know the importance of scouts, and not waiting on swords to pop, due to many groups attacking a location and 30seconds being in it by the time a sizeable force is set to respond, unless a scout calls over voice comms the enemy, #, and if the enemy is dedicated with siege or not. (Also those scouting do know how to divert most the attacks by use of siege to defend with.)
Now what the swords removal does is havoc groups who run 5-10 deep, will have a chance to attack a location which has no scouts and not have a group of 30-40 run in on them. So it is promoting smaller groups (most refer to as havoc.) into running around on maps, and giving them more of a chance to get into a tower/keep if the enemy doesn’t set scouts.
As for finishers, you have a free one by default. (So it doesn’t force people to buy one.) You really just buy them if you don’t want the standard finisher. (Or you can earn them in game.)
As for PPK, this is something which interests me. I am curious to find out if PPK includes counting those who alt+f4 once downed.
No swords can allow for this to happen, but that’s only if the strategies employed by defenders in WvW don’t change to turtle harder to prevent this from happening. At that point it can only make running havoc even less effective than normal.
For finishers, I appear to have mistaken the term for the paid ones.
Lol. Guess I’ll go foruming elsewhere depending on how bad it gets.
Whoever called the shots on this is probably the same guy who calls the shots about everything else; it’s disorganized, rushed, unnecessary, and seemingly illogical decision-making with no interaction with the community to alter the course of development.
If this change was actually about ANet wanting better readability on their end, they’d be modifying their own back end view and only that. To say it’s out of the scope of possibility due to software limitations is a lie by the web systems admin/web developers. That is, unless they’re truly inadequate at their jobs and don’t know how to work with raw data and coding alternative systems.
This is being done to make the forums look more active and hopefully bury the massive threads like the Trait thread which put a glaring spotlight on massive problems which have been blatantly ignored by the past 8-9 months.
And of course, it’ll let employees blame the fact that there are too many threads being moved around too quickly in a given section to allow them to reply to the really important topics, as those will be buried rather quickly before being re-raised.
I’m impressed by the fact that the company dynamic is currently utilizing lazy design as and policies a vessel to further allow for more laziness and enforcement of lazy policies.
Stuff
It is indeed exactly so. The time is not wasted because it is used to relax but the only way the game experience is relaxing is for it to happen in a very specific way.
That way is to obtain a high number of good rewards in a short amount of time. If that doesn’t happen the experience becomes lacking. I like spending time performing this activity when it happens on my terms. If it doesn’t then the time is not so well spent. So that’s why when in game I take every precaution so things happen the way I want them to and that my goals are achieved.
Additionally, I’d read up on Skinner and Konorski and evaluate what you just wrote in response – frankly, it seems to me that your definition of of fun/enjoyment is derived from the effects of operant conditioning in an immediate reward-driven lifestyle.
I am familiar with this and this is mostly correct. Is this a problem?
Also your proposed solution about the meta – while theoretically viable – is not something Anet will implement since they’ve pretty much abandoned the dungeon-side of content already. Their dungeon team is dissolved. The dungeons themselves rarely see fixes let alone overhauls.
Simply put there’s no interest in doing it since it would only touch a presumably small segment of the player base.
Thus, by asking for anything but changes to the dungeons or labeling a fix as attempting to remove a metagame by removing the ability for players to optimiz (I.E., diversity), the problem does not get resolved and simply affects other players in an equally-negative fashion.
Frankly, if GW2 does not have any kind of dungeon team and has nobody working on the dungeons/permanent story/creating more permanent content, they simply deserve to lose business by those who are uninterested with the way the game is playing, seeing as there’s no reasonable alternative. Changing numbers does nothing to solve the problem and only creates more possible problems in other game modes and styles of play.
I’m not saying “Deal with it because I like berserker gear/believe it deserves to be the dungeon PvE metagame strategy because skill” as some have, but merely stating “deal with it if they’re not changing dungeons to actually solve the problem.”
The bottom line is those are my 15 minutes and I’d rather not waste them regardless of how unimportant they seem to you.
…
Again – let me make myself clear – it is not wasted time since it’s time I’m spending in order to relax, burn stress and make sure I can perform other activities at 100%.
If you want to understand more about what I’m trying to explain feel free to whisper me.
Right, so if you’re enjoying yourself and relaxing, and the time isn’t wasted, why is this a problem? You break it down with quite a bit of scientific jargon and carry overall an air of attempted intellect, but all I read from this is that your enjoyment stems solely from the basis of being rewarded by making optimal use of your time through tangible/concrete rewards for performing a given task, and that you wish to complete these tasks as quickly as possible for the maximum reward.
Not only is your post simply contradictory when you mention that the time isn’t wasted and that you like spending it performing this activity, but it’s also indicative that the only way it isn’t wasted is when you’re being rewarded, which mirrors some of the latter points in my previous post.
Additionally, I’d read up on Skinner and Konorski and evaluate what you just wrote in response – frankly, it seems to me that your definition of of fun/enjoyment is derived from the effects of operant conditioning in an immediate reward-driven lifestyle.
Back on topic, the problem still lies not in the stat allocation and distribution among equipment sets and their effects in combat but in why the optimization of certain strategies creates metagame strategies. Metagames are literally optimizations – abstract optimizations – or games within games – which define the “best” methodology of approaching a given situation based on a desired output yield; due to the fact this is an optimization within a confined environment, if variables change, that optimization at some threshold is guaranteed to also change.
And it can only change, not be removed altogether.
This is asserted in that in order to create a situation where there exists no metagame strategy, the ability to create an algorithmic solution to an associated problem must be removed. This implies one of two things:
Either there are infinitely many variables allowed to influence the problem (impossible due to programmatic limitations when examining computation theory and algorithms),
or
Two different algorithms perform exactly identical operations despite being differently constructed (a paradox; similar to 1 = 2).
So how are metagame strategies better removed? Well, by simply attempting to increase the pool of available variables to create the illusion that there are infinitely many, or try to approach infinitely many as best as possible.
Therefore in this kind of context, optimization adjustments to just raw numerical data will not affect much, for the variables are pretty much figured out.
So adding more – or simply changing – the number variables is what needs to occur.
So in TL;DR/simple speech, the dungeon design needs to change, since the algorithms of how to solve the problem have been figured out, and running some numbers is all it takes to tweak the dominant metagame strategy into a new one, merely moving the problem somewhere else, and we’re back at square one. By altering the dungeons to allow for the incorporation of more variables, the metagame requires much more effort to re-establish due to more complexity and dependencies on the differences between human interactions with the content.
(edited by DeceiverX.8361)
It’s a two-way street in a lot of regards.
Usually the whispers come from people who have just been killed by a really cheesy spec like P/D perplex thief and similar builds, while many other of the rages come from people playing these cheesy specs who just suck and refuse to believe they got bested.
Frankly, I’ve noticed that the number of angry whispers often declines the less cheesy of a spec you use and how well you play it. I get TONS of whispers when I play my thief, and almost all of them are relatively positive usually regarding how I achieved my damage numbers/build advice/play advice to make my build work.
Ultimately, being the better person diffuses a lot of rage, and some of the folks who get ragey can actually be nice people. We’ve all had our off days where we die a lot and scream “BS!” at the monitor. Sometimes you catch people at the wrong moment. If they don’t cool down, well, then they’re just jerks, and you can simply block and report.
These changes are disgusting.
PPK promotes passive play and is overly-punishing to new players which only raises the toxicity in the WvW environment by condemning death/trying to fight and learn.
Bonus PPK for finishers – Seriously? You’re demeaning an entire game mode people drop HUGE investments into by making it P2W? SERIOUSLY?
No swords – Are you nuts? All this does is promote bunkering/camping zones to keep eyes on a given blob or group versus actually doing something. Organized groups now have to be focused on defending/keeping an eye out for attackers instead of being able to use the map to get pseudo-scouting. This is an attempt to promote aggressive small-scale play and ultimately the countermeasures needed to defend against it are going to punish it in reality.
I’m absolutely disgusted by the total lack of insight they’ve presented. Yes it’s temporary, but I can say that I will be resigning from WvW for that period because simply it’s why I play the game and I refuse to support joke “events” which modify the actual core mechanics of the game negatively created and designed in poor taste.
Honestly, I don’t think its the gear: it’s the dungeons and content need revamping. Also need new dungeons.
Literally and entirely this.
The mythical “berserker meta” ONLY exists in dungeon PvE. ONLY. Conditions are so wildly OP in the other formats natively that the only reason they’re not as widely used is because of the fact that so many builds are used on the basis that they need to dedicate a huge quantity of resources to conditions just to be able to deal with them. With conditions being a binary form of fighting, either you have solid cleansing and you hard-counter conditions, or you don’t, and often times you just straight up lose. If conditions weren’t so potent and so spammable, we’d actually see a RWEN meta in WvW – yes, rangers – instead of GWEN, seeing as guards would have almost no use aside from some stability and general group support to cover a few eles.
Why not sPvP? Again, huge cleansing emphasis due to the potency of controlling conditions, and that a lot of condition builds just don’t really work at all for the format for various other reasons.
Open-world PvE? I mean it really doesn’t make much of a difference…
Trinities solve nothing but create new metas and move the toxicity to alternative demands, and implementing new things to buff the rest would have adverse effects on the rest of the game where berserker gear already is considered to be sub-optimal and very far away from the meta. Again, it just moves the toxicity around.
Dungeons designed around utilizing strengths and weaknesses of characters and players are what make things equally viable. Consider the Asura fractal level – some builds can facetank right across the poison gas and make the whole thing go by WAY faster. More of these types of designs focusing on tanks and supportive builds need to be intentionally implemented such that tanks and support builds can have a definitive purpose in dungeons.
5-8 minutes matter to some people. They matter to me.
If I wasted 5 minutes on each dungeon – provided I ran 3 per day that’s 15 minutes a day. That’s one hour every 4 days.
Assuming I played GW2 for about every day since release ( let’s say 350 days/year) that means 7 days – 7 entire days of my life wasted by slow dungeon runs.
It is a lot.Also it’s not just the fact that the runs are slow – but wipes and taking a long time personally kill the experience for me. There’s no enjoyment in doing AC p1 in 30 minutes.
I really dislike these kinds of analyses despite the fact I do not in any way endorse any kind of stat normalization as it will not solve the “berserker meta” problem in any way, shape, or form.
But realistically, what activities would you otherwise be doing in that 15 minute window per day? Presumably, not another dungeon run, and presumably, nothing optionally productive which when performed for 15 minutes has a real impact on your life.
I’ve taken the liberty of using a few examples from my own life:
I mean I can park further away from the store where there are obviously open spots and walk into the store faster than trying to find a parking spot closer. So give or take around a minute there.
Okay, estimate I need to go to only on average one place per day, so a minute.
I could not hit the snooze button every day since I ultimately have to get up every day, 5 minutes later, anyways.
I could not take the elevator and use the stairs since it’s often faster than waiting on it to finish servicing other people. With the amount of floor-moving I do, that’s at least five minutes per day.
I could drive proportionally past the speed limit using back roads to get home slightly faster instead of using the more common ones. We’ll say two minutes each day.
I could take a shower for around three minutes less per day comfortably.
So we’ll take 5/7*365 – 14 = 232 rounded down for one sick day.
Or around 62 hours.
So around two and a half days per year are spent on things pertaining to my typical life which could be totally avoided. That’s quite a bit of time spent doing absolutely nothing. Over the course of say, an expected 40-year working period, I can expect to waste around half of a year – nearly the same as an entire year of college-level education – doing silly little tasks that aren’t really enjoyable or productive.
But the thing is, what else would I fill that time with? All of those blocks are miniscule.
I’m not going to make leaps and bounds in my career/field because I don’t take an elevator. Time is linear, and for our understanding and applications, it’s an absolute measurement, but it’s also relative to the span of a much longer period.
So I ask, what would you do in the meantime, and how productive is that time really going to be? Are there things out there which your time spent on your slight “excess” of play time GW2 is interfering with? If that’s the case, why is GW2 interfering at all with those activities? You shouldn’t be playing GW2 at all during that time if those should be taking precedence, seeing as the game in itself – what playing games are is conceptually – is a meaningless and insignificant waste of time. And if there are none? All that implies is that you’re merely stating you’re simply wasting time during your GW2 time, which in all honesty, if that’s the case, get over yourself, because like I said, this is a game, and it’s designed as all games are, to effectively be a waste of time.
Regarding the berserker meta, no trinity can solve it, because the trinity is in itself a metagame strategy used to efficiently clear content. No normalization can solve it either, unless all diversity is removed, since people like the above quoted will still exist and will still pursue to optimize meaningless amounts of time regardless of context, anyways, still keeping the toxic aspect of it alive.
I’ve said it countless times and I’ll say it again: the problem lies in dungeon design, not in gear/diversity.
They rip off pretty much every major title out there. From what I saw early on of these ads on some sites (ABP now catches all of these), the text used in the game’s logo was identical to that of LoL’s. Literally the same rustic gold serif font copy-pasted from the “League Of” portion.
The studio/game appears to be a pretty hefty scam on a lot of other popular games in the industry.
What gets me is that the designers have time to make videos of the content that’s coming up but do not have the time to discuss and fix important aspects of the game that require reworking.
I still think, the best Anet could do here is giving:
Thieves: Offhand Swords, Torches, Longbow, Crossbow, Staff, Axes and Maces, Whip
Rangers: Offhand Swords, Staff, Scepter, Focus, Halberds , Crossbows, Whip
Engineers: Hammer, Maces, Crossbow, Torch and some new Inventions like Electro Shocker, Freeze Gun, Vacuum Gun (Get inspired here by crazy weapons from Ratchet & Clank!!)
Warriors: Torch, Great Axe, Halberd, Main Hand Shield
Guardians: Great Axe, Halberd, Main Hand Shield, Offhand Sword, Longbow
Necromancers: Greatsword, Whip, Halberd, Sword, Offhand Axe, Maces, Torch
Elementalist: Sword, Shield, Whip, Torch, Longbow, Greatsword
Mesmer: Offhand Pistol, Rifle, Whip, Warhorn, CrossbowI think that are the best iconic choices for weapons each class should receive, besides of the point, that each offhand weapon should become for all classes that wield them able to be usedcin both hands, cause it makes 0 difference, if I hold torch in a left or in the right hand, but it would create alot more build varity if those offhand items could be used in both hands. However, eventuely with the limit, that these kind of weapons are limited to be able to be used only once, for certain classes to maybe restrict, which class is able to dual wield those items and which class not.
Example: Dual Wielding Shields should be just only an option for example for Warriors and Guardians, but not for Engineers or Elementalists
Funny you mention R+C.
As I was just about to respond to the person who suggested a giant 2H hammer wrench skin that I have dibs on a character named Ratchet Last Lombax if that occurs :P
Seems like a reasonable suggestion, although I’m uncertain how viable it would be to implement. A client-side handler for adding something like “multi-click cancellation” or something which just puts all actions on a separate timer might make this work, possibly allowing for expand-ability for users to be able to define the length allowed between registered double-click events.
Good luck with the suggestion!
Not a mystery, we know very well how it works. It does differ depending on the mob/boss however, providing more interesting combat than simplistic trinity games.
And because it does work more or less totally random, noone cares about the mechanic.
It fails in matters of teamplay and control. But if you want chaos though, it is perfectly well designed.
I disagree. I strategically drop and gain aggro all the time. It’s a way of making the AI feel more realistic and reduce dependencies on roles as per the game’s core design philosophy while still promoting ways for players to engage and disengage safely and work with that design in mind. Does shouting at something really gain attention in the heat of battle? Not really, no. Does being the biggest threat? Yep. But if that threat is really far away? Well, only if there’s not a similar threat closer or you’re unobstructed.
@Astral, forgot about the LoS thing and ressing. As far as shields go, I’ve never noticed a difference, and conditional behaviors are simply part of the mob’s AI.
It’s based on a few factors:
- Range of player away from the mob
- Each surrounding player’s toughness
- The damage dealt by nearby players
The NPE kind of killed open-world PvE in the low levels sadly to say. ANet’s “test subjects” apparently had a lot of struggles before (which I’ve never met anyone who has).
I want to say the “tutorial”-side of the game ends at 15 or so.
What would I suggest? Well, ideally I’d like to see some new weapons themselves, but I feel that’s unlikely.
In an ideal world? I think the following are quite thematic and relevant.
Ele: Mainhand sword and offhand torch
Engi: Hammer and crossbow
Guard: Offhand mace and offhand scepter
Mesmer: Mainhand focus and pistol, offhand scepter
Necro: Mainhand sword, offhand axe, and offhand sword
Ranger: Crossbow staff, and offhand focus
Thief: Crossbow, offhand sword, mainhand and offhand focus
Warrior: Crossbow
Realistically? I think this would be a start, as the crossbow would probably not be implemented:
Ele: Mainhand sword
Engi: Hammer
Guard: Offhand mace
Mesmer: Offhand scepter
Necro: Mainhand sword
Ranger: Staff
Thief: Longbow
Warrior: N/A
(edited by DeceiverX.8361)
@DeceiverX.8361
What I mean to get at is that the current format for living world doesn’t seem to include a lot of the big things that expansions have, like new races, classes, skills, weapons, maps, dungeons, end game, etc. The format has been far simpler.
Each episode consists of:
- one section of a new map
- a small handful of story instances totaling 1-3 hours tops
- an armor piece OR backpack OR weapon skin
- a new type of enemy
- some dynamic events
- some achievements
I talked about this with Vayne the other day, but I don’t see things like races, classes, or dungeons fitting in to the scope of this format. I can MAYBE see a single new skill OR weapon being added through this format, but it’s unlikely because everyone is just terrified of possible balance issues. It’s sad that everyone ignores the fact that balance can be addressed with further patching.
Races are even less likely because they would need a whole story arc (multiple episodes) dedicated to them, and new animations, and a laundry list of new armor skins to fit their body, etc, etc. These are things that are beyond the scope of a single episode of the current format, and it would simply make more sense to do a whole expansion to accommodate all of it as a cohesive package instead of a hodge-podge of separate episodes.
Like I said, I don’t care whether or not we get this in the form of an expansion. I just want these important kinds of new content which freshen the game experience to happen. There’s nothing stopping ANet from releasing new races, weapon types, skills, traits, mechanics, dungeons, etc. with the release of a new LS explaining the release of content. LS is just lore behind the world. For those who care, they’ll do it. For those who don’t, they won’t look into it further.
That’s what I’m saying. We don’t need an expansion. We just need the important content that often comes associated with them. I don’t need new geography and maps to explain new weapon types. I don’t need new weapons to let ANet give them to mobs to make mobs more diverse. I don’t need new mobs to get new dungeons.
And that’s why this game is getting stale and has been getting stale. So far all we know is that something “Big” is in the future, and so far, literally nothing has happened aside from a few new map chunks which for the most part outside of loot and farming are bad, and some more lore and armor pieces, which for the most part, aren’t very exciting.
It does not take an expansion to properly release new content for the maintenance of a game. Hell, the game I’m employed for in its eight years of uptime has never released an expansion, but has released two new races, eight new classes, upped the level cap four times, six new types of weapons, overhauled entire segments of PvP and the game engine, performed two UI updates, performed multiple skill and stat updates, added over eighty new skills to the game, fifteen new armor set releases over five-hundred crafting recipes doubled the size of the map, tripled the number of available dungeons, multiple game-wide rebalance efforts and near-monthly subtle changes and additions during normal maintenance.
And that entire company has had thirty developers total since the game launched and has a fraction of GW2’s income due to massive player upheaval due to pay to win problems caused by a new CEO’s micromanagement and poor decisions.
So no, an expansion is not necessary. Simply, new content is, however.
So far in two years – a quarter of this other game’s lifetime – I’ve seen only minimalist updates targeting “low-hanging-fruit” fixes which target things like tooltips, some new armors, a few new map chunks, very, very poor attempts at balancing builds, etc.
This is a AAA game with AAA hype and AAA funding. It’s being wasted.
It’s not even that. Nobody cares about how these kinds of updates are implemented as long as they are.
You should care, because how things are done directly affects the end product.
While delivery mechanisms are important and can build hype, the actual content is what matters in the end.
Like I said earlier, its like eating 1 Skittle every 2 weeks instead of treating yourself to a nice full steak dinner with all the trimmings. Anet can’t afford to make us a steak dinner every night, but I daresay 1 steak dinner every year or two is far more satisfying and builds better memories than a monotonous regimen of 1 Skittle every two weeks.
Except this isn’t applicable to a lot of what’s happened.
A better analogy is deciding to eat one meal per day or no meals daily and every so often having a big feast just to keep you alive. Frankly, I’d take the former out of personal preference, but both are pretty equal in terms of survival. But consider the fact that both cases are still unsatisfactory.
And that’s simply it. The way you get fed- be it food or content – is still unsatisfactory in both cases. Simply, ANet is not including enough new content or frequently freshening the game at an acceptable rate. I don’t really care HOW I get what I want – be it an expansion all at once, or a steady trickle, or whatever it is – as long as what I want comes at a rate which keeps me going. For many people, it has been too slow, and they’ve subsequently left the game, despite still loving the game, simply because they feel like there’s not much – if anything – left to do which interests them as players.
Didn’t follow through very much with what was said, but the OP can’t blame ANet for the decisions made to make females wear less.
I’m not saying that the attitude is justifiable, but simply, sex sells. A lot of the design choices are calculated on the basis that males aged between 15 and 35 are the primary demographic which should be sold to, since an overwhelming majority of the gaming community consists of players within those parameters. As a business decision, it only makes logical sense to appeal to the target/largest audience possible and doing so by utilizing hormones as a means of gaining appeal and generating interest. Additionally, it’s far more common to see a woman dressed scantily-clad than males, so the attire (or lack thereof) on female models is to pretty much be accepted as covering less skin. This extends far beyond the scope of video games; look at the low-cut, attention-gaining dresses of actresses at film ceremonies compared to the males who effectively all wear the same thing and show no more skin than say, one’s 75-year-old lawyer.
Am I saying it’s acceptable behavior? Well, I’m not going to take a stance. That’s a whole separate issue and frankly there is no correct answer to it, especially when topics like business and demand come into mind. Biologically we all know what hormones do, and how they affect us, but evaluating basic human decency and the whole thing pertaining to our presentation and expectations in a fantasy setting is nigh impossible. Trying to inspect this kind of behavior and evaluating whether or not it’s acceptable is like trying to contemplate whether or not subjects like prostitution (with lack of STD’s as a variable) and interest in pornography are acceptable as human behaviors, too. Simply, there are infinitely-many arguments both in favor of and against those behaviors.
I’m not going to try and shut down your request, seeing as I choose to wear whatever armor looks the best on my own character, and what others wear doesn’t affect me negatively (anything that would is definitely not within the realm of what is permissible for a T-rated game :P), but merely want to say ANet can’t be blamed for creating their armors to look this way, and that artists and designers shouldn’t be bad-mouthed for it, as a lot of it is calculated to generate profit and make the game marketable, and a lot of it is merely cultural (and usually the number of artists often favors females). Blaming them is the equivalent of blaming any given company for any given thing based upon the morality of their decisions rather than with the interest of monetizing and running their business successfully in mind. While ethics are a big part of business, and only focusing on monetizing is often a bad strategy, using this particular issue as a means of labeling them negatively is a bit of a stretch and ANet shouldn’t be singled out for its choices and decisions regarding it since it extends far beyond the scope of ANet and has for such a long time.
(edited by DeceiverX.8361)
It would have to be on opening as someone said since the loot scales with character level.
Why? because unless the drop tables are identical in size for all levels as this just calculates a set of random numbers and looks into a database index for your item ID to give to you.
So if the databases weren’t the same size, it could lead to some pretty massive problems without code made explicitly to handle each level, which would also require major updating to the code which handles this, which adds a ton of extra complexity and inefficiency to the game in general and require a ton of additional maintenance, while adding even more unnecessary bookkeeping and strain on the back-end hardware since every bag would need to have a permanently-assigned ID within it for its corresponding item. This would also mean that depending on player retention and acquisition rates, storage capacity of this data would possibly need to approach infinity.
Pretty much everything in computer science points towards the bags merely referencing a function/server event which calculates which item to ship out upon item destruction.
Not to mention that bags farmed before the implementation/release of new items can drop said new items, which pretty much proves that the bags do not hold the loot they contain upon acquisition.
Superior Rune of “Soon” – First one Achieved through LS episodes.
1.) Allows you to discover a second Superior Rune of “Soon” “when it’s ready, but we promise it’s big.”
2.) Allows you to discover a third Superior Rune of “Soon” “when it’s ready, but we promise it’s big.”
3.) Allows you to discover a fourth Superior Rune of “Soon” “when it’s ready, but we promise it’s big.”
4.) Allows you to discover a fifth Superior Rune of “Soon” “when it’s ready, but we promise it’s big.”
5.) Allows you to discover a sixth Superior Rune of “Soon” “when it’s ready, but we promise it’s big.”
6.) "Rune of “Soon” has been cancelled and all Runes of “Soon” are removed from equipment carrying them. Allows the player to unlock ‘“Rune of “Soon” II’ after another six months."
Repeat with Rune of “Soon” II and Rune of “Soon” III …
There’s no doubt they are working on “stuff”, and not just minor things.
People need to keep in mind that GW2 isn’t a traditional MMORPG. It’s always trying to be different. This was the same for GW1 also.
People are seeing this with the wrong perspective. GW2 updates the game in non-traditional ways. So far, it hasn’t updated the more traditional things, such as new races and classes. There has been new zones, pvp maps and eotm, etc., in a more traditional way though.
The problem is, we haven’t been given any future to look towards for the game. There isn’t any long-term investment that players want/need. That’s the real issue.
It’s not even that. Nobody cares about how these kinds of updates are implemented as long as they are.
I don’t need a new map or story to get new weapons and skills and traits. The gameplay as a whole is getting stale, especially with the very poor balancing and game design decisions made in the past.
While delivery mechanisms are important and can build hype, the actual content is what matters in the end.
The cemetery next to DR would only need the swapping out of a tombstone or two for a really cool memorial.
I support this.
(continued)
So what is meaningful content? Simply put, it’s content that has a permanent, definite effect on the game and re-defines what is considered “normal” every day.
I’m not one of those who really wants or feels the need for a geographical expansion, especially since the player-base feels to be at an all-time low, and I don’t think spreading people out further is going to help anyone. What I want is new content within the scope of the existing stuff. Have the game balance team working on balance with say, new implementations of weapons for different classes in mind, or simply release a pile of new weapon types. Get the artists drawing and building these, the animators making new combat and idle animations for them, and programmers implementing them.
Then get LW and those in map design to work on re-worked dungeons to help bust the PvE metas and the implementation of some new ones. Programmers with a background in AI can try and perform some monster and boss updates within the scope of these, etc.
The game doesn’t need what’s necessarily new content as much as it needs substantial upgrades and freshening up of the old content. People are simply desperate for something different. It’s why huge numbers of people move to LS when it’s released on day 1, but feel the same way they did before the release the next day since they’ve exhausted the new content for the most part. Nobody’s discrediting the work put in as much as where ANet’s priorities stand.
You guys want to feel respected? You want to feel like your voice is heard? Dish out!
This game takes money to run, and it’s exploding with content built with the money players have invested in the game. Not the money spent to buy the game; that money paid off ANet’s pre-dev debts. The money spent in the gem store is keeping the game alive.
Yeah, you can play free forever and that’s awesome, but if you play ALL THE TIME and you’re feeling like you have nothing to do, then maybe you DON’T have anything left to do and it’s time to play two games instead of one.
I stopped playing the game for about 6 months. When I came back I was SO behind everyone. So many fractals levels, so much ascended gear, everyone has tons of gold. There is so much in this game I’ve yet to complete I don’t know when I’m going to catch up even though I’m playing obsessively again.
If you feel like there is not enough content in the game then WOW! That means either one of two things:
1. You rushed through the game. You brought this upon yourself. Rushing through the game is a fast track to boredom and burnout. Don’t believe me? Go get on a free private Aion server that has speed-leveling enabled and see how anti-climactic and underwhelming your game experience becomes.
2. You play the game way too much to be healthy and it’s time to cool it down. Take break and do something else every once in a while.
If you’ve been playing the game since launch you probably have wads of gold and tokens in your wallet and you could feasibly enjoy this game without ever having needed to spend real money on gems. In other words, some of you have been playing this game for over 2 years for the low low price of $60. At the current life of the game that comes out to $2.25 a month. If you’ve burnt out all your time on GW2, it’s time to spend money on a new game to play while you’re waiting for new GW2 content.
This game takes MONEY and TIME to create. If you don’t feel like they’re chugging out content fast enough, first off you’ve gotta be joking me. Second, try and commit to spending a little money on gems as you are able, and encourage others to do the same.
You don’t have to spend any extra money to enjoy this game, but if you want MORE game than you already have, then SOMEBODY is gonna have to open up their wallet.
[/justsaying]
Since you feel the need to white-knight for ANet:
Many of those complaining about content or lack thereof are not those who have not spent anything but those who have spent the most. I’m certain that my bill for this game has extended at least triple the amount I could have spent on say, WoW in the last two years. Simply, the paying customers are upset because their money seems to be going nowhere.
Also note that GW2 built so much hype that it profited before it was even released, since ever single player on day 1 spent $60 or more. $60 is close to what Blizzard can expect to make in the lifetime of a given player based upon drop-out rates and the overall in-game lifespan of the average MMO player.
I think you’re mistaking content and meaningful content. I assure you that this game shipped with an absolutely immense amount of content and detail, and that while a lot has been released since the game’s launch, not a lot of meaningful content has.
And quite frankly, a lot of what has been released as “major content updates” has ultimately been terribly detrimental to the game, such as the NPE and trait “rework” which have threads about them which have views into the hundreds of thousands with thousands of replies demanding that the system be reverted, reworked, and/or simply removed because it’s absolutely terrible and has been nothing but detrimental to both new and veteran players alike, and has costed both ANet and the players a lot of money and a massive number active of community members. Remember that we’re in an MMO. It’s a combination of both publisher and player responsibility to keep new players interested and playing. The core systems and overall population of the game seems to be in a very good place in this regard. Frankly, ANet has been failing on many fronts to properly implement changes and find new engaging content for everyone to enjoy.
I don’t think “Adult” is the right word for the topic OP is trying to portray. I’d say that “Substantial” is a better word.
You look at the Order of Whispers storyline up through the assault on Claw Island (not to give away any spoilers) and cast of characters, and it feels excellently done. What happens there (although if one really thinks about it, is not necessary at all) is frankly the only time in the story of GW2 where I genuinely felt attached, engaged, and as though a particular character close to the PC had a genuine story which kept me engaged and attached to said NPC.
The story doesn’t have to be all bad all the time. Actually, making it that way would be rather dreary and overly heavy-handed. Do remember that Tyria is in a constant state of war against Dragons, and that the PC is the hero and s part of a genuinely strong group of individuals. That said, story elements do not often reference past events or interactions as well as they should, and the relationships between entities appears to be quite thin throughout.
Frankly, the prospect of good and evil is a rather “childish” concept in its entirety., and one of what I believe to be one of the biggest caveats in the GW2 universe. Emphasizing the gray areas of stories and making the player feel as though they have committed a wrong (or done a true good for the world) leads to a very dynamic and interactive way of getting them involved in the world. I DM for a Pathfinder group and recently put my party in a position where at the beginning they wanted to kill a particular “enemy” NPC from their past adventures. They were assigned by their faction so to speak to clear a cave of bandits of an enemy faction. By the end, they realized that they slaughtered many non-combatants and people with real names and identities/stories, and were effectively rescued by their “enemy” who was affiliated with these people (how is a long story). With the realization that they were given the task to blindly kill innocents as a test of loyalty, the party had no idea how to respond and was faced with a very difficult decision on what to do and who to side with when asked to reveal what information they knew about their own faction, and demanded to make a commitment to the new one.
Simply, a “good vs bad” method of storytelling through interactive media always struck me as quite linear with little room for expansion and done so for the purpose of simplifying things as though the audience would be incapable of making a difficult decision or carefully planning their decisions to reach the best one for them.
I’m here because my guild of 200+ active players is now about 5. They have moved to other MMOs, console games, what-have-you. I usually stay out of forum threads because I find arguing on the Internet to be the least productive thing I could possibly waste my time doing. The experience of this specific thread, when taken as a single narrative, is telling.
I just sat down and read this thread from start to present. There is such … animus. Resentment. Frustration. There are hundreds of people trying to say “we do not feel respected.” There are a bunch of illogical things and ad hominem stuff, which I simply read and moved on. As a former community manager for a different software company, I appreciate the difficulty of the position Gaile is in, and am glad a few folks are at least trying to spare her from their venting. She personally assisted our gaming community a few times in GW1 and with a delicate problem after GW2’s launch, so I wanted to publicly affirm I have deep respect for her efforts in what others have pointed out is a “no win” situation.
Marriage counselors will tell you that the fastest way to destroy a relationship is by building resentment. The most effective way to generate resentment is through non-communication. The most passionate supporters of this game are right here, in the forums, trying to elucidate their frustrations and disappointments. The resentment is even stronger because not so long ago, the community was told (paraphrasing): “we know we need to communicate better and we will improve.”
Promoting Gaile to interact with forum users was a great first step. Now, to the management team at Anet, give her the tools to do the job effectively.
I was a product manager for a different software company with a similarly-sized user base that was just as demanding of information about updates. They also had an incessant wellspring of cool ideas (some practical, most not), and our management team worked for years to figure out how to balance being competitive in the marketplace, not over-promising, and never under-delivering. And fantastically, other companies had already solved this problem! And existing GW2 customers have been asking for it; cautionary roadmaps and development progress updates.
On a two week sprint cycle, I was able to author blog posts monthly to keep my customers up to speed on what cool things were in the pipeline. These included feature overviews and video demonstrations, even with code still in production. It is not risky. We were publicly-held and our customers and shareholders were delighted to have access to and input in the process. Customers were also able to react early when something was clearly going to miss the mark, so we had the information immediately available to pivot. (I don’t know if your team follows Lean, but it’d be the same in most Agile environments).
Our end result is that our stagnant subscriber base grew by just over 125% in the first year after moving to this method of customer interaction. The second year saw nearly 200% growth.
It only takes a few hours of competitive analysis to demonstrate the successes of game development houses that are effective in this area. In this thread, some great examples have already been pointed out by unhappy, passionate users.
Any organization can choose transparency and customer collaboration. It takes courage at the executive level to make it happen, but myself and thousands of forum posts are (electronically) screaming at you guys to take that step. You will be rewarded with happy players, a vibrant and dynamic community of supporters, and increased sales through the cash shop and people pushing their friends to return because the environment has returned to the health and excitement present pre-launch.
Absolutely nailed it. I work as a CM for another MMO, and this is precisely what keeps players willing to stay and return. Those who berate Gaile don’t seem to understand she is not a developer and not in charge of what can be said due to confidentiality agreements which if broken can cost her her job. The bottom line is that execs need to hear this information, but sadly enough this is so difficult to do in this industry for whatever reason. It makes me upset that games after games fail on the basis of a lack of interaction, and that upcoming content is so frequently referred to as “top-secret,” as though a random surprise is going to garner more appreciation than paying attention, building some hype to fix the real issues and interacting, and then EVENTUALLY delivering the desired content after further interacting and refining the idea to perfection.
5 seconds is a long time.
So I will agree with LF berserker necro, as it will undeniably yield the highest damage throughput in that long of a period.
Otherwise, FA ele followed by D/D stab thief.
You’re operating under the assumptions that diversity comes at the cost of balance and that players here would rather have 100% balance than any amount of diversity. Let’s examine this assumption further, as I’m going to have to disagree with the assumption that the majority of players feel this way. In fact, most of those which do have already left on the basis that the game is not balanced enough for them/is too diverse and subsequently is imbalanced because of it, meanwhile the community is even more vocal about the lack of diversity that exists as a result of metagame strategies for certain goals.
Most of the complaints stem from metagame strategies that are the result of players looking to optimize their playing efficiency through the eploitation of the most powerful tactic.
And as far as I can tell, diversity is on some level why we’re all here. Otherwise we’d all be playing online chess or checkers instead since it has no diversity between players.
The irony also being that Chess and Checkers have meta-strategies and have already been “figured out” so to speak on the basis that any given game can be decided based upon the players knowledge of the game’s systems and strategies, not so much by his opponent’s.
Conversely, games with even more variety often have more balance to them due to the sheer number of similarly-effective strategies amplified by the nuances that action-based gameplay brings which permit number-crunching to be less impactful on gameplay. This is very apparent in the e-sports MOBA scene, which has absolutely incredible diversity within the scope or meta of the game (and infinitely more beyond that), but ultimately packs vast quantities of diversity through new characters, interactions, etc.
Simply, as more polarized strategies, character builds, etc. become apparent and moved into the spectrum of viability, the less forceful coercion there is pertaining to making players pick certain builds or roles. As options gravitate towards each other in regards to their similarities, then ultimately it makes the “best choice” much more apparent and easier to determine, ultimately counter-acting efforts to create a balanced environment on the macro-level.
(edited by DeceiverX.8361)
The variety is what keeps me playing, frankly.
If I’m the same as everyone else, I’ll have no interest in playing the game any longer.
I support more active play. That’s why I also prefer the new Adrenaline. Though I support a longer delay before it decays but prefer the fast decay since it makes play more active in regards to using the skills.
That said, Banners and active skill effects need some changing, although imho there’s not much that can be done here without making it a straight-up nerf seeing as if a war just got those effects while being able to retain its weapon skills while moving/dealing damage, it’d just be crazy strong.
Quite. Yes, they can achieve said goal, but not within a timeframe even remotely close to the optimized/meta group.
And again, this is mostly the case because said encounters are designed with that trinity (or whatever meta the game developers envisioned/realize people play) in mind.
Thus, the distribution of effectiveness of different builds and classes within a given game which is relatively balanced is dependent almost entirely on the encounters created and not the actual classes or gear combinations themselves.
I would genuinely shave off the extremes. Make zerker-y specs slightly more durable and slightly less damaging. Make bunker builds slightly more damaging and slightly less durable. Etc, etc, etc.
The variance in output / power is so large between builds right now, it makes thinking about what to rebalance nigh impossible.
No.
It still won’t solve the problems people have against the “berserker meta” which usually stem from limited diversity as a cause of toxic play and behavior in the “elite” PvE scene.
It’ll still remain the same way and for those who like DPS, it ruins the play style. Tanks in PvP formats already hit pretty much just as hard as DPS builds on the basis that usually they also end up stacking might awfully well and providing overall similar damage numbers.
For PvE, the entirety of the problem lies on dungeon design, and trying to normalize everyone to be the same regardless of build is a terrible low-hanging/easy “fix” to a greater problem which ultimately would create more problems and more unrest than before.
Stick to the topic, guys… this is about GW2 not it’s competitors.
On the contrary. The antics used by a company often determine whether or not it is successful, and monitoring the competition is essential for understanding good and bad practices to succeed.
If all companies operated in a vacuum, there would effectively be no such thing as competition in business. And with this being a luxury business, offering a reason to stay is much harder, and thus more competitive than anything, so focusing on the competition is absolutely important for the success of one’s company.
If things are genuinely in the works, then all I have to say is a simple dare:
Surprise me.
So far in two years, I’ve yet to be surprised. I know of games released over a decade ago with around maybe 5% of ANet’s staff are continuously doing so to far greater extents.
So far, I’ve just seen the same pattern happen, and it’s yet to really make the game more appealing since the content offered at launch.
BP was overpowered in a lot of scenarios, sorry to say.
The fact I went undefeated in a guild PvP and duelling session my first day in sPvP against people who dumped thousands of hours into their classes, builds, and strategies while playing as a P/P healing power/dwayna build based around blind-spamming my enemies to death and healing back whatever I took instantly kind of demonstrated that permanent blinding effects needed to get changed.
Thief suffers a lot in sPvP because of nerfed skill damage, lower stat scaling, and higher player defenses than in WvW/PvE, making their burst weak and low health pools and lack of defensive options outside of spamming evades require a lot of effort to survive with.
It’s always had some problems, even before the September patch. I’ve yet to have any more issues with it since the post-patch fix than I used to before the patch came out. Using them too quickly together will result in some back-porting, as will lagging at the wrong time.
Well to be entirely honest.
I’d really like to see at the very least some condition cleansing put elsewhere in the class outside of SA and Shadow Return.
Try against a good mesmer without either of the two. You’ll pretty much straight up die.
Hey hey hey, revolutionary thought:
Is it perhaps the professions USING the runes that is broken?Lets see… what enemies usually use Perplexity runes? Oh i know, DP thief. What does DP thief have that makes perplexity runes work so well? An incredibly spammable daze skill (Pistol 4, Head Shot). Then there is mesmers, who also have a few sources of interrupts, alongside their own confusion (they mostly use the runes for the duration bonus). Then there is warriors, they use it for interrupts and to boost a trait called “Distracting Strikes”. Engineers use it due to several interrupts in a single build, in addition to having 2-3 sources of confusion themselves.
Necromancers use it because well, their king of condi and fear is now an interrupt.So, the reason it is being used is more because classes have SEVERAL sources of triggering the #6 bonus.
So what makes the #6 bonus so easy to trigger? YOUR PLAYSTYLE, or should i say, the playstyle of most players out there. Many people (usually the ones who come here to complain, but there are others too), just use every skill they got on their skill-bar and hope the enemy goes down when they finish “their rotation of epicness”.
Now, a lot of people also happen to use weapons with longer wind-ups like hammers, longbows, maces, staffs and scepters. This further causes them to be easy targets.So how do i counter perplexity? I bring condition cleanses, and most critically, i do not panic. If i notice i have 5-10 stacks of confusion, i simply do not take out my shortbow and spam 111111. Because that will hurt me. Instead, i stay in a more defensive set and changes my pace. That’s right, i use slower attacks, and spend more time griding my enemy down carefully rather then going head first and hacking away as fast as i can. However, i also play a ranger, so i can let my pet deal with the enemy while i am somewhat reduced in offensive capability.
People that complain about conditions also need to get it out of their head that they MUST BE free of conditions at any given time. Ive seen people blow 20-40 second cooldowns over 4-5 bleed stacks that hardly tick for 400 damage. These bleed stacks (in my builds case) only last 5 second. So they will not instantly murder you. It will take a small chunk of your HP, but not flat out kill you. Many also spend cleanses on conditions that originate from power builds.
For the longest of time, i played a cleric regen ranger. My pet deals some bleeds every now and then. Bleeds last 10 seconds, but they do less then 70 damage/stack per second. Therefore, even if pet’s CD’s all line up and pet manages to stack 8 stacks, it still will not kill you. It will barely dent you. Yet people use cleansing skills that is also stunbreakers, because of low damage bleeds.YET, when i load em up with poison for over a minute in duration, that has been amplified by Poison Master, ticking for 350+/second, they dun do jack about it, cuz poison is NP.
I don’t recall D/P thief running perplex, unless I’m missing some kind of crazy new meta build that relies on spamming 4 as its only source of damage while bringing no other utility or damage to the table.
Otherwise it’s P/D, which has huge condition access and plenty of interrupts within utilities as well as applying the effects on steal.
The problem with perplexity is that it’s not so much that the builds which benefit the most from them are already OP as it is that the builds which use them apply a lot of condition pressure otherwise. I recently had the pleasure of creating a mesmer build which by itself would be able to cap 25 torment and about fifteen stacks of confusion permanently on a given target. Upon testing, my friend playing a guard i normally can’t even come close to beating on damage-based builds lost every single duel just because of the sheer overload of high-damaging conditions and the incapability of retaliating.
Interrupt-based builds are cool and all, but this isn’t the right way to make them viable.
The “berserker meta” exists only in PvE and only because of bad dungeon design such that the only thing that matters is the amount of health bars a party can drain. There is no “berserker meta” anywhere else in the game but speed-run-based dungeon PvE.
Otherwise, the entirety of the “meta” is based around players simply wanting to spend less time in dungeons since they’ve gotten quite stale and aren’t very challenging.
What needs a re-design are the dungeons themselves to allow for defensive players to be more productive (such as unlocking a brief shortcut, weakening mobs/bosses by passing through an area packing DoT effects only a tank can survive in or a dedicated support player can let their party survive by, etc.) such that the overall time spent within the dungeon remains approximately the same party-wide regardless of kit or build.
And with this of course, can come more challenging bosses, and mob AI needs a desperate improvement to abolish all of the berserker/boon-sharing/stacking seen which makes the dungeons stale, overly-easy, and nullifies the purpose of tankier/supportive players.
I’d like some examples. Remember we’re talking about high-end, fully min-maxed PvE. I understand many games support multiple builds/roles for classes in schemes beyond this (many PvP builds often use these schemes), but this is not about diversity but the direct complaint that the trinity is a better system for including more diversity within the scope of absolutely optimized PvE. I’d really like to see the mathematics behind how a given game managed to make multiple styles/classes able to build and play entirely different roles in various combinations while keeping clear times within around a <= 10% time margin of completion of endgame content.
I sincerely doubt you’ll find such an example, seeing as that would imply there exists a game with no metagame strategies while including the same or more possible diversity on the basis that it has achieved near-perfect balance and subsequently near-diversity. And I know for a fact that is something that has yet to be achieved in the game industry.
There are no alternatives in trinity-based games. I’m sorry, but claiming there is more diversity in high-level PvE play (since that’s what we’re talking about here due to the complaints about speed-runs and a berserker metagame for said speedruns) is absolute BS. Most MMO’s only provide support for certain party dynamics with ONE build or role for each class in mind. To claim that there’s less diversity in what the classes are doing in a given dungeon is a blatant lie. The next time your party gets healed by a DoT party support rogue while your ranger tanks and your paladin DPS’s in any other WoW clone, let me know. I’m an avid Dungeons and Dragons/Pathfinder player, and I can tell you now that the class limitations are terrible for the sake of roleplaying and building unique characters. The fact that so much needs to be house-ruled demonstrates that systems built around class roles become boring and more restrictive.
And regarding player skill flourishing? Why isn’kitten We’re in a meta where glass cannon is the name of the game, which undeniably based upon encounters takes more skill. So why is it not? You guessed it – bad dungeon design. Nothing is punishing to DPS players. It’s not because DPS/berserker is too strong (again, if it was, then berserker would be the meta in more than just PvE), but because yet again the dungeons were made poorly to the point where the difficulty is overcome by simple tactics like wall-stacking.
And that’s the thing. All of those builds should be operating similarly. That’s because that’s how the game was designed. NO SPECIFIC ROLES AND SHARED SKILLS. Yes, you can build yourself towards one dynamic, but your greatsword is still hitting harder on your guard than the staff, no matter how you kit. Do I agree with this part? Yes and no, but that’s a whole other topic and has nothing to do with berserker gear.
And you mention GW1 had a specific builds and a defined meta worse than GW2’s despite the fact it supported defined roles in its combat like tanks, healers, etc. Something something optimizing time for speedruns because metagames are player-defined strategies which optimize time : reward. GW1 wiki describes tanks as taking advantages in mob AI. It’s like they exist on the mere basis that encounters weren’t created well to support a more diverse environment. OH WAIT.
you don’t depend on pre-defined strategies to achieve the same end result
Tell that to the stack in the corner (and skip if that doesn’t work) people.
Again, this has to do with dungeon design and mob AI, not class functionality. Unless you plan on removing all AOE’s and cleaving effects from the game, nothing will change regarding stacking. And even then, it’s also done largely for sharing powerful effects like banners, boon sharing, haste, etc. Again, why is all this done? Because it optimizes performance and reduces time spent on trash mobs/boring encounters.
First off, the only reason the Tank-DPS-Heal triangle doesn’t exist is because there isn’t anything other than DPS, but just like in a trinity game you are supposed to bring the meta, and as the game gets older, this will shift even more as more people settle into speedruns or just quit the game.
The only difference in gw2 is that you can do even less things within a metagame than in a trinity game: If you have a tank, you build and play it differently, making tanky sets useful within a metagame. If you build a nuker or any kind of DPS, you might be looking into DPS items (which may be DoT like conditions, direct damage, or damage bonus scaling with your distance to target, all potentially useful), same with healer or defensive supporter: healing boosts, boosts to prots, or just boosts to spell casting time and spell recharge (the 40/40 sets).
The supposed beauty you keep talking about is that it chains your hands to DPS, even though the core idea was to abolish it in a way to allow wildly different combinations to not only work, but flourish, depending on player skill. Instead you have about two-three builds per profession and that’s it, they all do the same few things. It’s not better than the trinity: it’s even less.
In case you want to see where it leads, gw1 devolved into speedclears as people either adapted to the very very ultra specific builds items ranks and consumables, or quit playing deeming the grind not worth their time. And dead game is dead.
Right. The roles don’t exist because there are no pre-defined types. Every class has multiple build patterns, and can decide to perform a variety of roles. I’m not going to say some options aren’t under-powered or not viable, but frankly, it has nothing to do with the relative power of berserker or P/F/x gear. Hell, berserker builds in most PvP formats are usually underwhelming and are not exactly considered very good, with only a few specific builds as exceptions on the basis that they have no synergy elsewhere as tank stats are simply wasted. Otherwise, it’s not optimizing for the format. Thus again, it has nothing to do with gear, and entirely to do with dungeon design. There is no reward for building tankier, or more based upon support. Therefore, it’s purposeless. And with tank/support roles being effective in other formats and berserker gear being ineffective in others, clearly it has nothing to do with gear but simply that it makes more sense berserker gear is better since all dungeons are about is draining health bars.
And I don’t get the complaints about speedruns. I’ve only ever been kicked from one party because they didn’t agree with my build/class because it was a speedrun. Seems they forgot to advertise it before I joined. Otherwise, I’ve gotten a party for every dungeon with an “all welcome” sign within 30 mins of signing up or making one since I started running dungeons two years ago. Dungeon runners are probably leaving not because of the meta but because dungeons are stale. Which again, has to do entirely with dungeon design.
It’s just a fact that some people fail to understand players looking to optimize their playing time in terms of rewards per time will always create new metagame strategies which clear the content the fastest and will not want anything else.
This exists in EVERY game. The mtagame strategy may not be DPS-only, but there is a meta, and in many cases, said meta is set in stone and often content is designed around this meta to keep content challenging.
But if I don’t want to play a tank or healer, I don’t have any interest in playing. That’s why GW2 is so awesome: you don’t depend on pre-defined strategies to achieve the same end result. Time spent can and will always be optimized, but that’s just how it works. That’s why the dungeons need re-designs; until they are more than just depleting health bars (a measure of DPS), the DPS-based meta will always exist. There will never and should never be a point in time where nomad’s is the meta.
The traditional trinity “roles” do not exist in GW2. – only strategies within the game and the context of what is trying to be performed. Each player is merely an entity built upon his or her own preferences. It’s that simple, and nothing about it should change to enforce pre-defined strategies of roles in the game.
Don’t like the meta? Then don’t speedrun. Don’t like the trinity in WoW or other games? Don’t do those dungeons or don’t play that game. That’s the reason why most of us are here, frankly. It’s that simple.
Again, folks, it’s all about dungeon design.
Okay, so berserker speedrun takes 15 mins on a dungeon, full nomads, a bit over an hour.
Perhaps why not incorporate an area of the dungeon where a DoT effect occurs for a shortcut, but allows for only a tankier player to traverse this environment? Why not improve boss move-sets such that they more frequently hit in smaller denominations to make GC-play more risky and based on getting in and out rather than just bigger, harder-hitting AOE nukes on huge tells?
The fact of the matter is that the berserker meta comes not from defensive gear being too weak but because players want to spend less time grinding dungeons for money/tokens and get more out of their time. Nerfing berserker builds/stats or unifying gear combinations only reduces diversity and makes new metas which does nothing but divert the same problem elsewhere, and thus ruins gameplay for those (like myself) who ONLY play full-aggressive builds and will not continue to play the game if building defensively is required just to stay alive. That’s why GW2 is so appealing: anyone can do literally anything given enough skill and some slight kit adjustments, regardless of build.
There is quite literally nothing that can be done in the scope of gear that will improve the overall state of the game while changing/removing the berserker/DPS meta aside from changing the very encounters themselves. Yes, truly unifying all gear combinations would resolve this, but that’s only achieved because then there exists no possibility of a meta and no diversity.
Tank specs have roles in other parts of the game, most notably WvW and GvG (in NA; EU plays slightly more aggressive builds). In many instances, if you are not playing at least a PTV spec, you will not be considered as a candidate for an elite guild group. There are many, many guilds that simply will kick players for not partaking in the tankier specs designated to them, regardless of performance or skill level.
@Carighan:
Mass cleanses are taken because there are hard counters in both the form of stats and healing effects and no negative status effects tied directly to physical damage, while there also remain boons for damage mitigation like protection and aegis.
Single players can be fodder, but they can also do great things. The number of keeps/towers/camps I’ve personally flipped alone has gotten me a lot of credit on my server as an individual playing for PPT. I’m not justifying solo-roaming, but it is not always meaningless and detrimental. Players who can take camps in 9 seconds are just as effective as some smaller groups, and can take more territory overall in a shorter period of time while not giving a trail towards the enemy zerg or allowing for a RI-removal chain throughout territory for the enemy to take advantage of.
@coglin:
Thing is, prot reduces incoming damage of every incoming attack, which usually conditions are tied to. Protection always negates damage over a long period of time no matter how little the hits are for.
With cleansing and conditions, it’s the opposite; long-duration effects are negated by only quick bursts of cleanses which need to be cleansed only by mass cleansing due to their potency/spammability. It’s the effects such as weakness/vuln/cripple/immob that make conditions particularly deadly in zergs and why they’re taken to begin with.
Perplex doesn’t synergize, though, like say, Scholar runes. It simply defines builds.
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