(edited by DiogoSilva.7089)
How to counter the most overpowered gimmicks in this game?
With mindless spam. In this specific case, aoe spam.
But attention: if your opponent is good at playing a thief, they’ll dodge away to somewhere safe and then burst you down once your skills are under cooldown. You can always do nothing, if you want, and wait until they take over half of your HP again before you can even see them again.
They can burst you instantly.
If we exclude their instant burst skills, especially their two arcane utilities, elementalists’ skills are very telegraphed. Dragon’s Tooth and Churning Earth are two of the most obvious examples. They also have some of the most distinct animations, so there’s a large difference between a Lava Font and a Meteor Shower or a Flamewall.
Something like the Necromancer’s staff skills are the opposite.
With the amount of passive pets, passive trigger effects and the like, what is the community’s opinion to fix them? Will it require a revamp to the core trait and skill systems, or will simpler tweaks to each of them do the job?
GW2 will just keep evolving to eventually become GW3 they say.
Unless they’re planning to go as far as revamping some core systems to fix or improve several issues with this game, I can’t see this.
I can also confirm this. About half the matches I’ve played have been on temple. I do get other maps frequently, and sometimes even twice in a row, but temple is by far the most frequent map I play on in soloq.
Not that I mind.
Why play well if all you need to win (in soloq especially) is to spam and pray? Pray, yes, that your team has more op builds than your opposing team. It’s currently very easy to predict who is going to win and lose before a match even starts, purely based on builds.
When 2 mesmers, 2 eles and 1 warrior face 2 necros, 2 engies and 1 spirit ranger, guess what happens.
I don’t think the biggest problem with pvp is the is the rewards. I just came from a match where I couldn’t see anything that was happening in the battlefield. Inbetween the particle effects, the huge amount of pets, and the zergy nature of some matches, it’s almost impossible to see what is happening, and usually the best tactic is to spam even more aoe to the area, spam dodges like crazy, and hope luck’s on your side.
When I want to cc a guardian, I must wait until their crazy stability spam ends, and I must watch the UI and all the million boon icons they can have at the same time, while all the crazy stuff is happening.
Then whenever I lose my target, or my target automatically changes god knows why, I must go through tab targetting while I’m getting spammed by stealthed bursts in the middle of laggy explosions of particle effects.
And finally when everything seems to be under control, the number of times where a single characters goes from 0 to crazy amount of boons or conditions in a single second is ridiculous. Suddenly, this naked thief has all boons of the entire game within himself, and so does the guardian. Suddenly, after spamming condition cleansing on myself and cleaning my UI, I get a huge instant spam of conditions from signet of spite.
And what can I do? Take my time reading which icons I have in my UI and then react accordingly? Think strategically? No, I spam more condition cleansing, I spam more dodges, I get eaten alive unless I or my team mates burst my opponents, and most of the strategical details slide through the spamfest.
This is the biggest problem with GW2. Unless Anet suddenly decides to slow down the combat’s pace with an energy/ mana mechanic, it would require a huge work on every single trait and skill to make sure it stops being the spamfest it generally is.
Warriors seem fine at their current state.
That’s more of a balance issue, though.
Fun fact: my entire hurl > air burst, with full hp and without any blocking or evading, just took out 1/3 of a warrior’s HP. Because dragon tooth and fire grab are luck-driven, phoenix and fire circle didn’t even drop the warrior’s HP to half.
I can’t kill squishy thieves with this build (they take over half of my hp before I even seen them), I can’t go into a crowded area (aoe spamfest and stealth bursts destroy me before I can even react), and I can can barely take on a spirit ranger or an engineer 1v1.
Maybe I’m getting worse as a player, but I’ll just have to try a new build. Now, which one should I go for?
It’s overpowered akittens current state, but it would be nice if a toned down version existed across all formats of the game.
As an elementalist player, I feel much weaker in this meta than in the old one. Condition spamming is nearly impossible to deal with unless we go bunker and get eaten by thieves, or we can counter some builds with extreme kill-or-die burst, which is hard when everyone seems to have defense, boons and dodge spam enough to survive that. Unlike thieves, we can’t take most of their HP before they can even react, neither.
The biggest problem is that outside of s/d and d/d there’s little for us. Staff is not even used in team play, where it’s more reliable, so don’t expect it to be competitive in soloq. It has no defense versus burst classes. A staff bunker can take a beating out of a necromancer, but unless you can reliably support your party, it’s just not worth it.
If focus was any good, it could shine in this meta. Plenty of anti-protectile versus engineers and rangers, plenty of condition removal versus engineers and necromancers, and some nice extra anti-burst defenses. To tell you what, I’m really tempted to go focus, considering how appropriate it is for the meta. But it’ll probably won’t work. Focus fire skills are a waste of time, focus water skills are underwhelming and have little to no impact, and some cooldowns are just too high. You can’t heal in focus, so ironically it’s best to go burst, but what burst can you make? s/f fresh air burst + arcanas? With worse aoe, worse cc, less sources for burst, etc?
And it’s not like our conjure weapons offer any worthwhile playstyle for us, neither.
The devs are holding their balancing patch for after the patch. I really hope that when it comes, considering how much time it is taking, it’ll have a decent chunk of balances. Honestly, not only the current meta, but the old meta, were a bit too extreme. I don’t want to see only nerfs to necros or rangers, but to old eles, old mesmers, old engineers, guardians, thieves, etc. Nothing big for some of those, but a slightl tone down nonetheless.
I do think they should “regain” their place when they play again, after being decayed, in the sense that as long as they are motivated to keep playing, they will surely have their win rate fall some, so it doesn’t makes a difference.
But the decay should be faster, imo, at the very least for the people with very few games.
When I first appeared on the leaderboard, I had 8-2 w/l, and was rank 61. After playing a lot more matches, I’m now rank 360 with 16-18, and about to drop even more.
If we look at the top leaderboard players, they are at the top with similar scores that I had in the beginning. 10-1, 9-1, 8-2, etc. But, I wonder, is that an accurate portrayal of their skills? How many of them will keep their ranking after playing twice the games, and how many will fall?
I’ve said it before in this thread, and I’ll say it again: (an evolution of the) dynamic events are still the future of GW2, but for them to not degenerate into laggy, unfun zergfests, Anet will have to create anti-zerg mechanisms. They’ll have to create and polish mechanics that make (force) zergs to spread, especially with event scaling, so as to make sure that each dynamic encounter can be as interesting as a dungeon/ instance/ queen’s gauntlet encounter could be.
The meta event in southsun proves that in an unfortunate way. It’s hard, yes, but is it strategical? Every time I used to go there, when it was still populated, it was nothing more but a giant zergfest of hard-to-see one-hit kills.
Dynamic events just don’t work with zergs. Making them challenging, interesting or fun, while keeping the zerg there, will never work. As someone else said, it’ll either be too easy, or so hard that every player must play perfectly.
A scaling system that forces players to spread into many small groups of 5-ish would be great. Even better if some of those meta events happened at the same time as other meta events do somewhere else in another map, to further spread out the population. An event could spawn several mini-events across a large area of the map, demanding players to go to any of those points to complete an event – or even to initiate it.
Because it would be so much easier to create interesting content if the system can make sure there’s only 2-8 players doing a specific task, and not 25+.
One of the biggest obstacles to this, however, would be (the lack of) pre-planning. A zerg is an unorganized mess, but there’s certainly many organized players within it. Having an event requiring pre-planning before initiating could be a good idea, as long as it could “hand-hold” those player’s organization a bit. Incentivate players to form parties before an event starts. Warn them that they’ll have to spread. Guide each party to different sections of the area. This might seem crazy, but there could be a system that would mark the place of the map where each party would have to go, but no other players outside of that party or outside of a small group would be able to see it. Anyone could still contribute and help, but generally, instead of an universal “go there” orange circle on the map, the system could generate several personal orange circles, guiding the zergs to all sorts of different directions. Before an event starts, players would be able to choose where they would want to go.
“Should I prevent the assassin from reaching the NPC with crowd control, or should I defeat their boss near the cliff? The assassins will only stop spawing if the boss is killed, but the event will fail if the assassins kill the NPC.” After choosing one of the options, each player would be “guided” to their respective place with an orange circle marked on the map, but they could always change their “path” if they wished to. If both sides were successful, the event as a whole would universally reward all players. And if tehre were 15 players, or 20, or 35? The system would scale to create more “paths” to spread the zerg further, in addition to making each one harder with more champions.
And then, in situations where each small group of players could complete their own “personal” mini-event, they could help other players nearby to do the same, until all mini-events were finished. Then, again, the event as a whole would be successful, and it would reward all players involved, and spawn an universal chest, create a new event chain/ sequence, whatever.
Dynamic events need zerg-control mechanics.
(edited by DiogoSilva.7089)
Design flop? I’d say that the elementalist is one of the most well designed classes in this game, just one of the hardest to balance. Many issues with the elementalists now are balance issues, although there’s certainly a few contradictory design decisions for traits. Elementalists aren’t spamming clones, they aren’t spamming stealth and transforming the game into a “fight-the-tab-key” esport, they aren’t spamming skills without cooldown over and over, they don’t rely on passive playing and pet armies, etc. I’d say that elementalists and warriors are the most well designed classes in this game, with guardians close, and I only didn’t put Guardians up there, because I feel their virtue system’s is sometimes a bit more spammable than it should, or sometimes lacking some impact or just plain unexciting (passive aegis every 40s). (I don’t know enough about engineers or necromancers to talk about them.)
(edited by DiogoSilva.7089)
It needs to happen.One would think that investing in defence traitlines would be the way to become tanky,or the offencive lines the way to dps hard.
No sir Anet disagrees.Do that and you ll burst or heal half the time compared to someone who invested in arcana..
Makes sence,doesnt it?
Elementalist players have been asking for this change since forever. It’s the most logical change to make for elementalists. But Anet hasn’t done a thing so far. Fresh Air is a niche trait that only affects scepter builds, but regardless, and ironically, it demands at least some arcana.
I’m not sure what Anet thinks about this matter, as they haven’t said a thing. Maybe they want to make sure that each traitline offers a completely different and unique playstyle from each other? I’d say that, in this specific case, it’s just not working well. Besides, arcana has plenty of good traits for attunement swapping and for boons and boon duration. It would offer an unique elemental-dancing playstyle EVEN if that change were to come in.
As of now, the heavy base costs and the huge difference the cooldown stat makes are only crippling and restricting the class.
“Base attunement recharge: 16s ? 13s.
Attunement Recharge Rate: Nerfed to half.” I like this.
This is the single change that elementalists need the most.
Boons are already very important to eles, so it’s not like the stats from arcana line are going to be useless with that change. And it’ll still be viable even for attunement swapping builds duo to the traits that support that playstyle.
With the way the current attunement’s cooldown is set, there’s almost no reason to NOT use arcana. Not even traits like fresh air help at that, first because that would be a bandaid to the problem, and second because, ironically, fresh air has good synergy with arcana (especially its 5th and elemental attunement).
This change alone could probably create a new type of ele bunkers, with 20 in earth and 30 in water. Rock Solid bunkers with protection auras or auto armor of earth. Although earth does really need another (or a stronger) way to get protection, or else elemental attunement does its job better than the entire trait line, lol.
This might sound heretic, but maybe elemental attunement could be moved to 25th. It would be a direct buff to 30 arcaners (not exactly needed) and staff elementalists (cool!), but a direct nerf to everyone else (yeah, it does sounds like a bad idea), and have earth trait line offer the most reliable 10-point trait protection. It just makes sense. If anything, 10 point arcana eles would benefit more from extra toughness and condition damage than boon duration, but that’s IF the base attunement recharge was shorter, of course.
Finally, about Dragon’s Tooth, I like the idea behind it, but it’s just too unreliable. Churning Earth works better because it can be lightning flash’d, its area is bigger, etc. I wouldn’t mind if DT dropped slightly faster for slightly lower damage. That, or the scepter could get some extra support to make it hit. 3s gale, and maybe a shatterstone that could chill. Even some form of torment could indirectly help.
Base attunement recharge: 16s → 13s.
Attunement Recharge Rate: Nerfed to half.
With this change, 30 arcana elementalists should remain unchanged, while non-arcana elementalists will have faster attunement cooldowns. It’s a very simple change, but it would open a lot of new possibilities to any build that doesn’t requires boon duration, like Rock Solid Buffs.
Another thing elementalists need, is a tweak across all several minor traits. Especially earth’s 5th, which is underwhelming and doesn’t works with Lingering Attunements; air’s 5th, which has little to no impact; and possibly all fire’s minors. Also arcana’s 25th, but Renewing Stamina should be toned down (and the same applies for all vigor-on-critical traits), and Elemental Attunement tweaked for 3s of protection (instead of the crazy 5) and 3 stacks of might (instead of just 1).
Staff’s radius spells should be naturally higher, especially #2 skills. Staff’s trait shouldn’t be as required as it is.
Scepter needs some bug or funcionality fixes on dragon’s tooth (which deals no damage if the ele gets disabled) and fire grab (which has clunky hit detection, same applies for lightning touch). Shatterstone and dust devil could get some buffs. To not make burst scepter eles too strong, arcane utility skills could become more predictable (half projectile speed for arcane blast; delayed damage for wave) with 5s lower cooldown each to compensate.
Staff needs better protection from burst classes. Maybe a radius damage on burning retreat’s starting animation, to punish melee opponents; and maybe blinding surge applying blind while channelling versus a single target, before it blows off (take blind out of its last effect). Buff unsteady ground’s damage per hit, and maybe Shockwave could be aoe like gust (too powerfull?).
About focus… :P That requires something larged. Have Fire Shield last for 7s instead of 5s, and it won’t still be that great. Buff flamewall’s damage per hit, while having it apply several seconds of burning without stacking. Freezing gust could be aoe while having a lower cooldown (15s?), gale could last for 3s and do something else. Comet needs a buff somehow.
Earth focus is fine, but I have a few creative suggestions for it. Have obsidian flesh half own movement rate, but remove one condition per second. And remove condition removal from magnetic wave, and add a pushback. Why a pushback? For D/F, it’s going to be a useful tool to interrupt foes. For S/F, it’s going to be an interesting tool to keep foes at range.
Swirling Winds being a smoke field would be… interesting.
In a crowded area, with enough self-defense, tornado is decent. Certainly not elite-worthy, and very conditional, but it’s cool to spread burning and other effects within combo fields while giving a chance for a valuable decap.
With Blinx’s Soldier’s build, Tornado is a surprisingly useful elite to use at times, especially on the temple’s gate.
Just nerf burn damage and how condi power affects it and nerf bleeding damage, how condi damage affects is, and how it stacks in intensity. Look we have a semi balanced meta now. But anet wont do it because this is a pve game
And because it would be bad balancing. Tell me, are condition guardians or condition elementalists overpowered? Elementalists especially have access to both burning and bleeding. To you see them rocking the pvp meta? I don’t, neither.
The problem with conditions in this game, and to a lesser extent with boons, is one: spam. Spam, spam, spam. It’s the ability to fill your entire UI with icons with little effort and little to no cost. When you get burning, bleeding, torment, fear and poison all in your bar in a matter of seconds, there’s no strategy, it’s a pure spamfest.
And this issue won’t stop by nerfing necromancers, because it was already a problem before the current meta caricature. It’s an inherent problem with GW2’s combat system, which doesn’t punishes skill spamming enough, and it’s a problem with the trait system, which relies to much on adding even more conditions and even more boons to existing skills or even passively.
Weather effects/ seasons, and having to use the torches at the darkest nights (add to it unpredictable and dangeours enemy encounters) would be pretty cool. Exciting gameplay and excellent world immersion.
This game made the impossible… I think this is the first MMO out there where a character built exclusively for damage dealing is considered “team contribution” and someone who builds for support is considered selfish… I truly am amazed of how did things turned out for this game.
It’s because Anet’s attempt at removing the holy trinity roles didn’t work.
I like how it punishes critical/ zerker builds, but having it affect condition damage could be beneficial in this game, as it would give an alternative way to counter conditions outside of cleansing. It would make counter playing more interesting.
I’d say that being free to leave four times each three days is a bit too nice for leavers. In GW1, people who left a second time couldn’t join anymore, which was fair, even though the debuff lasted for way less time.
Are you in charge of leaderboard decay? Because it needs to be speeded up. People should start dropping after maybe 3/4 days of not playing.
3/4 days would put a lot of stress to players. I agree it’s a bit too slow, but I would probably make it last for seven days. Playing at least once a week seems a nice balance to me.
Seems many of us share the same opinion: an expanded version of the dynamic event system can be the future of GW2 and the living world content.
I agree that having a story cutscene/ instance at the beginning of the new content was great. Adds to the experience and world immersion.
Thinking that berzerker gear is the best does not make us elitists or speed-runner lovers, or else we’d all be zerker warriors. I’m an elementalist myself. If I cared about speed running, I wouldn’t be one.
It just so happens that this game’s pve balance is beyond broken. Anet needs serious balancing and content changes to fix it.
PVT gear? Good for tanking roles, which do not exist.
Cleric gear? Good for healing roles, but healing power scales poorly and is poorly supported by this game.
Condition gear? Restricted by caps and other factors, or else it could rival zerker.
Control builds? Defiant makes them useless, and outside of it, only a single stat helps them: condition duration. They’re better off with zerker gear.
Support builds? Boon duration and healing power only affect some forms of support, not all, and aren’t generally needed because a group can stack boons and mitigate all damage.
(edited by DiogoSilva.7089)
Yeah, it’s clear that dynamic events didn’t have that permanent impact Anet originally wanted them to do, and thus why the Living World concept was born. But to be perfectly honest, I feel that the next evolution of the living world concept is… guess what, the dynamic event system itself.
This is how current dynamic events usually work:
1. A trigger activates them;
2. Objectives revolve around “renown heart” fetch quests to scout guarding, and the area gets marked in the map;
3. Once the goals are acchieved (or not) by the community, three of the following consequences happen: a) nothing; b) trigger a new event, as part of a sequence/ chain; c) create or destroy something in the world (the “illusion” of an ever-changing world).
So, all or most of those steps can be improved.
Step number 2 can demand, as I suggested, more exploration (“find x” goals NOT marked in the map = this is key), or generate unique challenging and strategical enemy encounters worthy of a dungeon (something that the open world definitely lacks). Each of them would improve this game’s experience, which is currently driven by “go to that place marked by the map” and “kill x mindless enemies”. Another possibility is a story-driven scenario, with ambushes, betrayal, epic sieges, protection, dillema within killing choices, etc; which would create more interesting open-world scenarios too. Plenty of potential untapped here.
Step number 3b can benefit from an improved structure, and it would go along well with the more story-driven events. I suggested the narrative structure, with a beginning, a climax, etc. A non-linear story can be told, world’s lore can be expressed through dialogue, exploration and gameplay, etc. Some of this already happens in-game, but it’s a bit shy and lacks impact, maybe because lore-driven events lack that structure or maybe because gameplay encounters and the event sequence as a whole are not unique enough to convey the experience intended.
Step number 3c, as I said in my previous post, can be done by having event cycling contribute to the build up of something that would takes days or even months to acchieve, instead of instantly building or destroying something the moment it is completed. And, of course, each time they would cycle, there would be a system of sorts that would generate different encounters to keep each cycle diversified. This would incentivate entire guilds to stay in one area for a few days to build a city from the ground up, and then remain there to defend it, maybe even being rewarded with the city’s ownership and tax control thanks to their contribution in building it. And then, as more time passes (for example, a week, or a month), the system would generate invasions tht would scale in difficulty, until it was nearly impossible to defend it, activing a new set of events revolving around taking it back, and if still unsuccessful, by preventing it from being destroyed, or by building it back whatever was destroyed and preserving whatever was not. It could go as far as generating events to strenghten the structures of the city, almost like a WvW simulation versus PvE mobs. THIS would be an example of an ultimate dynamic event system, and if GW2 would ever to acchieve this someday, it would be ground-breaking. I believe EverQuest Next is trying to go after the potential this sytem might have, which was left untapped by Anet, but Anet has the years of experience and code, so if they decide to go this route anytime soon (if they haven’t already), they’ll certainly still be ahead of time.
And finally, as I also said in my last post, it’s how the events scale. Not only by adding more enemies (not always a good idea), or by adding champions (which is cool in context of the new reward system), but by spreading players. Not spreading in the “let’s zerg this event, and swamp the next one, and then the next one” kind of way, but “spread! if we don’t complete the three around the same time, bad stuff is going to happen!”. So if there were over 25 players in an event, the event could very well generate 4-ish ou 5-ish smaller sub-events that need to be completed at the same time, with the difficulty adequate enough for that many players. Imagine a champion in each of those small events. :P It would force players to play really well.
Queen’s Pavillion encounters are more interesting (Am I seeying weakness and cripple in my UI?), but if there’s one thing that this new content patch proves, is that it’s just nearly impossible for anet to make challenging content for a zerg. It just doesn’t happens. A zerg is always mindless, but more so than that, there’s problems with screen cluttering and lag. The best option is to have that zerg spread – to divide that zerg in several categories. Let’s call that “zerg control”. :P Anet needs mechanisms for “zerg control”.
(edited by DiogoSilva.7089)
I believe there are several issues with how Living Story has been handled, but not all of them are due to the content designers, but due to the limitations of the dynamic event system and the combat system.
People have already expressed clearly enough in his topic how they want to see the living story improved. I feel that GW1’s Beyond content was better at the living story concept than GW2’s own content patches. My wishes are:
1. More cutscenes and story-driven gameplay instances (why is all the additional lore information posted in the official site, while players get to know little or nothing about the characters in-game?)
2. Replayable story that is not under a clock. Really, Anet, you SHOULD introduce a Mission System like GW1 had. This way, new players don’t miss the story from old patches, while any player can replay it whenever they want. Add in an hardmode version for the more dedicated players, and you would appeal to a lot of people. Missions in GW1 were an excellent system for linear story-telling, for story-driven gameplay sequences, for replayability and for team-driven content. This, in my opinion, was always a fault with GW2 since the very beginning.
3. Make Tyria exploration more exciting. There’s no enemy patrolling the area, no strategical enemy formation teams, no unpredictable hard encounters. Explorying the world of Tyria does not expresses danger and the excitment that would come from it, because it’s so clearly structured and predictable. There’s a dangerous enemy there? It’s labeled a champion, so if you’re not in a party, just ignore it. Anything else? Trash mobs that can be easily beaten. Improve the unpredictability, improve the diversity of encounters, turn each encounter more unique, and Tyria becomes a more exciting place to explore. And of course, with good rewards there, and people will surely do it.
However, I feel there’s some faults with the dynamic system and with the combat system in group-play combat.
The dynamic system is cool, but needs to be expanded: it needs to incentivate more adventure/ exploration (by having players explore the map and look for goals that are NOT marked on the map), it needs to have a better structure (beginning, narrative development, climax, ending), it needs some more non-linear elements outside of winning/ losing consequences, it need to force players to spread out to not fail (especially in zergy events, have the system generate many small and distinct sub-events within the area that the open-world community must complete around the same time or lose – this way, you can prevent them from becoming mindless zergs), and they need to have more permanent impact. But how would they have a more permanent impact when they can cycle every ten minutes? Maybe by not having an instant permanent impact, but by building up something more permanent slowly. For example: a swam of dynamic events that revolve around building an entire city from the ground: depending on the non-linear choices, players would decide the placement of several houses or areas, or be responsible to which areas get harassed by enemy encounters or not. This massive sequence would cycle several time a day, but it would not revert the situation each time it would cycle: it would build upon it. So for example, if an event cycled 100 times per day, three days after, an entire city would be build, unlocking a different kind of dynamic event, one set to destroy that very city, and would cycle 100x times a day, each cycle reshrinking it until it completely destroyed it three days after.
Expand the dynamic system so that they contribute to building a situation everytime they cycle, across the several days, instead of building and destroying a situation every single time they cycle. And then have each cycle bring unique gameplay elements that would be generated by the system, depending on non-linear consequences. This way, players building an entire city from the ground wouldn’t need to repeat the same gameplay sequence every time the event cycles, because the enemies generated, the strategy behind the encounters, etc, would greatly vary.
The dynamic event system is the future of MMORPGs, imo. But the current system is still an infant, it still doesn’t differs much from a traditional quest system, outside of being more streamlined. There’s so much that can be done to make dynamic events have more impact, or create more unique scenarios, or contribute to world’s exploration, etc. And, in my opinion, the living world team should take existing areas and try to improve how they are played, besides the current generic “go there, do heart, go somewhere else, get the wp” system. I feel that the southsun content patch was a first step in that direction, but it was restricted by the very own limitations of the dynamic event system.
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No, it’s not.
I just edited my post and linked the same thing. I suggest you read it.
Range and damage have far higher priority than defensive stats. That means that if you run a dps warrior and a PVT guardian in the same team, the boss will probably hit the warrior far more often, making the PVT gear pointless. It’s even worse if someone goes with a ranged PVT character. Likewise, zerker ranged characters shouldn’t even require much skill, which makes them more noob friendly.
I used to think like you, but after one year of playing GW2, I just can’t find a cooldown-only or energy-only system to be better than an energy+cooldown combo.
If you make skills conditional, it’ll lead to auto-attack spam whenever the conditions don’t meet. What would be the alternative, removing auto-attacks completely? :P Adding several different auto-attacks for more diversity? The later isn’t a bad idea, but it’s an even better idea if there’s different costs behind those auto-attacks. And if other skills are better than auto-attacks at any situation, even if they are conditional, players will spam them over auto-attacks – they won’t just hold them waiting for a perfect opportunity that might very well never happen, with the exception of specific situations.
Resource-managing also adds an interesting “mini-game” that allows combat to remain strategical EVEN when skills are simplistic (like they are in GW2), EVEN when enemy encounters are simplistic, etc.
But you’re right when you say that it’s natural for us to impose testes solutions instead of finding new solutions. I can think of a few different solutions. For example, Churning Earth and Hundred Blades (in PvP) are very interesting skills because they’re high-risk/ high-reward skills – using them comes at the cost of movement.
So what can I conclude from that? That skills are more interesting when they are flexible but come at a risk, than when they are conditional. The former skills can be used at any situation, but require skill. Conditional skills are usually spammed (if they’re better than auto-attacks), or ignored except in niche situations (if they are not better than auto-attacks). GW2 is filled with the former kind of conditional skills, and the later kind are cool but niche – they fulfill a purpose, but it would be boring if the entire skillset worked like that.
And what does an energy system do? It add a cost to skill usage. A cost that is independent of time restraints or conditional effects. An energy system is a very universal and proven-and-true formula to make skills more interesting without making them all conditional.
No, it’s not.
Well,… the vast majority of the player base is constantly dead because they THINK they know how to play in this gear…
The vast majority of the playerbase is constantly dead in dungeons regardless of the gear they have equipped.
Unless everyone is running zerker… See the thing is, usually you have someone in tankier gear…which is not zerker…pulling aggro. Kinda negates the whole argument, right?
Aggro is determined by range and damage. That means that whenever a zerker is in trouble, they can just fall back for a few seconds. There’s also no way to reliably pull aggro, or else you would see tank roles in this game, which do not exist.
No build diversity? And then you listed WvW? Are you even playing the same game I am? Like….seriously?
It was implied that I was talking about PvE.
I’ve seen warriors drop dead in CoF P1 speed runs on almost every single run I’ve done.
I’ve seen every profession in any gear drop dead in this game. With so many one-hit or two-hit kills, it’s perfectly normal, even for characters with defensive gear. But at least DPS geared characters can deal more damage.
(edited by DiogoSilva.7089)
And enemies can’t kill you if they’re dead.
Also, ideally, different stats should be used for strategical choice. Not only to help some players survive.
You….just said it was terrible.
I said the endgame meta is terrible, which it is. It’s shallow, has no build diversity, and revolves around dPSing and dodging red circles.
But there’s more to GW2 than its endgame. WvW, PvP, bi-weekly content updates, etc.
GW2’s endgame meta is terrible, and is trashed for its dps-zerg-fest in every non-gw2 community.
And you play it……why?
Because I think GW2 is a good game regardless of its flaws.
The problem is that people believe there’s a defined “good” vs “bad” in these decisions. That’s incorrect. What’s “good” for “me” and “my” goals. Might be “bad” for “you” and “your” goals. Trying to shove near-religious gear beliefs down other players throats is just ignorant and immature.
Defiance is a fact, not a belief.
Condition capping is a fact, not a belief.
Poor healing scale is a mathematical fact, not a belief.
Power x Precision x Critical Damage scales better than any other stat in the game, this is a mathematical fact.
Every single content can be beaten regardless of stats, this is a proven fact.
DPS gear beats content faster than with any other gear, except for players who have trouble surviving. This is a proven fact.
Roles are not required. This is intended by Anet, as they themselves have said so.
Yes, it’s your decision to pick worse stats if you want them. It’s fine, really. Each player can do whatever they want. But zerker gear is mechanically the best gear for the game at the current state, and this will only change when (if) Anet decides to change how several of the mechanics of their game works.
It’s not a near-religious gear belief, because I don’t even like it. GW2’s endgame meta is terrible, and is trashed for its dps-zerg-fest in every non-gw2 community. It’s a flaw in the game that should be fixed.
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No, in my opinion at least, the problem lies in the games inherent design.
- No healer
- No tank
- Focus on DPS
- Little control mechanics
- Little support mechanics
- Long cool downs on anything non-DPS related
- Defiant
- Unshakable
- Product of Crit + Prec + Pow is higher than Product of Tough + Vit, or Cond + Cond duration
Exactly.
If roles were required in this game, people would pick different gear stats for each different role.
But the system isn’t flawed, the player’s logic is. I never run with zerker parties and I’ve done every dungeon just fine. Nothing in PvE requires zerker gear(or any other stat combo for that matter), the players do.
Nothing requires zerker gear, you’re right. There’s a choice between going for a more optimal build or a less optimal build. There’s a choice between picking underpowered weapons and the better weapons. There’s a choice between picking bad traits and good traits.
But there’s no flaw in player’s logic here. Quite the contrary. It’s the most logical option to pick zerker gear. There’s no logical reason to do otherwise, with the exception of extra defensive stats for the players that still have some trouble surviving.
You can even go naked and do fine. But if players don’t want to pick you because you’re naked, don’t blame the players logic, because they’re doing the most logical choice.
Just what you want, an undergeared player in a level 48 fractal because his main is geared and at that level too
If a player has farmed 48 levels, chances are, they’ll know how to finish the content. What you describe is more common within average players than with hardcore farmers.
In my opinion the real problem is that most people just want to rush through the content as fast as possible rather than sit back and enjoy it. I like that so many groups advertise that they only want people in zerker gear, it tells me who I don’t want to play with.
It has nothing to do with rushing. I play with zerker gear because it’s better, but I still “sit back and enjoy it”.
There’s a large difference between people who want to “sit back and enjoy it”, and people who want to pick weak stats. I know, I know: people enjoy build diversity. So do I, especially as a big GW1 fan. But this game’s design does not treats all builds equally. So don’t blame the players for “rushing in”, blame the systems. It’s the systems and the mechanics in place that discriminate most non-zerker builds.
MF Gear was just wrong. Anet realized their mistake. Account-bound mf gear will be much better, as it’ll allow you to diversify your farming experience through several characters, while having them stronger than they would be with MF gear as well.
Also, what has MF gear have anything to do with the problem with the zerker meta?
Do people know that the devs have expressed they wish to add the portal mechanic to other professions? It’s probably what will happen once we get access to new utility skills across all professions.
It doesn’t makes sense that Mesmers are the only profession to get one of the most important mechanics in this game. This does not happens with any other utility in this game. If you are a Mesmer, play it if you like the illusions, the trickery and the butterflies. But portal should be treated like any other utility mechanic and exist for more than one profession.
I’m not sure why fractals is character-based, but I do know that it forces me to use my main there. I already don’t farm fractals much, so my fractal’s level isn’t very high. I wouldn’t dare to level up an alt there.