Guild Wars 2

While I haven’t got a problem with a personal meter for number-crunching, I can’t say I’d agree with a party one, otherwise we’ll be seeing “LFG 4 Zerk War + Mes, Link Gear, Must have +6k DPS or kick”.

Unless there’s an option to run a dungeon and all stats are given right at the end, not through the dungeon.

I don’t think Arthur and Excalibur is an appropriate example, since Arthur was chosen by divine providence (aka RNG), and didn’t have a quest to get it (rather, it was a sign to show who would undertake the quest for the Grail).

I’d say a more appropriate example would be, say, Beowulf and Naegling, or Jason and the Golden Fleece.

That said, I do agree that Legendary weapons as a whole were poorly implemented; no lore, nothing to place them in the world and completely uninspiring in the way they are gained.

They’ll be introducing a way to create precursors though (eta unknown).

Personally, I think the story suffered mostly from its pacing.

While I do understand that slowing the pace down would require more content to be made for the story, if they managed to pace the story a bit more, they could have developed characters a bit more and given themselves more opportunity for players to become more attached to characters, linked it to the open-world a bit more (instead of having you gain ranks through the story, have ranks done by representing your faction through the world, and then you’re called to do a certain mission), and a slow build-up to certain events.

The genre (and for the second point, games) as a whole though, seems to:

• Try to make each player feel like The One – In an MMO, this is an absurd concept. Not every player can be The One. Thus, what devs need to do is make the player feel heroic alongside other players.
• Try to tell the story through cutscenes – mostly down to how technology has advanced, games tend to do most of their storytelling through cutscenes. For things that, say, have happened in the past, this isn’t too much of a problem, but continuously using cutscenes to tell the story throughout the game takes control away from the player, which somewhat defeats the point of an interactive media. Devs need to tell the story without taking that control away from the player, through the mechanics of the game and the interactive content part, rather than cutscenes in the beginning, middle and end of that particular part of the story.

Imagine how much more hard hitting

TL:DR

• Don’t try to make the player The One, but make them feel like a hero
• Try to tell the story through game-play, not cut-scenes

I find it is something that just comes along as I play the game (I have all my icons turned off).

were blueberry muffins

Bugs need to be fixed.

At the same time, the game and content designers aren’t necessarily the people who fix the bugs or do the programming.

Something in the back of my head is telling me that they get people to create tools for them to create content, thus bugs are a result of the tool bugging.

I mean, you don’t even need to be a programmer to be a game designer.

EDIT: Here you go, a job vacancy for a Tool Programmer

As a tools programmer at ArenaNet, you’ll be contributing to our core tools platform, an adaptable framework upon which all of our art, design and programming tools are built.

Tools engineering at ArenaNet isn’t about moving buttons around on a UI, it’s about understanding what makes our developers tick and working with them to create software that lets them do their jobs more effectively.

While this is the job vacancy for a Game Designer

Responsibilities

• Design and document systems and/or content
• Implement designs using our in-house tools
• Collaborate with artists, programmers and other members of the design team
• Give input on design issues

Qualifications

• Strong communication skills, both verbal and written
• Ability to contribute creative and innovative ideas to the game
• Understanding of how game play affects the end user experience
• Experience using game level and world building tools (i.e. Neverwinter Aurora Toolset)
• Strong problem solving abilities
  
  Desirable
• Previous game development experience (preferably as a designer)
• Passion for Guild Wars and a deep understanding of Guild Wars mechanics
• Creative writing ability
• Experience with scripting languages
• Hard-core gamer with extensive experience playing games
• Experience of working within scrum teams

Combat doesn’t need complexity; it needs depth:

• Complexity – How hard something is to learn
• Depth – How many viable choices can be made with the tools available

That aside:

• I agree on gaining weapon skills as a form of progression after 80
• I disagree on having all utilities available to all classes. It would create a balance nightmare. Imagine a Warrior with Shadowstep, for example.
• The whole helping your team-mate thing is already in game. It’s just the encounter mechanics don’t require it that often (short of someone going down)

Astral Projections.7320:

SkylightMoon.1980:

Stop asking guys. Just wait. Its only 2 weeks away.

Are we there yet?

”No…”

Are we there yet?

do the Conga.

/15 Charr on the wall

ColinJohanson.2394:

We’ll have some other reveals you’re not going to want to miss…stay tuned! (and no the reveal is not an expansion!)

That sound? That’s the sound of shattered dreams :P

I reckon the reveal is going to be:

• Aniversary sales figures
• Some sort of massive content reveal (possibly how the current LS ties together)

with her frostbite.

Question: How do you know one of the LS teams aren’t working on a massive update that’ll bring in a new region(s) / big baddie?

We already know they aim to bring in Ascended Weapons and Armour, Precursor Changes, new skills and traits, new crafting before the end of 2013 after all.

That would just completely negate the point of having weapons and armour unique to dungeons.

Asda Smartprice Keyboard and Mouse

I also use a gamepad (Belkin Nostromo n52te)

There’s a number of issues with this:

• The Personal Story – What happens to the players who haven’t even joined a faction yet? What happens when their story is telling them that the organizations are working together, but in the open world they’re fighting each other? It’s just disjointed.

• Events – Events are supposed to be about co-operation. If you can damage other players with your attacks during events, then chances are players are just going to kill each other before they complete the event. Not to mention it could potentially reduce the chances of players completing the event (If you hit 2 players with a greatsword, then you can only hit 3 more enemies)

Rather than asking for OWPvP, why not ask for improvements to be made to WvW to give that feeling?

nom nom nom

/15 charrizards

Zoid.2568:

TheDaiBish.9735:

Zoid.2568:

TheDaiBish.9735:

Place the role within the encounter mechanics, and not as a role that’s made before you even start the fight.

Encounters don’t really have many mechanics, almost every encounter in the game can be berserked down. Only fractals and some Arah encounters do need support or tanky speccs.

Your question was ‘how would you encourage roles?’, not ‘why are roles not needed?’.

My answer to encouraging roles would be to view control, support and damage as aspects of combat and not simply roles, and have the actual roles built into the combat mechanics, and not make it so each person is stuck in that role. This way, players can look at what tools they have to fulfil that role.

I.E Cliffside fractal, the person with the hammer has the role of damaging the seal.

Yes, you encourage roles by making them useful.
If you don’t need support or a tanky specc, then why use it when you can kill everything faster with a berserker specc? waste of time. That’s how most players in GW2 think. That’s not their fault, it’s ArenaNets.

ArenaNet haven’t made either CC or support builds very viable. CC doesn’t even affect bosses because of defiant, which makes them immune to CC. If ArenaNet change encounters mechanics by making them more difficult to fight and make fights a bit longer and change defiant on bosses so you actually can use CC on them, not be able to stunlock them but make CC effective. Players will start using support, tanky and cc builds.

In GW1 nearly no one ran full dps builds, because you couldn’t, if you did you were screwed. ArenaNet made mobs in GW2 a lot simpler.

Yes, and why is that?

It’s primarily because encounters don’t require players to use these tools. I think the closest we could have got is with the Lover’s fight in AC. Imagine if the boulders wern’t there, and they tried to move together more often? You’d be required to use the tools that allow you to control the bosses then.

In short, we don’t need base roles such as control, support and damage. That way leads to rigid role system. Instead, we should look at support, control and damage as aspects of combat, and then develop mechanics based on these.

For example, the CoF effigy.

You could completly base that around the aspect of damage, and still have roles:

• Damage to destroy the crystals
• Damage to kill adds
• Damage to attack boss

On top of that then, you could have a control aspect where a crystal spawns where to cannot be destroyed while the effigy is close by.

To finish it off, you could have a mechanic where condition removal is required on a constant basis (effigy basic attack could be flame grab)

Note I’m fully aware this isn’t how the effigy fight is, but an example of how roles don’t have to be limited to the damage/support/control mindset

Malkavian.3751:

The problem with the living story is that it doesn’t really allow for engaging serious storylines because it’s temporary content.

I can’t say I agree with that.

I.E look at life. Full of temporary, one-time events that can engage and move us.

It just requires good storytelling (pacing, storytelling through gameplay ect) and giving us time to get emotionally invested in the story. So while it’s hard to achieve this in a two-week schedule, to say that temp content cannot provide a compelling story is untrue.

Zoid.2568:

TheDaiBish.9735:

Place the role within the encounter mechanics, and not as a role that’s made before you even start the fight.

Encounters don’t really have many mechanics, almost every encounter in the game can be berserked down. Only fractals and some Arah encounters do need support or tanky speccs.

Your question was ‘how would you encourage roles?’, not ‘why are roles not needed?’.

My answer to encouraging roles would be to view control, support and damage as aspects of combat and not simply roles, and have the actual roles built into the combat mechanics, and not make it so each person is stuck in that role. This way, players can look at what tools they have to fulfil that role.

I.E Cliffside fractal, the person with the hammer has the role of damaging the seal.

No need to transmute it for stats – when it gets changed, you’ll be able to change it to any stat prefix you want out of combat.

Legendary weapons will also be brought up to Ascended stats.

In addition, we’ll also improve the functionality of legendaries, allowing you to set their stats when out of combat to any stat combo available, so you don’t need to transmute stat changes for legendaries. Legendary gear will remain with the same tier of stats as ascended gear and will not be made more powerful than other gear, it will simply be slightly more convenient since it will no longer need transmutations to change stats.

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/looking-ahead-guild-wars-2-in-2013/

of ripe apples.

I’d still play as I am now.

Loot, for me, isn’t a goal.

Place the role within the encounter mechanics, and not as a role that’s made before you even start the fight.

Fox Soul.4809:

No Walking.6349:

I just wanted to inform people who may not know (like I didn’t know until a little bit ago) about these things concerning zenith weapons.

• Once you have unlocked them, you can “withdrawl” as many of then as you want to from your achievement window with the withdrawl button. This may save someone from accepting the same reward twice to get 2 daggers or the like, or from using a fine xmute stone on them.

Just wanted to put this here to same some people trouble if they didn’t know Luckily I didn’t get the same skin twice, but I did use a fine xmute stone on one of them :/

you cant choose the same reward. Once you choose, for example, a dagger, you cant choose the dagger again.

He’s not talking about choosing the reward more than once.

He’s talking about being able to withdraw infinite copies of the skin.

Zanshin.5379:

The problem with Liadri is the camera angles and the red circles not being visible enough (can’t even imagine being colour blind here). It’s not a matter of it being hard or easy. It’s just that it’s badly done. Asking for that to be fixed is being entitled?

Asking for things like that isn’t, since they’re what makes content punishing and causes you to die beyond your control.

Asking for nerfs because it ‘excludes’ people is (Example 1,Example 2)

http://uk.ign.com/wikis/guild-wars-2/Rubric

Rubric armor is given as story rewards and drops uncommonly from enemies in level 40+ areas.

What was the name of the armour from the story reward?

EDIT: Ahhh, it’s called Stalwart’s Pants, it’s from the Tower Down PS mission.

kittena.3809:

Yet you feel entitled to difficult content that others can’t complete (including their rewards). Hypocrite much?

I don’t think that’s what he’s saying at all.

When it comes to challenging content people can’t complete, the most entitled think that they deserve the rewards even though they couldn’t do it, because the content ‘excludes casual players’ (well, that’s the most common excuse I’ve heard).

As a casual gamer myself, I simply accept if something is beyond my grasp, whether I lack the skill or the time to complete it. I don’t come to the forums asking Anet to change the rules because I’m excluded.

At the end of the day, I’m not excluded from the content. I can access the content, and I can try my best to complete said content. What I’m excluded from is the achievement and rewards if I don’t complete that content, and rightly so.

Otherwise, Anet might as well just give the achievement on the first try of the content, regardless of being able to do it or not, and be done with it.

Paulytnz.7619:

They are not instances as such, if anything they are more like “closed, open areas” if that makes sense.

I expect they are like this for various reasons such as:

1 – To have the area maps completion be viable.
2 – To give each area it’s own feel and in a way background story.
3 – Were worked on by different creation teams at the same time so the world could be made quicker (all at once) and then just added together.
4 – As someone else said to give us better chances of being on our home servers by splitting the areas up and sharing them around on different servers and such to help keep this a reality.

5 – To help us as the players know where and when we should be able to visit certain areas thanks to the maps/areas being level advised/based

I’m sure there’s tons of other reasons but all in all I prefer it like this. :P

Reasons 1, 2 and 5 could be achieved with a seamless world.

Psycho Robot.7835:

Let’s not forget about how you can inflict burning underwater.

Well, if you boil the water, I guess. The difference between a burn and scald is simply what caused the burn, after all.

But yeah, the particle effects.

Sil.4560:

No. Less instant kills, less annoying CC. I’d much rather see a vast AI improvement and attack patterns which actually engage players than this gimmicky crap.

Personally, I think AI that learns after every DE would be awesome.

i.e oh, I just sent my army charging in and got beat, so this time, I’ll rain down some siege from that nearby cliff as well this time.

Rainbow Sprint.3215:

TheDaiBish.9735:

Whatever way you look at it, a creature that can live in lava shouldn’t be able to be burnt. Same as a rock shouldn’t bleed, and an Ice Elemental shouldn’t be Chilled.

These sorts of things make players think of different approaches to how they fight enemies.

Except earth elementals can bleed, and ice elementals can be chilled. I’m fine if things are immune to certain conditions, but only if they go all the way.

Yeah, I should have expanded on how odd I find these things as well.

Hanayatori.3764:

lordkrall.7241:

They might. The main issue is that if they give good enough rewards lvl 80 players will simply swarm them and take some of the challenge away due to higher overall stats.

What if the fights were intended for level 80s, perhaps as a means of counteracting the ’there’s nothing to do at level 80’ issues that some people have?

You can’t have fights that are intended for level 80’s in pre-80 zones.

I mean, what if these fights spawn, and there’s no level 80’s around to do them?

Personally, I think they need to:

• tie how the mechanics scale, and not simply health and damage. For example, the Shatterer’s healing crystals. There’s the same amount no matter how many people turn up, meaning the majority of these players can ignore the mechanic. Scaling the amount that spawn with the amount of players would mean these idle players would have to take note of the mechanic.
• introduce anti-zerg and spam mechanics (AoE that does [base damage x the amount of people it hits], multiple little events within the main objective event that are important to success = the zerg will be split, and each little group will have its own responsibility)

Derek.9021:

TheDaiBish.9735, that’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard balance wise. Can you imagine something being immune to bleeds? That would be honestly gamebreaking.

In it’s current state, yes.

However:

• Implementing easier spec switching while in the world
• Balancing build effectiveness

would make it less of an issue.

Maybe this is the real issue here, and not the immunities.

Nick.6972:

You can’t make the World Bosses challenging – everyone will just zerg them.

And if they zerg and spam skills on them, then the mechanics will cause them to fail.

I can’t see that as an inherently bad thing.

Hanayatori.3764:

There would be no need to create any kind of lore or back-story for these fights…

I can’t say I agree with that.

Just plonking fights in that don’t fit with any sort of lore, or have any story whatsoever makes them a separate part of the GW universe.

Just look at Legendaries. Flameseeker Prophecies is the only legendary that has any correlation with the world.

If anything, the most challenging fights would present the most danger to the world, thus would require a back-story as to why they pose a threat.

As for making challenging, open-world fights, it’s possible if two criteria are met:

• Devs work on mechanics that discourage zerg encounters, and encourage co-operation and organisation within the limits of the current communication system (which would mean some kind of prior warning / respite period for people to communicate).
• Players understand that it’s OK to fail, and that these fights are meant to provide a challenge and compelling group content, and not simply as loot pinatas for them to repeatedly farm.

The Overflow system.

If players wanted to go to, say, Lornar’s Pass, uninstanced zones would most likely send them to the overflow even if the majority of players are in, say, Lion’s Arch.

Conncept.7638:

TheDaiBish.9735:

So you want to get rid of the torch event…because you can’t do it?

People asked for the same of the infamous Clocktower.

I’m just struggling to figure out the mentality that players feel like they’re entitled to these rewards and that rules should be altered for them.

Complete achievements from either this category or Jubilee dailies.

I’m pretty sure doing the Jubilee Daily adds to the Meta, meaning doing 16 days worth of Dailies can net you the mini (or the other Achievements and make the rest up with Dailies), meaning you don’t need to do the torch run.

So you want to get rid of the torch event…because you can’t do it?

They can’t simply make a weapon ‘a must have’ based on you considering it being an iconic weapon.

If they make the shield useful in all cases, there wouldn’t be any point in them having Focus and Torch.

ANet removed the static, dedicated role system, so they need to replace it with something, such as fluid roles that are built into the fight themselves.

Not only this, looking more closely, there are some decent mechanics in the game that give roles. Unfortunately, a lot of them can be brute-forced.

For example, The Lover’s fight.

Remove the boulders, make the ‘closeness’ mechanic come into play more often and adjust it so they give up after X seconds, and then you got:

• Damage (bosses and adds)
• Control (preventing them from getting close)
• Positioning (keep them as far away as possible to give the best chance possible)
• Support (removing conditions, damage mitigation)

As well as this, repeating what some people have said:

• Change Defiant (from stacks to a timer, and it doesn’t trigger if you interrupt, making Interrupt builds more viable if they add skills and more traits based around interrupting)
• More regular incoming damage
• Build mobs like players as much as possible (traits, weapon-sets, utility skills ect), as well as working on improving AI so mobs work together, making use of Combo Fields and finishers, interrupting skills ect.

shibby.7219:

Arenanet need to remember not everyone is a hardcore gamer what happens to the casual games that arenanet are excluding with theses events. Not everyone wants to play a berserk practically all the guides online used a berserker build

How does the content exclude casual players? Casual players can still attempt the content, and potentially complete it.

I’d call a gamer who expects to be able to complete everything, and when they can’t complete everything they call for nerfs because ‘it excludes casual gamers’, an entitled gamer, to be honest. This coming from a casual gamer.

If there’s bugs that stop things being completed, fair enough. That’s not a nerf, that’s making content work as intended. They need to be fixed.

I wouldn’t say remove it, since as people have said, it prevents stunlocking. However, it could be changed:

• Make it a timer as opposed to stacks.
• Defiant doesn’t trigger if you interrupt an attack.

Mesket.5728:

This is not a MMO*R*PG but a MMOPG… Roles here are meaningless, pointless and most of the times rejected and criticized.

‘Role’ in Role Playing doesn’t refer to roles in combat.

Conncept.7638:

TheDaiBish.9735:

• Support didn’t rely on out-healing damage, but mitigating damage.

I would disagree on that point, support is made to make people better at what they are already doing and/or make up for what they lack, or do the opposite for the enemy. IE, you actually support your teammates’ strategies and play, unlike in most games where you just prevent the tank from dying and make up for the DPS’ many many stupid mistakes.

I think ANet did a pretty good job at this, excepting that several classes really can’t support hard enough to be worth a full build, and no class can build off-support, which was supposed to be viable but is instead laughable because of how useless on and condition duration are without a full build, not to mention some of the inexcusable stack limits…

Good point indeed.

As for the off-support comment though, I disagree. In my experience anyway.

I main a Warrior with 2 banners and a Shout, but I’m specced mainly for Tanky, Sustained, damage with a Hammer and Greatsword.

My Banners and Shout help my team-mates in terms of Damage and Survivability (with Warbanner being my SHTF skill), while my high HP and Toughness allows me to a) stay in melee longer and b) take more hits while reviving a person (which goes faster thanks to the 20 in Tactics).

With my banner and 5 stacks of might, my 100B tends to peak at around 11k – 12k with no crits. Even higher if I do crit.

I mean, look at the Thief. Stereotypically the class that wouldn’t bring support. Shadow Refuge could be used to cover someone who’s gone down. Scorpion Wire could pull a boss away from someone that’s gone down. Blinds galore.

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/a-look-at-upcoming-pvp-changes/

Dishonored

We’ve implemented a system that hurts leavers and makes them cry! It’s called the dishonored system and it works like this:

• Not being present when victory is declared will qualify for match abandonment.
• Not moving for 3 or more minutes once the match has started will qualify as match abandonment.
• Each match abandonment gives you one stack of the Dishonorable buff.
• You can only get punished once per match.
• Each Dishonorable stack lasts for 72 hours.
• Players with five Dishonorable stacks cannot join ranked matches.

Something like that?

Stats Vs Cosmetics

Since I haven’t done much in the way of Fractals, I’ll just address this point (although I’m curious how much your were playing per day in order to get max AR).

1. I don’t think the best gear should be gated. Rather, unique looking gear and titles should be gated by content. The more challenging the content, the more visually impressive the gear is.

2. I can’t say that I’ve ever felt a sense of accomplishment in getting higher stats. The feeling of accomplishment for me is doing and beating the actual content itself; doing a rather difficult puzzle, that sort of thing.

Dragons

I agree with this. I personally think Anet dropped the ball on releasing an API allowing playrs to create timers for when these events spawn (although this wouldn’t be an issue if victory wasn’t assured). IMO, events like the Dragons should:

• Utilise the entire zone
• Have consequences for the entire zone should it fail
• Force teamwork and organization
• Have their mechanics scale with player participation, not just health.

Griefing

Griefing is only fun for the one doing the griefing. Also, the whole ‘everybody loves griefing secretly’ thing is plain rubbish. I don’t enjoy intentionally annoying people, especially considering they may just want a relaxing gaming session. I’d rather work with other people. I can’t say I agree with the idea that introducing ways to grief other players would improve the game in any way.

Itemisation

“Stat allocation is too similar, zero uniqueness when developing character”

Huh? So you’re saying that someone who is dressed in Berserker’s and specced for pure damage will be just as effective at doing condition damage as someone in, say, Rabid gear who is specced for condition damage?

I also don’t see how higher and higher stats would allow for this, outside of just putting out bigger numbers.

Unfairness – pertaining to Legendary weapons

Legendary weapons were poorly implemented in the aquisition. The one thing they did do right though is not make them a requirement for maximum effectiveness. Not to mention Legendary weapons have / will have their own perks:

• Will always be on par with the highest tier of gear
• You’ll be able to change stat allocation prefix outside of combat

This can easily be done through cosmetics and such. I don’t see why it HAS to be higher and higher stats.

There’s nothing wrong with suggestions, and yes, since you are (or were) a paying customer, your voice should be heard.

That doesn’t mean, though, that ANet has to scrap what they want their game to be because you (and like-minded people) want gear that continuously gets more powerful every month.

I mean, think for a moment: How many players who still play because of the lack of required gear grind would Anet lose at this stage if they introduced a monthly / bi-monthly gear treadmill, compared to how many people would return who have already left and found another game with it in?

Definition: The part played by a person in a particular situation.

In the majority of MMO’s, roles are predefined, known as the Holy Trinity. You have the Tank, who keeps the bosses attention, DPS who deal as much damage as possible and Healers who keep everyone alive through replenishing HP.

In a game that is based around the multiplayer aspect, roles are used to create the sense of teamwork. A common complain with GW2 is that roles aren’t needed, and that everyone is damage, thus the game lacks depth. From a perspective, I can understand why people think that.

However, despite being tried and tested, the Trinity (and set roles in general) has its issues:

1) Lack of Depth: If content requires roles x, y and z, then it lacks depth (the amount of choices that can be made from a toolset) in terms of how the players decides to tackle the content. PvE inherently has this problem anyway, since the mechanics of a fight tend to have a single way of tackling them (thus the depth needs to be found elsewhere).

2) Limitation in Mechanics requiring the roles: For example, the mechanics if there is a Tank tends to be limited to “Face away”, “Kite” and, if there are two Tanks, “Swap at X stacks of debuff” and “Tank A tanks boss, Tank B tanks Adds”. If you look closely at a lot of encounter mechanics in other games, they either a) don’t actually require set roles and b) could easily be adapted to not require set roles.

3) Psuedo-Teamwork: A complaint by someone in another thread was he often forgot he was fighting with other players. At the same time, this could be applied to set roles; everyone is expected to know their role, so you worry more about what you’re doing. If you’re a Tank, more often than not, you’re more concerned about how much threat you’re generating, since DPS and Healer is keeping their own in check. DPS is focused on their rotation and staying out of the fire (most of the time), leaving the Tank and Healer to do their job. Healers are better when there are mechanics where the Healer needs to be aware what other team members are doing, but aside from that, the healer is focused more on keeping the bars filled.

4) It’s all based around _x_PS: Tank needs to generate Threat Per Second, DPS is self explanatory, Healers need to do more HPS than the mobs DPS. While this is somewhat simplified, this also sums up the majority of my experience as a Tank, Healer and DPS in games that I have raided in.

What GW2 wanted to achieve

GW2 wanted to achieve that:

• Roles can be swapped while in combat, with people choosing to specialise if they so wish.
• Any class can fulfill any role.
• Control didn’t rely on one person keeping aggro.
• Support didn’t rely on out-healing damage, but mitigating damage.

With the actual core system in an ideal encounter (since the majority of encounters don’t require these roles), points 1, 3 and 4 have been achieved, with 2 needing work.

What GW2 can do to improve the ‘role’ side of things

1. Don’t have roles pre-determined, but build roles into encounter mechanics. Doing this can add more depth, since the player looks at what tools they have to accomplish this role.

2. View Control, Support and Damage not as roles, but as aspects of combat. By doing this, you break away from the whole pre-determined roles way of thinking, which gives much more freedom when it comes to designing roles within the encounters.

3. Rework Defiant:

• A: Have Defiant as a timer, not stacks
• B: Have Defiant not trigger if you interrupt

I’d personally opt for A or, more ideally, a combination of the two, since this would allow Control builds to more readily interrupt if they need to help their team-mates.

For example;

• The crystal mustn’t fully regenerate its health, otherwise the boss heals. Each hit on the crystal gives you a stacking debuff that causes a % DoT, meaning you need to swap with other players.
• The boss spawns lots of adds that need to be taken down before they explode
• then there’s damaging the boss.

Even though the fight is only focusing on the aspect of damage, there’s 3 roles (for all purposes of what the definition of ‘role’ is) in this fight; keeping the crystal from recharging, destroying the adds that spawn and damaging the boss. In this fight, team-members need to be aware of when they need to swap with team-mates when stacks get too high, and the person in charge of the adds needs to be aware of their team-mates position in the event the add did explode, as to not wipe them all out while grouped up.

Obviously you can fit other aspects in too:

• Boss will occasionally try to go and knock the player off of the crystal, in which case, CC can be used to prevent it
• Boss is condition heavy, thus requiring condition removal

Apologies if it isn’t a coherent read. I’m writing this at 3:40am with no caffeine.