Fury, fellyn. You also get a small initial base crit value.
I’m waiting on the 15th patch. If they fail to try to fix the massive number of problems all the professions have by then, they’re probably not going to for several months. It tells me they’re putting more effort into releasing new features as a gimmick for marketing, rather than worrying about fixing what they have now.
The thief in this video died as soon as he got the ranger down,what’s the problem or “broken” thing there?
I’ve always been fascinated by this sort of response from people. Just because the person who just nearly one-shot someone died afterwards, that somehow makes the kill he just got fair? That’s not a very good way of balancing a game, when you can rationalize away someone having a 1-2-3 way to instantly win a fight, so long as they can die just as fast. If that’s okay, why not just give players a button they can press that auto-kills their target but also kills them at the same time? Obviously I’m being facetious, but think about why that’s silly for a second, then apply that on a larger scale. Part of having fights be enjoyable is both people having opportunities to make mistakes, recover from them, gain an upper hand, lose it, and so on. Having “fights” last a couple of seconds is not a contest of skill. It’s masturbation.
(edited by Plague.5329)
The only weapon I can’t see a Warrior using is staff, focus and scepter. Torch makes just as much sense as a Warhorn does. It’d probably have a couple more useful skills, too. Although, knowing GW2 skills, it’d probably just be something that causes one-target burning and then something that blinds in a cone, or something dull and apprehensively designed.
Not much. Unlike GW1, where critical hits were more important for the use of individual skills, in GW2 criticals are more of just a DPS increase mechanic rather than a spiking mechanic. As a result, having a high critical rate usually means you’re sacrificing a massive amount of either resilience or base damage power. Criticals trigger almost all the time, and most of the useful sigils use only criticals as their triggers.
Most Warrior builds trigger Fury all the time, since it’s loaded all across skills. Actually having it up is an afterthought. You may as well just assume a Warrior has an innate critical chance of around 25%. Which honestly triggers pretty often, and certainly enough to get your sigils working (especially considering their own internal cooldowns).
You probably would like to have at least a +10% or so chance with almost every build, so you’re critting about 30-40% of the time. In contrast I think once you crest 60% you’re probably wasting a lot of utility and build synergy just so you can have a bigger number than everyone else.
ANet tends to sit and watch things for months at a time before doing anything, then make huge, sweeping changes to the game with only little hotpatches for individual problems in between that they deem too important or so inconsequential it wouldn’t break the game in the meantime.
That can backfire on them though, when they release the updated version and players discover some of the changes were asinine to begin with, or exploitable. They then have a carefully tested release with some severe problems associated with it because they completely internalized the new meta without considering the players may outsmart them.
Having to arrange teams when you’re just starting is too daunting for new players. Even somewhat experienced players don’t necessarily want to have to gather people up and organize a plan.
In GW1, this is what Random Arenas was for. You just walked in, press “Enter Battle” and the game would randomly throw you in with other people who did the same thing. No objectives other than to survive. If you managed to win successively, your team, who had proven themselves ten times by that point and understood what one another was doing, were then pitted against an actually organized team in Team Arenas, automatically.
It was a very smart system obviously created by a team of intelligent people. It taught new players the game, it was fun and it automatically transitioned success into more competitive areas. The 8v8 sPvP hotmatching in GW2 achieves nothing at all in comparison, failing to ease new players in, failing to teach the mechanics of the organized version of team play, and also failing to reward success in the same way RA did. (When your team lost in RA, that was it; the whole team was disbanded and you had to enter battle with a completely different randomized group of players. This also helped you make friends [or enemies] in the process.)
I feel like I keep harping on this with everyone else, but the GW2 development team really needs to step back and look at what GW1 did correctly, because they have a lot to learn from that game. It really amazes me they have taken so many steps backwards from PvP in that game. It doesn’t have to be the same game, obviously, but when something works very well, you improve on it; you don’t throw it in the trash and haughtily decide to reinvent the wheel.
I think people are a little too concerned with how much damage they do. I preferred the system in GW1 in which all the professions had locked base stats, aside from their attribute points and maybe rune choices. The severe min-maxing nonsense in GW2 is unwelcome.
It’s conversion numbers, I imagine.
Think of all the people who play PvE. Of that number, probably 50% may try sPvP at some point, considering people who stop playing, never use the account and so on. Of that 50%, another 25% might actually play consistently. Of that 25%, another 50% of that number might try tPvP. Of that small number, only a few may actually be able to form groups consistently or know enough people to create an organized team. After that, you deal with the problems associated with the game mode itself.
I imagine barely anyone plays tPvP in comparison to the rest of the game. It’s too detached from everything else, and due to how punishing PvP is on new players and how brutal 8v8s are on new players, that also turns off people immediately. No ranking system, a bad starter game mode and a fairly isolated area that some have never even heard of (I see people who want to know what HotM even is at times)… that’s a recipe for low populations.
Duels were laughed at in 1v1 because you could cater your build to completely shutting down certain classes. A melee anything versus most casters, for instance, is basically a sure win, simply because melee is punished so severely in GW1 with blinds, CCs of all kinds, hexes and a myriad number of conditions. Even ignoring that one kind of matchup, if you see a profession type, any good player can instantly throw up a generic build that will kill them, with almost no questions asked. GW1 was NOT a game where you could 1v1, outside of really specific situations, assuming people are running around in all-purpose builds. Obviously GW2 is not that complex.
I like the idea of there just being an open little 1v1 area in the HotM itself, where people can test their builds against one another, for everyone to see. It’s an important training mechanic in any game like this. Unless ANet is concerned people may get upset during duels and have their feelings hurt. We players need to be held and burped at least five times a day, after all. Yes, irony.
My main problem with the difficulty in dungeons is that most simply supplement any creative way to make the combat more challenging by simply giving the boss literally over ten million health and then making their normal attacks hit like a truck. At this point the fight ceases to be about skill and just becomes a game of trying to find an exploit to mitigate the lack of fairness in the fight.
I find the most satisfying boss fights are ones that encourage both ranged and melee, and will almost certainly get you killed by a single large windup, telegraphed move if you don’t adjust. For example, a boss that throws out a high lobbed grenade that can one-shot you if you don’t get into melee range. Or Kholer’s dagger storm (an example of a perfect boss mechanic).
I honestly think many bosses would be a lot more fun if they only had a few hundred thousand health points but they had several ways of mitigating damage for prolonged periods if you don’t stop them from using the skill, and/or the ability to completely wipe your party if you sit there talking during the fight or trying to eat chips.
Right now dungeon fights are just lazy, and throw bosses at you with tons of health to try to elongate the time you spend fighting them because of an arbitrary need to make the dungeon last X amount of time.
Probably. But if that’s true, what’s the point of the trait? Why not just have it increase damage, period, if its source is going to be something that’s always true anyway? Not much depth to something like that.
Yeah, doesn’t make much sense. I guess it encourages us to… waste energy? I have no idea. I guess that combined with doing damage at the end of a roll means you should be rolling after people like a Goron.
I really like the idea of a jumping puzzle everyone does at once. It just needs to be performed side by side, not in a big pile. Although obviously the clocktower was intended to be done solo, and the group thing came as a surprise.
I’d like a puzzle that is expected to take you about ten minutes to finish if you know what you’re doing, but is full of checkpoints along the way where people restart if they fail, all at the same time, and it’s laid out so that the players can see one another but they aren’t jumping on the same positions as one another. Like all the jumping pieces are the same model, but positioned about ten feet apart at all times so you’re all jumping on your own segments, but you can still feel some sense of competition. And of course, you’re rewarded with enough money to warrant the time. Probably about 5-8 silver, like it’s a tiny dungeon.
Remember when playing a game was about playing the game? And not about having spreadsheets to track market trends? Shouldn’t the richest people in a MMO be the people who have achieved the most spectacular feats, not people who sit in front of a NPC manipulating imaginary items for a few minutes a day?
I know. I run a soldier hammer build in PvP. But the point of it is not damage. It’s denial. My traits are all in defense and tactics for a reason. None of my traits raise damage at all. You can do that with gear.
The idea behind making hot join 8v8 instead of 5v5 was to lessen the impact of the individual, creating an easier environment for new players to learn in. ….
Unfortunately, it’s had the opposite effect. 8v8s are much harder to learn in because it’s so much easier to get killed. Honestly, 1v1s will teach you more about mechanics than any other kind of fight. It should be 5v5s only, outside of some future new game mode.
Some too much. Others, not. Warriors for example need a ton of condition mitigation. Freeze, immobilize, cripples and all. Yet the only reliable way is soldier runes with healing shouts, which our one condition removal skill works once and has a recharge of 45 seconds.
Other classes have insane mitigation, which I imagine renders some condition users next to worthless. You’d think the classes that stealth or jump around a lot and use mainly range attacks would have the least, and the classes with no tricks at all that have almost no range options would have the most.
Mad, I think your build is focused a little too much on trying to grab damage bonus traits for weapons that aren’t focused on dealing damage. If you want to use a hammer, that’s a sustained presence weapon. You’ll want to be on your target as often as possible, and your setup won’t allow you to do that. You’re going to be crippled, immobilized and so on more often than you’ll be hitting anyone.
Signet of Stamina is a terrible skill to bring for condition mitigation. If you’re frozen, are you going to use it to get back into the fight? Then what? You’re crippled for the next forty seconds. You also seem to be bringing FGJ for no real reason other than it gives you might. Your secondaries have no synergy with one another.
I’m sure you’ll kill a couple people, but you need to consider utility and what your build is DOING rather than just thinking, “I can disrupt people sometimes and deal a lot of damage in the process.”
Feel free to ignore “certain people,” by the way. Every forum has them.
Many of the skills are indeed simplistic, although all the classes are a little more simple-minded than they used to be. I suppose Warrior skills are just about the same, but because there’s not as many of them and the gameplay overall is less complex than in GW1, this can add to the problem.
Loaded question. In a way they’re the most similar of all the profession changes. Like in GW1, weapon skills are of course tied to weapons. They still have stances, signets and so on. They still sort of operate in the same way, being marginally tanky while at the same time in PvP focusing on sustained DPS followed by a single burst.
Unfortunately the core mechanics of the game have changed around the profession. With no monks, everyone dies faster in group play, fighting is more frantic and intense planning and “tricking people” as in GW1 is no longer important. Overall, the game plays more now like a typical action game than the more tactical, paced combat of GW1.
Think of all the problems Warriors had in GW1 when you didn’t have a monk with you. That’s their problem now. Builds center around trying to account for this, but with such a tiny array of skills to choose from, usually everyone runs almost the same exact thing. Individual skills are not balanced, so most you will never use anyway.
Right now Warriors may be the most evenly balanced profession, but that isn’t saying much. They’re all plagued with problems. They’re probably the weakest in PvP in terms of playing an important role in organized play. Overall, it’s not quite the same, despite the profession being pretty similar. Adrenaline skills are gone completely, aside from a single weapon-based burst skill that doesn’t do much of anything. Elites in the game are very high recharge only (and almost always terrible), so you can’t base a build around one. So don’t look to have much diversity to weapons, like you did in GW1. There’s no Decapitate/Eviscerate problems here.
So, I guess they’re very much the same. It’s just the game isn’t as good yet, and may never be due to the intense dumbing down of what made up the core elements of GW1’s combat system, and the repopulation of those areas with number min-maxing.
Use healing shouts with hammer / Mace+Mace or Mace+Shield. Preferrably Mace x2 so the trait for it applies to both weapons instead of just the primary. Shield basically just does the same thing less effectively in exchange for a little defense, which isn’t the point of such a build. Also, Tremor is awesome.
Adrenal Shouts, of course. You’ll want to abuse the Mace and Hammer burst skills (one of the few in the game that do something useful). Now, instead of building a glass cannon, build a tank. Your focus is disruption, after all, not damage. Also, look at it this way: the gain in stats from attributes is fairly small. Most of it is coming from equipment. Just supplement it to your liking with whatever kind of equipment you’d like. I can run 30 tactics, 30 defense and still have over 3,000 attack this way.
All shouts, of course. Soldier runes. This allows you to actually hit your target. Using a glass cannon physical skill build will not. Enjoy being frozen, immobilized and so on. Forever.
I like the idea of physical skills. But they’re not too great right now.
Well, using a longbow in PvP in general is a bad idea. In theory it would be a good idea. Area control and all. But it’s just too weak with too little going for it to be a really viable upper tier PvP weapon. PvE, of course, it’d godly. But the problems with primary weapon utility is another kind of write-up entirely…
Schwahrheit, try Adrenal Shouts. Assuming you’re using healing shouts like everyone else. Or “Furious” in Arms. Or Embrace the Pain. Or note the presence of Versatile Rage. Or Adrenal Reserves for outright reduction costs. Sharpened Axes. And even Thrill of the Kill.
No. We have no issues with adrenaline. I actually use Adrenal Shouts with a longbow in PvE. I literally have to switch to a second weapon and use ITS burst skill because I’m gaining adrenaline so insanely fast. If weapon swapping had no cooldowns I could literally switch back and forth spamming my burst skills, if I wanted to.
Briefly mentioning elites, we all know that story. Signet of Rage is the only real one, and it just applies swiftness and a little might. Oh, and fury. As though you needed it. Battle Standard is a defunct alpha skill back from when people didn’t rally on kills and you could res the dead. It desperately needs an update, due to its huge cast time and rather mediocre benefits (the stability it creates only lasts on the initial summon, by the way, for all you angrily reading the wiki). It’s also a little bugged and tends to fail to revive people anyway. Rampage? Haha. Yeah. Also, honorable mention: I Will Avenge You. Remember that? It’s not an elite, but it could be. It’s a shout, to go along with an elite signet and banner… and what should be an elite stance, but isn’t (Rampage). IWAY of course being a hilarious GW1 staple skill, but in GW2, now conflicting with modern revive mechanics and being overpowered anyway as a normal secondary skill. Its replacement, On My Mark, is another lazy skill that does nothing to the battlefield. Hence, why people always just use Fear Me as its replacement.
But there you have it. That’s what’s wrong with most of the Warrior secondary skills. Most are tied to old, defunct concepts that worked in alpha but no longer do. Or, even more commonly, are just too boring to warrant use, since all they do is raise an invisible number. This of course OBLITERATES any role they could possible serve on the battlefield. I think this more than anything is the main problem of the class. Not that we can’t use three weapons at once or that we need to use a combo, or whatever other asinine idea I keep seeing on the forums. Feel free to desperately nitpick at tiny details because you’re scared someone might buff the Warrior one day, and that it may affect you personally.
Signets:
Signet of Might: Passive? Improve power by 90. Active? Gain five stacks of might. Wow. That sure is interesting, huh? So much utility! Now, we all know how useful stacking might or power bonuses can be. No one is denying that. But remember… secondary skills are there for their utility, not as steroid pills. Signet of Might doesn’t DO anything to the battlefield other than PUMP CLAP YOU UP. You may say “Well, there’s nothing wrong with that” but I will stop you right there. We’re discussing why Warriors have upper tier viability and this is one of the reasons why. Sure, this skill works. It’s balanced. But it’s also lazy and uninspired, and it fails to give the Warrior a chance to actively change the landscape of the battle around him. If you can’t understand this, I can’t help you.
Signet of Fury: Precision passive, adrenaline gain. Again, Warriors don’t have adrenaline issues, and adrenaline doesn’t do anything interesting. And again, this is not a worthless skill, but like SoM, it doesn’t do anything within the context of what the profession needs in PvP. If adrenaline was a pain in the kitten to create and it was used to fuel most of our skills (like in Guild Wars 1), then yes, people may use it. But this is GW2, and adrenaline does nothing other than fuel as single skill that either does about +300-500 more damage or gives you Fury that you already have, or sets up the longest most telegraphed attack animation in the game. The problems here are all minor but vast.
Signet of Stamina: Faster endurance regen, condition removal. Endurance? Sure, everyone needs that. Condition removal? Everyone REALLY needs that. Unfortunately, this removes ALL conditions all at once, with a forty-five second recharge. For a class that needs to stay close at all times to its target, in an environment where cripples, dodges, freezes, immobilizes, sinks, floats, knockbacks, knockdowns, stuns and so on all hinder that and are VERY common, this becomes a worthless skill, especially when you can just run healing shouts with a soldier rune and remove four conditions every twenty seconds. This is a skill that highlights how the developers still don’t understand how their game is even played. Or at least how Warriors are played.
Dolyak Signet: Reduce incoming damage, gain stability. Sixty second recharge. This skill directly competes with Balanced Stance but is worse in almost every way. Little more need be said. An activation time to boot, unlike a stance. This skill is awful, and has the same minor problems associated with stability I listed with BS. There’s no real reason to ever choose this.
Physical Skills:
Kick: There’s nothing particularly wrong here. But it’s a skill meant to be put on a Ranger, or something. The Warrior in most builds needs to stay close, and you want me to knock them backwards? Plus, I only have three secondary slots, and you want me to waste one on something as simple as this? Bull’s Charge or even Bolas do basically the same thing, except a little better, and they’re approach skills.
Throw Bolas: Buggy, yeah. This skill is okay, aside from that. It actually does something actively. It’s not support, but it’s not supposed to be. If it worked and wasn’t so easy to dodge people wouldn’t ridicule it so often.
Bull’s Charge: Again, this is buggy, but otherwise fine. People certainly abuse it on those ridiculous glass cannon HB builds all the sPvP people complain about. In GW1 this skill was just a melee attack that caused knockdown if your target was moving. That means you had to trick your enemy into moving (because blocks were very common in that game). That gave it more depth, whereas in this game you’re just pressing a button and being fired into your enemy like a missile. I think this would work better as just a status that gives you a three or so second speed buff and stuns the next enemy you hit, assuming you land an attack before it runs out.
Stomp: I love the idea of this skill. It works like Fear Me in a way, so you can use it to repel attackers off a downed ally, knock people off edges, control choke points and so on. Unfortunately it has a down time of a whole minute. Also, it knocks enemies back, which is bad for melee. But that’s okay. Unlike kick, since this is more about area control, you shouldn’t be using it offensively, exactly – more as a control utility. Unfortunately since there’s a trait that reduces physical skill recharges, this skill is punished by having its recharge increased to normalize the traited version. Some of the fault rests with the traits, in this case. As a result, this skill can’t do its job, especially when you have things like conditions and staying in melee range to worry about more often. Not worth it.
(fin…)
Stances:
Endure Pain: 5 seconds of invulnerability to basic damage. This is okay, but it doesn’t have much real utility behind it. As most moves in the game are not massive damage spikes with big telegraphs, this skill is usually just a way to shrug off five seconds of normal DPS. It also doesn’t have much synergy with other skills. You can view it as just being a bunker skill for a bunker build that Warriors don’t actually have, as they don’t perform that role very well. Could use some work.
Balanced Stance: It’s fine. I have issues with Stability in general, only working on stuns and knockbacks and not on conditions, which is a bigger issue, and being so short term, but it’s fine. Stability is basically just used as a glorified spiking mechanic in PvP, rather than as a real counter while in combat, with some rare exceptions. I imagine if stability didn’t help spiking at all, people would complain about it a lot, as it would be nearly worthless unless it was happening more consistently. Most players don’t understand this because they’re all very range-heavy. Stability is a great trick for them. For Warriors, being able to stay in melee is life or death, so mitigating control effects is our life. Not an issue for almost any other class.
Frenzy: Idiotic, but okay. In GW1 you could use stance canceling to give this more depth. (Only one stance could be used at a time, so you could just use another to cancel the +50% damage and attack speed entirely.) But even if it worked this way now, since most of your slots are locked to weapons, heals or your elite, this is no longer a viable concept, especially for a Warrior whose utility is deeply tied to secondary skills, as the weapon skills do very little in many cases other than straight damage or damage accessorizing.
Berserker Stance: Warriors don’t have a problem gaining adrenaline. This is a worthless skill. Even if we did have problems gaining adrenaline, our burst skills don’t do anything of real merit in most cases, encouraging people to just sit on the adrenaline as fuel to increase their personal damage. Overall, adrenaline was a good idea in GW1 that has been poorly handled in GW2.
Banners:
I’ll lump all of these together, since they’re all the same exact skill. They’re obviously made with WvW in mind. You don’t want too many people getting a benefit from these things at once, when there’s fifty people around you. As a result, their benefits are pitiful. Worse, they’re just stat boosts. They don’t actively DO anything. Of course, there’s also the bundle stat problem. Banners should be the Warrior’s AoE solution for controlling areas, not just applying AoE stat bonuses. Imagine if instead of Banner of Strength just giving +90 condition damage and power, it instead poisoned nearby enemies around it in pulses and applied a 5-10% decrease in their run speed. In terms of stats, not much difference. But in terms of what you can DO with a banner like that, it’s far more interesting and makes the Warrior far more viable tactically. Bottom line: banners suck. They’re too “safe” in their design, and too lazy. Secondary skills should always do something active, not just apply stat bonuses. Even just applying a condition is cutting it close at times.
(cont)
(edited by Plague.5329)
A lot of underlining and bolding.
Okay… no. Giving us access to more weapons per encounter will not improve the utility of any of those weapons. I know people like the idea of just letting us use more weapons, but that will change nothing at all. The problems with the Warrior are intrinsic, after all. You even mention this, then ignore it. You could give us access to every single weapon in the entire game, all at once, and it’s not going to make the profession any better in terms of its role viability.
There are no major problems with the Warrior. There are, however, a lot of minor ones. Unfortunately, right now, since the profession is somewhat stable and the forums are populated with HB/rifle whiners, it’s difficult to gain traction on things you never even SEE Warriors use. Stances, signets (outside of that stupid precision build that morons use), physical skills certainly, and even banners. That composes a very large portion of our secondary skills. Actually, that’s all of them. Except shouts, which actually are the only secondary skills that are currently working as they should, maybe other than your typical Bull’s Rush or Balanced Stance. Or Frenzy, god help us. All have problems and this limits our viability for individual builds. Worse still, even if most of these skills were buffed in terms of either damage, recharge, or whatever, they still would not be any better because most of these skills have no utility external to the Warrior’s most basic mechanics.
I hesitate to do these write ups because I’m almost positive the devs never read them, but whatever. Let’s take a look at our secondary skills, and explain to people who don’t play the profession what’s wrong with them. Because I know most people just blither on about HB, Frenzy or whatever, and then frantically pout about Thieves for the rest of the thread.
cont..
Without touching on balancing at all, rooting in general is just something that should only be used with a skill’s design as a last resort, for when it’s just too good otherwise, and you need a mechanic to give your opponent the chance to counter it. HB is like this, as it is now. Kill Shot? Eh… Not really, but it’s not a big deal, as you’re telegraphing the move to begin with; being rooted isn’t going to make a difference with such an easy to see skill already. Personally, I’d just have Kill Shot slow your character down some. As far as the Warrior goes, I can’t think of any other skills that would ever necessitate rooting you.
I imagine most of these rooting mechanics are very old, archaic design relics from early alphas. Warrior, being the “central” profession for early balancing, suffers a great deal of old design theory that no longer really holds up in execution. Other professions have more specific traits, sometimes more specifically geared moves, fewer movement problems, fewer overall “locked” movement skills (not just roots, but things like Rush, Bull’s Rush, Whirlwind Swing and so on). It’s easy to just say “Well, that’s what the class does.” But I personally think they’re just old, defunct ideas that were never important enough to be changed (which is risky) prior to a release.
It’s something they’ll have to look at, over time. The rooting problem though? That’s fairly simple, and there’s no real logic to it anymore. It needs to be removed from most skills. But personally, I’m more concerned about making more skills viable, rather than mucking about with such small individual skill mechanics. As far as Warriors go, I’d like to see more builds become viable other than healing shouts, which means pulling things like banners, stances and signets out of the trash bin and fleshing out the idea behind them all a little more. Not buffing necessarily, just moving them out of their old alpha versions and into 2012-13, where everyone should be.
Well, I don’t really tPvP a lot and certainly don’t bother with paid tournaments. So the “updates” lately about how they’re adding them and improving them don’t really affect me at all.
I’m looking for things like skill and profession rebalances and changes, improvements to traits and so on. Also, something besides Conquest. That’s what I’m concerned about. A ranking system and so on are cute, but I do not care, personally. I know other people do, and I do think it’s important for the game, but when I see blog posts about things like that, I just glaze over it and discover it didn’t actually contain any information pertinent to me at all.
That first rebalance is what I’m aching for, though. There are so many skills right now I simply can’t use, just because the concepts behind them are faulty.
Now, I’m asking what that number is in GW2. It’s a complicated and difficult question, because it entails a lot, I know. But at what point do the design elements in the game just stop working, because too many people got involved? I use WvW as an example because it’s very evident there. If you get fifty people together, you end up just spamming speed buffs and spamming AoE in front of you as you steamroll through everything. All the various elements of the game’s combat design just stop working at that point. No condition damage, no control effects, no chasing moves, no backstabs or blinds. All that becomes a stupid idea. The fighting just becomes a mess, and is tantamount only to trying to cover as much area with as much damage as possible. You don’t care where it goes, because tracking targets is pointless. You’re just hurling damage around wildly without any reason behind your decisions, other than “there’s more people on this side than that side.” The combat system just breaks in these situations, and not just because of rendering issues or the size of the map. It just flat out breaks, and a vast majority of your traits, skills and potential combos and so on just no longer matter. You’re just praying and spraying.
Personally, I think the point in GW2 in which the basic conventions of combat stop working is somewhere around six people per side, if you’re just outright attacking one another with no other objectives to worry about. I don’t have hard data for this obviously, but it feels like around this point, certain basic functions of combat like melee, the importance of boon application, condition application and so on start to fall apart and cease to be viable, and the importance of tracking individual targets also falls apart over just throwing as much damage into a general direction as you possibly can. Nowhere near as bad as WvW combat, obviously, but it still becomes a bit of a mess. And I think this may be why they focused so heavily on Conquest and why people are having a problem with 8v8 sPvP – because it splits up the combat in the game into very small engagements between two to six people.
I hope. That. Made sense. That’s about as clear as I can make it. It’s a question about design in relation to the combat system, not map sizes. It’s not just related to spike damage, but to the way you want combat to be played in your game. I’m not saying if you get past this number it’s no longer fun, or anything like that. I’m just saying that many of the elements of design get very shaky at an indeterminate point between two even numbers of enemies. I think that number, assuming everyone is fighting and not running flags or capping points, is somewhere past 5v5, although a 6v6 obviously would still be very playable.
So if that made sense to you and you now have a number in your head, do you feel like that’s a problem? And if it is, why do you think it’s a problem, and how do you fix it?
Okay, after talking about this with other people, apparently I wasn’t clear on the question. Instead, I’ll give an example from the previous game. Guild Wars 1.
In GW1, the most number of players you could have in a match was 8v8. They had to play with this number for a while because, especially at the end of the Prophecies run, spiking had become a big problem. Why? Well, for example, in GvG, you could have a team full of almost nothing but Rangers… (and so the story begins)…
Now, combat in GW1 was more about pressure, watching for big moves and responding to them. If you just sat there attacking normally, no one would ever die, unless one side was just built poorly. You had to carefully plan for how you were going to break your enemy. You couldn’t just spam heartseeker as hard as you could or throw down a lot of overlapping AoEs, generally. You had to coordinate. You had to be clever. You had to play mind games with your enemy by canceling moves, changing the way you moved, tricking them into using important moves. Otherwise? It’d never end. Point being, GW1 combat between two competent people often took a long time, and wasn’t just about applying a CC and DOTing someone to death.
Now… This team of rangers could, at any point, select a target from the enemy team at random. It didn’t matter who, so long as it would take out an enemy, force the use of a resurrection signet and give them a death penalty. All the rangers would fire on this target at the same time. The total amount of damage was over the amount of health any player could possibly have. This killed the player, of course. There was no real defense against this, because you couldn’t have protective spirit on every single player, at all times. If the enemy team was coordinated enough, they could easily just spike one of you after the other. Your healers could not heal a dead person, and not react humanly fast enough to catch the damage before the target died.
Okay. Now, this was a big problem, because it didn’t matter what you did to the skills. If all those people attacked one person, all at once, they were going to die. It wasn’t fair to the other team, obviously. The only thing you could do is make every single attack in the game so incapably weak that spiking was impossible. Yet, this would also make actually killing anyone normally next to impossible. The solution was to limit the number of players able to participate in these matches to eight people per side. 8v8 was the breaking point of combat in GW1, more or less. Once you got past this number, damage overmatched the intended functions of all the design elements of the game. I hope that part makes sense.
TBC…
Just saying “nuh uh!” isn’t proving anything. How many banner builds do you see in higher tier play? How many signet builds? Stance builds? Anything that isn’t healing shouts with soldier runes? How about trait lines? Those sure are fleshed out, huh? 10% damage to this, 5% damage to that. Damage reduction while above 90% health? What? How about that discipline attribute line? 0.1% burst damage per point huh? That sounds great.
ALL professions have a large number of minor or major problems right now. Warrior may be the “most complete,” but like everyone else, it’s far from done.
I dislike underwater combat because I just don’t like being underwater. I know how to use my skills, but being underwater isn’t any more fun than being on land. It’s usually worse, as far as fun goes. Plus a good portion of my skills can’t even be used there.
It’s just a stupid novelty.
You know what would fix most of these problems? No conquest mode. Just kill each other.
Please go to the Warrior forum for a while. Warriors have a MASSIVE amount of problems and need buffs across the board. You’re just only aware of a couple of skills, all of them DPS/spike/glass cannon related. The class’ problem is with build viability. Please just forget about the kitten rifle and greatsword for just five minutes and look at all of our secondary skills and traits. Most you’ve probably never even heard of before, and for a good reason.
Warriors have NOT been “unilaterally buffed every patch.” In fact they’ve only been patched ONCE. And that was making tremor able to be used while moving. They’re not touching the class because they consider it to be where it should be in terms of power. It’s the other classes that are out of whack, as far as ANet is concerned.
People talking about 8v8s being too much on certain maps and how WvW combat, even when it works, can be messy and lacking in strategy since you’re just standing at range spamming AoEs, hoping to catch people who wander too far in.
Basically, just asking if there’s a “sweet spot” for the number of people who get involved in a single fight with one another. If there is, it seems like that should be the aim for WvW, and possibly a game type for a style of PvP.
Also, it leads to other issues of why there would be a sweet spot at all. I personally think it’s because of the class system. As there’s no healing class, no sort of “list healing” skills (heal everyone in your party/squad, all party members receive X, etc), those recovery and mitigation measures don’t exist in this game. Yet, damage will of course have no such problem. You heal for one person. When three more people show up, you’re still healing for yourself, but you can potentially take far, far more damage. Combat consequently doesn’t scale, because the systems in place in some other MMOs don’t exist (nor should they). Like I said, one way of covering that is a DR system for damage. 1v1 = natural. Two people attacking you = minor damage reduction. Thirty people attacking you = major damage reduction. That would allow people to actually move into melee in WvW, for example.
Basically it’s just a topic about the source of combat scaling problems in the game. I thought it would be interesting. Maybe it’s just confusing.
It’d be nice if it functioned as it did in GW1. There were many ways to get an IAS, not all were 33%, and the ones that were were usually very high recharge, especially for that game, and didn’t last long, or required a specific way of activating them, or had major drawbacks.
In GW2 the drawbacks aren’t really there, aside from the Warrior. Even then, because of stuns and the nature of Conquest (limiting combat to just one or two people at once to cover more area), you can circumvent that almost entirely, as there aren’t four or five more people to punish you for trying it. And of course, no stance cancelling to give the whole concept additional depth. (And even if there were, there’s not enough slots to accommodate such a thing since most are now locked to weapon, healing or elite.)
As a Warrior, I wish they’d change the 100B functionality just so people would stop talking about it as though it’s actually a problem. “Warriors are overpowered!” “How?” "Well, HB is – " Yes, yes. Anything else? No. I didn’t think so. What, Eviscerate? You want to talk about that? Not really? How surprising.
I think it would be ideal if there were no damage increase traits, skills or so on through the whole game. It just creates min-maxing problems and causes the min-maxed versions of the skills to be the new normal, and the skills themselves to be worthless unless you’ve min-maxed them. +10% damage if… +5% damage if… and so on. Those sorts of things do not need to exist, especially when there’s a world of other possibilities to choose from, many far more interesting and rewarding.
Well, obviously hammer is lackluster in PvE, being a damage-friendly environment that gets mad and huffy when you try to use nasty things like thinking to disrupt enemies. How DARE you, after all.
It does seem stupid to me to use Earthshaker, fly halfway through the air, have some tiny projectile hit me, and STOP DEAD IN MIDAIR and then fall gently to the ground, all the while in the standing dazed animation. Really. I mean… really.
I considered posting this in the WvW forums, but it seems more appropriate here. Consider how moves work in this game, and how support skills scale to the number of people involved. Also consider things like melee viability. You want all these things – primary concepts in your game – to be viable in some form in any range of PvP combat.
Now, I’ll stipulate, you don’t have to worry about map size. Nor objectives. Your only goal in this hypothetical situation is to take your group of X number of people and go kill another group full of the same number of enemies. Not necessarily any defenses, terrain variations, nothing. Final Destination, I guess.
Now, without worrying about these other factors, at what point do you think the combat of GW2 breaks down, and ceases to function properly? I ask this because in WvW, obviously the game has problems. Many are associated with rendering, no doubt, but even ignoring this problem, obviously this is not Mount and Blade. You won’t see a huge collision of Warriors and Guardians at midfield, wailing into one another in an attempt to force their way into the weaker ranged lines. WvW just favors ranged, and you can use melee in very specific situations against less numerous enemies; you can also make odd “strike team” builds that try to jump in, do five seconds of damage and then run away before the literal hundreds of thousands of damage obliterates them in an instant. This is just one example; there are plenty of others.
Even moving away from WvW, in hotjoins, many believe there are simply too many people involved. Many cite maps as being the problem – being too small. Yet, even if it was an open battlefield, do you feel like the abilities and profession focus in an 8v8 would still be even enough that combat would scale smoothly?
In GW1 this was a problem, mainly due to spiking. Even if healing could cover an indefinite number of people, having even eight or nine people spike you with a basic attack at the same time meant instant death, in some cases. There was no DR system to ensure that when someone was ganged up on by multiple people, the damage was reduced or mitigated a little to give them a chance to fight back. The number of people in some game modes was adjusted because of this problem. Again, one example out of many.
So, what do you think? What’s the point that combat “breaks?” In GW2, is this number 5v5? Is it 8v8? 24v24? 50v50? Or do you believe there isn’t one? And why? And if you consider it a problem, what is your solution?
Larger game modes should be exclusive to more organized game modes. Pick up style matches like RA in GW1 were limited to four players per team. As the coordination necessary for game modes increased, so did the amount of players required for a team.
I remember playing sPvP for the first time in beta and wondering, what were they thinking? Like any other sane person I leave matches that get too many people involved. They turn into Unreal Tournament very quickly.
It always amazed me that they intended for players to be able to hit anyone for over 5k damage. Considering how low player health is in comparison, it’s like they want the game to be played like it’s Quake, or something.
If the lowest health possible for a player in your game is about 15,000, you’d think you’d design the game so that even by stacking buffs, min-maxing a build and so on, the most damage a single combo in the game could ever do would be about half of that, and would take either coordination or a lot of time to set up. One person just running in from behind, stunning you and doing 20,000 damage in 2 seconds is just asinine.
Maybe it’s just my personal preference talking. I think combat in MMOs should be more about decision-making and long term performance, not just surprise ganking someone and then walking off bragging, “You should have reacted to my god mode mode faster, noob!”
Mildly annoyed at times. They’re a nuisance class often played by idiots, yet because they’re easy to use and over-rewarding for the effort you put into it, it makes idiots believe they’re good at the game, undeservedly. Usually, most thieves that try to gank me I can kill after they predictably burn off all their initiative, just because they’re terrible players and it’s all they know how to do. It just gets on my nerves when I’m in the middle of a fairly even fight and a thief jumps out from behind a bush somewhere and spikes me down right after I finish a dodge roll, or similar. They walk off with an undeserved sense of self satisfaction.
Class balance? I think it’s a poorly thought out profession, in so much that it has far too many escape options for the massive damage it can perform. I envisioned the Thief as being… a Thief. Something that doesn’t do a lot of damage unless you let it, or when it’s able to start stacking benefits, as it plays. As in, it’s hard to catch and kill in a fight and it steadily builds power over time. Perhaps via… stealing? Whether draining your own power or literally taking bundle items. They’re honestly just Assassins from Guild Wars 1, which were also a poorly handled concept. Press 2 to win was just an asinine decision.
Neat. It’s a good kind of idea. People making a quick strike into the heart of enemy territory and trying to plow through way back through enemy forces to a recently seized keep. Fun. Except it didn’t work that way most of the time.
^ Having at least one means of disruption is what really matters. Some people run Axe-Mace/Hammer or even use a shield, or so on. I just personally like being able to stunlock people for extended durations using tremor as an opener, followed by pommel strike, switch to hammer, earthshaker (adrenal shouts, preferably enter combat with 100% anyway), backbreaker, staggering blow (all of these are interrupts and stuns of some kind), then switch BACK to mace and pommel strike, tremor, and so on. Fear Me acts as another interrupt for when you have everything on cooldown. It’s infuriating for targets to deal with if they’re not using stability, and even then it can be a problem since you can just fear them and pound the back of their head as they run away, until stability wears off. But that’s how you cover up weaknesses in your melee profession – disruption and denial (GW1 versions of what most gamers consider CC), not pure damage.
The issue with stacking vitality is, yeah, you’re not actively doing anything other than surviving, which is fine if you’re a bunker profession. (Warriors aren’t, and can’t be within reason.) Rather it’s that it’s VERY easy to burn through health points in this game. How do engineers, eles, guardians and so on bunker? With lots of healing and health? That can be a part of it, but it’s mainly through utility. Having a lot of health is meaningless when each profession can easily burn off that much in a few seconds. What matters is how you can deny that damage, mitigate it, redirect it or outright deny them the ability to use it. That’s how you played GW1 and that’s what works in GW2. The Warrior just doesn’t have much of it right now since I think they developed the profession with too much of GW1 in mind, where you had monks constantly bombarding you with condition removals and direct heals.
I know ANet considers the Warrior to be where it should be, and the other professions to be out of line, but I think they believed this incorrectly based on assumptions about the gameplay that we’re all still learning about. The class will have to change dramatically, along with everyone’s. The fundamental concepts behind the profession don’t work in execution, in some skills’ cases. Reducing the cooldown on stances for example is not going to magically make them a good skill to bring. There are lots of traits and skills that just need to be reworked, because the trinity is dead, and certain conventions associated with supplementing the workload of profession types is not currently being met by builds, across all classes. Thank you, Plague for President 2012.
I finally managed to complete it after memorizing the whole run enough that I could get past the WAVE OF MEAT that obstructs your vision almost completely at the start of the puzzle.
The difficulty of the puzzle is this:
1) MEAT – Norn, Charr, extremely pale naked people.
2) The start. The first “wait cog” causes everyone to bundle together, masking your vision. You can’t see the puzzle, much less perform it.
3) The start #2. The beginning has a lot of “junk” in the way that causes you to slip off weird jagged parts of the rubble you had to jump on. You can perform the same jump a dozen times and land on three different places because of tiny variations. The fact that you can’t see them because of gigantic norn versions of the guy from Powder and angry speech bubbles does not help.
4) The “long jump cog.” At this point people have started dying because they don’t have the paths memorized enough to get past MEAT MODE. This one cog you have to make a nearly perfect long jump to, on one of its “teeth.”
5) The “tiny beam.” I always slipped off the left edge after landing perfectly because of the angle. You just have to use the stepping stone and take an extra couple seconds to be very careful here, which means speed running everything up to this point.
After that it’s honestly easy, but you need to fail a couple times to memorize where the puzzle wants you to go. The puzzle, aside from basically one spot (the tiny beam) is actually really easy, for the most part. The main difficulty is that everyone spawns and runs together, so you can’t see what you’re doing, and more importantly, you can’t learn where anything is because you can’t make that initial progress.
What you’re describing is a large problem with the Warrior profession. It doesn’t affect any other class anywhere near as much, although obviously everyone has to worry about conditions.
Run a healing shouts build (shake it off, for great justice, probably use fear me over on my mark) with runes of the solider (remove conditions on shout use). That’s our one build we use. There isn’t another one. You can try Mobile Strikes as a trait to try to circumvent some of the issues, but that requires investing 20 points into a fairly worthless attribute line (0.1% burst damage per point, lol.) and it only affects immobilize, not cripples, freezes (which will make your leaps go about 2 inches) and so on. So that’s not an option either, if you’re trying to be serious about it.
If you want to be stupid, you can try to run a warhorn build. If you enjoy losing. One condition removal every 20 seconds sound good to you? Me either. Signet of Stamina removes all conditions on you, but like you said, any half-brained player will just put something right back on you again. And since SoS has a 45 second long recharge, feel free to think of anyone that actually recommends its use as a fool. Seriously, anyone that isn’t telling you to run a shout build doesn’t know what they’re doing, or only lucks out doing hotjoins. Or is a contrarian. The problem with BOTH of these options is that immobilizes, freezes and cripples aren’t neatly packaged together all at once every thirty seconds. Most players have many ways of knocking you around, sticking you in place, and so on. If they see you use your ONE way to get rid of it, they’ll just use another one, and you’re stuck in their kiting chain until your one pathetic counter skill comes off cooldown. As a Warrior you need constant counters to kiting of all kinds, and conditions are the most numerous and frequent, in most cases.
Just run healing shouts like everyone else. It’s your only build option. You at least have 40 more points to “play” with after burning 30 on healing shouts and reduced shout recharges.
Personally, my favorite build in pvp is 30 defense, 30 tactics, hammer and mace x2 with adrenal shouts (good trait hidden in Discipline, unfortunately). The condition removal mixed with the constant disruption is a nightmare for most players who see a warrior and think I’m going to pull out a greatsword and try to bull’s rush them. Warriors are the weakest 1v1 class for the reasons listed above, but I can usually 1v1 most players without much problems, because I’m mitigating their build by disrupting it in various ways. Plus with soldier gear, you’re running around with 30k health, 3k attack, 3k defense and about 25% critical chance with fury upkeep (SoR being the only truly viable elite in PvP.)
(edited by Plague.5329)