Guild Wars 2

Since GW2 is a game, that was able to reach players from various other Games, like the FPS-Genre, MOBAS, other MMO’s, Strategy-Games etc. I thought it would be interesting to see which Features or Mechanics you miss from other Games that you think could work in GW2.

For me, coming from an SC2, GW1 and a little bit of a MOBA-Background, I miss one thing in particular – it would be a big change for sure, but it would open a lot of doors for GW2:

- Being able to switch Control and Cameraposition from one Char to a pet, a Location, an Illusion etc.

With that I mean that I could switch from Controlling my Ranger to my Pet, having full control over their movement, while my Main-Char would go into “Auto-pilot”. Also, it would be cool if I could klick on the Map and my view would go over there (this would maybe make FOG of War a possible feature or maybe you could only klick on positions on the Map where you had Allies, Pets or static Stuff like Spirits. That could enable you to guard Positions with Pets/Spirits etc. simply to be able to watch if some enemy is going that way). Just imagine how fun it would be to make mindgames with controlling and jumping with your Clones, so that the opponent would think that it’s the right target or the possibilities fro movement and scouting a ranger would bring to the table, when you could move and control and have vision over a place on the Map with your Pet, thats far away from the actual Ranger.

Another thing I kinda miss are Items: What if there was some sort of Item-shop as another “Point of Interest” on the Map, where you would have to meditate for a few seconds to be able to get an Item. With the above feature implemented, you could maybe get sth. like a Ward of Sight (an Invisible static object that gives you vision over a part of the Map where you placed it). Maybe there could also be sth like a reveal-Effect Item that lets you see Invisible Targets, small Stat-boosters etc. Maybe you could even implement some sort of a “loadout-feature” that lets players choose a few items at the beginning of a Match.

Again, those would be pretty big features and I don’t think that they are essential to the games success as a PvP-Title, I just think that the Idea is interesting! ^^’

So: What do you like from other Games and think that could work in GW2? Again, it can sth big or small, this thread isn’t about what GW2 needs, but what you think would be a fun Idea to implement!

On the one Hand, more Skills available to choose from sounds pretty good, but there are certain downfalls to it that make it understandable why racial abilities aren’t used in sPvP:

1) If one race has better skills or skills that are better suited for a certain class or role, ppl will most likely choose that one. Therefore, creating a character gets less personalized and visually, the game is less interesting if you always see 5 asura’s vs 5 asura’s or sth. like that.
2) More skills = harder to keep balance in check. Especially in Skill you’d have to balance over 8 classes, with different skill-interactions, Synergy etc.
3) Racial Skills, that are designed to work in PvE, would also have to work in PvP, so you’d have to again maybe have the Skills have different Effects in PvE and PvP, which is sth. you don’t wan’t to do if not necessary: It makes the game harder to approach by Beginners and if you want your game to succeed, you need to make sure that you can hook beginners fast and not overwhelm them with information right from the start.

Well, I guess the Mayans were right after all…. -.-°

ilJumperMT.4871:

Rangers are still useless
Warriors keep getting buffed when they are OP
Thieves are forced to all roll D/D
Mesmers are screwed in PVE and WvW now

Rangers weren’t ever useless; underpowered maybe, but the buffs are actually quite interesting, especially the ones to the greatsword. Counterattack has been substantially buffed, blocking ranged attacks for 3 seconds instead of getting cancelled immediately and doing no pushback. Maul is also kinda nice now. I’ve been testing out Power-builds with Sigil of Int for 100% Crits → Maul now could work well with that. (gonna test this now)

Warriors aren’t OP at all and they can use the buffs.

A Major Part in rolling D/D before was Dancing Dagger, which was an insanely good teamfight-skill, which made the Thief with D/D good in almost every important aspect of sPvP (sustainability, teamfight-capabilities, burst-DPS, sustained-DPS, Mobility) at least they nerfed his Teamfight-potential and sustained DPS in Teamfights a bit. Now, ppl can actually play sth. else rather than D/D, because having both insane burst and a clearly OP teamfight-skill, was just too much to pass on.

xiv.7136:

I don’t mind shatters, I can deal with those. A bunch of clones rushing you = dodge. Deal with it.

- The Problem with Shatter-Mesmer is the very low-cooldown Immobilize, which makes it hard to dodge the shatter without firing off a defensive CD with a much longer CD than the shatter-combo (Mist-form, Elexir S, Endure Pain, Shield Stance, Rocket boots, Teleports etc. with 3+ times higher CD).

- Another factor is Magic bullet, which makes it impossible to dodge the Immobilize; first pressure a bit and maybe fire off a combo to make the opponent use his CD, then go into the full combo with magic-bullet + immobilize + shatter → guaranteed combo that deals insane amount of DPS. With such a low cooldown Immobilize and an insanely strong follow-up combo come other problems as well for Chars with defensive cooldowns that do nothing against immobilize, like Lightning Reflexes, Armor of Earth, Spectral Armor etc.

- To top that all off, the combo even rips off boons, negating even more defensive CD’s, like Armor of Earth, Spectral Armor, Save yourselves etc.

And this all comes for the prize of not even sacrificing a single utility-skill to make the combo work!

This problem with combos that are very hard to evade, deal insane amounts of DPS, require no additional Utility-skills to work well and have very low CD, exists only on Mesmer and Thief. All the other strong burst-combos, like the ones on the Ele, Warrior etc. require a much bigger investment in Utilities, have bigger drawbacks if they don’t work, are easier to evade and have much longer cooldowns.

I don’t necessarily think that this is imbalanced, as long as those very strong burst-chars don’t do all the other stuff very well too. So far, they’ve at least nerfed the Thiefs teamfight-potential (Dancing Dagger) and the Mesmers Movement and Team-support and sustained DPS (Portal and Phantasm-nerf), so it’s at least a step in the right direction.

First of all, I was kinda disappointed with the patch as well, because the changes were just so minuscule, but that’s just how ANet wanted to approach the game; don’t get hasty with decisions they’d later regret, just because there wasn’t really enough time for the metagame to develop and to truly see what’s actually imbalanced.

Now to the changes:

1) Thief wasn’t broken because of his ridiculous DPS, but because he was good in all important aspects of an sPvP-game (mobility, sustainability, teamfight, DPS). With Dancing Dagger nerfed, one of the Thiefs best Team-fight-abilities was nerfed, which is a good thing.
—→ I think they still want the Thief to be a glassy burst-char with heavy DPS and good mobility, but not make him the jack of all trades he was before; a step in the right direction, nothing big, but at least sth.

2) Bunker Guardian: Very minor nerfs, I’m not satisfied with it, but I see why ANet wants to be cautious about this stuff.

3) Bunker-Ele: First of all, I have no Idea why ppl think that the only viable option to play Ele in sPvP/tPvP is Bunker-Ele, secondly, the Staff-Ele isn’t a Bunker-Char, it’s a support Char. If u wanna Bunker with ele, go for S/D, cuz you’ll need the Extra Armor from Rock Barrier. And the true Bunker Ele got a HUGE buff: Obsidian Focus now applies to Stone Shards! This means that on the biggest Spam-ability on the Bunker-Ele, which he has in the Earth Attunement (+90 toughness), he’ll get an additional 170 armor. This is huge and IMHO, makes up for the Healing lost on soothing wave. Besides that, Ether renewal (which works with Obsidian Focus as well), has become a viable option. If a player can watch out for interrupts and time it well, the healing output and condi-remove is just insane.

4) Mesmer-Nerfs: Okay, I don’t really get the Phantasm-nerf as well, but it’s a nerf, so I’ll take it. ^^
The Portal-Nerf was much needed though.

All in all, the changes won’t really change all that much, all the classes played before are still very viable. It’s just a very little push in the right direction and nothing too drastic and game-changing and that is the balance-philosophy ANet wants to follow with GW2. Once you get your head wrapped around it, that there won’t be any huge balance-changes, the patch makes IMHO quite a lot of sense.

Make Staff-DD viable, like:

- Buff dmg on Chain Lightning
- Slightly buff dmg on Ice Spike and Eruption

Maybe also give Staff more Combo-finishers….

Also, there are quite a few UP Skills that aren’t used at all and could use a buff, like:

- Glyph of Elemental Power
- Glyph of Renewal
- Glyph of Storms
- Signet of Air
– Signet of Water

I totally disagree with the notion that Quickness is broken in GW2, I even think it’s underpowered, especially on the Warrior.

Just compare it to Frenzy in GW1:

It was only a 33% DPS-increase, but it had nearly no CD and you could cancel the stance and therefore the double amount of DPS taken, with another Stance. In Gw2, It has 60 Seconds CD and the Stance cannot be cancelled.

Furthermore, even on other classes, that can reduce the CD of their Quickness down to under 50 Seconds, almost every class has Stunbreakers and very effective defensive Tools, with about the same CD, so it’s no problem at all to make the Quickness used by a class totally useless and severely punished by the drawback associated with it.

IMHO, the best way to use Quickness is for Stomps and because we don’t see that as often (because the best classes for quickness+Stability-Stomps are Ranger and Warrior and they aren’t played as much and in no way OP atm) I really can’t argue about whether or not this is balanced.

Another important point is, that Quickness is almost never coupled with an Overpowered Build. Almost no Engi uses it, Warriors and Rangers aren’t OP at all and Thiefs do better with backstab, which uses no Quickness.

I think Quickness is a good Idea, because it requires a build to heavily invest into DPS and has a rather big drawback. You loose 1 Utility-skill and most classes need to invest in an immobilize/stun or get assistance by their teammates to ensure that the risk they took with investing in DPS is justified.

If you’re going for simple 1on1, a decent Ele with a “Phantaram-build” can take on a Thief. Don’t get me started about them in real games, that’s a whole other story.

The Ele-build depends on rather long cooldowns (for both the burst and the survivability) to win against Thiefs, so if a Thief pops up during a Teamfight, there’s often nothing you can do but watch ppl falling to Dancing Dagger and Backstabs.

So if you play against Thiefs in a match, just keep at least one defensive CD (Mistform, Lightning Flash, arcane Shield) rdy, if you don’t know exactly where the Thief is and you’ll at least be able to flee the scene. ^^’

Laiboch.4380:

My experience with PVP has always been “Once the QQ nerfs begin the game starts dieing.” There are several classes that hit just as hard as a thief and some with better survivability.

I am all for justified balance, but balance means ALL classes not just one or two.

There will always be whining, it’s about how the developer handles this “information” that will potentially make or break a game.

Btw. There is no class that hits as hard as the Thief and is as hard to kill… AND, the Thief has very high mobility and is good in teamfights. As a rule of thumb, most classes can be good at maybe 2 or 3 out of those 4 core aspects (DPS, Survivability, Mobility, Teamfight), the Thief is the only one that is incredibly strong in all 4 and thats a problem.

Main: Ele-roamer / Bunker-Ele

God-Tier: Thief
Top-Tier: Mesmer, Guardian
Mid-Tier: Engi, Ele, Necro
Low-Tier: Ranger, Warrior

The reason I don’t complain about Thiefs, or didn’t until this Post (^^), is because I’m very happy with the State of the Game so far and some “minor” imbalances aren’t that bad… for a certain amount of time.

I do think though, that Thiefs are severly OP as DD’s, for several Reasons:

1) Very hard to kill: A Thief has numerous ways of getting out of harms way and has a lot of sustainability, even though he can go for a total glasscannon build. He has a good Teleport-stunbreaker, can turn himself invisible and receive almost no DMG and has all-around great mobility, thanks to shadowsteps.

2) Backstab- and Dancing Dagger-DPS is surreal and the Thief requires little to no Utilities or specific traits or Teamsupport to get to that amont of DPS. What I want to say with that is, that other Builds, even certain ones on the Thief, require Utilities like Quickness or Immobilizes to really burst sth. down. With backstab or Dancing Dagger, you need nothing like that. You can even go full DPS and kill sth. with a few hits or completely turn around a teamfight and it works in almost every Build. You don’t have to give up survivability, teamfight, capabilities, mobility or anything else to deal these ridiculous amounts of DPS.

3) Mobility: With all his Shadowsteps and the Signet for additional Speed, the Thief has very high mobility. Again, this mobility doesn’t come with any negative effects on DPS, Teamfight potential or survivability – it’s just there.

4) Cooldowns: The Cooldowns or rather Initiative-Requirements for the Thiefs skills are so low, that even if you miss a Combo that can easily kill several other classes, you just w8 a few seconds and it’s back up again and the enemy has lost defensive cooldowns with a much higher recast just to not die.

Let’s wrap this up with a comparison between the Thief and an Elementalist in the Role of an offensive Roamer:

1) If the Ele wants to be hard to kill, you have to run Valk-Amu and/or Cantrips with long Cooldowns and get quite a bit of Healing Power. This cuts into the potential DPS a lot.

2) If you want to get even near the burst-potential of a Thief, you need to go full glass-cannon and use utilities for Arcane-Spells, which give you little or no defensive capabilities. This is a huge sacrifice, because you’ll die instantly to almost anything. You will also have much less teamfight-capabilities, because of lack of Healing-power and no sustainability. These things all come natural to the Thief and u even get extremely powerful teamfight-skills like Trickshot, Dancing Dagger, Shadow Refuge, Choking gas etc.

3) Mobility: As an Ele or pretty much any other class, if you want to use a shadow-step (which gives you lots of mobility on certain maps), you need to burn a spell with a long cooldown and if you want to get near the 25% increased movement speed, you often need a specific trait for it (like speedy kits on the Engi). In this Aspect, the Ele is very good as well, because he doesn’t have to sacrifice anything to get the high mobility.

4) This is probably the most crucial difference between various other burst-classes and the Thief. Using a Combo on an Ele, Warrior or any other burst-glass, most of the time uses up a lot of cooldowns (Flam Grab, Arcane-Spells, Frenzy or other Quickness-Skills) and are often easy to evade with spells with similar CD’s. If the Combo doesn’t hit, not only is the class without a lot of DMG, but because he had to sacrifice defensive capabilities, he’s often quite vulnerable to turn-around-kills. The best example are the quickness-skills, which all have quite big drawbacks or an Ele that sacrifices most Utilities to deal more DPS and stands vulnerable with maybe 1 Mistform every 60+ Seconds.

The Problem of the Thief is, that he is so strong in various situations and roles, without any drawbacks at all and with the possibilities of even going for very defensive node-defender-Thiefs, Roamers, Condition-DMG-Thiefs etc. I really wonder why not every team plays 3+ Thiefs, if they just want to win…