Guild Wars 2

What a lot of people don’t seem to get is that we need to look at the details closely before coming to a conclusion. If housing was the problem, WoW would be going down in flames as we speak as the Garrison system is a form of housing, obviously that’s not the case

WoW’s revenue is 10x what GW2 is – maybe more then that. They can afford to spend far more on development. When smaller games cave into ‘popular demand’ for expensive but rarely used features – you have a problem.

A friend of mine really liked Wildstar housing – her house was featured on one of their videos even. She doesn’t play Wildstar anymore. It’s an opportunity cost issue.

Its not – does this feature kill the game – of course not. Is does this feature get people to subscribe and does it keep them subscribed. If you have only 5 million dollars for development each year – how do you spend it?

I think honestly the living story isn’t far from that answer.. You get people to log in again and check things out – and doing all the achievements can take a chunk of time. It’s pretty smart.

The guys over at Blizzard have money coming out of their eyeballs – they can make a whole expansion about Panda’s and just say ‘my bad.’

Windsagio.1340:

Hume.2876:

Windsagio.1340:

Hume.2876:

Here is the deal – this game is supposed to be all about active ways to stay alive.

“Meta” as understood in the dungeon sense is the ultimate in passive play though, you know your specified role and you do it exactly as you’ve done it every previous time. It totally freaking works, but let’s not pretend it’s active play. It’s less active than old-style ‘get out of the red circle!’ raid fights

And switching to all Nomad fixes this how? Don’t confuse bad encounter design with boosting of the passive mitigation stats. Like I said if you understand how combat works – you will understand why Zerker is the best case scenario for the game designers.

If you want to enable the content designers to put the focus on active abilities – you are smart to devalue passive mitigation.

I didn’t say that though :p

It’s fixed the way Anet is trying to fix it, by designing encounters with that kind of playstyle in mind.

Specifically they have to try to force active play. This isn’t, as you say, a stats thing, it’s in the enemies.

The Dungeon meta is about ability/trait combination allowing quick, low risk, passive play (usually in stacks). They have to force people out of the fields/mutual coverage and into actual combat. This is why so many new opponents drop continuing ground effects, they’re trying to force players to split up and actually play instead of sitting just around the corner so the enemies LOS run into 100 blades.

It’s also why those new mender enemies have an extremely powerful large radius AE heal that’s interrupted on any hit that also slide back a bit when they’re hit. The whole point is to force players to use pulls to grab them or more often to go out and target them. Again, it’s promoting active play rather than passive ‘let the enemies come to me’ play.

I play Zerk guys in Silver Wastes – it’s not a problem. Zerk gear just puts the emphasis on active and not passive mitigation. You have to dodge at the right time, use your bleeds etc etc. Use pulls and interrupts etc. You can’t just blindy run into a crowd of Teragriffs and hope to live in full zerkers. It’s a better design.

GW2 is not doing away with the Zerk meta. . All the passive stats do for armor is take the skill out of the game in PVE. Have a bunch of unkillabe noobs and let them randomnly hit keys to the mobs are dead. That’s not good game design.

In PVP its a different story. PVP hits aren’t so big that you can be one shot – so non zerker gear and even bunker builds have their place. You still want to use your active mitigation but its about blocking/reflecting/blinding the big upcoming attacks.

It’s a bit different but its a good system. People in this thread who want to tear it down don’t fully understand it. Forcing people to switch to a new meta or requiring people to have the ‘right’ gear for the right situation (ala Molten Core with its fire resist) is not a good game design.

You don’t want to lock people out of content. The real problew GW2 has is that people who go all tanky or healy and get rejected don’t seem to understand how lack of DPS hurts the team. The Zerk meta is fine. All we need is for GW2 to teach people how their combat is supposed to work early on – and then it will be self explanatory why Zerker is the way to go.

MikeyGrey.2496:

Hume.2876:

Windsagio.1340:

Hume.2876:

Here is the deal – this game is supposed to be all about active ways to stay alive.

“Meta” as understood in the dungeon sense is the ultimate in passive play though, you know your specified role and you do it exactly as you’ve done it every previous time. It totally freaking works, but let’s not pretend it’s active play. It’s less active than old-style ‘get out of the red circle!’ raid fights

And switching to all Nomad fixes this how? Don’t confuse bad encounter design with boosting of the passive mitigation stats. Like I said if you understand how combat works – you will understand why Zerker is the best case scenario for the game designers.

If you want to enable the content designers to put the focus on active abilities – you are smart to devalue passive mitigation.

Then what about other non-3x offensive gear types. They should just disappear? Do you really think its ok to go all offense and triumph in all aspects of the game? what kind of build variety is this game promoting?

How your character is designed should have a clear impact on how you handle encounters. As it is, players can run dungeons naked and that most certainly is not ok. It isn’t a matter of experience. I myself ran end of arah p4 first and only time almost naked way back when it was new(not by choice; multiple deaths & i was opener). Nor is it completely the game difficulty. Different situations should require you to adapt accordingly. Mechanics can go a long way to introduce variety.

Your build goes beyond just what you wear. Even if your choice armor is limited, point allocation should make the difference in the gameplay. As it is now, anything (and in some cases, even nothing) is viable. Your build design should reflect on more than just your time.

This game is NOT dependent on gear. It’s a horizontal progression. That means not having optimal gear does not lock you out of content. This is why the Zerk meta exists – if you can do dungeons naked – why not pick the fastest way to go through them?

The Zerk meta is not a problem – its the best case scenario for designers. It allows the content to be designed around active mitigation – and not having people outgear the content.

Games like WoW require you to ‘spreadsheet’ the gear. It’s all about optimizing your gear and not your play. That’s a different kind of game. GW2 is supposed to be an action MMO.

Gear is largely there as a little added plus – its not even necessary to do content. It will make your life a tad easier. Make it so you need the ‘right’ gear – and suddenly you have different kind of game.

I don’t want to play that game. You are welcome to pick from at least a half dozen other games that rely on players having the correct gear to unlock content.

Windsagio.1340:

Hume.2876:

Here is the deal – this game is supposed to be all about active ways to stay alive.

“Meta” as understood in the dungeon sense is the ultimate in passive play though, you know your specified role and you do it exactly as you’ve done it every previous time. It totally freaking works, but let’s not pretend it’s active play. It’s less active than old-style ‘get out of the red circle!’ raid fights

And switching to all Nomad fixes this how? Don’t confuse bad encounter design with boosting of the passive mitigation stats. Like I said if you understand how combat works – you will understand why Zerker is the best case scenario for the game designers.

If you want to enable the content designers to put the focus on active abilities – you are smart to devalue passive mitigation.

I see it as a sign of intelligence when developers don’t listen to the players. A great example is Wildstar housing. They spent a boat load of money (likely millions of dollars on housing) and that game is going down in flames.

You are much smarter using internal metrics to find out what players really like and what they really do – and adding that to your game. If it turns out that lots of players like things like Silver Wastes – that’s what you add.

Niche interests dominate the message boards – things like crafting and housing have just demolished so many MMOs over the years. Developers need to be smarter in this industry. They have to know more about game design then the players – and not let the player design the game.

There are some persistent rumours that GW2 is working on an expansion. If we get one of those I bet we get new dungeons.

I cry a little on the inside when I read about how people want to destroy the meta. GW2 has screwed up alright – they haven’t really shown people how their combat works. If people understood how its SUPPOSED to work – then people would understand that wearing Zerker is best case scenario for the game in PVE.

Here is the deal – this game is supposed to be all about active ways to stay alive. ACTIVE – not gear based. In WoW for example you had ‘free’ dodges where you would just stand in once place as a tank and the game would calculate that the mob missed. That’s passive mitigation. WoW after a while decided this sucked and at least wants to make you hit buttons to ‘avoid’ damage – even if you don’t see any animation.

Here in GW2 they are already a step ahead of that. You can debuff the mob to put up active mitigation (blinds, immobilize) – you can use abilities (Aegis – this is like WoW’s active) – you can use stacking of boons to increase your offensive potential to overwhelm the boss (best defense is a good offense) – and you can strafe behind the mob to avoid various attacks.. and so on. Its all active.

What you DO NOT WANT is to make the game about WEARING the right gear to PASSIVELY avoid damage. This is the worst case scenario. This is like old WoW but without rotations! Its entirely no skill. Ever run a dungeon with someone who just avoids damage – with a full tank set/build and does almost no damage? I have. Its not great. We do not want to make changes that reward these kind of players.

High skill players need to be rewarded – that’s the only thing that matters in a horizontal progression game. Any "meta’ can be quickly accomplished because its a horizontal progression.

Any attempt to change to favour low skill who want to make players run with 10 gear sets of gear should be rejected (1 each for the various encounters) . GW2 is supposed to be an ACTION MMO – and PVE changes should reflect that – and not destroy them.

Once you get how the combat it supposed to work – its immediately clear why Zerker should be the meta for PvE. If passive mitigation is not very important then you care about maximizing your DPS, boons and the ability to put out debuffs and such. Zerker gear lets you do this very well. (Some builds might potentially use stuff line Sinster or whatever but you get the idea – its gear with 3x offensive stats).

I have to agree with the zerkers.

There are several basic things the anti-zerkers don’t seem to get.

#1. Running low DPS gear makes things HARDER for your team. Boss fights last longer – enemies get more chances to do some dangerous special attack. Your control abilities get used up – as the front loaded blinds and such wear off.

#2. Almost all of the high DPS builds that are in vogue are HIGH support/control builds. Rather then focus on skills that extend an individual players life its about using talents like spotter or might stacking talents. Its about using blinds instead of ‘altruistic’ healing for a guardian for example.

#3. Beserker builds MORE responsibility for the individual player – you are squishier – you are tasked with more support/control responsibilities – because they are needed for your part. The TANKY builds OTOH are selfish. You aren’t supporting your team much – you have less control – all for the sake of individual survival.

Yes its not optimal from a ‘gear selection’ choice – sure you don’t have come up with weird mixes of gear to hit certain key levels of attributes. But it IS optimal from a play style point of view.

It puts the emphasis of good play on awareness of the situation – and use of abilities, as well as being ‘light on your feet’. The problem in this thread is that LEGIONS of people simply DO NOT understand the combat in this game.

As I explained in #1 most of the anti-zerkers traits/gearing makes life much harder on the team. You might end up more survivable – but trying to WoW the game makes life suck for the team.

The core of high level play is all about using control and support along with high DPS to deal with the tough encounters. I really suggest that more people watch videos on the combat system to understand why Zerker gear is so popular.

Once you get this – you will see that most zerker builds try to optimize all three aspects of this. Zerker builds allow arenanet to best show off their combat system in PVE.

The people that want to stand there and go through their rotation or stand there and throw down heals – WoW style don’t really understand this game. I suggest that these players go back to WoW.

Zerkers are not elitists who are trying to show off. They are TEAM FIRST guys in this game. Zerkers put the team ahead of individual player ease of play..

This is why when starting out its often suggested that you have a few pieces of Knights in your build so that you can get used to being squishy. Its challenging – but its for the team.

I agree that the feeling of teamwork in PvE is very diminished compared to many other games in the genre, and needs to be fixed. In particular, control and support roles don’t seem to be effective for what one gives up to use them. It leads me to feel like anything other than maximum DPS is of limited use which causes all of my characters to essentially have the same goals and many have the same or similar optimal stat distributions for a particular type of content.

Very good post. My point wasn’t that we need a trinity – its that the trinity was an avenue for teamwork in the best of other games. Think of sports.. if you think of a basketball team.. every player can shoot, pass and dribble – even the big centers. But when you play you let the PG do most of the dribbling – and the center does most of the ‘finishing’ around the hoop.

The essence of teamwork is doing things differently because you were working with teammates – and because of these actions your team can rise to new heights. This holds true for the military and they like.

People say that the trinity can lead to simple regimented roles. That’s absolutely true. Its not an automatic fix. But that doesn’t mean that this game doesn’t need to think a bit more about how to make it teamwork oriented.

Its not even that there is zero teamwork – it’s that its inaccessible especially for players who are starting out. You will hear from players that all they do is autoattack or hit 1-5 on every weapon. Yes these are ‘bad’ players – sure. But for a lot of the content there is no reason to do better. But its worse then that – and this was my initial point – you can’t even really see how others are doing.

Arenanet wanted to break new ground by busting up the trinity. But they need to add more teamwork back into the game – even if they never want the WoW trinity. I don’t care how they do it..

But its one of the main things missing from the experience of most of the players IMHO. I like GW2 – I hear all the bad reviews they get on the internet (and here) and I think that with some tweaking they could really fix things.

I see nothing wrong with support/control/dps – if they wanted to go that way. But they need to let players see who is doing what – and how well they are doing – and make it actually pay off to do those roles. Right now – the consensus is you really want to concentrate on damage..rather then the roles.

I don’t think that was a design goal because of the way the gearing is. They need to sit down and hash out how they can make it a bit better for the more serious players and yet not wreck things for the super casuals.

The problem with this kind of thing OP is you end up like Blizzard. You decide the fix is the same stuff with ‘easy’ and ‘hard’ modes. That sounds like a solution. But its not really..

The reason is even GOOD players will pick the easier path – if it offers the same reward. Even if they are good enough.. The human mind will absolutely pick the path of least resistance – even if it less fun.

Some of those people – probably MANY of the people that zerg down champions in a train on some servers could two man down some of those same champions. This would probably be even more “fun” for them. But they are driven by the rewards.

If you could make 10,000 a day pushing the S key vs. 5000 bucks at a real fun job – almost everyone would pick the push one key solution. For this reason what you want is UPLIFTING content.

You want all gamers to be challenged A LITTLE – across the board. This is hard to implement. But if you just sink down and give people ‘easy work’ they eventually get bored and quit. Blizzard is learning this the hard way..

Easy and hard modes don’t work – because everyone – even capable players pick the easy ways – and yet they don’t like it. You need a system that rewards challenging encounters more then easy one – and you need content that forces even low skill gamers to improve a little.

What Anet needs – and this goes for WoW too. Is more difficulty gated content. Unfortunately I think to do this reasonably well they need to strengthen their trinity (even if it is control, support, damage) and they seem loathe to do this.

Time gated content or dallies is too boring. It doesn’t matter that players do these activities – they still build up long term hate by doing so and quit the game – telling no one to come back.

The only decent way to have some difficulty gated content in the game is via some kind of PvP tournament/raiding/tough 5 mans. And to make these more accessible (at least the PvE part) you want stronger class roles so that people learn who is playing well and badly in their group..

The lack of trinity was a pretty big mistake on Arenanet part. Essentially all the classes play like DPSers with some added utility. Yes sure in theory there is still teamwork but its as if you decided to run a dungeon in WoW with 5 warlocks. Maybe they could do it with some awesome teamwork.

But the average run of the mill encounter/boss/world boss etc doesn’t use any team work. So called ‘easy’ teamwork isn’t there – and none of the other systems whether the combo system or the utility skills really compensate.

The end result is that the learning curve for this game is all messed up. Its either ultra easy all casual – but tricky in certain PvP situations/dungeons etc. I hate to break it to Arenanet but the holy trinity (group roles) really WAS a step forward for MMOs.

The rest of their problems – lack of progression etc can be fixed. But this fundamental design error weakens the game dramatically. I guess even GW1 had roles.

I feared it wouldn’t really work when I read about it – and it doesn’t. World Bosses are just zerg fests/buttom spams. That’s because as I explained before if they balanced it to be hard you might need some really tricky teamwork or like say a "burn’ team of all skilled glass cannons.