Zerker is also best for open world content (higher clear rate, higher tagging rate with random weak AoEs) and any zerg boss you can actually crit. The “can’t-crit-zerk-ban” just invalidates all dps gear so you’re left with PVT/clerics (because conditions are still worthless). And while a PVT player might survive better against Scarlet’s souped-up minions, the second Elite Aetherblade Thug Battle Standard will kill them too, as the first already gave him 25might.
Whenever the content is about tagging and getting loot, survival is way more important than damage. The PVT player might die to the second Battle Standard, but the Berserker still dies to the first one and might get downed easily by many other damage soruces like Lighting Strikes or Grenades.
Few utilities increase direct damage (you don’t really want more people running Signets purely for the passives, do you?) and few traits can be switched without actually retraiting entirely, which as I said can’t be done on the fly.
And while there is room for “improvement”, we’re back to “accepting the design versus questioning it”. Yes, necros can use an axe and switch dumbfire for Close to Death, but they’ll still be running an inferior mockup in suboptimal gear through no mistake of their own beyond playing PvE necro in the first place. Anet needs to either allow people to adapt without being penalised for personal playstyle choices, or diversify/“dumb down” the content enough so everyone can make a meaningful contribution.
Some classes can fill their bar with damage improving utilities and other don’t. If you’ve no other meaningful utility, a power boosting signet is among the best things you can slot.
As a Guardian, with Aegis, Reflects and any other defensive utility being a complete waste, Bane Signet is actually my second utility choice for this content right after Stand Your Ground.
Banners of Power and Discipline (and Battle Standards), even FGJ, for warriors; blast finisher and fire fields for Eles and Engis; Frost Spirit for Rangers … I could easily expect about a 20% damage increase just from that.
And when I talk about adapting, I talk about a full retrait before porting to L.A.
Retraiting “on the fly” is still useful but nowhere close to what a fully respec can achieve.
About questioning the design, I absolutely question how Conditions work for PvE.
That’s, however, completely unrelated to this content. Even if they are even worse when fighting Knights, they’d still have been useless without the reflect phase.
This also means that tuning a conditiomancer for massive content requires a complete trait and gear overhaul. It’s annoying but nothing new for Necro users.
And don’t get me wrong. I wholeheartly dislike the Knight fight.
I just think that encouraging player to adapt and experiment with their builds instead of sticking to their “chosen one” is something positive.
A minor nuisance that must be squashed, burned, torn to shreds and forgotten before it can take root. It would already be bad if the Holo fight actually required dedicated condi players, what if the next boss reflects all crits? Or has a constant 2000dps armor-piercing aura? Or is only vulnerable to conditions and has the aura?
I wasn’t calling the Knight battle a minor nuisance :P
That was about porting to the Mist for a full retrait.
About your hypotetical encounter … you would need a good amount of power damage for the Knights and a good amount of survivability for the Holo. I’m not sure if it could be matematically possible to achieve both.
Condition vulnerability still wouldn’t be a problem since you could easily reach the cap with a couple of dedicated conditon players. Those should attack while every other player dance and cheer at them (there’s a chance on inflicting weak conditions and lowering the overall damage if they attack) :P
I will point this out about the Knights, a mechanic which I don’t believe anyone has made note of before. Knights do not reflect conditions 1:1 to the players. That is to say, if you “apply” 5s of Poison to a buffed Knight, you don’t receive 5s of Poison yourself. I’ve been trying to figure out exactly what does happen, and it’s possible that the conditions just get reflected around randomly (like your Poison goes to some other player while you get someone else’ Weakness), but I actually think what happens is that you get several seconds of a random condition each time you apply a condition. So like if you apply three stacks of Bleed, you might instead end up with one stack of Poison, one of Cripple, and one of Chill or something.
I just know that my character tends to apply various conditions regardless of which attacks I use, so I just have to put up with that if I want to deal any damage at all, but I tend to pick up conditions that I don’t actually generate.
No, it’s not random.
If I use Chains of Light during the condition reflect phase (yeah, its stupid :P) I get automatically affected by immob.
I don’t know exactly how it works, but I guess reflected conditions share the application method of the original soruce. Directly applied conditions are directly reflected, while projectile ones are reflected like projectiles.
Two problems with this: One, as you state yourself, max dps “zerker” is the meta anyway, thus Anet should design such challenges to drive people away from it rather than further enforce it.
To be honest, max DPS berserker is the meta for dungeons, and outside the few well known paths that a lot people run for farming, I’m not sure on if we should call it meta at all.
Many organized groups run it and there are a few speedrun PUGs here and there, but for the most part those dungeons/paths are pretty much ignored.
The meta for zergy content has been really more about PVT than anything else.
Secondly, the game interface currently can’t support constant build-switching. Even new sets of exotic gear are hard to get unless you’re rolling in cash anyway, so requiring a specific stat combo for time-limited content is a no-go. (“hard” is of course relative, but it still takes several days running CoF for the full zerk set if you’re broke and we only get 2 weeks total)
I already said that I don’t expect anyone to get a set that doesn’t want for some temporary content.
I strongly believe that there’s enough potential in overlooked traits, utilities, weapons and consumables to increase the damage output by A LOT.
I still think, however, that an average veteran PVT user should have enough laurels (and maybe even guild commendations) to acquire some ascended berserker trinkets that might be useful on a quite recurrent basis (I would not buy the now, so close to the ferocity changes).
There’s also no feasible way to retrait/switch templates mid-adventure, meaning the hardcore players would most likely develop 2-3 “most adaptive” builds which can switch without a full retrait (banning all other builds and classes in the process) or enforce gear and build checks before the run.
Obviously the solution is to give us build templates and/or better inventory management so carrying around 2-3 different stat combos actually becomes feasible (without investing into the gemshop for additional bank+bag slots); but until that is done they should keep force-retrait “challenges” OUT of the game, thank you. Maybe 1-2 raid dungeons so hard even TTS will take months to beat them, with a meaningless “bragging rights” reward for their effort, while the vast majority of players can simply ignore it.
I agree on the build/template system being too rigid.
I also think that the overflow issues don’t exactly help people to retrait and those staying in L.A. for different activities might feel slightly uncomfortable with a different trait setup (I do).
For people porting to L.A. just for the Knight event, however, I can’t really see a good reason to not visit the Mists and retrait before. It’s just a minor nuissance.
(edited by Vargamonth.2047)
Part of being a decent player is also about maximizing your chances of success.
Maximizing? No, it’s not. That’s part of min-maxing which is among highest tiers of play. Decent is a long ways away from that. Decent is knowing what your build can do and doing it well enough for most fights.
Also, you’re making some rather large assumptions about my build. I suggest you don’t. Suffice to say, I’m not using burning speed to avoid any attack.
Yeah, I probably shouldn’t have used that word.
What I mean is that your main goal should be to finish the event, so if the event needs damage, you should try to bring as much as you can figure among your possibilities.
As I said, worrying about a minor damage being reflected is pointless if the event is likely to fail because a lack of DPS.
It’s like if the enemy would pop retaliation. It might seem unhealthy to hit it at first glance, but if the DPS race fails otherwise, then it’s a sacrifice that must be done (just being careful to not destroy yourself).
And yes, I obviously have no idea about the build you’re using.
I could perfectly be mistaken too in my assumption of staff in permafire being the best sustained ranged damage for ele (apart of some eventual Ice Bow).
Part of being a decent player is also about maximizing your chances of success.
Actually, your comments seem to be more about other players maximizing your chance of success. Rangers, for example, are worth nothing more than a precision buff with some damage on the side. Not players who have their own health pool. Do you even bother to rez them when they are downed?
And as a guardian I’m little more than another damage source which will eventually grant stability for the extraction attack (which happens to be useless if everybody dodges). I’ve neither damage boosting auras nor reliable low CD finishers, my heals are useless and the player side loses DPS if I dare to grab a staff for buffing.
I can be a “tank” too and keep the Knight engaged and easier to nuke down (a ranger also can do this), but that’s currently pointless. Most of the time there’s enough people meleeing and an obvious lack of DPS.
I guess I could also be a high DPS melee fighter, but that’s out of my reach and my computer doesn’t help either. I’ve tried to go in and out and burst during extraction attacks, but the safety window is too small and I become useless for a few seconds until I can return to scepter (not sure if useful).
And yes, I try to res every character that gets downed next to me :P
Yeah expect this idea these “unique snowflakes” have was the selling point to this game when it came out.. So people ARE entitled for playing how they want.
There’s an additional factor. The devs have been talking about “build diversity” as a design goal for quite some time. Required bosses that want lots of berserker gear is rather contrary to that goal.
Maybe, just maybe, “build diversity” is also about every character being able to be tuned/customized to fit better different purposes and not exactly about allowing every mixture of random builds to be succesful in any context.
I am glad we agree that the mobs must stop following the [b]rarely hitting the players, one hit killing [b]model.
This should be replaced by the often hitting the players, but lower damage model.
The problem here is that thoughness should had been modeled (at least for PvE) as a flat damage reduction, being specially effective against fast frequent attacks (which are hard if not impossible to actively mitigate) but next to useless agains the big moves (which would be the place for evades/dodges to shine).
With proper attack/damage rates, this would be much more in line with the idea of an action based combat MMO. What we have now is hardly possible to balance (I can show you some weird math to “prove” it if you want)
Yes berserker should always deal the highest damage, if the player can survive with it. At the same time, tanky characters should survive longer than berserker gear. The medium that Anet should aim for is hybrid, somewhere in the middle. Berserker is the extreme in damage, while tanky is the extreme in survival.
The biggest obstacle right now is that too many people is using berserker already. So Anet may be hesitant to make new contents and AI that can effectively killing off berserker gear players (e.g. 90% chance for berserker to die once every 5 minutes). Anet may be worried about the outcry from the berserkers.
But this is important for the long term of the game.
Not exactly. Tanky characters should have an easier time surviving (which already happens btw).
This is not supposed to be a classic number based MMO where you can measure the time one spec would stay alive. Even if numbers play a huge role, the ability to survive must be highly dependant on player skill and a godlike player should perfectly survive in zekers for longer than a terrible one in soldiers.
If everything could be reduced to numbers, then there would be an optimal build and everybody would stick to it.
The problem with berserker gear is how unchallenging the content is. Surviving as a glass cannon is just easy enough to ignore more defensive specs..
The defend the circle idea is just one of many. The key is to make all 3 types of gears useful. The event, instead of being a DPS test, now test and see if the players know what they are doing. Here is how the players may fail the event.
Berserkers: If they do not know how to survive, they will die rapidly. The zerg DPS will drop and the player zerg will wipe. Zerg wipe=game over.
Hybrids: Somewhere in the middle.
Tanks: If they do not know how to either absorb damage for or heal their allies, their allies will die around them. This will drop the zerg DPS. The waves after waves of mobs will eventually kill everyone. Zerg wipe=game over.
But there’s a DPS check. If damage specs fail at surviving or tanks at defending them, players are likely to be overwhelmed and lose the combat.
Yes, the 3 types of gear are useful, but that’s completely different from any character, no matter what spec/gear uses, being useful. They’re only if they do what they’re supposed to do.
Soldier gear may have its place, but won’t work on a bearbow ranger (without even piercing arrows) spamming autoattack at the backline. Unless you’re extremely forgiving with the DPS requeriments (in which case a lot of tanks and a few hybrids would be enough and nothing would have changed), this kind of builds could and would make the event fail and then complaint about berserkers one more time.
(edited by Vargamonth.2047)
I expect Elementalists to provide some might stacking (and fury through Persisting Flames) with Arcane Brilliance and Wave over fire fields.
And as an ele, I refuse. Fire Fields can actively hurt anyone using projectile finishers during the reflect phase. I do not like placing them then. And when I do, I’ve seen people dodging out of my fire fields or otherwise avoiding them. I personally can’t blame them. Part of being a decent player is avoiding doing stupid things that directly hurts allies.
We’re talking of a (usually 20%) chance of receiving back 1s of low condition damage that’s going to deal no more than 700 damage.
The fire field doesn’t even need to be a huge wall. Burnign Retreat can be used to avoid the extraction attack (so no time or Lava Font wasted) and creates a wall which is radial towards the boss and shouldn’t be a problem at all.
Part of being a decent player is also about maximizing your chances of success.
If your server has no problem beating the Knights, then it’s perfectly fine and safe to not lay fire fields on the ground. If, onthe other hand. it tends to fail because of a lack of damage, then there’s no point on worrying about a minor damage source when it could make winning possible.
I have yet to see any valid argument as to why the knights’ design in itself is good for the game (and on the flipside everyone will agree that taking a condi build is a total waste)
I see it as good in the sense that should encourage players to look into their builds and try to adapt them, which IMHO is a very important part of the game that, since usually uneeded, A LOT of people completely ignore.
In this case the tweak should be towards DPS and, given how controversial the whole DPS/berserker thing is, generates a lot of rage. The idea, however, could still be valid for survivability, condition removal and many other things: people tend to not change builds even if for better and it’s good to encourage them to make situational changes.
On the other hand, having this on the preevent towards the final boss of the LS season finale is a terrible mistake. This update should have provide some feeling of epciness and illusion of challenge while being among the less skill/gear demanding ones.
Condition builds, as you said, are completely useless, but that’s a common issue for almost every PvE group content and not specifically related to this event.
Sure the condition immunity/reflect phase makes it worse but, if we have to be honest, condi builds would still be crap even without it.
(edited by Vargamonth.2047)
Teaching players how to read boss cues, proper movement/positioning, when to attack/when NOT to attack etc. are all good ideas for improving player skill.
Putting players in a situation where “you need to play Zerker/full DPS otherwise you can forget about beating this content” is NOT a good idea. If that were the case, why even bother having other stat spreads at all? By all means, encourage players to improve their skill, but creating situations where certain builds or stats are useless is NOT good design.
I have to disagree.
Understandings the different posibilities your class offers and being able to tune your charcaters for different tasks is also an important part of improving as a player.
If some event is repeteadly failing because a lack of damage, I expect players to make changes and try to contribute to the DPS output as much as possible.
I obviosuly don’t expect a player to open the AH and inmediately buy a full set of Berserker gear (I’ve always believed that some alternative gear is highly desirable and I’m really surprised on so many veteran players not having something in this line. I don’t know, maybe the mystery cat tonic is too tempting). I don’t think, however, that some trait/utility tweaking (which costs next to nothing) is too much to ask.
Unless they’re fighting in melee range (so keeping the boss rooted in place and making ranged AoEs easier to land), I expect Warriors and Guardians to be built for damage. I expect the first ones to bring Empower Allies and Banners and the second ones to slot Stand Your Ground and wield a Staff as a backup weapon only if they’re tanky gear users.
I expect Elementalists to provide some might stacking (and fury through Persisting Flames) with Arcane Brilliance and Wave over fire fields. So I do for engineers, which have an insane amount of low CD blast finishers on top of their own fire field.
I expect rangers to trait for Spotter and bring Spirit of Frost (which I rarely see btw), probably even traited, for a freaking 3.5%/7% AoE final damage increase.
I wouldn’t be surprised if an over 50% damage increase could be achieved without touching any single piece of gear.
(edited by Vargamonth.2047)
If there are no max level fiends waiting for you, there’s no reason for rushing to 80 at all.
How about trait points, skill pool and investment in max level gear load outs?
Some of us would like access to a fully spec’d level 80 character sooner rather than later. I don’t enjoy playing the handicapped version and the content available to leveling toons is very monotonous after a while. I will say to Arenanet’s credit that GW2’s leveling is easier than in most MMORPGs but it’s still boring(to me).
The problem is that a maxed character trivializes a good amount of the available content and makes it even more monotonous and boring to play.
If I have to be honest, the leveles between 30 and 80 are completely useless and shouldn’t have existed ever. The game could have worked even better without levels at all.
This, however, is a quite radical change that could have easily alienated a lot of MMO/RPG players, which is obviously undesired from a bussiness perspective.
Developers probably didn’t want to take many risk in this matter and I honestly think they did a fairly decent job managing the boredom of leveling up.
It could have been better, that’s for sure, but I have no complaints on it.
I’ve never noticed any issue with leveling in GW2.
If you’re new and trying to catch up some friends in order to play with them, they’ll not have any problem on giving some tips, helping with story mode dungeons and even carrying you through some explorables.
If there are no max level fiends waiting for you, there’s no reason for rushing to 80 at all.
Following your personal story and exploring the maps you’re brought to (completing hearts, gathering and playing DEs that are totally new for you) is usually enough for not feeling underleveled.
Even if it happens (probably caused by not being able to play Story Mode Dungeons, which is a bit painful if the daily isn’t up), there are still many side-activities that can help you to catch up with the story: a bit of crafting, living story, WvW (and now even sPvP through tomes), queensdale champion trains … even going out your way for some additional daily (like Shiverpeak killer on an human toon) can give a good chunk of XP from both the exploration and the daily itself.
And, of course, once you already have one or more level 80 characters, there are several ways to speed up the leveling alt if you want to do it.
I still stand by my point that the current mobs are very very bad at killing berserker players. That’s why berserker is the norm; it is the optimal damage. If the berserker players does die often, the optimal damage will no longer be berserker. It will be somewhere between berserker and tanky gear. And that’s what it should be.
Berserker (or any other triple damage stat combination) should always be the highest damage dealing gear AS LONG as you’re capable to survive while using it.
And you’re right, monster AI is a complete crap. A lot of people, myself included, agrees on that and points at it as one of the main culprits on making glass cannon specs not skill demanding enough for most of the content.
For a player that can’t properly survive in berserkers, as you said, a more balanced should be the optimal choice for damage.
In order to make this work, however, you absolutely need to keep the “identifying animations” idea alive. Otherwise, dying on berserkers would be something completely random and the balanced/hybrid approach would be statistically superior, making berserker not suboptimal (tanky gear is suboptimal damage wise, but at least increases your survivability and allows you miss evades more often) but just 100% useless.
BTW I am not saying a tanky gear character should be able to face tank absolutely everything neither. But a reasonable amount of damage avoidance will allow him to survive.
I also disagree with the point on timer is a requirement. It isn’t. My hold the circle event does not need a timer. The players just need to survive against all the attacks from the mobs, until the mobs run out of troops.
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If you’re fighting against a quite zergy amount of enemies, damage becomes fairly unpredictable. If a tanky character can be bursted down so fast that a good reaction time /skillful play is needed in order to retreat to safety (and with a proper personal/team setup, be fully recovered in a few seconds), then everything else would explode and become right unplayable.
On the other hand, if you’re fighting against a single readable enemy, you’ll need a terrible performance (missing several avoidances in a row) to fail.
There’s only one exception to this and that’s about the damage being high enough to almost oneshot the tanky character, and that bring us back to the glass cannon spec which eliminates the threat faster.
Without DPS checks, tankiness is just a much safer way to success.
I’ve no problem with your defend the circle idea. It’s too zergy for my preferences but a lot of people would enjoy it and absolutely has its place.
However, there’s actually a DPS check in that fight. You still need to clear waves fast enough for not being overwhelmed by reserves and fail the event because of a lack of damage.
I would play that event either as a glass cannon staff elementalist (dealing as much AoE damage as possible) or as a hybrid/tanky guardian (fighting in frontline, trying to contain the enemies for the ranged DPS players to stay safe and have an easier time landing their area damage).
I would never play it as a tanky Wave of Wrath spamming guardian who stays in some weird midline where doesn’t “tank” anything, not even receive damage (no point in being tanky, not even talk about traiting for Altruistic Healing), does crappy damage and whose support isn’t THAT good as some people think.
You can expect, however, a good amount of players using this spec (specially if there’s loot for tagging enemies) or any other weird thing like glass cannon frontliners (exploding in matter of seconds and, obviously, not respawning at WP and waiting to be resed at the ned of the fight) or tanky single target ranged backliners. Then, the event would fail and people would complain on the DPS check being too extreme, only organized communities / large guilds being able to complete it or the game being zeker or GTFO.
I hope you get my point here.
(edited by Vargamonth.2047)
“Identifying animations” in Living Story events only works if it is 40+ players vs 1 single boss. We cannot have other mobs around that can provide a serious threat.
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It depends on how the whole event is designed.
Marionette could have over 100 players involved and the whole fight was still decided by small fights over platforms where active defenses were perfeclty viable.
Escape from L.A., going for citizen rescue, didn’t need a single player blob at any point ( I duoded miasma events without any problem at all).
The idea of 40+ players fighting a single giant foe (what Battle for Lion Arch bring to us) is something I absolutely dislike.
It can provide some people a sense of epicness, but doesn’t offer anything new mechanic wise. It’s pretty much like any dungeon encounter, just easier to recover from death (be it by WP respawn if possible or ressed by another player) and without the ability to chose your allies.
I personally love the idea of fighting one world boss, while being chased by 10 assistant mobs. Getting hit is expected, yet deals less damage. As a result the players can equip tanky gears to survive these attacks.
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I’m always up for fighting several enemies, adds or just multi-bosses, at the same time (not only for open world, also for dunegons). I honestly think it fits way better the combat mechanics (which are balanced around sPvP), allows more room for control (getting rid of that Defiant nonsense, at least for dungeons, where the amount of control skill is finite) and increases the skill cap of glass cannons specs by forcing them to monitor several threats.
If the AI will be smart enough to avoid being funneled into a corner and perform some nasty skill combinations (like chilling a player that tries to flee from a melee heavy hitter or snaring one at the same time a pulsing AoE lands over him), that would be awesome.
We probably disagree in the perfect amount of adds/enemies.
For me, having 3-4 weaker champions (still big models to not be cluttered by an insane amount of players) where we have a single Knight would be ideal. Playing a full damage spec would be way harder (currently I just need to avoid a extraction attack every 20 seconds or so, which is ridiculous), but still possible with good positioning and awareness.
A blob of monsters would be, as you previosuly pointed, completely unreadable and not the kind of fight I would enjoy.
(edited by Vargamonth.2047)
My point in saying that is GW2 tried the trinity less mechanic and simply just created a different trinity – aka the zerker meta. . Beyond it’s own IP little to no one is interested in copying them. If this was such an amazing and desired idea one would think that new title after new title would be coming out without trinity’s.
I already see action based combat mechanics, including dodging and other active defenses, becoming prevalent in every recently released MMO.
This doesn’t completely replace the trinity on its own, but it’s clearly a step away from it.
No these “quest”, they are actually called events, are not a DPS check, they are events that encourage people to play together. The biggest problem right now is, that there are way to many “unique snowflakes” around that keep shouting “I PLAY HOW I WANT AND YOU PLAY HOW YOU WANT” which is something that just doesn’t work in a genre that is all about playing together.
Really? So I should load up on 3 or 4 exotic gear sets with various stat combinations – with trinkets, runes, and sigils – just so I can play how a certain event needs everyone to play? Then keep changing up my Traits per event? Are you saying that’s the way to do it?
I don’t know if this is sarcasm but … yes, that would be great.
3 or 4 exotic gear sets with various stat combinations (with trinkets, runes, and sigils) are, however, far form needed. There’s no need on having the optimal gear for everything, but some capabily to tune the character towards it is highly desirable.
For a full soldier gear user, for example, swapping the trinkets to berserker ones (I would’t get them until ferocity changes are made) and retraiting (which costs next to nothing and, yes, it’s something that players should do much more frequently) should be enough to considerably increase the damage output if needed.
Condi users are a bit trickier and should eventually get a whole power set (or make a power based alt). There’s still no need on huge investments; If the gear is unlikely to be extensively used, retraiting and rare/masterwork gear (except maybe for weapons, which are much more tier sensitive) with cheap orbs is enough to perform far better.
It’s obvious that a new player won’t be able to do this and it doesn’t really matter, but when even veteran players chose to be unefficient and work agaist the common goal, that’s actually a problem.
I actually support a new idea altogether: An improvement to the mob AI so they fight as a unit.
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And that’s why I said we’re not going to agree. The concept of timing defensive moves is indispensable for me, it’s just the main thing that keeps me playing this game.
When properly timing these defenses becomes impossible and the game becomes too passive reliant (like WvW battles) I lose interest. I don’t get anything that a classic combat MMO could not offer me (In fact it’s even worse since I play dedicated healer in those games, which is something I can’t do here)
While active defenses are quite prevalent in dungeons, most fights can actually be easily facetanked (as long as you still prevent some hits at least). The damage isn’t really THAT devastating until you reach high level fractals, and even there, building defensively and ranging is the easiest and safest gameplay.
The almost only reason for dungeon facetanking to not be the meta is that it results in way slower runs (there are really few bosses where extreme survivability makes things more difficult), which becomes crucial when there’s farming behind the content.
If we’d get a temporary dungeon that could be entered only once a day (or require grinding some kind of items to allow entrance) and would kick players on a wipe, that would be completely different.
Players going the easy way and facetanking dungeons is not a problem at all because, even if possible, offers far worse income ratios and it’s naturally discouraged.
When there’s a real chance of failure and finishing the content becomes dominant over doing it as fast as possible, however, playing safe is encouraged and soft DPS checks become necessary for disallowing the most extremely survivable setups (which, otherwise, would be unrivaled).
Let’s take a look on your enemy unit idea.
Needless to say that I dislike it. Several mobs blobbed on a single spot (where every player AoE is also going to land) makes impossible to read animations. Active defenses become quite useless and you are forced to rely on passive tankiness and healing.
The focus fire on glass cannon players makes this even harder (probably impossible) and it’s quite ironic btw. While it makes complete sense for enemies to target the biggest threats, what’s the point then on slotting survivability? If increasing your own survival makes you unlikely to be attacked, what is it doing for the group?
But most important. Is this content allowed to fail?
Unless it takes place on some kind of instanced enviroment (like inside the benchmaker), nothing prevents dead players from resing, joining the fight again and eventually winning.
If the event won’t fail, why should I bother on using an offensive spec and putting myself at risk when I could be built for survival and not only avoid repairs but also mindlessly spam Wave of Wrath and tag every mob for a chance of loot?
Even if the fight is instanced and a global wipe is possible, how are the mobs supposed to win if there’s a huge amount of extremely tanky players slowly melting them? What can they do against the insane amount of Resurrection banners players would bring? If they are blobbed, how can they prevent defeated characters from being ressed when the player blob leads them to the other side of the room?
Your “reserve” advanced tactic is the only way to exhaust players and allow NPCs to eventually win, and while not a clearly explicit timer, is still a DPS check.
If new units spawn over time, players would need to defeat the previous ones under a time mark in order to not get overwhelmed. Otherwise (if new units would appear only when the previous one is defeated), nothing would prevent players from building as defensive as possible and keeping the last enemies alive on purpose while topping their health bars and recovering CDs.
And that’s exactly my point.
Whenever some content is allowed to fail (winning the event becomes dominant over doing it fast) and no DPS checks are included, the most deffensive setups will always be the safest choice.
DPS checks are needed in order to disallow the most survivable setups and force players to take as many risks as they’re confident on handling.
No matter how you design a content, there’ll be always an optimal strategy. When that strategy is about using the spec that reduces the risk the most, there’s absolutely no point on using anything else and build diversity gets completely destroyed.
Side Note: Yes, the current state of the Necromancer is atrocious for PvE.
(edited by Vargamonth.2047)
In any case, when player gear (even trait/weapon) choices are mostly about a balance between damage output and passive survivability, there’ll always be some kind of DPS check. Without them, designing a content to be challenging for tanky builds but still doable by more aggresive specs is extremely complicated.
The only downside on tanky gear is that it kills way slower and, when you’re going to have a limited amount of tries (temporary content taking place at fixed hours), maximizing the success rate becomes way more important than completion speed.
Without DPS checks, there’ll be no use for anything but the most defensive armor sets (currently, while suboptimal, you can use them as a cover for possible mistakes; the opposite can’t ever be true).I think WvW is a great example of where Berserker doesn’t work.
In WvW, the damage comes at random times. You have no idea when your enemy will hit you. You enemies are human, and they do whatever they want. There is no set pattern.
The result? Only the best of the best WvWers will dare to use berserker gear in a zerg fight.
Why? It can be roughly estimated that 90% of the berserker gear users in WvW will not survive that first zerg engagement.
Now, a zerg fight usually involves the two zergs engaging, breaking off to buff/heal, engaging again, breaking off to buff/heal again, etc etc. However none of this concerns berserker gear users. 90% of them will be dead in that very first engagement.
Is there a timer in WvW zerg fights? Nope. But it works. So how exactly is this different from Living Story events?
Because WvW, in general, are highly successful in killing off berserker gear users. Living Story events, on the other hand, are very poor at killing off berserker gear users.
I think the game need to be designed so that there is a 80-90% chance of dying for berserker gear users.
Maximum glass cannon=>90% chance of dying once every 5 minutes (on average).
Maximum tanker=>10% chance of dying once every 5 minutes (on average).This way, there is a real incentive to get more tanky. Glass cannons that dies that often actually deals less damage than more tankier builds. And if too many players are glass cannons, it is possible for a zerg wipe (people are dying too fast too often to be ressed, so eventually everyone is dead). That’s the mission failure; not due to timer running out.
Berserker gear doesn’t work in WvW zerg fights because those are actually the less action based ones across the whole game.
GW2 combat system is supposed to be about spotting and identifying animations and actively reacting to them, which becomes impossible when two huge groups of characters fight against each other (it’s already quite a mess on a tPvP teamfight, and that’s only 5v5). In these cases, where there’s no way to properly use active defenses, characters are built as passive as possible.
If you read my previous post again, you’ll see that, in fact, a quite big fight against add waves has been my only idea for making defensive stats useful.
In any case, I’m fairly sure we’re not going to agree on how to improve the game.
The way you talk about WvW big battles makes me think that you somehow like how they work. On the other hand, I think they don’t fit the whole idea of the active combat system and absolutely hate them :P
They go on this ridiculous rant which states how they are nerfing the zerker meta to force more build diversity and gear choices (which btw was a complete lie) and then they design content that is nothing more then a DPS check.
I don’t think they’ve really said THAT. It was more on the line of toning down the DPS because the reachable damage output was just too high.
Triple offensive sets will always be the optimal choices for PvE, and that’s probably working as intended.
The thing is:
The goal of world events are always to kill something.
This isn’t even the cause of the problem.
The cause of the problem is that all the world bosses we seen so far is huge hp pool and count down timer.
These two things means that it is all about the berserker gear. All other gears are underpowered, if not flat out useless.
The game should be designed so all different gears have their own benefits and flaws. DPS and berserker should not be the only way. If not, why bother to have other gears at all? Just have everyone use berserker gear and be done with it.
Why bother on having different gears? That’s a really good question with a quite simple answer: GW2 Itemization sucks for PvE.
Every available stat increases either damage or passive survival, which doesn’t make any sense for an action based game.
Things like boon power, control power or endurance regeneration could have worked as stats. What we have? Too classic for a game that doesn’t have classic combat. Passive defensive stats can hardly be seen as anything but the always suboptimal training wheels.
Now, let’s go deeper in the DPS check matter:
During the early days of the game there was a problem with dungeon where, even if a boss was causing havoc, dead players could respawn in the closest waypoint and endlessly return to the fight as long as one player remained alive. This was addressed as an “issue” and “fixed” (the player can still res by reloging and join the fight by walking all the way to the boss).
This is even worse for a massive open world event. There are so many players involved that there’s usually no problem at all on ressing completely downed people in the middle of the battleground.
On top of that, ressing at some WP and returning to the fight will always be a viable option without worrying on everybody dying. Not even a fix like the one made for dungeons could prevent this.
If you want to make failure a possibility for these massive open world battles, there aren’t exactly a lot of things you can do.
1) Add a timer.
This obviously encourages building for as much damage output as the player can handle.
Even if a dead player will always be able to respawn and return to the fight (or, usually, even to be ressed directly where he died), every second lost means a loss in DPS that can make the whole event fail, so this method actually punishes deaths, which are harder to avoid the more DPS you slot.
2) Wipe everybody if some “combat phase” fails.
Let’s think, for example, that the Knights are invulnerable and can be damaged not because players get a buff from some weird circle on the floor, but because there are some Priory mages channeling a ritual.
From time to time, enemy waves could attack and try to kill those scholars and, if any of them died, the Knight will regain its power and oneshot everybody around.
In this case, everything is in the details. For example, if these enemies would ignore players and directly attack the priory members, then defensive stats would be useless.
If enemy waves would spawn on a timer basis, then a lack of damage could end on an overwhelming enemy force. If not (waves spawn when the previosu one is defeated), then the event would probably be easily “exploitable” (keeping a few monsters alive).
Some kind of even ground between attack and defense can be achieved.
For example, the Knight itself could be opening the portal that spawns the waves, which would remain opened and summoning enemies until some amount of damage is dealt to the boss.
This way, damage oriented players should focus the boss while the tankier ones contain and finish the adds (which are probably too many for pure active defenses to be the best choice).
In any case, when player gear (even trait/weapon) choices are mostly about a balance between damage output and passive survivability, there’ll always be some kind of DPS check. Without them, designing a content to be challenging for tanky builds but still doable by more aggresive specs is extremely complicated.
The only downside on tanky gear is that it kills way slower and, when you’re going to have a limited amount of tries (temporary content taking place at fixed hours), maximizing the success rate becomes way more important than completion speed.
Without DPS checks, there’ll be no use for anything but the most defensive armor sets (currently, while suboptimal, you can use them as a cover for possible mistakes; the opposite can’t ever be true).
Flame and Frost: the Gathering Storm – 1
Some interesting things came with this patch (Guild Missions, for example), but the LS part was completely uninteresting.
Flame and Frost: the Razing – 2
Character introduction and 2 pointless mini story-quests. Not much to say.
Flame and Frost: Retribution – 8
A new dungeon is always welcomed, and this one was a quite good one, specially the end boss. A little bit too easy unfortunately.
The Secret of Southsun – 2
Traveling across the island gathering samples is not the kind of content I enjoy. I disliked the minigame too.
Last Stand at Southsun – 2
Didn’t like the minidungeon mechanics. I also dislike zergy content.
Dragon Bash – 4
Quite enjoyable minigame. Everything else was uninteresting.
Sky Pirates of Tyria – 9
Liked both the dungeon and the JP (even if the goggles were a bit frustrating).
Bazzar of the Four Winds – 8
I like Sanctum Sprint. The Scavenger hunt became interesting for once, probably cause the JP nature of the map (even the world wide one made us revisit JPs).
The introduction of Skyhammer could bring the score to zero, but since it’s not part of the LS i’ll ignore it :P
Cutthroat Politics – 6
Liked both minigames. Disliked Candidate Trials.
Queen’s Jubilee – 8
Mostly because the Gauntlet, which could have used a better camera and a less overpopulated zone, with PC performance not being affected by a zerg farming happening behind which I couldn’t care less about.
Clockwork Chaos – 1
Zerg farming anyone? Scarlet Playhouse was also absolutely disappointing.
SAB: Back to School – 10
Best LS release ever.
Tequatl Rising – 6
Not a big fan of zerg content, but this looked like an improvement (and permanent). Too blobby mechanics for my taste.
Twilight Assault – 7
New permanent dungeon path (unfortunately, at the cost of an already existing one).
I like the path, but the reward is awfully balanced for the tame it takes (when compared with other dungeons/paths).
Tower of Nightmares – 2
Zerg + generic awful scavenger hunt. It should be zero, but I actually liked some monster combat capabilities.
The Nightmares Within – 7
Awesome experience climbing the tower solo (did it many times even if rewards were crap). Instanced chambers and final boss looked ridiculously easy when compared with the “open world” tower.
Fractured – 7
I like most of the new/recycled content (specially the 4th stage bossfights). On the other hand, the new scaling system, both for rewards and difficulty, is quite awful (and easily “cheated” by selecting some specific levels).
The Origins of Madness – 9
The Marionette fight is, by far, the best casual massive content designed for this game (even if still frustrating to rely on so many random players).
I haven’t played Triple Trouble seriously, but it looks like a big improvement if compared with Tequatl.
It also seemed that ANet learned from Clockwork Chaos to how not set up the loot for massive events.
The Edge of the Mists – NA
The LS playable content was almost nonexistant and I don’t like WvW for anything but eventual solo roaming.
Escape from Lion’s Arch – 5
Origins of Madness was just an illusion; devs still don’t know how to properly set up loot.
The whole thing looks epic and it could have been really interesting if zerg farming would have not been way more profitable than trying to top the rescue score.
Battle for Lion’s Arch – NA
I don’t dislike the content, but until now it has been quite buggy and poorly balanced.
Achievements that promote playing against the common goal and, now again, a complete reliance on other random players are quite negative points, inadmissible for a season finale taht should try to be as perfect as possible.
Won’t give a score because I still trust on things getting better.
Overall: 5.5
Barely passes :P
Can you even crit the knights?
Yes, they can be critted normally.
Yes looks like anets love for guards and warrior. Why do I even play my engineer? No love.
That warrior and guardian thing is getting pretty old.
If you’re playing this content at range, like the majority of the playerbase, what do warriors and guardians bring to the table?
Warrior has a fairly awful sustained ranged direct damage (you probably need to rotate between Rifle and Longbow with Fast Hands to make it somehow decent). Unless going in and out (which requires far more skill than staying all the time at range), the main reason for using a warrior is about the support capabilities through banners and Empower allies.
Guardian, on the other hand, deals nice ranged damage but lacks support. Aegis is removed almost automatically (by the condition reflect effect I guess), so no point on it (neither on Unscatched Contender) and the only blast finisher the build offers is on 40 sec CD.
It’s possible to improve the support through Empowering Might, but that’s at the cost of points in Virtues, which means losing a final damage multiplier, the ability to use Unscatched Contender when fighting Prime and the boon duration for the might EM applies.
Why play Engineer?
I’m not going to say it’s the best class out there, but it couples a decent ranged damage with a fairly good upkeep of AoE might stacks. I can’t really see any issues with the class for this encounter.
I don’t really understant so many complaints against soft DPS checks and Berserker gear.
Berserker is the way to go because it increases every direct damage stat and condition damage performs horribly in any group content.
Vitality, Toughness and Healing Power are all of them survival stats and there’s hardly any way to make them useful without becoming a must.
Currently they’re suboptimal choices (A single group built for extreme melee survival could still be great in order to keep knights rooted in place), but still can be taken if a player is not confident on his avoidance ability. Making some defense numbers absolutely necessary would be, in fact, not only a much more clear gearcheck but also render unusable (not just suboptimal) some gear choices.
It’s completely understable for relatively new players to underperform but, honestly, every veteran player should have alternative characters/gears for different kinds of content and berserker gear is quite recurrent as the optimal choice.
(edited by Vargamonth.2047)
Dungeons may never get worked on, shields may never have their value increased, but the one they have done to screw with “all zerk all the time zerk or gtfo zerk zerk zerk” heads is in the living story… the tower of nightmares? and even LA right now, you are punished for zerk/zerging, and I like this.
I have to disagree.
Neither the Tower of Nightmares nor Escape from L.A. punished berserker gear. Enemies were slightly smarter and running on full zerker was more challenging than usual, but still absolutely viable and the fastest one on dealing with every fight.
Those releases just encouraged (loot wise) zerging, which is fairly incompatible with berserker gear atm and which regularly receives as many complaints as berserker meta does.
If you would try to climb the tower (killing enemies instead of skipping everything) / save as many citizens as possible either solo or with a quite small group, berserker would still be the most efficient possible way to do it.
I’m not really sure about something like FoW or UW working in the curretn state of the game.
One of the beautiful things with FoW and UW was, IMHO, the ability to enjoy them by many different ways.
They were fairly big zones, divided into sub-zones with different types of enemies. You could use a build for solo farming one or several of these zones, group up with a mate in order to handle a bigger part of the map, or just make a full group and complete every quest for the final chest.
With the current loot system, there wouldn’t be any reason for entering zones like these with less than the whole group. It probably could be (and would be, that’s for sure) soloed/duoded for the shake of fun and/or challenge but, as I posted earlier, this kind of things get old pretty fast and lack proper replayability.
Without variations of the core mechanics, FoW and UW would probably be either something really close to a dungeon or just another zergfarm.
The only possibility I can imagine outside of this would be about scaling instances (like the chambers in the Tower of Nightmares), which unfortunately prevents the content from being challenging at all.
The truth is, the game never needed this loot system.
With open world gameplay being focused around DEs, deleting any loot from DE spawned mobs and granting a meaningul reward (and not the crap we have atm) on completion to every participant would have been enough for not only pleasing every gamestyle but for actually having people doing these events for something more than daily AP completion.
Excluding a really small amount of spots (and, currently, champions) the game has never been about killing those open world non DE related monsters. As long as killing aknowledgment and quest items (for heart completion) were shared as every drop currently is, there wouldn’t be any issues with a more classic looting system.
In fact, moving away from the classic individual/divided loot does, IMHO, more harm that good.
Currently, since everyone is going to be rewarded, there’s no point at all on trying beat some non-scaling content (like dungeons or world spawned champions, for example) with less people than possible (well, it is if you sell dungeon spots, but I find it a quite obscure behaviour that shouldn’t need to work that way). You can do it for the shake of fun and challenge, but when you renounce to some reward on the process, it gets old pretty fast and lacks proper replayability.
Granting players the choice to handycap themselves for a greater reward can work like a difficulty setting for a single player game, allowing developers to design most content at a fairly low challenge level without worrying about people finding it undoable or faceroll easy.
If, on top of this, downscaling (another awesome idea, just horribly done) would have been properly designed, we would have IMHO a more interesting open world and a far better game.
I dont’ really get the point on featuring this and then designing the whole game for a downscaled characters to be way more powerful than in-level ones.
In addition to this (which I agree is a quite personal opinion), I’m pretty sure that we could list a lot more features that most of the playerbase would agree on being poorly designed (Precursor sources, the AP system that doesn’t look an AP system at all, the completely uninteresting way of introducing ascended weapon/armors, …).
I think it’s an overall great game and has absolutely worthed every cent of its cost, but when you look closely it has too many things that could have worked better if done in another way.
Let’s think for example on the loot system.
Surrounding players not becoming a nuissance for your own gameplay might seem a step forward at first glance. It has proven, however, to have clear downsides.
The first of them is the zerg gameplay.
Having content specifically designed for large groups of people isn’t bad at all; it provides some sense of epicness that many people like.
I honestly think this was the original idea behind World Bosses. Pre-events would trigger, the word would spread and most people playing in the map would gather to fight the beast. This was probably true for the first weeks after release, but eventually many zones became less populated and these encounters showed to be poorly designed and not worth the effort.
The real open world profit source was indeed about large groups of players, just done in a different, and probably unintended, way. It was pretty much about “exploiting” the combination of both loot and scaling (another awesome idea on its own) systems, zerging regular event chains (mainly around high-end zones like Orr) and forcing them to spawn loads of enemies to kill and loot.
Further nerfs on those event chains and the introduction of daily chests somehow revitalized World Bosses. It worked, however, on a quite weird way, with players monitorizing spawn times on some external web, joining the map just to complete the event and moving to next one right after that.
Regular DEs and open world gameplay just was completely unrewarding for the most part (and remains this way over one year later)
Feedback about how little sense killing champions in open world made leaded to the introduction of champion loot bags, which obviosuly, instead of encouraging soloers or small groups to try to defeat them, leaded to the current zergy champion trains.
I won’t go deep into how the loot system affects WvW gameplay, specially after the introduction of WXP.
Recently released content, like Marionette or Wurm, are much better designed gameplay wise for large groups players. Unfortunately, they require too much people, which might cause a lot of issues with overflows and waiting times.
They have it place, of course, for large guild/communities to enjoy them, but there’s a huge gap between these (specially Wurm) and the still poorly designed original World Bosses.
Having one well designed but not excessively coordination or number (scaling for about 20 people and onwards) reliant encouter on about each map would probably be more than enough for giving those big battle lovers an awesome game experience.
Even if a quite poor indicative of anything, an 1k-1.5k AP mark might be reasonable if you’re trying to avoid unexperienced and/or undergeared players. You could still be missing a great player and you can still get clueless people far beyond this mark, but it probably delivers good results statistically speaking
The really stupid thing is how this required AP mark has been increasing over time (reaching those ridiculous 5k values) when it indicates nothing but some kind of devotion to dailies/monthlies and LS achievements.
0.5 second cast is too fast.
When your only clue is an animation, you need part of that animation (so part of the cast time) to take place before you realize what’s happening and react.
0.5s might be ok for an attack you might want to evade (since evading is the most common form of defense and can be used more instinctively). It actually depends on how obscure the animation or how “predictable” the skill is.
For a skill to be reliably interrupted I would say that 0.75s is the bare minimum for the average player, probably closer to 1s when you factor in a lot of possible handycaps (not every interrupt is instant, you might want to check if the target has used some form of stability or any other defensive tool before blowing a CD, animations can be obscured during a teamfight, your enemy might be an asura, …).
Non-zerker builds are already being given preference because they simply can’t make a encounter that would challenge zerkers and still be accessible to non-zerkers. And despite all the bellyaching, zerker builds are every bit a valid play style as any other.
Of course they can; it’s actually fairly easy to do.
The tricky part is doing it while keeping the risk vs reward idea and avoiding cheap solutions (like an enviromental damage source ticking for X each second), but it’s still far from a difficult task.
Let’s think on a fractal version of the marionette, where the whole group stays on one single lane fighting against an endless stream of enemy waves.
The encounter implies some kind of DPS check (in order to avoid being overwhelmed by stacked waves, which unlike in the open world marionette event, would actually try to kill the players) and the idea of a dead foe not being a threat anymore remains true.
A full DPS group could, however, bring much more damage than what is actually needed and suffer by attrition (higher reliance on defensive skills that could be on cooldown, less capabilities to recover health between waves, …) where a more balanced setup wouldn’t.
It’s all about the details. Depending on how you design the encounter (when does a new enemy wave spawn? can the players get out of combat and fully regen between waves? does the lane provide LoS spots? does it provide some enviromental weapons, like mortars, that players could use if lacking a bit of damage?), you can make it to be beatable by a wide spectrum of setups while offering an easier time to whichever you want.
On top of this defense, every fixed amount of time (or number of waves, depending how you designed the respawn) a portal would activate, allowing ONE character to enter and face a champion in order to sever a chain.
Now again, this would imply some kind of DPS check, and now again, the damage output of a berserker spec could be far from needed. Like it should be for the most part of the game, a full DPS spec would provide a faster completion time while involving a higher risk (specially if having to fight alone, without the cover of some ally defensive tool) of failure, which could be devastating depending on the design (does a single platform fail involve a wipe? If not, will be the defeated player be ported back to the lane or will the group be forced to continue with one memeber missing until that platform gets beaten).
As it happened on the original event, players succeeding on a platform would get that debuff preventing them for entering another portal for a while (another two severing attempts). This would prevent the whole group being carried by some player/build and would allow bringing some kind of dedicated support (which for some unknown reason people seem to love) which won’t need to fight on a platform (and probably lack the needed DPS).
If you want to “fix” the zerker mentality, probably you should “fix” the farm mentality first.
If the content were challenging enough so just finishing it could be seen as a success, then we might see a lot more of diversiity. As long as it’s balanced around random and uncoordinated PUGs and mostly around repeating it over and over in order to farm gold, it’s quite understandable for people to chose the spec that gets it done faster.If just finishing it could be seen as success why would anyone do it more than once?
People play for the rewards and sometimes for the bragging rights.I’ve done EVERY dungeon path once – for the achievement – but only do a few of them because they’re easy and reward me the most.
If you amp up the difficulty and make everything " a challenge" then prepare to have a lot of content that nobody will do.Example : high-end fractals – look at the CDI topic – everybody wants better rewards and better means to acquire fractal weapons.
People do the content because of the rewards, not for the sake of doing it. This is true for almost every MMO game.
Of course MMO content needs replayability and rewards.
I’m not saying that you should feel rewarded just by the fact of completing this content, but that it would be actually hard enough for a failure to be expected.
When I PUG for some GW2 dungeon, I’m fairly certain on having it finished. It might take longer than I expected, there can be a wipe at some point … it doesn’t matter at all. It’s just a brief delay on getting my gold.
It’s possible, however, to have content where failure is a quite feasible option and something must be paid for the access. Even if eventually would be speedcleared (like every PvE content), this kind of content encourages you to ensure a success over trying to do it as fast as possible, and that might be an option for different gear stats to have a chance.
Obviously this is the kind of design that a lot of people won’t ever step into and I don’t expect it to ever happen in GW2 (even if I’m pretty much describing GW1 elite zones), but it’s also obvious that if they keep tuning the content based on an average player PUG, it’s not going to be hard to speedclear it on berserkers.
(edited by Vargamonth.2047)
Just to give another proof.
I have tried to solo Arah p2 first boss a few time. Started with my full zerk warrior…always failed when the boss was about 30% hp… 1 hit by the ball-thing that she casts (since puts red circle in a place and the ball goes to a totally different place) After a few failures like that, I was like “Let’s see if I go full Ptv!” So I went to throw a few AC and HotW tokens into a full PTV armor (power toughness vitality). Guess what? 1 hit by the ball, only difference was that I never managed to bring the boss below 70% hp with such a lowered damage, which made my chances to defeat it way lower. (I am no pro, I can’t dodge everything forever, if the fight lasts 20 mins I can’t get to the end).
The problem is that you can easily find proofs telling exactly the opposite.
For example, when I PUG for AC I swap my Berseker/Scholar armor for my old WvW roaming PVT/Pack one and slot Hammer as my secondary weapon (even if not traited for it).
Why? Because most PUGs, even if lacking the damage to take down both Spider Queen and, specially, Kholer before they become a threat, still stack on those corners which, while amazing for speedrunning, prevent you many times from spotting enemy animations.
If Kholer spins while on my Zerker gear, I get downed before I can properly react and pop up Shelter or Renewed Focus. If I use soldier armor and spam my hammer autoattack, however, I can both easily survive the attack and reduce the damage my teamates would receive.
I hear voip, and i hear kittening on PUGs. PVE should not be tuned for the former, and should be tuned for the latter. If you need a drilled group and VOIP to pull of interrupts, they are worthless.
And that’s exactly the problem here.
Once you tune the content for random PUGs of arguably low skill level and absence of VOIP (so absence of any true form of real-time teamwork), you automatically prevent it from being challenging enough for full-berserker coordinated/meta groups to struggle.
If you want to “fix” the zerker mentality, probably you should “fix” the farm mentality first.
If the content were challenging enough so just finishing it could be seen as a success, then we might see a lot more of diversiity. As long as it’s balanced around random and uncoordinated PUGs and mostly around repeating it over and over in order to farm gold, it’s quite understandable for people to chose the spec that gets it done faster.
I agree to most of the comments here, but if the passive on VoR is there just to offer something extra, then why does battle presence exist, and if you invest loads into healing power, why doesn’t it actually become a good heal that guardians can use or rely on?
Have you seen regen warriors? The healing power scales really well with HS to the point where breaking a regen warrior is not possible without either loads of conditions or multiple people.
Healing Signet actually scales far worse tan Virtue of Resolve (HS is a 392 base regen with a 0.05 HP coefficient, while VoR is a 84 base regen with a 0.06 HP coefficient).
IMHO, it wouldn’t be a problem if HS would scale way better than it currently does (obviously decreasing the base regen numbers), since the whole class can only benefit from Healing Power through Adrenal Health (not amazing scaling either), Regeneration boon (either from Dogged March or Regen Banners) and Shoutheal (Regen Banners and Shoutheal being mutually exclusive).
Guardian, in the other hand, has a lot of different healing sources that may benefit from this stat, some of them specifically designed to fit into a Healing Power builds (Selfless Daring, for example, has a negligible base effect and a quite high scaling).
Unlike many of those healing sources (coming from trait, weapon and utility choices), VoR is a common feature to every guardian build. If we agree on Condition Guardian being fairly lackluster atm (so no effective scaling for VoJ), having VoR strongly scaling with Healing Power would achieve nothing but making healway builds the naturally stronegst option and pidgeonholing the class into that route..
If defensive/sustained specs were inferior to damage ones (or any other not investing in Healing Power at all), increasing VoR scaling could be a acceptable way of achieving an even balance (I still think that improving the optional parts of the specs would be much better). In the current state (where Bunker guardian, using Clerics amulet, is the prevalent spec for sPvP, and WvW meta is also about bunkerish/sustained builds), however, it doesn’t make any sense.
(edited by Vargamonth.2047)
Virtue of Resolve (Courage is the Aegis grantig one) is perfectly fine IMHO.
It’s a class specific mechanic present on every possible guardian build. A better scaling with Healing Power (btw I don’t find the current scaling bad) would made naturally stronger those builds investing on it (as long as other Virtues remain unmodified by stats, which is fairly true since Condtion guardian isn’t viable at all).
The class offers many other CHOICES (through traits and weapon skills) for a Healing Power build to be viable.
And as for people still zerging and not learning, I recently got my Triple Play achievement yesterday. That’s a zone-wide achievement and it means people are learning how to play properly rather than mindlessly zerging for loot. Anet doesn’t have to spell it out for us. We should have to learn the right mechanics & strategy to win.
As we found out with the Scarlet Invasions it is EQUALLY selfish of you to want those who want to zerg to instead PLAY THE WAY YOU WANT instead of how they want… but sure, we can bring those arguements back from the dead if it tickles your fancy.
It’s not exactly the same.
Both Invasions and the current LS have a clear intended goal for players to achieve. It happes that, the way rewards are stablished, an unexpected playstyle has shown to be way more profitable in terms of loot.
Players are hardly to blame for sticking to the most profitable way of handling the content, but the issue is no way a “play the way you want” related one. It’s clearly a design failure where one task is assigned to the playerbase and another cross-activity, actually counterproductive to the original idea, ends being way more profitable.
Remove loot from mobs and champs and give reword on the end of event depending on how many civilians we saved!
This is too extreme and probably counterproductive.
If all the reward would be given at the end of the evacuation, then we will have to deal with a lot of people semi-AFK or looking for rubble (in order to get selfless/thoughtless potions) that would be equally rewarded.
What needs to be achieved is a better adjustment between intended goals and possible rewards.
If, for example, the activity is not supposed to encourage zerging, then event spawned mobs and champs should probably get their loot removed, with the events themselves granting some kind of reasonable, unscaling, reward.
1) Most people don’t know about the citizen rescue rewards.
2) Doing events does not only reward you with bags, it also gives you money, experience, karma, standard loot from mobs and chests from boss events.
3) You do not have to rescue citizens yourself to get the citizen rescue rewards.
4) Achievements require completing events instead of rescuing citizens.
5) Thoughtful and Thoughtless potions require a lot of heirlooms and thus many people are looking for rubble.
6) Keeping all of the above in mind many people who know about the rescue rewards come to the conclusion that rescuing citizens is a fruitless endeavor because no reasonable threshold of rescued people will be reached. So they decide to not bother.
Awesome summary
There’s no relationship between Achievers/Explorers and Vertical/Horizontal progression.
Achievers are described as “players that give themselves game-related goals, and vigorously set out to achieve them”.
Any players devoted to farming for a cool skin (horizontal progression) is strictly an achiever.
An Explorer archetype appreciate horizontal progression through tons of classes, skills, traits and gear choices to mix, match and play with. On the other hand, they couldn’t care less about a cosmetic-type horizontal progression.That’s not exactly true. All the types can farm for a new armor. The difference lies in the reason they do so – Achievers want to show off. Explorers want to look good. Socializers might do that because people they play with are doing the same. Killers do that for the stat advantage only, they are the one group that is not interested in looks at all.
Every player, even a killer archetype (which I admit is a bit tricky, since they might even want to look as “noob” as possible), has a good reason to get a skin that makes them look better.
Looking good (or different) is not tied to any kind of player in particular. If anything, it caters to Socializers which is the archetype where RPs are included.
Archetypes just try to describe the kind of game experience players enjoy the most (and no player belongs strictly to one single archetype), so it’s all about the process behind that good looking skin.
Let’s think, for example, on a Legendary weapon (just as a skin, ignoring the fact that they’re ascended weapons now).
Explorers would probably find some of the required tasks (world completion, maxed crafting, dungeon and WvW tokens, …) quite enjoyable and effortlessly done.
They could also enjoy figuring out the best spots to farm different materials (and get a good amount of each farmed while trying different builds for it). However, the vast amount of required materials on top of the way Gw2 economy works (everything is about figuring the best spot to farm “gold”), forces players to a grindy execution that an explorer will never enjoy.
If we would be looking at some non-legendary expensive skin (easily reducible to a huge amount of gold), the process would be completely unappealing to Explorers. They might want it (every archetype could), but they won’t get any fun on getting it.
Since they enjoy chasing the carrot on the stick, Achievers are the most suited for this kind of task.
Once they have decided they want that Legendary, they’ll enjoy every step, no matter how grindy, that brings them closer to it. Since no player is strictly 100%/0% an achiever, we will have a “grind tolerance” instead, which will be higher the closer to a pure achiever the player is.
Finally, as you said, Socializers could enjoy the process if it’s relaxed and allow them to play/chat with friends and other people in the meanwhile. Killers are the less likely ones to enjoy it (probably just the WvW badge part), but that’s mostly because the game doesn’t cater to killers at all (they are mostly a open world FFA PvP thing).
Honestly, I think part of the problem is people automatically zerg. I’ve had the most fun so far this patch away from the zerg rescuing people in small groups of three to four players. Its not like you need to be in a group of twenty to fight through the mobs.
It’s actually a lot worse.
During my last participation, I gave a try to citizen rescue. I sat on the beach just right to the Bloodtide entrance, just killing regular mobs and saving citizens on respawn.
I counted 82 people rescued just by myself (other 10 or so being encouraged by people passing by), which ended being over 10% of the total amount (around 750).
While quite efficient at rescueing, I ended with 92 bags (77 from mobs, 15 from bonus reward), which isn’t bad but can easily be outperformed by zerg tagging (which happens to be far worse on citizen saving).
Unless the 1k – 1.5k rewards are awesome (which I don’t know) and, more important, likely to be achieved , there’s no point reward wise on anything but zerging.
This creates some kind of vicious circle where, if top score is unlikely to be achieved, people will join the zerg for better assured rewards, and the more people joining the zerg, the less likely that top score becomes.
Actually, if there are tons of AFKers, the group have no chance at the event rewards. And since the event kicks them out afterwards, they have to keep moving their characters back inside LA and then AFK again. After a while, it isn’t truly AFK anymore.
Maybe not completely AFK but, for example, I’ve done a full heirloom run (which is another design mistake) where my contribution to the main rescue goal has been pretty much zero.
If the reward were solely based on overall saved citizens, then I would have got it on top of the heirlooms, outperforming everybody actively working on the evacuation without actually doing anything for it.
This is pretty much Scarlet Invasions 2.0
It doesn’t really matter if a split and coordinated force can save a lot more citizens.
If bonus rewards are not clearly superior to the amount of extra bags a player can get from mass tagging on upscaled events, people will just zerg and/or focus on missing achievements.If ANet wants to discourage zerging, they need to start looking at the loot system and how it interacts with event scaling.
I think they just need to remove drops from killing mobs. Instead, all rewards are given out instantly when the players achieve the main objective. They can add MANY levels of reward so they are all within reach of each other. These baby steps will encourage the players to play the game like how Anet envisioned it to be.
25 refugees escaped. Reward!
50 refugees escaped. Reward!
75 refugees escaped. Reward!
100 refugees escaped. Reward!
125 refugees escaped. Reward!
etc
What needs to be removed is the loot from mobs spawned by events (and grant a fixed and reasonable reward at event completion), or at least from any extra mob spawned by event scaling.
Some people is going to zerg because they like it, and even if not the best approach for the activity, there’s no problem on rewarding them for their effort.
What needs to be avoided is the zerg gameplay giving the best rewards even when it’s
counterproductive for the intended end goal (stopping an invasion, saving as many people as possible, …).
Regular mobs, which don’t scale and are next to nothing for a zerg (they don’t have enough HP for a lot of people to even tag them), should keep some drop to make them on par whith events.
Even if having the biggest part of the reward tied to the amount of citizens saved (be it through more reward tiers, as you suggest, or directly on the end reward chest) might sound perfect, it encourages A LOT of AFK farming, so it probably should stay as low as it currently is (except maybe for the top scores, unlikely to happen with too many afkers).
(edited by Vargamonth.2047)
Why was there no chance to thwart the attack?
in Battle for Lion’s Arch - Aftermath
Posted by: Vargamonth.2047
Looking at the success rate on previous battles (like Scarlett Invasions or the Marionette), we probably should be grateful for the story not depending on us :P
This is pretty much Scarlet Invasions 2.0
It doesn’t really matter if a split and coordinated force can save a lot more citizens.
If bonus rewards are not clearly superior to the amount of extra bags a player can get from mass tagging on upscaled events, people will just zerg and/or focus on missing achievements.
If ANet wants to discourage zerging, they need to start looking at the loot system and how it interacts with event scaling.
That’s an over-simplistic (and incorrect) view of the MMORPG genre. The seminal paper on this is Richard Bartle’s “Players Who Suit MUDs” from 1996. To summarize, he divided online multiplayer RPG players into four groups:
- Achievers – people who like progression
- Explorers – people who like to see new things and figure out stuff
- Socializers – people who like to talk with each other
- Killers – people who like to impose their will onto others
A Bartle Test was quickly made, and the sample size is now over 800,000 players. If you’re an Achiever type and think you represent the bulk of gamers, I’m sorry – you don’t. The most common player type is actually Explorers (people who like “horizontal progression”), not Achievers (people who like “vertical progression”). (I’m ESAK btw.)
…
There’s no relationship between Achievers/Explorers and Vertical/Horizontal progression.
Achievers are described as “players that give themselves game-related goals, and vigorously set out to achieve them”.
Any players devoted to farming for a cool skin (horizontal progression) is strictly an achiever.
An Explorer archetype appreciate horizontal progression through tons of classes, skills, traits and gear choices to mix, match and play with. On the other hand, they couldn’t care less about a cosmetic-type horizontal progression.
GW1 was amazing for Explorers, but IMHO GW2 clearly caters to achievers and maybe socializers.
There’s for sure a lot for a fresh explorer to discover and enjoy, but the game is too simple in terms of build optimizing (specially for PvE) and the interest will eventually vanish.
Every acheivement can be completed. The bonus bags are just 100 more regular bags.
In what way was GW1 grindy?
The end game achievements like vanquishing and cartography sure. But the game itself was not grindy at all – it was entirely story based and armour was very very easy to get.PvE skills, faction-based titles that gave you access to armor, weapons and consumables and in the first year getting BiS gear was expensive aswell (runes, upgrades)
None of that was necessary. Faction based titles were entirely optional and the armour that they gave you access to had EXACTLY the same stats as the armour you could buy from a vendor – that is horizontal progression by definition.
Runes and Upgrades were not that expensive, money was not difficult to make in GW1.That depends on what stage of GW1 are you looking at. At release, money was far from easy to get and things like a Rune of Superior Vigor were next to prohibitive.
But in prophecies the storyline was long and leveling up was not a speedy process. It wasn’t a grind either, at no point did you have to stop and level up before proceeding – the progression arc was simply longer. Which meant that you didn’t need those runes until you got to Dronkar’s – at which point you probably should have been in a place to afford them.
You didn’t need those runes neither before Droknar’s nor later on. You also didn’t need a “perfect” weapon, something only a really small part of the playerbase had, at any point.
You could complete the content with easily attainable subpar gear, just like in GW2.
Characters weren’t easy/cheap to max out gear wise until NF or so (until close to GW2 release if we include title-based PvE skills in the equation, and I’m probably being a bit generous counting allegiance rank 6 as easy).