You make a good point there Anchoku. Without that all important damage increase, a stun is still inferior to raw damage. Due to the overblown boon spam in the game, most classes can ignore the damage they receive (or heal right through it without even speccing towards healing). So while you are stunning an enemy (which is not needed), you could also be doing damage to that enemy (which is what the game is all about). So a stun has no place, unless the game balance changes dramatically.
Stuns have a place, just not while stability and invulnerability periods are around (the whole board really needs to be redrawn). Stuns also don’t need to be 2+ seconds long. I still don’t understand why anet made things like super speed, super jumping, leap skills (although they are very ridgedly scripted), and then still loaded such emphasis on stuns and soft CC. It’d be easier on the UI and more enjoyable to just have players moving around constantly and catching up with each other instead of one player effortlessly hitting another player who then can’t move normally or at all for 2-8 seconds. Hard and soft CC are there to get in one or two big hits, not telling a guy that he would be better off making a sandwhich during this life while some other jerkwad takes 5 seconds to hammer through a shallow rotation while his character is more or less immobile or his active positioning is permanently invalidated.
The whole thing is nonsense. It’s also a thing that I corrected with a necro rework.
A versatile weapon and a new playstyle.
GW2 is too shallow to allow for that. You’ll get your lava font and blast finisher and like it.
How about a trait that would add pulls to wells?
Or add pull to staff marks.
Or add pull to AoE weapon skills.
Or add pull to plague form.Or a trait that replaces fears with pulls?
How about a trait that actually changes the way that a skill is used instead of just giving the same skill a freebie bonus for no real reason that players now have to passively counter? How about making things like staff marks and wells NOT the same mechanic copy pasted 4 times over? Honestly, just read https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/necromancer/A-good-necromancer/first#post5026965 a necromancer which accommodates player movement, positioning and support options.
You know, it’s funny. “We want you to get hit,” would have been almost justifiable (aside from the fact that getting hit is objectively a bad thing), if they had just set all of the necromancer threshold procs at really high points like 75% – 100% or just made them all more or less guaranteed RNG with a cooldown (like runes with “50% chances to proc ‘x’ when struck”). Making stuff like Last Gasp proc at 50% HP is awful because necro has no real way to bounce back from -50% total HP. Then they say stuff like “You have a huge HP pool” means anything when necromancer doesn’t even have that many HP threshold procs at all (not that such things are interesting or balanced in any way).
And yet people still get excited for specializations or think entirely within the design philosophy of anet when saying how any given class could be “better” or “more balanced.”
I do not see how being hit offers any advantage for Necromancer. Even gaining Life Force on Spectral skills is a poor trade for losing health. I just chalked the comment up to them not understanding how Necro worked.
It’s not about gaining advantages, it’s just poor design. When HP is a number that can be quantified at points between 100% and 0% (the former being maximum and the latter being dead), reducing that number should be a raw sign of player dominance over another player. Instead, we get things like retaliation, auras and threshold triggers that reward players for effectively being bad, all in a limp-wristed attempt to add some depth to this game’s shallow combat.
I’d much rather Anet revisit their idea that Necros should be harder to escape from, if not one of the hardest classes to escape from.
So instead of both necromancer and opponents actually moving around manually, you’d rather just make everyone slow the moment that they enter into range of a plodding necromancer?
At the very least we need more access to stability, otherwise our healthpool is utterly meaningless if we’re just stun locked and taking an absolute thrashing.
If you’re talking about PvP, does anyone really move a lot at all once people begin contesting a capture node? You just want another warrior on the field?
So I say less focus on mobility, more focus on our ability to lock a target down (immobs, chills, and cripples) and the ability to mitigate damage better than just taking it when we’re stunlocked and have no other course of action.
So people will continue to walk/teleport up to slow necromancers, but now slow necromancers get to make these players move super slow or not at all? GW2’s combat is already reminiscent enough of Runescape.
Want to be hit? Then play Guild Wars 2.
This game has loads of “gain free bonus when someone hits you” and it’s only getting more. No game that legitimately takes itself seriously would make taking damage so trivial or rewarding.
The devs don’t care that much about player suggestions or don’t have time to consider them. I’ve already said it before, but necro’s future hinges on anet providing the specialization with enough overtuned numbers to bump it into meta tier. Stock classes aren’t changing because anet lacks the imagination and resources.
Shout necro? Can’t wait to press 4 identical use, instant, effortless buttons within the span of 5-10 seconds and then wait 20-60 seconds to do it all over again. inb4 we get a Cacophony that’s just an instant PBAoE Mantra of Pain spike which also bleeds and a Vocal Minority that inflicts weakness in the same way. Truly innovative.
To completely ignore dodging as a mechanic,
Given dodge’s base recharge rate and total resource pool, does an instant, nearly static block (the distance traveled while dodging isn’t exactly tremendous) which lasts 0.75 s really add a lot to combat that is governed by tab targeting? Clearly it doesn’t contribute a lot given how the average player mitigates most damage through other forms of invulnerability or passive healing. Sometimes I wonder why they didn’t just make “dodge” into a half-second, channeled parry to be used while WASD’ing and then fill weapon bars with more skills dedicated entirely to raw movement instead of things like “Throw Axe.” At least then combat might look a little bit different because melee players wouldn’t have to worry about dodging out of position from cleave range while mitigating damage and all players would just use their unique movement abilities to move about quickly if they needed.
Aiming in an MMO is a tricky proposition, because often MMOs have higher latencies than other games which can host fewer people on custom servers.
Exactly, which is why instead of aiming, MMORPGs tend to focus on windows of opportunity instead of aiming. Only trouble is that gw2’s timeframes are insufferably long and ridiculously forgiving for them to be called dynamic or skillful. Unfortunately, it’s far too easy to kill any given player in gw2, so they had to imbalance individual player survival in order to keep up with the already imbalanced player damage. It’s easy to see that much given how weak necromancers are in combat and how they coincidentally also don’t have static invulnerability or vigor.
That said, GTAoEs are still a form of manual aiming (even though most of them too big to miss). It’s also very possible to play with targeting off. Latency seems to be as much of an interloper as it is in any other online game and not drastically worse due to gw2’s supposed genre. Even so, introducing manual projectile aim into gw2 isn’t the way to make it better. The way to make it better is to tighten up overly forgiving invulnerability time frames, give players more non-teleport mobility options, make circles smaller, introduce more directional attacks, whittle down CC, and reemphasize direct damage as the primary means of killing enemies. And even then, let’s be honest: if anet was willing to go so far with directional attacks as they did with the revenant, do you really think that latency is a big issue to them? Why should it be for you?
Also, you basically said “GW1 would be quite the set-up if it wasn’t GW1”. I’m not really sure what point you’re trying to make.
While it would be a big change, the main pillars of gw1 were build customization, the attribute system, the diverse mechanic pool and the varied PvE/PvP encounters. Improving player movement and mobility in that game would probably have something like a dervish update effect instead of warranting a “GW1.5” release.
Really? Because the whole reason i have stayed with this game is because the combat is completely unique.
Do you actually aim anything once you get into range? If not, you’re playing the same MMORPG everyone has been playing for two decades now. GW2 was pretty close to being something a little more than that too what with the analog movement. Shame even that is dreadfully slow and “mobility” is really all just scripted tracks for the most part.
Truth be told, GW1 was more innovative than GW2 when it comes to games marketed as “MMORPG.” If that game had analog movement, scripted, fast leap sequences, ground targeted attacks and jumping, it’d be quite the set-up.
(edited by Erasmus.1624)
Its much more reasonably to expect them to change their stance and give us more stationary avoidance than it is to make us highly mobile.
Well, this game’s combat is just something anyone can find in any other MMORPG. Might as well go all in instead of spending too much effort trying to keep it covered up as poorly as they do. If you’re looking for something different, feel free to ask me for a solution.
I dont believe necros should have mobility. But there is no justification to not giving us active defence which scales. Such as vigor, blocks and projectile defence. That defence is required in PvE. Not giving it to us is setting us up to be in an even more unpopular position when new challenging content comes out in HoT.
So you’d rather just stay in one place and eat damage but take no effects like everyone else in the game? Why not push for a playstyle that has more legitimate movement (no teleports) and can grant advantages with keen positioning/timing?
Thats not completely true, a deathshroud/spectral power necro can rip newbies apart
So it’s balanced by the bottom line then? Is that fair? Not that “press button receive second health bar” or “fall below 50% HP receive second health bar” are balanced at all really.
There is no justifiable why. There is no reason. Necros just ARE bad. The question isnt why, the question is how do you fix it in a way that doesn’t jsut make it overpowered. Anyone can make an overpowerd set of necro traits, but how do we make a balanced set of necro traits.
You should just look at my rework of the necro.
Necros are infamous for not having mobility.
We already know that. The question was “Why?”
Reason is because they can be very tanky.
This obviously can’t be the case, otherwise nobody would be crying so hard about how necros are fodder in pvp and how they don’t have a lava font in pve.
They are incredibly tanky when fighting 1v1 fighting on a 3v3 or more they get ripped to shred because their defenses scale inversely with the number of enemies since life force is a limited resource instead of a static period of negated damage like shelter shield block distortion etc.
So limited resource < static period of negated damage. Necromancer only has the former. I still don’t see why the guy who isn’t objectively as tanky as other classes deserves to be so devoid of non-WASD movement.
Necros are infamous for not having mobility.
We already know that. The question was “Why?”
Reason is because they can be very tanky.
This obviously can’t be the case, otherwise nobody would be crying so hard about how necros are fodder in pvp and how they don’t have a lava font in pve.
Necro isn’t meant to have mobility
Says who? For what reason?
What I do not understand is how every other profession can build something like a Necromancer and now we have seen a new profession and two elite lines with descriptions of further debuff and control skills.
GW2 doesn’t have enough gimmick mechanics to warrant the amount of classes and skills that it has available for any given player. Combat in this game is so shallow that it was natural to see a class or two left behind in the dust while other classes just do the same thing except more optimally. If you want a necromancer that has a distinct playstyle and impact on the field, then you need an extensive rework like the one I made.
You have a valid point, Flow, about tiers not matter in anymore. Only when leveling and unlocking will there be any difference.
I am really not comfortable with having lines associated with weapons and then having to pay for them. It’s limiting.
What if each line was not associated with a weapon but would give any weapon an extra bonus or effect?
Spite – 20% condition duration and vigor
Curses – 20% condition damage and 1 bleed 4sec on crit 3 sec ICD
Death Magic – 20% boon duration and 3 sec retaliation on hit, 10 sec ICD
Blood Magic – 1% life steal on every hit, both ways
Death Magic – 1 stack 5 sec might on crit , 3 sec ICD
What if traits actually affected how players use skills instead of just always giving players a bunch of entirely brainless freebies to go on top of the same mindless rotation that a player would be doing anyway?
I support baseline piercing. Staff 1 pierces. Lifeblast, the manifestation of pure Lifeforce channeled into a projectile, cannot pierce without a trait?
Great game design.
Flavor alone is not a valid basis for design.
It’s a good start.
Considering the horrid cast time and the after cast it needs a buff. Piercing as baseline is just one possible suggestion. No need to get sassy :p
Just because life blast has a cast time that gives an enemy some sort of cue or wind up period in order to take an action doesn’t mean that it needs a buff.
I support baseline piercing. Staff 1 pierces. Lifeblast, the manifestation of pure Lifeforce channeled into a projectile, cannot pierce without a trait?
Great game design.
Flavor alone is not a valid basis for design.
I like the idea of consuming LF to proc an extra effect but DS is our primary defense mechanism. Any trade of it for increased dps seems unnecessary and counter to the intent of DS.
Now, if there were a skill that would allow consumption as a heal or defense option, that would be interesting.
DS wouldn’t need to be solely a second health bar if the rest of the game was remotely balanced around telegraphed or timed attacks. Unfortunately, the rest of the game is balanced around passive procs, teleports, invulnerability periods, effects over time and instant actives.
DS could very well be many things if gw2 were just properly balanced.
(edited by Erasmus.1624)
Reworks. Hoo boy.
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/necromancer/A-good-necromancer/first#post5026965
The necromancer is more or less just a sub-optimal engineer in terms of its identity and “role” in this game. Do something about that. Just don’t be satisfied with “I’m still doing the same thing as I was doing before but now it lasts longer/deals more damage/randomly triggers some instant effect that most anyone can do!” Making life blast pierce and deal enormous amounts of damage doesn’t change how one uses life blast. It’s still the same ability, and the same goes for any trait-affected skill in the game. If you want something actually interesting and unique, you’re going to need entirely new skills and draw backs to allowing their usage.
Anet isn’t going to meet you halfway. You are going to have to strain over the table and grab their lifeless hand yourself.
The current GW2 Necromancer is slow, players often feel rather helpless when focused, and it lacks dimension and identity in combat. There’s also now the worry of how the necro specialization will pigeonhole the class into rolling a single spec in an attempt to avoid being swept into obscurity. So in an attempt to make stock necromancer not quite so insufferable, here’s another one:
http://pastebin.com/G2ikmR5G; Everything is in line with the new trait system except that minor traits have been removed. Players now just choose everything for themselves.
Everything is pastebinned because of the sheer amount of content. Names for anything are just place-holders. This is just a little thing finally off my chest.
- Means of tying the Skyhammer/SAB/Zephyrite air aspect “boost jump” effect to the player’s “jump” key while under the effects of super jump.
- A means of implementing and tracking the diminishing returns when blasting a single water field.
- A means of allowing haste (formerly “super speed”) to grant its full movement speed bonus (+75%) instead of wasting most of it by virtue of player movement speed capping out at 133%.
- The protection stacking mechanic in the first bin if you read that. The protection change is mainly just a ploy to add some more dimension to support; not really necessary.
As a note, the majority of this document was created about a month and a half before the Revenant was revealed (early 01/2015). As such, a few skills saw revisions, borrowing from the small pool of “new” mechanics of what were revealed as Revenant abilities.
(edited by Erasmus.1624)
Just did a 50. Out of four, only one got a infused ring. Lower tiers also gave nothing.
Yeah, I’m not feeling the “improved” drop rates.
Shadow Behemoth didn’t work.
Absolutely nothing from 50. kittening waste of time.
Guild runs daily for 30, 40, and 50. Nobody gets anything worthwhile.
Op. I like your post. I really do. But if ArenaNet really needed help with writing, which they do, then they really shouldn’t be holding their writer position in the company. Basically, I’m interpreting your post as a huge ‘GET GUD’ message to the company, which is greatly needed since they really do need to get good.
Account-wide dyes. Wardrobe.
…Thanks for features that should have been in the game from the very beginning, Anet.
The Knights event was left in a very sorry state over a weekend where one would expect more players to log in and play. I think ANet owes us an explanation on what went wrong and how they can improve so kittens like this doesn’t happen again.
They wanted the fight to be more challenging. They are human beings that don’t work 24h each days and there is this thing called “weekend”, people usually don’t work on weekends.
Sure they do. It’s called overtime. Thus far, to me it seems like ArenaNet’s just being lazy and unhelpful in regards to this problem. We have yet to receive a substantial word on the subject, even with all this whining for the past week. They really should have just spent the weekend fixing six minutes instead of fixing other non-issue bugs.
Active damage mitigation in gw2 makes it possible to avoid 100% of the damage without investing in any kind of toughness or armor defense whatsoever.
My proposal
Adaptive Active Damage Mitigation
it’s simple really,
make dodge tie into the character’s toughness and armor rating.
Dodging would have a base damage mitigation of say 35-50%
For any higher damage mitigation you’d need to invest in toughness, armor and vitality.
up to say 75-80% damage mitigation via dodging.What this change would do:
- it would make zerk only parties a lot harder, dare I say impossible since even dodging would not mitigate 100% of the damage and since zerkers do not invest in any kind of defense they would rapidly melt down.
- it would make defensive based play both desired and interesting to play.My 2 cents.
Discuss.
EDIT
the numbers and formula’s are nothing but an example, I do believe wholeheartedly that the idea is a sound one.
It’s up to the professionals to figure out the correct ratios and so on as to not give high armor classes an advantage over light armor classes.
That is a horrible, horrible idea. Mainly because of the current reward and encounter system. For one thing, since most bosses are just HP sponges, you’d do very little damage and it’d take much, much longer to go through a dungeon for very little reward. All that time spent dodging is you not hitting the boss. Then you just die without having contributed anything.
(edited by Erasmus.1624)
Friends and I tried, bugged.
Money makes the world go ’round.
I found it hard to scrounge up the motivation to do fractals after I got stuck on 49 pre-patch and even more so after I heard about the patch that would implement kitten leaderboards that required everyone who worked hard to get reset back to 30. Post-patch, it’s pretty much reached negative levels. These days I just log in, do my dailies, then say over VOIP “I’m bored.”
There is literally nothing to do after I do all my time-gated content.
I’m sure it’s been mentioned a billion times already, but I’d like to reinforce the idea that ArenaNet should actually listen to the people with the angry stacks instead of the other people. More than likely, they have good reason for it.
Living Story is finally gone! Yay! Here’s to a box expansion next year.
Scarlet is an awful villain and I’m sure many of us just want to bash some dragon heads. Can’t we just get an expansion to do that? Thanks. Also, your current design philosophy sucks.
All these casuals around me.
Play ranger.
Too mainstream.
One day ranger will be an actual class.
Way too late. Too many managers, too many conflicting opinions, the lead dungeon designer got fired for trying to do his job… it’s all downhill from now on.
Time Gated Crafting, ensuring that the vast majority of players can easily keep up.
Your post is perfectly agreeable, except this part.
I don’t want to be forced to go at a snails pace. If i want to put the effort or time or gold into smashing through content like a flood through New Orleans than I want the game to let me do that. Let me hold my phallus enhancing +20 sword of grinding high while others struggle. Not everyone wants to ride the care bear express to equality ville.
Achieving something at the same time as everyone else is no more of an achievement than having my hand held and crossing the street. I’m a big boy now anet, I can decide how fast I want to get something without you prescribing how much fun I should be having and when.
Fair enough. Let me ask you this. Do you think you should get an edge over everyone else because you have more gold to spend or more time to put towards your Ascended items? Do you feel proud of defeating someone even though you had an unfair advantage?
The introduction of Ascended gear, as controversial as it already is, necessitates the need for this so called time gating. Beyond just the time required to get an Ascended piece ,there’s also the staggered release of Ascended items. This was completely intentional. If ArenaNet decided to release all Ascended items at once then the players with too much time and/or gold on their hands would likely dominate both PvE and WvW. Sure, they won’t be keeping this edge indefinitely but the fact that they can at all will upset the balance of the game.
Yes and yes, though the pride is also mixed with laughter at their expense.
I understand completely why anet is doing this, of course. As you say the rich players would roll in in new gear and completely wreck all but the most skilled players leading to new players having a bad experience, casuals having a cry about how O/P the new gear is and so on. Clearly anet believes that the revenue they would lose doing this would be more in the long run than say, the revenue they could obtain from the whales that would outright buy gems to convert to gold to buy all the things needed to get their hands on an ascended weapon.
But those types of calculations are better left to John Smith.
Those couple digit stat increases sure make a difference when you’re running around in a zerg and, outside of that, when you’re bashing health sponges with a stick. It makes me almost glad I have all my trinkets ascended from all that grinding I had to do.
(edited by Erasmus.1624)
Sigil stacks go away when you get downed… then you’re forced to hit 25 things again if you want the stacks back. MAN, IT SURE WOULD BE GREAT IF SIGIL STACKS DIDN’T GO AWAY WHEN YOU GET DOWNED.
(edited by Erasmus.1624)
Mine’s missing too. Honestly, it makes me wonder how ArenaNet screwed this up.
They’re broken for me. Didn’t get credit for Mt. Maelstrom and Black Marches and I waited until the end AND killed Scarlet. How in hell did this get broken?
The gauntlet is too easy to farm a lot of gold with thief!!!!
I see thieves doing 4-5 gambit fights in around 15 seconds against deadeye!
They are able to farm 5g every 10 minutes or so just using their autoattack with blind..The gauntlet is infested with thieves because its too kitten easy !!!!!!
The game is broken!!! fix that… the game is not balanced at all!!!!!
60% of the players in the queems gauntlet are thief class. Something wrong with that!If you get a thief you get rich. If you dont, keep trying with all the dimishing returns everywhere.
You must be new.
Hey everyone! We have elected to “hotfix” the Necro and split Dhuumfire to bring it down a bit in PvP. This change will be in today, with patch notes in the usual place.
Thanks for the feedback!
Can’t you just get rid of it? Go look at the necro sub forum. There is an overwhelming outcry from us that we never wanted burning in the first place. It doesn’t fit the classes theme, its already gotten several of our traits nerfed as a result, and its causing nothing but trouble for everyone.
That sounds like too much work for ArenaNet.
I suggest you (Arena Net) roll back achievement points based off dailys.
No. Why should we have to suffer for new players?
But RNG within RNG within RNG is FUN. Seriously though, I don’t see ArenaNet/NCSoft stopping their RNG shenanigans anytime soon, sadly enough.