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BLKs have never been a good value. I’m sure if they increased drop rates on skin tickets and added a bit more exciting items that could drop from the chests people would spend a lot more money on them.
If you’re going to have a lottery style system, it needs to have the potential for big payoffs – not mediocre if you’re lucky. For example, add a small chance for a level 80 boost, or an ascended/legendary precursor, and you’ll suddenly have whales dropping hundreds of dollars on them, and a lot more people buying them randomly here and there.
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I’m kind of done with nicey-nice on this topic. People who are opposed to this option are ridiculous, including people at Arenanet that oppose it.
Even if the pet worked perfectly, the Ranger is a Ranger, not a Beastmaster. Beastmastery is only one facet of what they do. There’s no reason it should be so forcefully shoved down anyone’s throat who wants to play a class with a ranger/druid theme. The fact that the pet frequently causes gameplay management problems other classes don’t have to deal with is just icing on the cake for why a perma-stow needs to be kittening option.
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I love the Revenant, but there’s virtually no argument that it has a couple of major design problems and fails to even feel a little bit polished until you finish obtaining Glint.
The way that each utility line performs a specific function with very little overlap limits the usefulness of utility swapping. As if that wasn’t enough, there is also little synergy between the functions of their weapons (S/S and Hammer is the only thing resembling an exception, which is why only Power Revs really work). This means that both the Revenant’s utility and weapon swapping are less useful features than you would expect, and the class somehow ends up feeling much more restricted than others pretty much across the board.
This needs to be corrected. My opinion is they need to do one of two things:
1.) add an additional ranged weapon that supports condi (either as full condi or hybrid – my vote is Shortbow) AND one additional melee weapon that is more hybridized than any of their existing options (my vote is either MH Axe or Greatsword).
2.) Remove weapon swap per the original desire and replace it with something more creative, like letting your current legend modify your weapon skills in some way, even if it’s a relatively minor global effect, like extra torment application for Mallyx. This would require some rebalancing of all weapon skills, but it’s still probably easier than #1 overall.
Additionally, they need to do something to increase synergy between the different utilities so that utility swapping isn’t a mostly useless feature. My opinion is that they should add a generic 5th base legend that soft-maps to the Invocation line, which can be used as a bridge legend that works in tandem with other legends. This would also allow them to turn Jalis into true tanking legend as well instead of having it be a somewhat under-tuned “basic” legend with a few tanking features thrown in.
Discuss.
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Agree in PvE it works. But in PvP good players are mooving a lot. When i encoutner someone that only facetanks i can get a coffe while he dies ….
And the problem is that, because of its fickle nature in PvP with regard to players easily moving out of it, Anet has its damage over-tuned. This makes it OP in a lot of PvE content, once again causing Fire to dominate the other attunements in overall usability.
They need to make it much faster and reduce its damage. Or just replace it entirely with something different.
Rev is my favorite class in the game, thematically speaking, but it has a pretty major conceptual problem that needs to be dealt with. The tldr version is that they have an overly-restricting design, and that too much of their usefulness comes from the elite Glint stance.
Originally, they did not have weapon swap, but this was found to limit them too much as the ability to change utilities in combat didn’t do a great job of replacing the versatility of weapon swap, kits, and attunements, so it was added late in development.
This, however, really only served to further highlight the holes in their design. Not only does each utility set perform a specific function with little synergy between them, but each one of them is also tied only to a single weapon set. This means that both their weapon swapping and utility swapping are much less useful than you would expect them to be, and they end up feeling much more railroaded and less fluid than other professions. Utility swapping becomes somewhat useful only once you unlock the elite Glint stance, which means Revs feel particularly unpolished and incomplete while leveling 1-80.
This issue is 90% of why Revenants feel clunky in play, especially during leveling pre-80. They need 1-2 more base weapon choices to help alleviate this, such as a condi or hybrid ranged weapon and a hybrid melee weapon. OR they need to have weapon swap removed in favor of something more creative to compensate. Lastly, they need at least somewhat better synergy between their different stances – focusing mostly on Jalis since it’s the main pre-Glint support line and it really should be more competitive with the other stances.
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The idea of weapon skills never really made sense for Eles, I’d like to see a weapon-as-utility skill feature, where their weapon skills are no longer tied to whatever weapon they’re using and can be slotted as if they were utility skills. This would also allow for the removal of attunements, with something a bit simpler for their f skill(s).
It would be a good experiment to see if this is something that could be handled by other classes as well. I generally am not a fan of having my first 5 skills always locked based on whatever weapon I’m using. I think this sort of railroading for the sake of false security with balance has done more harm than good to GW2.
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Dragon’s tooth needs an update for the current level of dps and sustain, as well as something else, maybe unblockable. As it is, its basically unusable b/c it never hits a competent player and not very rewarding when you do hit it. Compare this to something like Rev elemental blast, which does more damage on the first tick alone, takes less time to cast, and has a ton of extras.
Even in PvE this skill isn’t all that great. There isn’t any Dragon-tooth spam build – that would be lava font spam on staff instead. Dragon’s tooth doesn’t even keep up there.
While you are at it, fix shatterstone too. Here is a hint: adding more vuln still does nothing if it doesn’t hit anyone!
Well, of course there’s no DT spam build, because it isn’t a spammable skill. It still adds to Fire’s DPS substantially being an instant cast with high damage. Overall, it contributes to the problem we have where Fire tends to be over-tuned relative to all other attunements, making it the only viable attunement for non-situational usage in most PvE content.
It’s just a badly designed skill.
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I don’t really know why they have the skill calibrated the way it is. It should be faster and deal less damage. Any skill that has a long animation time balanced by higher damage is going to be over-tuned for PvE and under-tuned for PvP. They need to fix it.
The AA is much, much weaker than it should be. They nerfed the crap out of it when they changed it from Bleeding Shot years ago. That’s most of the problem with the Rifle. The LB has a similar problem. As a result, both weapons are highly situational.
I’ve been thinking how its funny that ele’s air staff is so similar to dragon hunter’s longbow. Both autos bounce, both have a “ring ward” on the 5, both knockback with the 3, and have a long, slow windup on the 2.
However, DH’s autos hit pretty dang hard, the 3 hits very hard, and the 2 hits super-hard. Eles are all pretty….weak.
Well, this is more a problem with DH longbow AA and #2 hitting too hard. I’m always against AAs hitting, and will always advocate for buffing other skills on the weapon set before the AA. AAs should only be buffed when necessary IMO.
Ele’s staff AAs are decent overall. They could use some improvements to help hit far away moving targets, but it’s probably intentional to be able to avoid ranged attacks from nearly max range if you move around properly. Also, Fire AA should really apply burning on the main impact target. That’s really the only change I would like to see done to Staff’s AAs. Water can heal, Air can chain to multiple spread out targets, and Earth is a 100% projectile finisher that also applies weakness.
Also, who noticed that this is a revived thread from 10 months ago?
That’s the exact opposite of what needs to happen. Fire’s AA is already way beyond the other three attunements in overall effectiveness, which pushes you into camping fire, and when you switch attunements, you want to switch back to Fire as quickly as possible. Air’s AA needs buffed the most, since its only role is DPS, and Air gets virtually no supplemental DPS from its other skills. Water and Earth also need some improvement since they’re way too situational as they are. This is because the utility they provide is not as significant as the DPS they lose. As someone mentioned above, the tradeoff is imbalanced in 95% of situations. This is true for many other weapons in a support role in the game, and is a large part of the reason why support builds are so hard to work with.
Also, your philosophy of “buffing other skills in place of the AA” is terribly wrong-headed. Auto attacks set the tempo for sustained DPS or utility in any engagement that lasts longer than a couple of seconds (i.e. all of PVE), so they operate as coarse adjustments to a weapon’s performance, with the cooldown skills operating as fine adjustments. The only way you can compensate for an undertuned AA is to make the cooldown skills dramtically overpowered, and vice versa. That makes zero sense as a balancing paradigm. In fact, Anet needs to put disproportionate energy into making sure AA’s are well balanced across weapons and professions before they waste time tweaking cooldown skills to try to fix gross imbalances in weapon performance.
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I don’t think either armor modeling OR voice work is the biggest problem with new races. I think the biggest issue, which IMO is something they need to tackle, is that they have to somehow be made to fit into the existing story framework -
a.) a small handle of specific races could probably be “pigeonholed” into the existing PS without too much trouble, and these would be the lowest effort options. This includes the Kodan, and perhaps the Tengu or Skritt.
b.) Alternatively, a new PS could be crafted around a different world region (such as Elona or Cantha) opening up new options for all kinds of races.
Honestly, I’m hoping we get a little of both, but b. would be better than a. in the long run. As they add new continents, such as Cantha or Elona, they should have new PS accompanied by two-three new races native to that continent. The PS doesn’t have to have the same scope as the original one – it can be scaled down with reduced branch points, etc, to make it easier to implement and scale.
It honestly might be worth doing that for the original PS for the sake of scalability, especially considering it wasn’t particularly well received. I know they kind of attempted and failed with this a while back, but I think it was just because it wasn’t a great execution.
Interesting data. I think that Condi Rev is one of those specs that’s easy to be decent while impossible to be great.
I have a funny feeling the next elite spec will be condi focused. But, who knows.
A while ago nerf AA, so that we supposedly do not use as much AA but suddenly it is the only thing we have left, exposing ourselves doing damage with AA and we are getting all the builds conditions.
Powerful weapon change? A stroke of 1k + equilibrium you can only use it once, in which you have more than 50% of this, not when you want) so I do not think it is powerful or feared. Also now the staff only serves for cc and nothing else (maybe 4 to clean, and is too slow).I think developers do not even try their classes, they just look at their numbers mathematically and decide what to do …
I feel that I needed a light nerf 10/20% might be enough but this is a massacre to the unfinished class.
I believe you are right, and I feel it is also true for Daredevils’ staff/Warriors’ mainhand axe.
I mean which game designer could think that making auto-attack the most effective way to DPS and making every other skill slow/weak/doing the same damage as a single AA (sometimes even less !) a good idea?
Even some time after the first nerfs of the Revenant, the gameplay was still good and interesting. Now, it’s actually quite boring and feels very repetitive and not really rewarding.It’s really the first time in a MMO that I’ve seen players telling me to mainly use AA because the rest is too situational or too weak. I’m talking about PvE where you do need DPS because ennemies have much higher health pools compared to PvP/WvW.
I don’t know. I think it makes common sense that the autoattack is the bread and butter for DPS due to the disproportionate significance they have with sustained DPS, with #2-5 offering more situational utility. Of course, for classes other than Thief, they can be balanced by cooldowns; but utility on those skills tends to be more interesting than just straight damage.
I’ve been saying for years that staff attunements other than fire sacrifice too much damage for the utility they provide, and it’s mostly due to how bizarrely weak the #1 skills other than Fireball are.
They need to be buffed. You should not be forced into frantically attunement dancing or camping in fire to be even somewhat effective.
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I don’t understand why they only buffed Arc Lightning in PvP when it’s just as needed in PvE. In fact, that’s true for most of the buffs from this patch.
There are arguments it would have worked out better, there are some where it’s worse. I do know that a sub based model would significantly impact development and content releases and since I think people that currently play are more or less pleased with paid content, free content and items in the Gemstore, I don’t think that impact would be positive to them.
At this point, there is no reason for threads like this. Gem store is a business decision and no data we have access to suggests it was a bad one … or a good one. It just IS. Granted, there have been games that move to different business models, but if anyone is under the illusion that moving away from the Gemstore at this point would be a good idea, they are going to be highly mistaken. In fact, the Gemstore is an integral part of what makes the game work. It CAN’T go. It needs to continue to grow.
Personally, I would not pay a sub for this game because Anet has shown they can provide good content without it, as well as interesting items with value in the Gemstore. Any introduction to a sub to play would be a significant screw over to loyal customers.
Oh, it’s out of the question now – they’d alienate way too many players trying to add one after the fact. It was purely conjecture about what would have happened if they had started out with one.
There’s no way we’ll ever know.
No matter what I read in this thread, not a single person can compare how a non-Gemstore version of GW2 would have faired against the current version; speculation is fun, but it’s not real, especially when it’s made on such thin data as what is available to us.
What I do know is that I’ve never seen anyone make a thread complaining that the game is free to play … think about that for a minute.
There’s an argument to be made that a traditional subscription based model might have worked out better for GW2. Fewer people would have bought it, but IMO it’s likely it would have gained traction and retained more players, because p2p sets up a psychology of personal investment in a game that you don’t otherwise have.
If they had done that and succeeded, the game probably would have grown a lot more than it has now. On the other hand, it may have just had really bad direction in its first 2 years or so and revenue wouldn’t have mattered that much, and is just still struggling to catch up now.
I don’t mind the Gem Shop. They just need to find more creative ways to use it. My biggest problem with it is that there’s way too skewed an economy gap between gold bought and gold earned. It takes too long to get by playing the game relative to how cheap it is in the gem store, creating a situation where you feel excessive pressure to just buy it with real money.
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Anet said directly that expansion sales didn’t meet expectations, mostly due to free to play players not picking it up. It’s not a secret. It’s not some deeply buried conspiracy theory. The expansion didn’t do well as expected.
Anet has made mistakes, and NcSoft even admitted “mistakes were made”. What those mistakes are we can only guess, but the odds are the lackluster sales was attributed to many things, not just a couple.
Yep, fully agree. “If I had to pick one thing…” does not mean I would prefer to.
I don’t necessarily think it was related to any specific feature (or lack thereof) of the expansion, except for maybe forcing veteran players to re-buy the entire game for full price, which was one of the dumbest business decisions I’ve ever seen in my life. But, mostly, I think it was maybe just that Anet had expectations that were too high based on the sales of the original title combined with the mediocre interest in the Maguuma Jungle as opposed to, say, Cantha.
A huge, huge number of buyers of the original game lost interest, probably forever, after the first few weeks of playing it. I have my hunches as to what the biggest culprits were, but who knows for sure. The majority of those players are unlikely to be lured back in by anything. Maybe some of them will respond to Cantha.
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Many of us who have been here since day one, know how the trait/mastery system has devolved into the mess that it is today.
As O.P. said, before the rework and because these were the main focus of your character’s specialization – in the absence of elite specialization- traits were way more impactful on your character. Also, they offered better synergies between them and thus there were far more combination than there are now with Elite Specializations.
HoT did nothing but to reduce the build combinations and even ruin some options for playing differently than the intended purpose of Druid, Chronomancer, etc.I hope ArenaNet seriously focuses on a new system that is way more versatile before shipping out a new expansion. If not they must add more synergies between the vanilla Masteries and ideally rework some of them. Regardless the 3 lines of Masteries with 2 other combinations for each, needs to go ASAP! It offers too little choice especially considering most of them are already limited as they are in terms of utility and effects.
I also want to re-emphasize how borked I think it is to use the same resource for both skills and traits. They should not be in competition with each other when you are leveling a character.
Well it is intended as an insult, so if you see it that way you are correct. If it’s used alone to end an argument they are being lazy, I think it should only be used when people talk about simplifying the pve or making it even easier.
It implies gw2 is an elite game that you aren’t worthy of.
Yes, pretty much. Everyone arguing that it isn’t both insulting and stupid in most contexts is simply rationalizing their kittenty behavior.
if you need heal, you swap to heal..but you only get a small heal. water is not fit for purpose for healer, its also not fit for purpose for sustained dps, its in nowhere land. Swapping to water to get a heal is also not an attunement, its a click sequence to get a heal. A water attunement should be heavy healing + dps filler, not weak healing + weak dps filler, jut like fire is sustained dps + 0 heal.
Yeah, this is pretty much my argument. Water, Air, and to a lesser extent Earth all have more trouble than they should operating as sustained attunements. For staff, effectively, Fire is the only sustainable attunement, while the other three offer very situational utility and are otherwise extremely underpowered.
I don’t know why this isn’t seen as a problem by pretty much all Ele playerss.
Telling someone that wants mounts because every other game out there has mounts to go play one of those games? Not insulting.
Telling someone “Go play another game, like solitaire.”. Yes, insulting.
I disagree that the first one isn’t insulting. Mounts are a relatively simple, single feature that would not be infeasible for GW2 to implement, and the fact that they exist in other games does not make those other games like GW2 with mounts.
It’s rude, dismissive, and simple-minded. And no, I’m not talking GW2 needing mounts. I’m talking about the attitude of players against them.
OP is absolutely correct, and I don’t even really think it depends on the context. It is sometimes appropriate to politely suggest that GW2 might not be the correct game for someone if what they’re suggesting is way, way outside of reason for anything Arenanet might ever consider doing, but that is not the context in the majority of cases where something like this is said.
It’s immature, snarky, simple-minded, and narcissistic in pretty much all cases. Anyone who is posting on this forum is a paying customer and has a right to air their opinion on issues or ideas they have for the game. If you disagree with it, the only correct response is to either ignore the suggestion, or politely offer a “devil’s advocate” perspective, which continues dialogue in a productive way.
I lose my temper all the time on forums, and it’s pretty much always due to that sort of behavior. I’m not in the wrong, because I never do this to anyone else.
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Let me start this off by saying I don’t think GW2’s balance is really that horrible. There are some things that really surprise me with how long they go without being noticed or changed (when I was maining a Thief, Vital Shot’s busted DPS was the most obvious problem in the universe for literally 3 1/2 years before it was finally updated, for example).
But, I have a huge, huge problem with the fact that balance updates only happen an average of once every two-three months. That’s ridiculous, and a terrible way to manage the game. All it does is three very harmful things to the game, with no benefits at all that I can see:
a.) Things that are obviously a bit busted end up being left alone for way, way too long, causing frustration to build among players with limited to no catharsis.
b.) It creates a cultural issue where balance patches are built up too much in the minds of players, which exaggerates the emotional response when they are released.
c.) It leads to a stale meta problem – players lose interest in the game because it’s too static with no incentive to regularly experiment with new builds.
Ultimately, it’s kind of one of those things where too much analysis and bureaucracy ends up becoming counter-productive. Balance will never be perfect, so it makes way more sense to iterate quickly and without excessive analysis, especially since the analysis this game has appears to not be very good. This is why most online games release balance patches weekly or biweekly. It’s the obviously better way to do it. It’s also why we should have more skills available at this point than we do.
The biggest problem with this game by far is the joke of balance. I don’t think Revs are really that bad, but the fact that they make asinine changes and do it once only 3 months or so is completely ridiculous.
Balance changes should biweekly or at the very least monthly. I have no idea who thinks this is a good way to manage a game. You don’t need to spend months analyzing whether a skill may or may not be too good. All it does is make people even angrier when changes are made.
I’m just curious – does anyone use anything other than Fire as a fallback in Staff? I get that they just offer different types of utility, but seems like Fire is the only one that isn’t under-tuned in terms of DPS.
In particular, it seems like Lightning should be able to compete well, but it just doesn’t, at least not for me. What do people think about this? Am I doing something wrong?
Fire is your main DPS attunement and most content in PvE doesn’t challange you enough to get out of fire… Low risk high reward gameplay. If you want to make the most out of a staff ele by effectively using the other attunements beside fire, try WvW.
Ele players really should be joining together to ask for DPS buffs for the other attunements. There’s no reason Water’s auto should do less than 1/3 the damage of any other auto in the game. Likewise, there’s no reason Earth’s auto should be so weak just because it applies Weakness. How many other abilities stack Weakness while also doing more standard DPS?
The fact that the game essentially prohibits you from “camping” (and by this I mean falling back to, not staying exclusively in) in any attunement except for Fire is totally preposterous.
I’m not sure that’s so clear cut … The approach to gameplay is pretty simple; killing stuff before you die, so it makes sense that the highest DPS attunement is the most leaned on.
The argument to buff other attunements so you don’t camp Fire is the same argument to buff a classes weapons for balance. The problem is that there is no why for doing that, other than giving more choice. From a purely practical consideration, it’s not needed and it adds very little to the game to do it. There is little reason to care about what attunment you are if they are all doing the same damage.
You are just… I dunno. I don’t understand. I was very clear that I’m not talking about making all the attunements do the same DPS. That would be silly. The point is that the DPS discrepancies between the attunements is way too large – so large that Fire is the only attunement that is not highly situational. You want to spend as little time in the other three as possible because, within seconds, they’ll tank your DPS while only providing you with mildly useful utility. This is especially true when you’re solo, vs in a large zerg.
It’s straight-up badly designed. Water’s DPS should be about 75% of fire’s, not 35%.
Get zerker, you will not regret it.
I have zerker. I’m looking to try something different for a change. This game’s one-dimensional zerker meta is a real problem IMO.
I’m just curious – does anyone use anything other than Fire as a fallback in Staff? I get that they just offer different types of utility, but seems like Fire is the only one that isn’t under-tuned in terms of DPS.
In particular, it seems like Lightning should be able to compete well, but it just doesn’t, at least not for me. What do people think about this? Am I doing something wrong?
Fire is your main DPS attunement and most content in PvE doesn’t challange you enough to get out of fire… Low risk high reward gameplay. If you want to make the most out of a staff ele by effectively using the other attunements beside fire, try WvW.
Ele players really should be joining together to ask for DPS buffs for the other attunements. There’s no reason Water’s auto should do less than 1/3 the damage of any other auto in the game. Likewise, there’s no reason Earth’s auto should be so weak just because it applies Weakness. How many other abilities stack Weakness while also doing more standard DPS?
The fact that the game essentially prohibits you from “camping” (and by this I mean falling back to, not staying exclusively in) in any attunement except for Fire is totally preposterous.
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Acting like Virtues and Pets are comparable is rather silly. The former has much less aesthetic impact than the latter, and this is true across all other professions.
I still think that having so few skill and build options is a huge reason why a lot of people think GW1 was a better game. I’m not sure when game designers will realize that you can’t railroad players for the sake of balance and expect it to turn out well. Balance will never be perfect.
Some people just really have no ability to actually hear other people. To some people, the Ranger represents more than a pet class, and playing another class is a poor substitute. I really don’t see how this is such a hard concept to grasp.
Oh, we hear you just fine. You want Anet to spend time and money on altering their concept of the Ranger to fit your personal fantasy because you regret your choice of the pet class and apparently never agreed with it from the beginning but played it anyways. You are attached to the name “Ranger” because you feel it’s supposed to be something else based on other fantasy archetypes but this is Guild Wars 2, not any of those other games or LOTR, or any other media.
For some reason too, you have convinced yourselves that it’s just a simple fix that won’t require a massive rework of talents and balancing as evidenced by statements along the lines of: ‘all they have to do is…’ or ’it’s simple to…’ or (my favorite) ‘if I can come up with XYZ then why can’t Anet do it’.
What we’re saying is not that it will never happen, since none of us can predict the future, but that you need to be making lemonade out of these lemons while you wait for your desired gameplay to maybe be implemented because Anet has already said no, no and no again.
I don’t even main a ranger, so I have little emotional investment in this conversation. Therefore, your assumptions are incorrect. Instead, I’m speaking from a high-level concept and game design perspective. Hogtying a profession to a pet when that profession represents more than just pets is silly.
Cool, glad to hear it’s doable, if difficult (which is to be expected tbh). I’m generally impressed with rev atm, it’s a much more chilled out experience than thief since it has ways to deal with stuff other than just dodging better haha xD
I don’t have any issues playing at the level I’m at but just wanted to check really, I don’t want to get to higher levels then find out people won’t party with me or something dumb like that.
Thief and Rev have been my two mains over the years, and tbh, it blows my mind that anyone defends the Thief in PvE. When I switch back to my Thief from my Rev, the difference in attrition and overall effectiveness is completely laughable. It seriously feels like I have to play twice as hard to be half as effective, and I spend more time downed than I do healthy. Maybe my build needs to be tweaked, but even a bad build shouldn’t make that much of a difference.
I’ll probably never go back to Thief full-time unless they’re completely remade from the ground up.
I posted this in another thread, but seeing as you’re also a Thief main, I have to ask you, what makes Rev good? From the skills I see Rev looks more like a Thief than Thief does lol, but that’s just aesthetics. Initiative lets us do a bunch of attacks and combo fields or whatever, but in PvE I feel like I’m just too squishy and stuck in Shortbow most of the time. Then I found out that Rev just Auto attacks to victory? That seems kind of crappy to me.
It’s mostly that they do just as much damage as Thief, generally (more in some situations), they deal that damage more easily than thief (simpler AoE targeting and “hooking” mechanisms), AND they have much better survivability with their higher base health and heavy armor. They’re also highly versatile.
I had trouble adjusting at first. Heck, when I heard about the first five skills being determined by weapon choice, I considered skipping GW2 — it sounded awful.
After playing with the system for a few weeks, I couldn’t imagine going back to GW1’s.
How did that work? How can determined weapon skills be better than letting you choose whatever skills you like?
GW1 was a balance nightmare. The amount of options made it so that a very large percentage of the skills was never used. Compared to the differences in usefulness between options in GW1 the differences in power between options in GW2 are nothing. People always say that GW1 was full of build diversity, but GW1 was even more prone to FotM builds than GW2 is.
And that was before the terrible introduction of PvE skills.
There was still infinite build diversity, even if they weren’t optimal. I spent at least half my playtime in GW1 making builds.. that’s part of what made it so fun.
It was a balance nightmare? funny how we had less cancer builds in GW1 and more balance than we do in GW2. I prefer IWAY or RSPIKE / BSPIKE compared to the bunker nightmare, condi nightmare, or complete garbage builds like when turret engis were around. I never understood making AI so powerful, it takes zero skill.
All those meta builds in GW1 were destroyed by balanced, or aoe teams. I know cuz I beat them all the time, they were just builds for the noobs and let them advance the ladder before hitting a wall.
In GW2 there are much much less counters in the game so everyone ends up using the same meta, which makes the meta boring and stale and it never changes until ANet finally nerf the crap out of it then we move on to the next boring meta where everyone is still the same.
Meta in GW1 it felt changing like every month , not 6 but maybe cuz I enjoyed it more. They also had players team helping them balance (I forget what they were called) instead in GW2 we are all basically beta testers with no test realm, something that should be in any modern MMO.
Talking exclusively pve, yeah the balance was terrible. I mean just look at shadow form lol it changed like 10 times but never once stopped being an invulnerable skill. What was the friggin point in even changing it then? Makes no sense. But GW1 was more a pvp game.
Bunny thumper ranger and BB sin still 2 of my fav builds ever. You also gotta respect how we managed to find these builds in a sea of 1300+ skills
Severely limiting gameplay and player freedom over balance concerns is not a good move, and it astounds me how many people think it is. Balance will never be perfect, so the more “careful” you are with it, the more diminishing returns you get. So after a certain point it becomes excessively wasteful and taxing to players.
I do think GW2 lost players early on over too much railroading, and having too few skills options spread out over too many levels. At this point, we need to be getting new weapon skill options for existing weapons, so that you can choose individual slots for weapon skills, in addition to getting new weapons in the game for players to play around with.
I also agree that the meta changes too slowly in GW2, due largely to them moving at a snail’s pace with balance adjustments. I think this does more harm than good to the game’s longevity.
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I would prefer new weapon skills that would give us slot options within a given weapon type over new skill slots.
Raids are literally the only place where dps matters. How would being able to use a dps meter elsewhere somehow create elitism?
Are you seriously afraid that someone is going to come up to you in Queendale and start smacktalking your dps?
Sometime I wonder if all the anti-meter, anti-log people have never actually played in a game with a dps meter.They have, it shows because they are fully aware that even if it doesn’t really matter in dungeon/fractals etc, people will still “monitor” and still criticize others play if it is possible.
I’ve played plenty of games with dps meters, and I’ve seen it happen plenty of times. Even if it doesn’t “matter” if someone thinks someone else isn’t in their opinion pulling their weight, frequently they WILL make time to comment about it.
Yes, this. It does little good and just ruins everyone’s fun by enabling dumb kitten elitists.
No. Don’t agree. Maybe for raids, and staging areas, at most. But even then, combat effectiveness in this game is about more than DPS because it doesn’t use a strict role system, depending on your profession and build. This type of thing would just result in a lot of shallow elitism.
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Mostly thinking about small group PvE, probably FotM mostly.
I’m thinking about investing in some Minstrel’s gear and running a full tank/support build. Is this something anyone has experimented with, or any build suggestions for?
(they’re way too squishy with no proper form of damage mitigation)
(ignoring the fact the thief is the only class that perma-evade you to death).
Go back, and reread the entirety of my post. The bottom line is that Thieves are simultaneously underpowered and overpowered due to the gimmicky mechanics of Stealth.
You definitely weren’t making your position clear with your initial posts. You were originally saying that the current system was a primary cause of early attrition and that it was broken. In your latest post, you’re arguing that it’s fundamentally ok, but needs improvement. That sounds reasonable to me.
I’m not sure I agree with your contention that boons and control builds don’t exist. Typically, you just need enough boons and control for the particular fight and (usually) one set of builds is better, so people choose that more often than not. However, there are plenty of comps to achieve that same effect, if you don’t care about being more than 70-80% efficient, which is fine for most of the game.
Healing is pretty weak, that’s true. That appears to have been a design decision, so that people work on damage avoidance (which requires skill) rather than damage reversal (i.e. heals), which puts the burden on a healer. I happen to like this, but I’m not against ANet increasing the options for profs that aren’t Druid, Tempest, or Engineer. (There are some mesmer and guardian heal builds, but they aren’t as effective as their mitigation options. There are even variations for necro and warrior, but those are relatively weaker than other builds.)
With regards to your second point, I think even ANet would agree that the current stat allocation and prefix system has tied them up in knots. It would probably take a massive overhaul to rebalance this more than a little. Put another way, you’re not wrong, but I’m not sure that there’s much they can do about it outside of a far, future expac.
Well, keep in mind how far it’s already come since launch. And, I do think the lack of clear roles was an issue for attrition. It’s just how people are used to operating, not even just from similar games like WoW, but even for tabletop games like D&D. I think GW2 can and does now see benefit from at least partially emulating that. I have, however, always been a supporter of getting away from the trinity and, correspondingly, the concept of rigid roles, and I think my original post made that clear. Regardless, there’s no point in straying into semantics regarding a past argument.
I think putting somewhat more burden on a healer is warranted, but I also agree that it shouldn’t be strictly necessary to always run with a dedicated healer (or tank). I get where you’re coming from, but I do think that, generally, there’s too much emphasis placed on individual active defense, and too little on group recovery and support, considering a lot of players like the idea of playing healers, and almost everyone likes the idea of group-level tactics as opposed to strictly individual tactics.
Maybe this is a reason to introduce a Monk-style class at this point, one who has multiple different types of healing/support builds and relatively few damage-oriented ones. Guardian support/healing also needs a buff to be on the same level as Druid and Tempest, frankly.
Actually, the main problem is that Stealth in this game operates as more of an offensive tool than a defensive one, which you could argue is a major design flaw. This is why the Thief class simultaneously feels broken in different ways to both Thief players (they’re way too squishy with no proper form of damage mitigation) and non-Thief players (they’re way too easy to abuse against other players).
There are lots of potential ways to change it for the better, IMO. One would be to allow it to last for much longer (the standard is 3 seconds), but for it to not make you completely invisible, only harder to see, while also providing a defense buff and/or regeneration throughout the duration. This would tend to help both Thief players and players fighting Thieves.
Alternatively, it could benefit from being the one skill in the game that works differently in PvP than it does in PvE. Revealed, for example, serves no purpose in PvE.
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We don’t need a 4th utility, what we need is another legend at core.
A ritualist-inspired legend, with turret-like spirits would do it just fine.
That completely breaks the symmetry of the game. The OP’s suggestion makes far more sense. I also think we need one more utility skill for each legend and at least one new weapon choice at baseline to feel like a complete class.
However, barring that, the core legends should definitely each have an F2 skill. The main problem with the Revenant currently is that Glint is too good while nothing else is good enough. We see this with other elite specs in the game, but not nearly to the same degree.
Every profession has 5 families of slot skills. Each slot skill family has 1 healing, 4 utility, and 1 elite. Every profession is missing 1 healing and 2 elites. This leaves us at a total of 27 slot skills per profession.
The revenant has 4 families/legends, with 1 healing, 3 utility, and 1 elite, for a total of 20 skills.
The revenant is missing 1 family and 7 skills. Customizing the slot skills might be difficult technical-wise (When you change utility positions, and then change the legend, the game doesn’t remember it).
More weapons and a custom herald F2 for every legend are necessary, but regarding slot skills, the missing legend is the way to go. Since the revenant is partially based on the ritualist, it’s only logic for that missing legend to be ritualist-themed, with support options.
I get where you’re coming from. My assumption is that this would require us getting a 6th generic trait line, which would break precedent, but maybe that isn’t actually necessary. Maybe, instead, it could be tied to the “generic” invocation line we have currently, and it would be a more generalized set than the other 5.
Argh! Why don’t you guys understand that you already have “pre-defined roles”!? Apart from choosing a profession, you just only have one instead of many to choose from! The argument against this makes zero sense.
Again, that’s not how the game works now. The role I take varies dynamically with the other players in my group and with the particular mechanics, even without changing my profession. That is one of the things that makes GW2 fun for me.
In contrast, in games with multiple pre-defined roles, I’m forced to stick with that role throughout the entire instance. (The closest thing to an exception is in raids, which is closer to what you’re asking for already.)
My argument is that you haven’t proven a case against the current system; you just keep asserting that you prefer a different one.
No, what I’m asserting, and perhaps I’m not making it clear enough, is that the current system we have needs further refinement. The game needs to allow for builds that are not oriented around DPS. The beginning of this framework does already exist in game, but it needs to be further developed. We need to have more viable heal options besides the Druid (and arguably the Tempest). Additionally, there should be a framework for having a build that focuses heavily on boons, or control conditions, or threat grabbing, in addition to direct and condition damage. The reason we only have the most rudimentary version of this currently is twofold (I stated above but will repeat here):
a.) we don’t have diverse enough options for weapon skills, with most available weapons for any profession being too pigeon-holing AND too focused around DPS. Weapons that are not focused around DPS (such as Ele Water Staff) tend to give up too much damage for too little utility, meaning they’re mostly just suboptimal. IMO, they should break past the current convention and start adding new weapon skills for existing weapons. Some weapon skills could even be weapon-agnostic. Water ele is a great example of how you could more or less completely eschew damage in favor of providing substantial healing AND either boon support or control effects (or both), leading to a character that contributes to the party in significant ways without directly damaging enemies.
b.) damage (still) scales in a more significant way with stats than anything else. While the game allows you to take other stats like concentration, expertise, healing power, or toughness, the scaling on all of these stats lacks punch compared to the scaling on damage, leading to a situation where it’s rarely recommended and very, very few builds make decent use of it.
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Greetings
Just wanted to make sure this wont be forgotten over the time. Town Cloth Tonics were a okayish solution for the time being. But there are still some weird extra-rules which seem to be a bit off and since there was no real conversation with the dev team about this feature, I just wanted to share my thoughts, hoping that a community manager will find this interesting and checking if other members of the community still feel the same:
First: The tonic itself blocks inventory space. I know, that this is the concept of tonics, but since the Clohes are the only tonics that don’t really transform your character but just style them, it feels a bit off
Second: No dying. This comes pretty much with the first point, since I am pretty sure that this was not really by design of the town clothes, but by design for tonics (since you just can’t dye a tree, a quaggan or a Karka tranformation).
Third: 15 Minutes and not fighting abilities. I mean seariously? Okay, once again, the second part makes perfectly sense for tonics but even for any other tonic the 15 Minutes transform back is just a bit awkward. Why should I want to be tranformed back when there is an extra button in my skills bar (the only button if this is not costume brawlable) to transform back?
So while I am sure, that there is a design or technical reason for you to not make these clothes available via the normal outfit area, I’m at least curious why not making it infinite so I don’t have to doubleclick an item all 15 minutes to not to be transformed back (this is especially ridiculus if I think about the fact that there are some karma merchant tonics with no lasting time at all)
Maybe this is something which is felt by some other people too.
Thanks
I will always recommend bringing back tonics as outfits. Always. There’s probably some execution and distribution issues, but ANet should hit it hard and brace for the little whinging that comes after, so we can have those assets in a properly usable form.
The problem is that most town clothes were pieces and not full assets. That’s no reason to not bring them back. They really should just exist as armor skins, even if Arenanet has to remake them. Same for the outfits. They dropped the ball on not just committing to that to begin with, even if it would mean they are released more slowly.
To be honest swapping between air and fire (using fresh air trait) is a dps boost vs small hit box than camping fire.
The AA on air is not really good so you can use a conjured weapon in the while you are waiting for air overload to be ready to use.
Water and earth are not for dps, they are for utility. You need heals/water field? Go water… You need some cc or a balst finisher or a reflect? Go earth.
You don’t understand what I’m saying. I know they aren’t for DPS, but that’s no reason why they shouldn’t offer enough DPS to be usable outside of burning cooldowns and frantically swapping out of them. The gap in DPS between Fire and the other attunements is too large, creating a situation where, no matter what your build is, Fire is your core attunement with the others only being used situationally. My opinion is that that’s silly.
water = lower dps but heal to compensate, earth its mitigation, air it should be single target and cc – fail there.
The overall issue however is gaming modes like raids and other mmo put an inflated value on dps, not versatility, because you cant min-max or stack versatility. Add on top of that people who have learned that min-maxing is all that matters and you have a double pronged problem that enforce each other.
Not only that, but other healing and CC builds do not sacrifice as much DPS as Ele does to take on those roles. It really doesn’t make sense. Water’s auto should do 75% or so of Fire’s auto, not 40% like it does.
We don’t need a 4th utility, what we need is another legend at core.
A ritualist-inspired legend, with turret-like spirits would do it just fine.
That completely breaks the symmetry of the game. The OP’s suggestion makes far more sense. I also think we need one more utility skill for each legend and at least one new weapon choice at baseline to feel like a complete class.
However, barring that, the core legends should definitely each have an F2 skill. The main problem with the Revenant currently is that Glint is too good while nothing else is good enough. We see this with other elite specs in the game, but not nearly to the same degree.
In any event, having defined roles wasn’t enough to prevent WoW from becoming a straight DPS-fest once you reach raid farm status anyway. Yeah, your healer heals and your tank tanks, but they do it with as much DPS thrown in as possible. Not really any different than it is here, but I think the gameplay in the learning phase can actually be more compelling without the trinity.
That’s an excellent point … tank and the healers only do those things ‘just enough’ … I’ve not played a single trinity-based MMO where tanks/healers pared back their gear from tanking/healing into DPS for optimal performance as they mastered the raids. Indeed, in some instances, tanks and healers became irrelevant once player performance was optimized; that’s a real screw over if you’re a tank/healer looking for groups to raid with.
From what I can tell, GW2 (smartly) skipped that tank/healer step that most people view as necessary for instanced team content. Good move IMO.
Except it has the effect of removing choices from players. I’m all for everyone doing a variety of things. It doesn’t change the fact that a lot of people like to tank, and a lot of people like to heal or support rather than directly fight enemies. And there’s no reason GW2 has to implement a rigid WoW-style trinity to provide those options, and others.
Besides, what you’re saying is factually wrong regarding the most popular MMO in the western hemisphere. WoW always requires tanks and healers unless you’ve outleveled the content, and tanks and healers always spec as tanks and healers for group content.
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^^ I agree. His whole argument hinges on the fact that you can’t have ‘good, instanced team content’ unless people have roles that are well defined. Obviously, that’s just a personal opinion. Much of the other stuff in there is not factual, like that this lack of roles is the #1 reason the game ‘hemorrhaged’ players. Not even Anet would know why any specific players leave the game, because there is not even a trigger to them leaving … but somehow, THIS guy knows why.
The utter confusion, chaos and disarray is due to people looking for a structure that was never there; OK, probably some level of people wondering who ‘the healer is’, but once you figure out what Anet is trying to do, you adjust and realize it’s much simpler than trinity.
Any fix is on the players side, to recognize some defined role is not necessary in this game to succeed in dungeons/fractals.
Gee, what a surprise. One of the “petless ranger” dissenters. You know, some things are just intuitive, like the fact that people like contributing something unique in group play rather than just being totally interchangeable with everyone else. Or prefer multi-dimensional tactical combat over one-dimensional DPS fests. Or feeling some degree of attachment to their class based on their ability to customize the way they play it. Or that most players early on joined and left as guilds when they figured out that group content didn’t meet their needs or desires.
I feel no compulsion to try to argue against anyone that disagrees with obvious facets of reality.
It is not “an obvious facet of reality” that defined roles makes a game more interesting to everyone. What I objected to primarily was the incorrect assertion that this was a primary cause of attrition after launch.
It’s fine to say you (and many others) enjoy a game with defined roles more than an otherwise identical game without. It’s not true for everyone.
Argh! Why don’t you guys understand that you already have “pre-defined roles”!? Apart from choosing a profession, you just only have one instead of many to choose from! The argument against this makes zero sense. It’s hilarious how in human psychology we tribalistically get entrenched in opposing viewpoints when there’s no rational basis for it whatsoever. It’s what our entire American political system represents.
I won’t deny that I’m guilty of it sometimes. I’m pretty sure that’s not what’s happening with me here, though. Maybe I’m just not expressing myself clearly. I’m not saying that I want Arenanet to “dictate” roles to us. I think Arenanet just needs to continue the trend they started last year and open up more build possibilities across classes. It should be a feasible option, even in open group or 5 man content, for some classes to spec totally into a heal/support build, or into a tank/heal, or tank/support, or hybrid DPS, or DPS/control, or support/control, or heal/control.
The current status quo is largely a factor of two issues – a.) lack of skill options, which heavily favors DPS over anything else for most professions, and. b.) differential scaling, where damage scales with stats in a more significant way than any sort of healing, defense, or condi/boon duration.
Both of these things, IMO, need to be further addressed.
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