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You’re not supposed to have everything. You’re supposed to pick and choose what’s supposed to be appropriate for each encounter.
Although personally, I think signets should go in their own slots, as having a skill which is often there to not be activated is a boring concept.
Geez what a bunch of hyperboles. Last time I checked, all classes had at least 25 utility skills, 5 utility slots allows for 1/5 of the total skills available.
Storied instances and dungeons should pretty much always be permanent, period.
I don’t even think it’s okay to remove them then add them back in as fractals. What’s the point? The launch dungeons aren’t going to be removed, what purpose does removing newer ones serve?
I agree with the above poster. Living World = Temporary content is just a bad concept that Anet seems to be having trouble letting go of. You gain little and lose much by removing or altering existing content as opposed to just adding new content with each patch.
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I really like the scenarios described by Nike.2631, and would like to direct your attention to the also brilliant ideas developed by Shriketalon.1937 in his thread To Merge the Personal and Living Stories .
Read it before he is infracted for putting his text into JPGs :-)
It’s really good.Wow. This guy has really thought this out. Some would be relatively easy, and other parts would be much more difficult, but I think it is the direction the living story should take.
Revamping the story mode dungeon path would be the easiest part (they’ve done this for dungeon paths before). Zhaitan now knocks the airships out of the air. Zhaitan is hurt from the cannons, and now the heroic players need to finish him (with Traherne helping) after crash landing. We triumph, but the pact is severely weakened and incapable of fighting any other dragons. Inspired and afraid, citizens of the kingdoms force their leaders to confront the dragons.
As for separating the personal story from the world; it can be done, but there will be risks and trade-offs. That would be a big decision for ArenaNet. But I would like to see an integrated living story in a changing world while still maintaining the ability to go into an instance and enjoy what I’ve missed.
That guy has a lot of good ideas though. I hope everyone takes a look.
I am wholly in favor of that person’s ideas, and have even suggested (with less detail) that breaking the LW into mini-stories and festival events as temporary/recurring content and larger stories as permanent expansions to the PS is exactly what they should do.
edited to reiterate: The thing I find disheartening about this thread is that I don’t think there is enough serious scrutinizing of the basic concepts underlying the “Living World”. People seem to just be blowing smoke and talking about how to improve its delivery when we should be critiquing the concepts underpinning it. In particular, the idea that a Living World is created by having temporary content or frequent changes to existing content.
The fact is- that’s a bad idea, and always has been, period. You lose a lot more than you gain by constantly removing content to make the world feel “living” (which doesn’t work anyway). A living world is created simply by the addition of new content involving new storylines that the players can immerse themselves in. Not only is it unnecessary to remove or dramatically change previous content to get that, it is more detrimental to the game than it is beneficial.
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Well, the idea is that (I assume) they are gradually going to add more skills to the game, and 5 slots hardly gives you room for everything, it just gives you a little more room for experimentation.
A suggestion for scepter auto-attack:
- Make Ether Bolt a projectile finisher.
- Make Ether Blast a blast finisher.
- The Ether Bolt cast by clones would also be a projectile finisher.
- Scepter is the only mesmer weapon without a finisher. Even our underwater weapons have finishers.
- Creates interesting possibilities with glamors, which synergizes well with the Inspiration trait line.
- Adds potential for both AoE and support capabilities in groups.
- Enhances conditions builds without creating a spammy quality to it.
- Gives an alternative (or compliment) to staff as a defensive weapon in holding points in PvP
- The projectile speed needs to be increased or the pre-cast animation reduced, or both.
Cool ideas. More than anything else though, the #1 needs a reduction to its aftercast so the chain casts faster (your last point). That is easily the most broken thing about the weapon, and it is on several other weapons in the game too (Thief MH Pistol).
What do people think about the idea of expanding the skill bar to 12 to accommodate 5 standard utility skills instead of 3? It could help build diversity and helm make combat a little more engaging. They could just move the healing skill to the right of the weapon skills.
Because females are sexy and people.rather look at a hot girl than some random dude .
Lol, this is a ridiculous response. Firstly, sexy is subjective – some people find guys sexier than girls. Secondly, even for people that find girls sexier, that is probably not the reason most of them are playing female toons. It has more to do with generalized aesthetics (animations, armor models, etc.) and the idea of playing an actual character.
Scepter autoattacks across all professions, along with Pistol and Longbow, are weaker than they should be because they have a slow rate of fire for their damage specs.
I think P/P needs a different condition applied on Body Shot, a faster base attack and a decent AoE. P/P could be a nice condition style build for the thief (sort of like the engineer) but it is too compromised with too much single target, limited condition application and slow recharges.
I could see changing Repeater into either a ranged AoE skill or a teleport both of which would help bring it on par with the SB.
Pretty much this. The following relatively simple updates would make P/P much more functional and much more fun:
Increase firing speed of Vital Shot so that it can carry sustained DPS without keeping you starved
Retool Unload to be an AoE cone
Additionally, maybe it would be beneficial to give Body Shot a short duration burn
It’s a personal opinion, but I’m just so against things like player housing and farms and fishing in a game like GW2. Just because it’s a Living World doesn’t mean we have to do all the menial things in the world. I’m supposed to be a hero, a slayer of beasts, defender of Tyria, commander of the Pact…and I’m going to manage a farm??!? I don’t want to be a shop keeper or farmer or zookeeper or fisherman. Am I retired? What’s next? Laundering my armor? Vacuuming my player housing? Entertaining small parties with hors d’oeuvres?
Personalization of the Home Instance is fine, if it shows my progression as a hero. But I don’t want to manage shops or go to market. That’s not what this game is about to me.
As for Player Initiated Events (PIE), I’m all for it. But I’d rather them be adventure based rather than defending a market-bound cart of radishes I grew. Can’t I challenge new hunters to a great hunt? Or spread the tale of a lurking evil in a cave? Or challenge others to a contest of _.
Just because that stuff is in the game doesn’t mean you are forced to do it. It just helps build a simulation style world which a lot of people really enjoy having in addition to being a hero within that world.
THAT’S where all the bad blood surrounding that event comes from.
Simple greed.
And that’s the game’s fault. If it really were more about content than the reward, I’m sure feedback in general would be a lot more positive.Ummm…no. That might be true for some people, maybe even a lot of people, but not for all people.
What upset me about the event is that I missed it, and couldn’t get a clear answer on just what the hell had happened during it. All I got (at the time, mind you) was a confused mess of answers that had me feeling very left out. Did I want the reward? Well, sure, but “missed reward” was hardly on my radar at the time. I wanted the story, I wanted to see what everyone else had seen. There’s always another chance at a reward from something else, but I was to NEVER get to be in that part of the story, and that sucked.
This is why we need a better mechanism to re-tell the story of missed LS events. I had suggested either in an in-game or out of game Lore Book that details not only the history of LS, but of Guild Wars as well. This will also help players who never played GW1 understand the original lore.
But this story telling can’t simply be one paragraph for each LS. I don’t want to see one paragraph introduce roxx during flame and frost and then explain what happened in a few short sentences within the paragraph. The explanation must be drawn out enough so that nothing is left to the imagination, other than trying to recreate the story in my mind from the words written by Arenanet.
Bobbystein, what do you think of this?
It’s a great idea that’s very similar to the ones that we’ve been discussing internally for months now. Here’s the catch: we’re limited in how much room we have to display text inside a UI element, unless we want to allow scrolling. Also, the more words we put in there the less likely most players will read it to the end, and the more expensive it will be to localize once we scale up the feature to include all Living World releases (and whatever other content we decide to reference with it). We have to find that sweet spot where players get the information they need while also conforming to our technical and budgetary constraints. That’s not always easy.
So while I think it’s entirely possible that we can implement such a feature we are limited in how much historical text we can display. But if players are able to “fill in the gaps” somehow, then I think they’ll get what they need out of it. I wish I could say more because I think our current designs are pretty exciting, but we’re just not ready to discuss them in detail just yet.
Regarding GW1 lore in the game, I think it’d be really compelling to have in-game books or some other delivery device to allow players to immerse themselves in Tyria’s history.
Personally, I just think that certain segments of the LS (specifically the F&F and Aetherblade content) need to just be re-implemented as permanent content that function as expansions to the Personal Story.
Other, smaller events can be done as temporary content that works like side stories used to enhance existing lore and can maintain autonomy from the larger story. This can be chronicled in a new UI.
For a Living World, we need:
Seasons
Better Weather Effects
Dark Nights (no, not Christian Bale)
- yes to the above *
Purchasable Real Estate
Player Owned Shops
Player Owned Farms (for Livestock and Produce)
Fishing, Hunting & Farming Professions
- no to the above. this isn’t The Sims or an RTS *
Player-Generated Dynamic Events
- explain *
Player owned housing/shops/etc has been done in many MMOs and I think it’s likely more players want it than not.
Well, I have to vigorously (politely) disagree with the idea that in order to seem immediate, things like dungeons and such have to disappear quickly.
Why? There’s always been a temporal disconnect in dungeons – we understand that every dungeon in the game, in fact, is ‘done’ at this point in time. By the rules of living story, they’d be gone by now. Yet we traditionally suspend our disbelief in these games because we understand dungeons are stories about how we got to where we are.
If there needs to be a compromise, let the new dungeons stay for the whole length of the 3-4 month arc. And then ship them off to a new tab of the UI where we can review summaries of the ‘recent history of Tyria, as compiled by the noted Historian Whoevermacallit’.
With, say, an option to ‘relive our memories’..
I also agree with this. The whole concept of temporary/changing content = a living world is very, very misguided and a notion they seem to have trouble divorcing themselves from. The world will feel dynamic and ‘living’ just by being expanded with new content; you don’t need to waste development resources by removing what was there before (unless it’s to update something that was bad) or force players onto a specific timeline for participating in events.
In fact, attempting to do so carries the potential to cause more harm than good because it means Arenanet is driving the narrative themselves when it should be Arenanet doing the world-building but letting players drive the narrative through their characters.
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For a Living World, we need:
Seasons
Better Weather Effects
Dark Nights (no, not Christian Bale)
Purchasable Real Estate
Player Owned Shops
Player Owned Farms (for Livestock and Produce)
Fishing, Hunting & Farming Professions
Player-Generated Dynamic EventsFor a Living Story, we need:
An In-Game Calendar that lists recurring festival events and distinguishes them apart from the Living Story releases.
Shorter story arcs, more zone-by-zone storytelling and less focus on larger player-funneling zerg events.
I’m a fan of this post. This can all happen in conjunction with larger lore/world updates that are merged with the Personal Story and focused on expanding the world with new content rather than changing or disrupting it through alterations to existing content.
The Trinity is mostly bad. Of course, Guild Wars 2 so far has mostly failed to realize the potential of a trinity-less system. I’m sure they will incrementally improve it though.
I think one of the fundamental problems with the current model is an event-driven framework for emulating an evolving living world. The problem comes from the fact that it’s a bad model.
Consider, the trans-continental railroad which was built in the USA in the 19th century. You can argue that it was an event and I’ll give you that one, perhaps a series of events. But, the key is that it didn’t come and go as, say, a concert would. It came, stayed, and forever changed the lives of many people. I’ll argue that that is how a living world evolves. There is continuous change, but a perception of permanence.
I think everyone agrees that an expansion satisfies the requirements of an evolved game world. A new major story emerges, new lands open up, the are new side stories, new characters, expanded old characters, etc., etc. I would really like to get away from the episodic TV, event-driven model for evolving a LW because it simply fails to model an evolving world. I would much prefer a model where the content of an expansion is delivered over time. Epic storytelling would then be possible in the context of evolutionary change that would engender anticipation rather than burn-out.
I agree with most of this. I can’t shake the feeling that Anet is clinging to an idea that isn’t as sound as they want to believe it is. I will repeat what I said above here:
The LW should not be focused on disrupting the world, it should be focused on expanding it. I think that’s the key piece that keeps getting lost. Unite the Living World and the Personal Story into one upgraded Personal Story concept. Make new instances and dungeons permanent (including retroactively adding back ones that have been removed in some cases). Limit temporary content and alteration of existing content to special events that are disconnected from the larger plot of the game like holidays/festivals and the occasional side story.
You ultimately gain little and lose much by changing what’s in place already versus just adding on to it. I don’t see any reason why you need to dramatically alter zones or dungeons to fit with new lore instead of just opening new zones and dungeons. It really doesn’t make much sense. The narrative of the game should be expanded by Anet, but not driven by them – that should fall to the player/character. Development driving the narrative just results in players becoming disengaged from the world and losing interest in the story through a lack of immersion
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Chris,
What do you and the other Devs think about the idea of having a static server that people are transported to for their personal story? People could play on their main server with all of their friends and participate in the LS, while still being able to complete the personal story as intended. It would also give you guys the freedom to change the world as you see fit, without being anchored down by the Personal Story.
The switch could be something simple like the NPC is the Mad King’s Labyrinth, where talking to him transports you to the Inquisition or Clocktower.
I think this is an interesting idea. Let’s flesh it out some more. Can you give me some more details around your idea?
Chris
It’s an interesting thought, but I don’t think I’m too keen on it. Why? Because the payoff isn’t worth the work – what exactly would this do to fix the issue of the LW and PS feeling narratively disjointed and creating cognitive dissonance?
I really disagree on that, becuse p/p has allways been USELESS and broken.
Erm. No.
Its probably on par with every non-warrior zerker setup. I’m able to string together 3 or 4 unloads for about 7-9k each, sometimes 10 or 11k if I have full might stacks. Id say thats not too shabby.Yeah except it’s not just about how much burst damage it’s capable of. The set is fundamentally broken because it relies too much on both Initiative starvation and the ability to stand still to do even mediocre sustained DPS.
This is a problem that will remain in place until Vital Shot gets a substantial buff.
Last I checked, I can move while unloading. So while I am unloading x 3, I am constantly moving, not standing still.
I do agree, that the spec is fundamentally boring, but not broken. All you do is unload spam, thats it. A buff to something like Vital shot would be a nice wrench into the mix.
By movement, dodge was meant. With unload, you cannot brainlessly damage, dodge, damage. Its a channel ability that takes its full cost at start of channel.
Correct, I didn’t mean you literally couldn’t move, I meant that your mobility and ability to react while maintaining even mediocre DPS is severely restricted.
The only way P/P can function reasonably is as a total burst set, and even then only when you don’t need standard mobility to survive. It is far below par in every other area, including sustained DPS, in large part because Vital Shot needs a significant buff.
Again, the LW should not be focused on changing the world, it should be focused on expanding it. I think that’s the key piece that keeps getting lost. Unite the Living World and the Personal Story into one upgraded Personal Story concept. Make new instances and dungeons permanent (including retroactively adding back ones that have been removed with new triggers). If you alter existing content, make it temporary and only do it for special events that are disconnected from the larger plot of the game like holidays/festivals and the occasional side story.
You ultimately gain little and lose much by changing what’s in place already versus just adding on to it. I don’t see any reason why you need to dramatically alter zones or dungeons to fit with lore instead of just opening new zones and dungeons. It really doesn’t make much sense. The narrative of the game should be driven by the player/character, not by Arenanet. The latter just results in players becoming disengaged from the world and losing interest in the story through a lack of immersion.
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Actually I agree with Guhracie, the level/scaling mechanics in GW2 are one of the top innovations in the game and possibly the best in the whole industry.
The open communication is good for the players and the devs and will serve to benefit the game. This has been needed for a long time and I’m ecstatic that it’s finally happening.
They will get a lot of negative feedback from virtually any change they attempt to implement, but in the end that matters a lot less than having open lines of communication – even through the forum rages thir playerbase will end up respecting them a lot more. So kudos, and I strongly encourage them to keep it going.
I think this raises an interesting question, what do you consider to be “temporary” content, and what qualifies (in your mind) as content that occurs and drives the living story forward it makes sense to have go away, vs. that which remains?
Hi Colin,
I wanted to quickly respond to this, then I will read the rest of your post. Have you guys considered using phasing? Keep the content in the game for everyone and use phasing to phase the world into the different changes that the Living Story dictates.For people that are playing alts, if they have unlocked the last, or most current phase, of the Living Story with a previous character, they have a choice to kick off the LS from the beginning or at the current point in the story.
Are there technical difficulties to this to wihch GW2 and Phasing don’t mix? This would seem to solve your problem of content that should be temporary and content that could stay. It would also fix the problems that are in the game, such as undead in Orr still chanting Zhaitans name when he has been defeated by many.
Thoughts?
Our take on phasing, and why we never did it to begin with is: the world isn’t progressing, it’s just fake progressing for you and the person next to you isn’t seeing it progress simultaneously. One of the biggest things we wanted to accomplish with Gw2 is that the things that happen do matter, they happen for everyone, and everyone experiences them together. This is really putting the social aspect of the game and immersion, above the personal aspect.
That doesn’t make phasing wrong, but if you judge by the above pillar it makes phasing wrong for Gw2. Each design decision we make takes that into account as one of the games core pillars. When something in the open world happens, it needs to happen for everyone, and we gauge everything that way.
Edited to add: This specifically applies to experiences in the open world, and doesn’t mean we couldn’t do things like letting you see moments in time in the past, or experience living world instanced (or “phased”) moments on their own timeline.
I kind of see what you’re saying here but I at least partially disagree- not in the sense that I think phasing is necessary or even the best way to accomplish your goals, but in the sense that I don’t think it’s as necessary for immersion as you think it is to make sure everyone is experiencing content in the same way at the same time. The player has the knowledge of unfolding events regardless of when they do or don’t play through the content. In fact, it’s arguable that you actually lose immersion by disengaging the player/character from the narrative.
What you’re essentially doing is forcing the content on players at specific times and if they can’t participate, forget them. I disagree that that’s good for the game in any way. I would argue it’s much more important to let players experience content on their own schedules rather than force it on them. It also adds richness to the world by letting new players experience it as an unfolding narrative specific to their characters.
Please read my post above for what I feel to be the best way to approach the Living World and the Personal Story, because the current disjoint between these two is ruining the game.
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Wow, a lot of content in this thread already…
Temporary vs Permanent Content
LW content motivates players to log in to experience the content while it is fresh. The time limit on the content temporarily concentrates player activity, which smooths the open world experience (e.g. dynamic events). Once the LW cycle progresses, however, some great instanced content (dungeons, story arcs, …) is essentially lost. Rather than increasing the amount of content available to players, one piece of content is swapped for another. Essentially, this leaves players with the same number of content options they had before, which causes a feeling of stagnation. Though individually small, these portions of LW content would accrue if made permanently available, offering players a greater variety of choices when they have tired of other content.I think this raises an interesting question, what do you consider to be “temporary” content, and what qualifies (in your mind) as content that occurs and drives the living story forward it makes sense to have go away, vs. that which remains?
There is a thin-line between content that drives the story forward, which if it lasts forever feels like the story never really progresses, vs. content that all goes away and ends up feeling like the world never actually progresses. Which releases, and more specifically what aspects of specific releases do you feel were successful balancing content that didn’t remain forever that progressed the story, while simultaneously leaving enough of a mark on the world to feel like the world is changing an evolving?
For me the original invasion of Southsun Cove was the best example of this, it had a lot of “story” style content that made sense to happen and then go away, and also left a lot of permanent experiences as a result of that storyline.
I also felt like the story content that came along with the Queens Jubilee and Clockwork Chaos did a good job of accomplishing this as well, though the outcome of the invasions don’t have enough impact on the world.
Another food for thought: Back when we invaded Southsun, we did a lot of “one time” events with the story content. Folks complained that one time wasn’t fair because they would miss it, so we extended the “story” style content so you now have 2-4 weeks to experience it. Does having it around this long take away from the sense of story progression, and make it feel like it should be permanent when it’s taken away? Or would simply having (using the TV analogy) something like TiVo that allows you to see the story you missed balance out this issue?
The main issue is that when you remove almost as much content as you put in, over time, it will make the world feel increasingly stagnant regardless of how much the world changed during that period of time, because MMOs need the feeling of growth at least as much as they need the feeling of change. Guild Wars 2 in many respects feels like it’s a year behind in development because so little of what was done in the last year expanded the world in any meaningful way.
To address your question directly, however, in my opinion, there should be two types of Living World content:
First would be the large scale stories/events that unfold in a manner similar to the F&F story and are meant to drive the story forward in a permanent way. Content coming from this branch should be integrated with the Personal Story and include a combination of new storied instances/dungeons and new explorable zones and should be mostly permanent. This should also result in upgrades to the systems behind the PS that allow new features like the ability to replay stories, read NPC biographies, have ‘trophies’ in your home instance, etc, and perhaps a new henchmen feature where you can recruit people to take into personal instances with you. You can retroactively add back the LW events from last year that are appropriate as expansions to the PS and continue from there.
Second would be a combination of holidays/festivals and the occasional one-off done in a side-story format that can be used to enhance existing lore and can exist independently of the integrated PS/LS without causing any real issues. This would include content like the Dragon Bash and could be mostly temporary or recurring.
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I really disagree on that, becuse p/p has allways been USELESS and broken.
Erm. No.
Its probably on par with every non-warrior zerker setup. I’m able to string together 3 or 4 unloads for about 7-9k each, sometimes 10 or 11k if I have full might stacks. Id say thats not too shabby.
Yeah except it’s not just about how much burst damage it’s capable of. The set is fundamentally broken because it relies too much on both Initiative starvation and the ability to stand still to do even mediocre sustained DPS.
This is a problem that will remain in place until Vital Shot gets a substantial buff.
Jon, can you confirm whether Vital Shot is working as intended? Because currently it seems feeble enough that it forces you to rely on Unload for sustained DPS (creating a problem with Initiative starvation), which I believe to be the primary culprit behind why P/P feels so weak and clumsy.
@Einlanzer: Actually, it does.
The chain will not progress to the next attack until the previous attack has hit a target. This causes the chain to be significantly faster at close range and significantly slower at maximum range.
If that’s true I was never aware of it, but I do know that the chain is too slow even when standing right on top of the target. I’ll have to test this out later.
I just had a wacky idea that might make some aspects of MH sword less frustrating. I’ll test it out when I get in to work and report back.
Jon
I like the idea someone else had of basing the way the skill is working on the range from the target. I.e. Monarch’s leap when far away and Hornet’s Sting when close, rather than Hornet’s Sting always being default.
Regardless, the autoattack should not require micromanagement, so I hope you have an idea to fix this.
Having read several of Jon’s posts on the various profession boards pertaining to the Dec. 10th balance updates, I have concerns about the way he views autoattacks on the different weapon sets. I get the impression that he is borderline dismissive of them as a balance concern because he doesn’t like the passive gameplay they create.
I get that. However, there are several (mostly ranged) weapons in the game across professions that have serious problems almost entirely due to having a poorly designed or badly tuned autoattack. Most of the time it’s simply too long of an aftercast for the damage (Mesmer Scepter, Thief Pistol, Warrior Longbow), though in a handful of cases it’s something unique (Ranger Sword autoroot).
But autoattacks exist to serve a purpose, and he’s apparently disregarding how important it is for them to behave consistently both within a particular weapon and between weapons. This is because the autoattack carries disproportionate weight in determining how well a weapon works. All weapon balancing should begin with the #1 skill then spread out to the other skills then to traits, instead of being myopically focused on traits. The only way to compensate for a weak or badly designed autoattack is by overloading other skills or traits in the set, and that’s not a very good design approach.
A much, much better design approach would be one of the following two options:
1.) The easier route- Carefully balance all autoattacks with regard to one another so that they perform as equivalently as possible across all weapons and professions. Solidify your expectations of the role autoattacks play to be very concrete and apply that to all weapons. They should be the “bread and butter” skill that works as the primary source of sustained DPS in contrast to the utilitarian/strategic role of other skills, and they should never require micromanagement.
2.) The tougher route- Remove autoattacks altogether and replace all the current #1 skills with more powerful utility oriented skills similar to the 2-5 skills. This would likely require some rebalancing of enemy health, etc., but would still be better than the current haphazard approach where autoattacks have large discrepancies in their relative efficacies which creates severe balance issues between the weapons.
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I think we have a pretty good understanding of the mesmer scepter auto attack problem. I would really like to design a chain of auto attacks here that end with something good, and then allow the clones generated from scepter to also do that thing. That being said, we are trying to avoid just condition spam overload with that weapon because that would be greatly compounded by clones spamming as well.
Here’s a couple of thoughts.
a) clones generated by the scepter could inflict a short duration bleed on each attack (1 tick) like the trident.
b) normalize the attack speed of the scepter so the attack rate doesn’t depend on the distance from the target or have the scepter apply a different effect depending on range. For example, short range -> torment, medium range -> cripple, long range -> burning.
Regarding b, the attack rate doesn’t vary based on range (this is illusory, no pun intended), it just has too long of an aftercast for its damage, which is common across several ranged weapons on various classes, most prominently Pistol and Longbow (this was recently fixed on Rangers).
Jon doesn’t seem to mind that autoattacks vary wildly in their effectivness when I would regard it as the most critical component of inter-weapon balance. I would argue that having a weak autoattack is the #1 reason why several weapons feel borked to hell and back.
The Longbow’s autoattack for both Rangers and Warriors was far too slow for its damage. A few patches ago this was fixed for the Ranger but left alone for the Warrior. While the Longbow is still good in certain situations, it’s a poor choice for a primary weapon due mostly to Dual Shot’s pitiful DPS.
Please buff it by reducing the aftercast by .25 seconds like was done with Long Range Shot. That is all.
I’m going to sidestep the listed changes and mention something that needs to be done but hasn’t yet-
Dual Shot’s firing speed needs to be increased. It does very paltry damage and has a very sluggish rate of fire. While the Longbow is still effective in certain situations, this makes it a very poor choice as a primary weapon. Furthermore, the aftercast on Long Range Shot was reduced a couple of patches ago because it was always too long, so I’m not sure why it wasn’t here as well.
Jon has some strange ideas on the role of autoattacks from what I’ve seen – specifically that it’s okay for them to be inconsistent, weak, unreliable, or operate like skills with 10 second cooldowns, when it very obviously isn’t. This sole mentality is kitten ing several weapon sets in the game to mediocrity (Mesmer Scepter, Thief Pistol, etc.)
The problem here is that no other weapon any any class in the game forces you to micromanage the autoattack because that’s ridiculous and not the purpose the autoattack is supposed to serve. This is a liability and needs to be fixed. Saying it’s “working as intended” isn’t adequate.
If you think that’s how it should be, then you just need to remove all autoattacks on all weapons and replace them with something stronger, which would require a much greater balancing undertaking than simply fixing the autoattacks to be balanced and work consistently relative to one another.
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Yeah, the problem isn’t that they have added skins to the gemstore, it’s that every new skin goes to the gem store. They need to add some new skins to the game itself.
How to fix P/P is simple and always has been – buff Vital Shot.
The entire problem with the set is its Initiative dependency- not just for utility but for even basic DPS. The fact that Vital Shot fails at maintaining adequate DPS on its own means that Unload has to take its place which means that simply maintaining reasonable DPS keeps you Initiative starved. This results in a perpetual problem with the set where you are forced to over-sacrifice damage for utility or mobility and over-sacrifice utility and mobility for damage.
It’s a simple problem with a simple solution, I don’t understand why it hasn’t been addressed yet.
I have two main things I’d like to add here:
First is to second the suggestion I saw farther up of swapping the nerfed Opportunist with Practiced Tolerance.
Second, I’d really like to see something done about the pistol autoattack. This is an OK move for P/D condition-spike builds in WvW roaming, but that’s a pretty narrow gametype. I enjoy playing a build with P/P as my main weaponset, and I’m constantly iterating on my build in a (so far) vain attempt to get some kind of reasonable mileage out of this autoattack. While it is possible to use Unload very often with the current initiative-regeneration traits, and it will probably still be possible under the new initiative paradigm, the reliance on doing so is the one thing don’t like about the weaponset.
It seems like the autoattack either needs to attack faster by having reduced aftercast, deal more direct damage, be redesigned as a chain attack, or be redesigned in some other way to boost its usefulness, both for P/D in non-WvW roaming play, and for P/P in all parts of the game. Of these, reducing the aftercast is probably the simplest thing, though it would improve P/D’s ability to stack bleeds, single-target bleed-stacking is not exactly the most OP thing you can do. My favorite idea is to make it an attack chain, since that creates the possibility of leaving the current attack as the first in the chain, while putting a move that really felt strong, or had some special effect, at the end. Doing this would make pistol #1 feel like it really had a point besides filler while init regens, and would potentially introduce some more decision-making into P/P dps, related to whether you wanted to spend more init to do more damage with Unload, or whether it was worth sacrificing some damage to let the full chain land and have init for, say, Black Powder. In either case, it really feels like something needs to be done with pistol #1 in order for it to pull its weight and feel like it makes sense with the weaponsets to is part of.
I’ve been on a crusade since launch to make people aware of how Vital Shot’s weakness is almost entirely responsible for how bad P/P is. It’s important for the autoattack on any weapon to be a functional source of sustained DPS on its own (while the other skills provide tactical supplements), but it’s especially important for any Thief weapon because of the Initiative mechanic. Vital Shot is very comparable to Bleeding Shot on the Warrior rifle, but appears to be intended to be weaker and faster when in reality an excessively long aftercast means it’s only weaker, even though it has less range.
It seriously boggles my mind how this hasn’t been addressed in over a year and yet Body Shot was ‘buffed’ which did little for the set because the whole problem with Body Shot was never Body Shot itself but rather the fact that it was locked in direct resource competition with your bread and butter damage skill, a competition the latter will virtually always win.
The set basically forces you to sacrifice way too much mobility and utility for damage and way too much damage for utility or mobility and in the process also becomes extremely dull and tedious to use. It’s a serious design problem and even if a lot of people don’t understand it it’s largely why P/P is railed against and complained about so much.
(edited by Einlanzer.1627)
What I don’t get about Sword #1 is why would it be the only autoattack in the whole game that requires micromanagement to use effectively? I don’t think saying “working as intended” is an adequate explanation. I know some people like it, but they aren’t really getting the point. This is similar to what Jon said on the Mesmer board about not wanting to overload the auto to fix Scepter even though the auto is clearly the problem with it. They clearly are not paying enough attention to how important the autoattack on any given weapon is in order for that weapon to feel good.
The autoattacks need to be designed consistently and balanced against one another or removed altogether.
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I don’t really know that I think it’s a good idea. There’s already too much elitism in the game.
It’s great to see what’s going on with the thinking process behind changes. To be honest, I’m mostly concerned about two things that are totally untouched so far: a.) survivability/attrition, and b.) the viability of Pistols. Vital Shot is weak-ish which, for P/P, leads to overreliance on Unload for basic DPS. This messes up resource management for the whole set and leads to a situation where the most optimal way to play P/P is staking power/crit and spamming Unload, keeping you mobility-less and Initiative starved.
Surely that isn’t intended – is Vital Shot every going to receive a buff to its damage or attack speed so that it can perform its needed role of bread-and-butter shot, and allow Unload to play a more utilitarian role?
The Living World and the Personal Story – There is a serious disjoint between these two that undermines the entire narrative of the game and creates cognitive dissonance. A permanent, sustainable solution integrating the two desperately needs to be crafted. It’s my personal opinion (and I would argue objectively sound) that temporary content should be ancillary while permanent content should be the primary focus and not the other way around like it has been. Additionally, I do not believe it is in the game’s best interest to try to force players into a set schedule of participating in the vast majority of new content. What is currently called the “Living World” would be best split into two different things – a.) deep, saga-styled unfolding stories implemented as expansions to the Personal Story along with PS enhancements (mostly permanent), and b.) yearly festivals or one-off “short stories” that do not involve significant changes to the world and can remain totally independent of the events of the Personal Story without creating lore problems (mostly temporary). The Flame and Frost would be an example of the former, while the Dragon Bash would be an example of the latter. To go along with this, enhancements to the Personal Story ‘system’ are in order, see below.
The Personal Story System – To go along with the fusion of the Personal Story and parts of the Living Story, the systems behind the Personal Story should be upgraded. We should get something like a storybook interface with Lore compendiums, biographies of NPCs you’ve met and interacted with, and the ability to both replay any instance/dungeon (without changing your original decision) and reset your entire story (using a Gem Shop item). Additionally, it would be cool if we saw upgrades to your home instance as well as you played through the story, such as the ability to recruit NPCs as henchmen and take them with you in personal instances and interact with them in your Home Instance and manage certain things about them.
Rewards and player-directing – While I’m not one to complain as much about reward structures as some people are, the most noticeable issue in Guild Wars 2 currently is that often times reward does not properly rise with risk. This is a problem not just in terms of the reward structure, but because of the effect it has on the game world. The entire region of Orr is a great example of this. It’s currently a barren wasteland where most waypoints stay contested the vast majority of the time because there are no players there to challenge them. It’s a snowball effect because the players that would go to Orr otherwise avoid it because they know it’s pointless – they won’t be able to accomplish much there. The fact is most players are champion farming in lowbie zones because they get a significantly better return on investment in those areas. It should be a viable way to play, but it shouldn’t be the optimal way to play. This extends into dungeons as well. Special attention needs to be given to retuning rewards to rise properly with the level of investment and risk.
Dynamic mechanics – Dynamic events should be built around the assumption that the number of players available for participation can vary dramatically. More dynamic events should have pass/fail structures and be part of meta events. More importantly, Dynamic event timers, NPC numbers/strength, and enemy respawn rates should all be increased or reduced based on the number of players in a region. It should be hypothetically possible for a single player to take back a waypoint if there are no other players around, etc. This would help keep zones like Orr relevant forever.
Cantha and Elona, along with additional playable races and classes. Enough said.
First, let me there is a lot to love about Guild Wars 2, and this is not intended as a rant. I think at its heart it is a great game with phenomenal potential, but it often seems like not enough attention is being devoted to certain (in some cases obvious) things that are holding it back from being as great as it could be. So, here, I wanted to leave my comprehensive feedback on where I feel Anet should be focusing its development efforts for year two. Here they are, in no particular order:
Profession balance in general – In any MMO, classes are king because they control and direct the player experience. The resources allocated to class balance are just not good, with changes happening too infrequently, involving too little communication, and often being too small in scope. PvE balance issues seem to be hardly ever addressed, and even changes that do occur often feel sloppy and inconsistent, such as changes to traits that have unaccounted for ripple effects, nerfs to one thing due to problems caused by something else (Pistol Whip -> Quickness), and weapon speed issues being fixed on one class/weapon but not another (Longbow – Ranger/Warrior). There seems to be an overemphasis on Traits (fine tuning) with a haphazard/indifferent approach to bigger issues like the relative balance of autoattacks, which is very, very important. Also, some classes have significantly worse attrition than others without really getting anything in return and it’s very noticeable even in the introductory levels. I would recommend doing a thorough review pass of all skills (including most importantly the #1 skills) before moving onto to traits. I would also recommend reducing the gap between the three health tiers because it’s currently needlessly large for the minute differences in both offense and utility that exists between the professions.
The dominance of Berserker Gear – This is an issue caused by two fairly major design problems: a.) dungeon content in particular is not designed well to encourage build diversity or challenge people in anyway other than “dodge and do lots of damage really fast”, and b.) The Zerker triad of stats is more synergistic with a more significant buff to your capabilities than any other combination even when you remove the “offense over defense” mentality. The former means there should be teams dedicated to diversifying PvE encounter design, and the latter means there should be people analyzing ways to revise calculations to bring the different stat combinations into a more equivalent playing field with one another. While I definitely do not want to see a hard trinity in the game, dungeons should facilitate a soft role structure where you get greater benefit out of build diversity within the party than you do out of having everyone min/maxed for direct damage.
Condition damage – Condition damage is great in solo play but pulls significant diminishing returns in group content, which is another (less overt) reason why Zerker rules in group PvE. This is a relatively simple change and I’m not sure why it hasn’t happened yet. There is no cap for direct damage, so there should not be any cap for condition damage either, or at the very least the caps should be based around an individual rather than a group.
Real, permanent exploration-based content – Any MMO will start feeling stale the longer it goes without significant new content, and the Living World in its first year did not do an adequate job of creating meaningful content that actually pulls players back into the game. The bits of engaging content it did have were yanked out (justifiably or not) within a short period of time. Because of that, the game now feels ‘behind’ in terms of growth as a result, and development should be seriously focused on creating substantial content like new zones (with greater variety), new weapons, new dungeons, etc. Whether it’s contained within the Living World or standalone development pieces doesn’t really matter as long as it’s being done.
I can’t help but feel like a lot of the issues would be resolved if they would just close the gaps in health some. The huge difference in surivability between professions isn’t really compensated for by anything else, and Thieves and Eles struggle hard with attrition in a lot of the content without getting all that much in return for it.
Having a 10k difference in base health at level 80 is too much. It should be more like 5 or 6k.
Oh, and they need to correct ranged weapons across the board – they pretty much all have poorly tuned autoattacks and do too little damage. It’s supposed to be a risk vs. reward thing but in actuality it just screws the game up because certain professions are kinda supposed to stay at range and consequently they are punished.
900 is the standard range of Shortbows in the game. At best it should be traitable, 1200 range by default never felt right. It’s still a very strong ranged weapon.
Yeah, pretty much. The main reason for this seems to be that their balancing efforts are hugely disproportionately skewed toward pvp.
One other thing about the scepter.
The weapon seems designed to fight from 900 range. But the autoattack is so slow, the effective dps drops way below most other weapons when you’re at 900. Speeding up the projectile by as little as 25% would make it a lot more comparable.
While a buff to the projectile speed certainly wouldn’t hurt, it’s not really the problem and increasing it wouldn’t really increase DPS that much on most targets.
The problem, instead is the attack rate. The aftercast after each attack in the chain is too long, making the rate of fire awkwardly slow. This is a problem on several ranged weapons that single-handedly makes those weapons feel very gimpy and I have no idea why it’s been addressed on a few (Ranger Longbow, Mesmer Greatsword) but not most (Thief Pistol, Mesmer Scepter). It’s almost like the devs are blind to how important it is to have solid, functional, consistent autoattacks on all weapons.
(edited by Einlanzer.1627)
I’d be surprised if it was any less than 85% of the player base that would vastly prefer to see large scale content like new zones and dungeons over gimmicky monthly events and mini-stories.
Frankly they’ve wasted a lot of time year one, let’s hope they’re getting their act together.
And I am surprised that some people still seems to prefer getting content once every six months that can be completed in less than a month instead of content every two weeks.
The issue is not that we get content every two weeks, it’s that the content is mostly lame and then we lose it in two weeks. Additionally, the amount of content released bi weekly so far, all told, does not equal the amount of content that an expansion typically brings. 1 new (very small) zone in a full year? No thanks. Also, expansion content would be more meaningful in this game due to the scaling system.
Try to use your head a little, eh?
You hit most of them, I just want to add a few:
The uselessness of Smoke Bomb in the Downed State (in PvE)
Last Refuge
Pistol and Shortbow autoattacks being too weak/slow
They seem to have a problem of only focusing on microscopic details rather than looking at larger scale design issues. It’s pretty frustrating that we go patch after patch without any real significant updates.
I don’t have any issue with zerker gear. As you mentioned, progressing to the point of player skill where you can manage fine without any defensive stats makes perfect sense and should definitely be rewarding – as it currently is.
Its the lack of overall build diversity that PvE leads to that I have more of a problem with. If everyone in your team is at the top of their stuff and knows what to do, there’s very little reason to not go full-blown glass cannon. It’s a rather big issue that I feel has little if anything to do with berserker gear itself.
This is pretty much accurate. The problem is less with Zerker specifically (although there is an issue specific to Zerker, see below) and more with the broader design schemas in the game. I am opposed to a strict trinity system, but the building options with gear are pretty much currently “personal offense or personal defense” when it should be more like “personal offense, group defense, healing/support, or control”.
I don’t think defensive oriented gear needs to go away, though, and to some extent I think it’s undervalued even in dungeons. Primarily, it helps tanky characters hold aggro and consequently safeguards squishier characters. Additionally, something the Zerker obsessed folks seem to forget a lot is that Dodging means breaking your DPS. Having better defense allows you to dodge less frequently, meaning less gaps in your DPS. It’s probably still a net loss, but that does help mitigate it.
The other issue, which is pertaining to Zerker specifically, is that the stats simply have better synergy than any other combination and end up giving you more bang for your buck even when you remove the stigma of building for defense. This is something I think Anet really should address at some point.
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While it’s true you don’t want a #1 skill so good people just spam it, but right now I’ll often pop Torch #4 and just wait for weapon swap rather than use Scepter #1.
Yeah, the more I think about it the more perturbed I get at the prospect that they are just brushing autoattacks under the rug and are over-focusing on the other skills for balance passes. If that’s true, it’s a bad, bad idea but it explains a lot about the current state of weapon balance in the game. Autoattacks carry more weight when it comes to how ‘good’ or ‘bad’ a weapon feels than any other single skill, so it’s by far best to make sure they are tuned correctly (both independently and relative to other weapons’ autoattacks) and only then move on to the other skills.
The autoattacks aren’t ‘spam’ oriented anyway. They are autoattacks- the whole purpose of them is to provide a passive, steady stream of reasonable DPS (or good support/healing) which grants you the flexibility to use your other skills creatively and strategically. Because of that, it’s horrible for the game when the relative balance of autoattacks is way out of whack, and Mesmer Scepter #1 (along with several others) very much is.
To be frank, this worries me.
(edited by Einlanzer.1627)