Who says people didn’t research though? For me, I loved the concept of it. I like the idea of ditching the trinity, of it being about skill based instead of gear, of it being an action game maybe not as good as TERA, but action-game like nonetheless.
Maybe people like the idea and it didn’t pan out?
Well, part of the problem is that auto-attack is just too good. Axe auto-attack is fairly close to Hundred blades, and will eclipse it during the cooldown. The 3rd part of most of them is so good that you won’t want to stop it until the chain is finished.
You have to take things like animation time and weapon swap cooldown into account too. While it looks like Cleansing Flame does a lot of damage, a sword auto-attack does about the same, maybe more in the same time it takes to perform that long channel.
I liken it to running out and charging for the free ravage for feral druids in cataclysm. It looks like it might be an increase because its a big crit, but it turns out that in the time it takes to do that you would have done the same damage just sitting there.
As far as GWII goes, I think combat complexity is screwed by design. WoW rotations only use 5-6 low cooldown attacks on average, but in GWII those slots are taken by utility instead, leaving 1 slot for auto-attack, 1 for a damaging attack, and 3 variables.
combat complexity is improved by design, actually. let me take you through what my hammer guardian does in a dungeon.
- #1 attack chain for symbol on 3rd hit
- smash for retaliation
- F1 for might and burning
- dodge
- #1 attack chain
- consecration to keep up burning
- smash field for might
- signet to keep up retaliation
- #1 attack chain
- dodge, smash.
- virtues for retaliation, regen and protection
- smash mate’s field for chaos armor; watch mobs get lit up by random conditions
- immobilize the oncoming warrior mob
- knock back one ranger; cast wall of reflection in front of second ranger
- smash wall of reflection for retaliation
- shift into bear form because i feel like it; CC one mob for 10 seconds.
- roar for might
- ???
- profitthis isnt even my complete dps priority procedure. it’s like 60% of it. i didnt even mention the other two utility i have (maybe another fire or light field), in addition to the other weapon set that i constantly switch to in order to mitigate damage on my mates (mace/focus)
World of Warcraft:
- 1,1,1,1,1,1,2,3,1,1,1,1,5,2,3,1,1,1
- move 3 steps to the left because there’s a red circle underneath me for some reason
- look at my dps meter to feel good about myself; glance over other green bars
- look at boss’s red bar again
- 1,1,1,1,1,1,2,3,1,1,1,1,5,2,3,1,1,1
- ???SO COMPLEX BRO
admittedly, zerg DE’s are a problem because theyre so easy now and the bosses are so dumb. however, in these zergs, youre still doing way more than you ever would in WoW by cleansing conditions, applying boons, creating fields for burning projectiles and such, and maintaining some simplified dps priority (maybe 3-4 abilities).
Warmaster Blackhorn:
- Dodge linear charge, 1 second warning time, 2 mobs that do it
- Don’t stand in front of the mobs that are constantly moving and charging
- Get inside constantly spawning circles (Can miss a couple and still win)
- Gather inside periodic big circle (Wipe if no less than 6-7 out of 10 people stack in it)
- Kill the sapper (Wipe if hes not CCed, immune to damage until he re-appears right beside his objective)
- Meet strict DPS standard while doing so, or else everything is going to stack up
This is from what most WoW players seem to consider the worst, most boring raid ever on normal mode. Blizzard tends to leave 1 boss per tier for people to just sandbag on like what your example entailed.
Vallog – Butler route, Caudecus Manor final boss
- Sit on him, hit hundred blades every 6.5 seconds, auto-attack else wise because he doesn’t really do anything. If you are ranged, turn around when he puts his reflect up.
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I agree that when there are a large number of players doing an event they get pretty boring in general due to not really needing to use defensive or supportive abilities that much. Players aoe/cleave mobs down too easily, and the mobs don’t know how to aoe back. Perhaps this will fix itself somewhat over time just due to lower concurrent players in the world as the game gets older.
There is a significant difference among the classes still. Try playing an elementalist, engineer, or mesmer if you want a bit more activity just doing offense. I just deleted my warrior because he was so boring and shallow to play, but have lots of fun with the more complex classes.
The answer though, is NOT to homogenize the complexity/difficulty of the pure offense toolkit of the classes like WoW did. WoW moved in that direction too far, it’s surprising how much you could apply a generalized “how to play” to all the dps specs:
This is your dot, keep it up as often as possible.
This is your harder hitting ability/spell, use it on cooldown.
This is your random proc ability/spell, use it as soon as it lights up.
This is your filler, spam it when none of the above are applicable.
This is your 1.5-3 min dps booster cooldown.I played that game for 6.5 years, I don’t want to play it here too.
The answer is to always make sure the defensive, survivability, and control matter. I think for the big zerg DEs they need to start spawning more veteran/champion mobs, not just increase the number of normal aoe/cleave fodder that comes running at you.
In a nutshell, yes. In practice its not that simple.
- MoP fury always wants to have either bloodsurge or two raging blows ready for every Colossal smash, but you don’t want to delay CS.
- Sub wants to have HAT take care of the 4th and 5th CP to prevent overflow, but due to the inconsistency of it you might energy cap while waiting for it.
Its all these little things that it has, that other MMOs don’t. Rift and SWTOR have tried to emulate it with procs and cooldown resets and such, but they kind of missed the point.
As far as GWII goes, I think combat complexity is screwed by design. WoW rotations only use 5-6 low cooldown attacks on average, but in GWII those slots are taken by utility instead, leaving 1 slot for auto-attack, 1 for a damaging attack, and 3 variables.
Short of Anet turning their back on the philosophy of GWII and letting people swap out weapon skills for other weapon skills, its not going to happen.
Irony being if you were really holding 2 weapons like say as a martial artist.
No you would darn well never attack with both at the same time. Not even to pull an Anakin and lops off a head using em as scissors, it just would not work well.
In Martial arts the reason for using a shorter blade in your left or ‘offhand’ was to block and parry away blades.
Lunging at someone with 2 blades/dagger would be a sure way to take a fatal blow, not inflict one.
You youngsters need to watch more Bruce Lee =)
But yes as a video game I agree the disparity between the 1 button attack on one hand vs. 2 hand seems big…well that is only until you realize that attack speed plays a factor too. At least it does for me Engy, he attacks harder but slower with rifle, but faster and weaker with pistol. I believe this is how they balance it. the 2,3 skills however I think would be the most pertinent since for most 2h vs 1h they have the same cooldown length??? or do they?
Death Blossom, Cyclone axe, really anything that has any kind of spinning or flourish at all are terribly impractical to do in real life too. Rolling is an especially bad idea and i’m not sure how it became a standard dodge.
Honestly, real combat in a game would be pretty boring.
Lots of good suggestion here. But, and there’s a but, here is the thing :
How do you intend to put some strategy in a boss fight, when all the players are just brainless nukers who attack everything they can ?
I mean seriously, I was told that the centaur boss in Harathi Highlands gave much better rewards if you didn’t touch him during the first phase. All right. So you have 10 people for like 15 minutes who spam on the chat “Don’t attack him at the beginning, let him do his summoning stuff”. All right !
But when the boss appeared….. every last of the brainless zombies that are called “players” just spammed the hell outta him. And this happens every time. And so even though I’ve done this event countless times, I still don’t know if this boss gives better rewards when you don’t kill his summons in first phase.So, my question : How do you intend for players to notice any amount of “strategy” at all, when there’s not 10% of them that know of the word “strategy”, and that read the chat ?
You create self-intuitive scripts for bosses, you play around with them on test servers and see what people can and can’t reasonably handle.
Case in point, Dragon Soul LFR in WoW. It started off being exactly the same as normal, but with lower values. Overtime, the mechanics were simplified and removed until the only ones left were the ones that a 25 man PUG could cope with.
Obviously putting flame wreath(Fire circle appears around random people, everybody dies if those people move) in a 100 man PUG is a recipe for disaster, but there are things inbetween boss auto-attacking and that.
Its not just about HP though; Cataclysm brought standardized health pools, and any boss attack that hit the party instead of just the tank was all magic damage, so plate was meaningless.
That way, the difficulty of the encounter was pre-set, rather than ranging from impossible because you have to eat an AoE that does 20k damage when you only have 17k max HP, to trivial because you can just ignore that AoE and heal through it.
In GW2, it can be easy and slow by being an AoE weakness spammer with high vit/toughness, or it can be extremely painful but less slow with berserker set.
The advantage of bleed builds is that swords and longbows for warrior get very little benefit from power. This leaves you open to take defensive or utility traits instead, while not really losing a lot of damage.
Really, damage overtime being weak is an awful misconception. If at 60, I have 17 stacks of bleed on average ticking for 74 damage, thats 1258 damage per second, nevermind that it potentially goes up to 25 stacks.
As for passive condition removal, can’t you just layer it with hamstring, or a sigil of doom? Or can you not layer conditions in this game.
Its probably the best water skill in the game; Short cooldown, short animation, high damage cone. IIRC, the warrior version doesn’t have an AoE component, only 5 does and it has a 25(20) second cooldown.
Mine at level 78 hits for about 400 per little bomb, with an 800 damage weapon and full berserker. You’ll understand if i’m skeptical that another 200 from a level 80 exotic weapon will make those little things do 20x their damage.
Warrior Longbow and thief shortbow are completely incapable of killing other players at ranged too, but they are great for PvE. Does that mean they aren’t real ranged weapons?
It can still work without a trinity, auto-attack damage of dungeon mobs just needs to be brought down to normal level with most of the emphasis being put on avoidable attacks.
Emphasizing interrupts or CC isn’t really viable due to the poor uptime. Even chain dropping black powders on my thief doesn’t make me safe, because it assumes everything is stacked inside it. It’ll usually only catch one or two enemies, with a third outside of it killing me.
Sometimes I wonder though. If greatsword is designed around being at max range, why does mirrored blade only give 6 stacks of might if you are in melee range of enemies?
I guess you could use it, then switch weapons. Or use it, then blink/portal away, but the idea that I can create 12 stacks of might (13 second duration with my might duration+, 4.7 second cooldown) but can’t capitalize on it is a little odd.
A full cooldown reset every 45 seconds is far too powerful, even for a 30 point trait. I could see an organized venomancer running that – Basilisk venom stacked on everybody, steal, basilisk venom again.
Overall, its just not very well designed as a trait. Its too powerful as a guarantee, but not very useful as a random proc off of a long cooldown ability.
Everybody thinks they are underpowered underwater, even warriors.
Its usually a result of not upgrading underwater weapons, or a profession’s water weapons being power based while the player is building for condition damage or vice versa.
I’d love to have some of the water abilities on land. Thieves are invincible in water, but they have no AoE and their damage is purely reactional so if they aren’t getting hit, they can’t kill things at all.
Most of the spear jab clones are stronger than land skills.
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Why does it seem every person here talking about skills is ignoring the obvious stuff such as Bola’s, Stomp, Charge, kick plus all the stances they have.
they have a hell of a lot of utilities that aren’t signet/banners/shouts, I’m not even sure what sort of skills you are looking for, give an example of something that would make it the warrior more to your liking
May I ask how you are playing your warrior, what weapons are you using and stuff like that, maybe thats where the problem lies.
Its because utility and traits in GW2 tend to be incredibly underwhelming, especially if you came from WoW but also if you came from any other recent MMOs. They have high reuse and very weak effects.
Eg. Fear me! 3 second fear, 80 second cooldown
Intimidating shout – 8 second fear, 1 minute cooldown
Bull charge – 2 second stun, 40 second cooldown
Charge/Juggernaut – 3 second stun, 20 second cooldown
Stomp – 2 second PBAOE stun, 60 second cooldown
Shockwave – 4 second cone stun, 20 second cooldown
Its a lot less overpowered sounding when you consider that everybody has a batman sized utility set and there are CC DRs.
Anything earlier and you are approaching the realm of 9 second stuns and 1+ minute long AoE CC, which evidently weren’t very good design.
Smite is essentially a ranged hundred blades with all it’s problems, but also being more damaging. To put into perspective, if everybody has identical stats it does about the same damage as 2.5 full damage heartseekers over time.
You can get similar results to Bull charge + hundred blades with Bane signet + smite + cleansing flame, but again, also has the same drawbacks where anybody whose seen it will be able to effortlessly counter it.
The number of skills for elementalist is largely superficial though; S/D or D/D water is all but useless except for saving a slot on condition removal. Its healing isn’t enough to justify the attunement cooldown, and theres no reason to DPS in it.
Same with air. I don’t use it for anything but traveling or tagging mobs really quickly since Scepter 2 is instant.
That leaves fire and earth, and well…
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/elementalist/Why-swap-attunements-when-utility-is-not-needed/first#post125076
When you consider the significant damage disparity between ranged and melee, in addition to the risks of it, i think i would prefer the option to swap between them when its reasonable to do so.
But seriously, it would be like if a warrior could only choose to swap between axe/axe and great sword, which both fulfill the same role.
Its mostly a problem in the low level zones because the 1-15 and 15-25 zones don’t have success based DE chains, only failure chains and on top of that, there just aren’t that many.
By 50 or even 40, its pretty easy to end up with no time to do hearts because you are so busy running between DEs.
I have math. Unless you’ve been playing 24/7 since release its simply not realistic to do that, short of abusing crafting leveling or the WvWvW escort before they nerfed it.
No you aren’t exploring bob. You are running from one waypoint to another.
When I left Queensdale after actually exploring it I was 20… When I finished Kessex I was 40. I’m almost 70… and yet I haven’t visited a map higher then level 25. I’m still not done with all the lowbie maps exploration.
Sorry, but bull ****. Level 60-70 zones give 8-10k per DE/heart. DEs in Kessex start at 600 and end at 800.
Even at 1000 exp per quest like you’d get around 25, you would be doing 90-100 DEs per level when you are lucky to find one if you are in the right place at the right time.
If you were doing level 45 DEs, you would get 2500 exp per quest when you need 100k+ per around 70. That would still be running the entire Ulgoth chain in Harathi hinterlands 10 times per level.
That isn’t leveling too easy, thats getting to level 20 in pre-searing.
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Its not related to lack of trinity. WoW could easily drop trinity and keep scripts as it is, and i’m sure Blizzard would drop tanks and healers if it weren’t such a drastic move.
Raid encounters for tanks have almost exclusively been tank swaps and picking up adds. High auto-attack damage and Tank swap mechanics are made specifically so that a raid needs multiple tanks, ergo if there is no tank, there is no need for such a mechanic.
No, the problem is that DE bosses and even a lot of dungeon bosses don’t have any script at all.
I’m level 12 by the time I finish Queensdale and all my story quest. This includes …
- 100% zone completion
- Harvesting every node I can get to reasonably
- Doing all story missions up to my level
- Doing every DE I find. This includes going to places I suspect there might be a DE going on, with no indicator. Orange marks or NPCs asking for help will only appear when you are close enough.
The only times I ever end up overleveled for a zone are the one that have spammable DE chains that respawn quickly, like Harathi Hinterlands and Ulgoth or Kol being up every 5 minutes.
Is that the intended leveling pattern? Either go to multiple zones per level range, or grind the same DEs over and over again?
Flanking strike needs the mesmer greatsword tweak, where they massive sped up the animations.
For cloak and dagger, the vulnerability is important for 25 deadly arts. It guarantees the next backstab gets the extra 10% damage, rather than having to manually condition the enemy first.
I’m fine with the dragons being impossible to fail. You really don’t want to wait 3 more hours for another attempt if you fail.
But the mechanics for the fight are insultingly simple. A lot of the time when I fight the Shatterer, I can just sit at a claw, attack and occasionally lose half my health in a hit, and regenerate it back. When I have died, his attacks are so infrequent that I could sit there and come back on my own without ever being hit again, while being right beside him.
Just because its a zerg doesn’t mean that a fight can’t have any scripting. It just means it can’t have any strict, do this or wipe scripting that depends on everybody doing it.
Like, how about Slabhide heroic in WoW? He rains stalagmites when he flies that kill you if you are under them, then he lands and does a zone-wide AoE that you have to LoS with those said stalagmites.
The Shatterer could rain those giant crystals down, then roar and explode them 15 seconds after he lands or something, where you have to kill a crystal and stand where it used to be or be downed by the explosion.
Bleed, burn and poison should have no interaction with other players, and should be invisible to other player’s interface, with everybody having their individual stacks.
Wooden boxes should bleed. They already made the exception to skeletons and machines because it wouldn’t be fair to make certain specs obsolete. They also aren’t critable, and neither are the dragons. This completely wrecks good traits on every class that proc things on crit.
Staff guardians are actually great at being credit hogs. The staff auto-attack is strong and fast enough to claim credit in a large AoE, but not really enough to kill things.
I agree completely though; Nowadays I won’t rez someone if I know there is a possibility that I won’t get gold, or i’ll miss out on AoEing a wave of 15 enemies for an extra 1500 exp.
But instead of calling me a selfish, it would be better to rework the system to accommodate playing as a team, rather than DEs being a rush to AoE tag things so that wouldn’t be necessary.
The way I see it, doing anything should award credit. If you heal or put boons on people, you should awarded for every monster a player booned kills.
If you stop to ressurrect someone, instead of being cheated out of a wave of exp, you should get exp from everything in a 1200 yard radius.
I think you guys should be more like… playing according the skills than trying to change the skills as you please..
Also dissagree with the clones not removing phantasm.. it adds certain lvl of decission making, if u have the trait u’d be like.. “should i dodge this and trade my DPS for survivality?” if u dont have the trait, u can have both..
if u’r using scepter u’d be like “should i do this 300 dmg hit rather than waiting 2s for the 3rd hit to reset back to the 1st one and not lose my 4k dmg phantasm?”.. etc etc.. we cant just have all the goodies in our class..
The problem is the awkwardness of it. I used to use sword/sword and scepter/pistol. I would start by using phantasmal swordsman, weapon swapping, then phantasmal duelist. Then i’d have to stall by using wasting all my other abilities, or turning around and running away just so I wouldn’t make a clone.
For greatsword, it means I can’t use mirror blade if i’m going for three phantasms. Theres no decision to be made – it would be flat out dumb to replace my phantasm with a clone.
So on Ulgoth, i go staff and any combination with a ranged phantasm now. I get my three up, get a good distance away and just sit there auto-attacking, because there is nothing else to do – Using any skill will either do nothing, or actually hurt my DPS.
Thats not a good design.