Guild Wars 2

Dye kits are added to and removed from Black Lion Chests over time. They also eventually come back to the gemstore for short times.
You can never tell how profitable the investment will be.

As an example, Crimson Lion Dyes were unavailable for a month or so. After that they were introduced in Black Lion Chest and prices started dropping.
Shadow Dyes were added to Black Lion chests as soon as they were released and afaik still have not left neither the chests nor the gemstore.

I don’t think conditions are too powerful (in fact, I would even increase scaling for most of them).

I don’t even think burning is too powerful.
There are for sure some burning application skills/traits, like Judges Intervention or Zealots Fire, which need to be toned down (or, at least, split between PvP and PvE), but damage numbers look fine for the most part.

Some world bosses being melted in PvE was totally expected.
The old condition system rendered any kind of condition/hybrid build useless for massive fights, while uncrittable foes remove any advantage from high power damage builds.
The solution is as simple as getting rid of the uncrittable nature and increase health pools.

It’s going to depend on A LOT of things, including the content itself.
The only thing I’m quite sure of is that tanky power gear, like Soldier, will be more useless than ever :P

The 300 condition damage loss from traitlines will be noticeable and almost surely result on a damage loss for conditions even if Might+Banner keeps the condition damage over 700.
However, it’s not like other classes/specs are not going to be hit by these attribute changes too.

I’m not trying to analyze the whole picture and figure if Engineer will be or not a meta class. That’s just impossible without all the data, not only about different classes but also about the new content to be released.
Just wanted to point that 25 might stacks + Banner of Strength are enough to beat the break-even point, so the upcoming condition scaling changes won’t necessarily reduce the condition damage output currently achieved by power builds.

Jerus.4350:

You’re not factoring in the current gains from Might. Full Might + Banners will get us to the point of current no might+banner condi damage. We’ll still see a loss. How notable that will be… /shrug. And we may or may not see a damage increase from the traits themselves, though I’m a little concerned with the loss of fireforged trigger, it’ll throw the rotation off losing that. And, as you point out Condi Duration loss will surely have an effect.

Essentially, conditions are too effective right now without investing points into the condition-damage stat. We will significantly lower the base damage on damaging conditions while increasing how much they scale with the condition-damage stat. This means at lower levels of condition damage you can expect to do less damage than you currently do, while at higher values you’ll do even more damage than you are currently able to. The formulas are still being adjusted, but to give you an idea, the break-even point before you start doing more damage is around 700 condition damage.

The way I understand this statement, the base damage will be reduced while the scaling factor will be increased up to a point where, over about 700 condition damage, we will get a higher damage output than before.

So, for example, bleeding damage might go from 42.5 + 0.05*CD (77.5 damage at 700 Condi Damage) to 21.5 + 0.08*CD (which achieves the same 77.5 damage at 700 Condi Damage).

Foefaller.1082:

Engineer is definitely going to be shaken up with this change. If nothing else, the fact that the base damage for conditions will start lower will mean a dps loss for the current meta since, as Jerus said, a good chunk of our damage came from bleeds. Whether it will be enough to force a gear change, or if we’ll simply have to accept a lower place in the almighty dps list remains to be seen (and likely depends on what all those TBDs from the core spec livestream turn out to be)

Not really. The blogpost states that the break point is around 700 condition damage, so nearly maxed might stacks + Banner of Strength should be enough to prevent any condition damage loss, probably even to achieve an increased damage output.
Condition Damage taking advantage on vulnerability should somewhat compensate the Condition Duration loss from traitlines, probably outperforming it on arguably short fights.

If would expect 10+ man instances to have heavy emphasis on splits besides maybe a large boss at the very end.

Just players taking advantage on a very limited AI on top of a probably not well planned map layout.

If some tactic makes things faster/easier, developers should expect players to use it. As long as they design encounters with that in mind, it shouldn’t be a big problem.

MiniEquine.6014:

Vargamonth.2047:

MiniEquine.6014:

Black Box.9312:

MiniEquine.6014:

Black Box.9312:

Oh please. There are currently traits that are centered around specific weapons, but not entire traitlines. Reaper, for example, is heavily focused on using chill to your advantage. A necro has ample access to chill without having to use GS. You’re not pigeonholed into the specific weapon.

We have no cripple outside of the bow autoattack and this knockback trait, which, hey, look at that, we don’t have significant access to knockbacks other than the new bow trait. So yeah, you can still trait for other weapons too, but at the end of the day you’re still essentially traiting for two different builds rather than one cohesive, more powerful one.

Black, I think you’re a little blinded by your dislike for the spec. Here’s an example from dulfy where you can take the Dragonhunter traitline and there are literally no traits, including minor traits, that depend on traps, cripple, or the longbow

http://dulfy.net/gw2traits#build=AgIBqAKoBuw~

You’re absolutely wrong about being “pigeon-holed” into certain playstyles with this spec. The only difference is that you can use the longbow and traps now, but you don’t have to. Some of the non-LB/trap traits are actually pretty good.

Hahahahahahahaha. Good luck lasting 10 seconds in a PvP fight without Valor. You’d be better off sacrificing the extra damage from Zeal or Radiance for it. But then again, why sacrifice those when you can just have all three and not worry about the dumb DH traits?

So you’re saying there is literally only one build for guardians and that build exclusively uses zeal, radiance, and value trait lines? You do realize that there are uses for all 5 trait lines in the meta right now, right? Since when was PvP solely about who could deal the most damage? I seem to recall the Conquest game mode favoring bunker builds too.

He’s talking about Valor, which offers some of the most relevant healing sources for Guardian (Monk Focus and Altruistic Healing).
I overall agree with him: Dragonhunter looks subpar for any non-LB build (Spear of Justice is quite a beast on a hybrid build, so I guess it might work if you like one-trick-pony style). I find Virtues more appealing than Zeal though.

So, why would he purposefully create a Strawman and assume somebody would get rid of valor as opposed to something else? Clearly nobody suggested such a thing. If you want a different build then you’re going to have to give up some traits in certain lines; that works for everything.

Because the build you linked doesn’t invest in Valor.
He said that it would be better to get rid of Zeal or Radiance instead (always Zeal IMO, Radiance looks like a must if you go DH), and even then, both feel more interesting than the DH trait selection (which is the only one you can take if you’re not using a LB).
I don’t completely agree with him on this: I think DH can effectively compete with Zeal. Not with Virtues though.

MiniEquine.6014:

Black Box.9312:

MiniEquine.6014:

Black Box.9312:

Oh please. There are currently traits that are centered around specific weapons, but not entire traitlines. Reaper, for example, is heavily focused on using chill to your advantage. A necro has ample access to chill without having to use GS. You’re not pigeonholed into the specific weapon.

We have no cripple outside of the bow autoattack and this knockback trait, which, hey, look at that, we don’t have significant access to knockbacks other than the new bow trait. So yeah, you can still trait for other weapons too, but at the end of the day you’re still essentially traiting for two different builds rather than one cohesive, more powerful one.

Black, I think you’re a little blinded by your dislike for the spec. Here’s an example from dulfy where you can take the Dragonhunter traitline and there are literally no traits, including minor traits, that depend on traps, cripple, or the longbow

http://dulfy.net/gw2traits#build=AgIBqAKoBuw~

You’re absolutely wrong about being “pigeon-holed” into certain playstyles with this spec. The only difference is that you can use the longbow and traps now, but you don’t have to. Some of the non-LB/trap traits are actually pretty good.

Hahahahahahahaha. Good luck lasting 10 seconds in a PvP fight without Valor. You’d be better off sacrificing the extra damage from Zeal or Radiance for it. But then again, why sacrifice those when you can just have all three and not worry about the dumb DH traits?

So you’re saying there is literally only one build for guardians and that build exclusively uses zeal, radiance, and value trait lines? You do realize that there are uses for all 5 trait lines in the meta right now, right? Since when was PvP solely about who could deal the most damage? I seem to recall the Conquest game mode favoring bunker builds too.

He’s talking about Valor, which offers some of the most relevant healing sources for Guardian (Monk Focus and Altruistic Healing).
I overall agree with him: Dragonhunter looks subpar for any non-LB build (Spear of Justice is quite a beast on a hybrid build, so I guess it might work if you like one-trick-pony style). I find Virtues more appealing than Zeal though.

Ashen.2907:

I am curious as to how taunts forcing the target to attack the taunter, a defining element of trinity play, works in MOBA games as claimed above. I dont play that genre but I can imagine, from my PvP experience in other genres, that it would be frustrating to have targeting choice taken away from the player.

Taunts exist in MOBAs, although they are quite uncommon. They usually can be seen as a hard CC effect which makes affected characters autoattack the caster for a short time.

Dawnbreaker.6215:

Also, how is trinity disappearing, when MOBA games, which have overtaken MMOs at a frightening speed, are entirely based on the trinity system? League of Legends, DotA, Smite, HotS, all of these are based purely on the trinity system and they’re in much faster growth than any MMO.

GW2 is just a “back to the origins” MMO, a final breath of a disappearing game genre.

Maybe, just maybe, we should be focusing on tPvP if we are going to compare GW2 and MOBAs.

Are you talking about some specific content / game mode?

Spear of Justice has a much more powerful active effect than the core mechanic, ensuring a hardly cleansable (the target must go beyond 900 range to get rid of it) 20s burning damage and 11s burning upkeep (far more than the core active, even in group setting, once Burning stacks in intensity) in every scenario.
In combination with Big Game Hunter, it seems extremely unlikely to outclass this effect through Supreme Justice.
In a similar fashion, Spear of Justice active also pierces by default, making Permeating Wrath far less interesting.
When specced in DH, both traits get diminished to a point where they hardly worth the investment anymore.

We could also take a look at Wrath of Justice (Striking an enemy with Justice’s active effect triggers Signet of Wrath), which is hands down much more reliable with the regular VoJ mechanic.

Fortunately, the PBAoE blind from Justice is Blind is still instant, as it would have been quite useless on a 3/4 second casting time (it also means SoJ will go full CD if interrupted though. Otherwise, we could trigger the PBAoE blind every 4s by cancel casting, which is borderline OP and unlikely to happen). The ability to use it to secure a stomp is completely lost though.

The cross sinergy isn’t exactly better for the remaining virtues.

While the combination between an amazing condi cleanse and a movement skill that can be used as a disengage / gap opener looks interesting for the Longbow DH, Absolute Resolution barely makes any sense for any other DH spec (almost automatically pidgeonholed into Soaring Devastation).
Investing on two powerful but unrelated and hardly synergic improvements for the same long CD skill doesn’t look like a good idea at all.

In a similar fashion, both the stability effect from Indomitable Courage and the protection form Inspired Virtue look far less interesting with the new Shield of Courage effect.

In short, there’s a quite poor cross sinergy between DH and our current virtue related traits (the Virtues traitline gets almost butchered).
This doesn’t mean DH will be useless or underpowered, nor it will leave Guardian in a bad state. The core Guardian is powerful enough and the DH definitely provides a new playsyle through Longbow on top of some convenient damage multipliers and niche trap uses for many PvE builds.

The lack of cross sinergy when compared to Chronomancer and Reaper, however, is still a big problem, specially since DH is the first specialization we get.
It’s basically pointing at a rather uninteresting core class mechanic leaving too little room for creative design, and it can only get worse in the long run, as more specializations are released, if no big changes are performed.

There’s no need to tweak any game mechanic to achieve build diversity. It’s something perfectly doable through encounter design.

If the content becomes truly challenging for average and slightly above average meta players (and rewards are balanced so this content becomes more appealing than faceroll one, something ANet looks terrible at), the meta will shift towards defense. Since the game allows for the additional survivability to be both distributed and concentrated, we might get a quite broad range of possibilities.

For really skilled and coordinated groups it will still be about damage and high cost effective (and not gear related) well placed support and control, but that’s how it should be for an action based combat game IMHO.

Fashion Mage.3712:

Vargamonth.2047:

snip

Doesn’t do much for support builds either (in fact it hurts support builds due to the virtues change).

Agreed, DH has next to zero sinergy with support builds (the new VoC looks interesting, but it comes with too many drawbacks).
I can accept that though, as it’s probably quite difficult to make a specialization line synergizing with every previous build. The problem is that it doesn’t even have a good synergy with offensive ones (it doesn’t offer balanced hard choices between control, mobility, survival and damage).
DH just delivers a completely new offensive playstyle around Longbow for PvP and some convenient but hardly gameplay changing advantages for PvE.

DH is barely anything but a Longbow specialization.

The DH 10% damage bonus against enemies beyond 600 range (a minor trait) is basically Longbow trait.

So is the adept 10% damage multiplier against crippled foes. We can definitely always benefit from it in PvE, where the condition could be applied by other players, but the trait only makes sense as a bow/trap related trait since those are our only reliable cripple sources.
We have another way to aply cripple: taking Dulled Sense as a Master tier trait. The problem is, with anything but Longbow we want the cripple so we can stick to our target, so what’s the point on applying it on a knockback? Do we even have any decent knockback application? Yes, we do: Heavy Light as a Grandmaster trait which, as Longbow related trait, makes Dulled Sense also a Longbow focused choice.

Hunter’s Determination is again a Longbow trait.
We have a ridiculous amount of choices which are heavily related or exclusive to Longbow, with barely any use (besides some niche sinergies with specific traps) outside of it.

All we have left are improvements for our reworked virtues and, honestly, it would not be a problem at all, as they synergize pretty well with a more melee oriented gameplay, if the new mechanics wouldn’t be in direct competition with many of our regular choices.

Our virtues have always been the most unimaginative class mechanic in the game (basically three signets with a situational and often quite weak instant AoE effect on activation), and we have usually improved their active and passive effects through traits.
The DH specialization, however, completely changes this and makes them naturally much more interesting, specially if we are investing on improving this new effects (as we are pretty much forced if we don’t use a Longbow).

For a basic guardian, resolve is nothing but a small health regen passive effect and a moderate AoE spike heal on activation. Not exactly a big thing unless you run a healing build, so the option of using it as an instant 3 AoE instant condition cleanse becomes huge.
However, once the skill becomes a leap with a 3s Immoblize on landing, what’s the point on going for Absolute Resolution? Both effects are huge, completely unrelated and require quite an investment, so it’s pretty much a hard choice.

The DH specialization has a lot less cross sinergy than Reaper and Chronomancer with the original class.
Not only does have no use for supportive builds, but it also automatically destroys some of the choices for offensive ones (benefits from Virtues line get decimated, for example).
In the end, it brings barely anything but Longbow and a few (subpar, IMHO) alternatives for current offensive PvP builds.
Ironically, some convenient damage multipliers could easily make the specialization one of the most popular ones for PvE without delivering barely anything interesting gameplay wise.

There’s a lot of room to push towards a more coordinated gameplay with the current game mechanics.

Mad Queen Malafide.7512:

There you go. This is why the game is so unbalanced. All the important skills (read game mechanics) are concentrated on the same few classes.

For example, why do guardians have such great party support in the form of boons (especially Might), when they also have reflection, AND wear heavy armor, AND can regenerate endurance faster, AND have invulnerability, AND have Cleave attacks, AND Stability?

WHAT?!
Everybody agrees on Necromancers lacking a lot of utility and being in a really bad spot, but your Guardian biref analysis is crazy.

Heavy Armor? Yes, it equals 153/304 Thoughness bonus over Medium/Light armor bearers. Also Low HP tier, which equals a 427/756 Vitality malus when compared with Medium/High HP tiers.

Might? What Might? Relying on Guardian Staff for might is subpar for easily 99% of the PvE content and plain terrible for most of it.

Endurance regeneration through Vigor, a long CD Invulnerability skill, Cleaving attacks … those are things necro lacks but which are available for almost every other single class.

You’re right on Reflects and AoE stability (which I don’t find that huge), and you missed decent AoE condition removal (if needed) and reliable AoE AEGIS (which is the true jewel of the crown).
Everything else is meh (better than Necro though).

The WoR thing on Lupicus is in no way an exploit. Both Consecrated Ground and Wall of Reflection are doing exactly what they are supposed to do.
Is it bad design? Absolutely.
Should it be fixed? I say it should, not because I don’t like it, but because we all know what’s going to eventually happen if no changes are made on that wall :P

Maybe.7180:

Yes, this luck makes me jealous, too.

As for this “Unfortunately, it’s just impossible to have the same kind of experience a second time” – not true. Last night I thought that it would be fun to do some world bosses, and you know, I still had a lot of fun and when I see Jormag or Tequatl flying, that makes me think “OMG, this is so EPIC!!1”, even tho I have all the achievements and I really don’t feel like I NEED doing this. And I feel quite the same about every thing in this game. Even farming Silverwastes still seems interesting to me (Hidden Depths event is so much fun!). But well, I am also a very emotional person, maybe that’s the thing.

I meant the experience of understanding the mechanics around a boss/puzzle and figuring out a good strategy from scratch.
Of course the content can still feel epic and fun. It will probably be less frustrating, so maybe even funnier than the first time for those that doesn’t exactly love puzzles.

Jerus.4350:

Rin.1046:

Slow dps players down by making them deal with content more carefully, but do not stop them from doing it.

This is one of the things I think one of my old games did very well with a certain content design choice. They had a lot of stuff that was % based effects on the boss. Be it strait AE damage, Add Spawns, or required mechanics. Thing is GW2 relies on it’s NPCs to trigger these actions instead of the game itself, hence Lupi/Grawl Shaman phase skips. In the old game I’m talking about though we had encounters where say you had 2 adds spawn every 10% on the boss. If you unleashed a massive burn you may be able to take it from 100% to 60% in a couple seconds, such that the adds either hadn’t spawned or hadn’t reached you, but when they did, you’d get 8 adds coming at you instead of just 2.

This made bursting through certain enemies much more risky on top of the already more risky DPS setups. It was still very doable with correct tactics, but it made you consider what you were doing. Some enemies we’d not unleash the massive burns till the end when we knew it would finish it off, opting for a more controlled approach for the first 60% of the fight.

Now, again, I don’t know how they’d translate that type of system over to GW2, seems like the mechanics are different, and with current HP levels on many enemies you can burst them down from 100-0, so it’d render that type of design null anyways.

But, I thought it was worth mentioning it, because it fits what you were talking about, and I liked it very much. As it wasn’t just taking less safety nets, but actually making the content harder.

I like the idea too and I actually think it fits GW2.

Lieutenant Kholer works exactly as you suggest, for example.
Obviously, the boss suffers from an alarming lack of HP (as everything in AC for lvl80 charcaters) so, as you pointed, can easily be bursted down from 100 to 0.
On top of that, the whole battleground is a LOS paradise and the adds, which suffer from the same lack of HP, spawn too close to the boss (despite most of them being ranged), so they are doomed to be cleaved down almost instantly.
The idea, however, is still there.

We can also take a look at Imbued Shaman.
It has its own “issues”, namely the very nature of the adds (all identical and completely projectile based) and the bubble phase being a skill subject to a CD, but none of those seen with Kholer.
Even the Archidiviner works o a similar way.

Using more varied adds (even somewhat randomized ones, although I admit it would bring some new “issues”) and making them spawn spreaded away from the boss and on a more constant rate (every 10% instead of the usual 25%, so key CDs like AoE pulling or some powerful reflect are less likely to be ready every single time) would, IMHO, bring a lot of nice new things to the table.

Dawnbreaker.6215:

Let’s imagine that dungeons become more difficult to nukers due to high AoE conditions or other attacks that overwhelm the dodge and block abilities, and the absolute most efficient way of doing dungeons becomes being a tank who stacks conditions on NPCs until they die. This is not the case now, but I am simply asking you to imagine that scenario.

What problem would you have with that? See, there would be no trinity there. Would it upset you that glasscanons wouldn’t be as good? If so, it proves this is a personal issue of yours, and not a rational concern over the game’s balance.

The only way to make a tanky build the most efficient one for beating something is making mathematically inviable to use anything less tankier.
On top of this, there’ll still be some tankier build performing better than its even more tankier counterparts.

Dawnbreaker.6215:

Cyninja.2954:

Dawnbreaker.6215:

Cyninja.2954:

Dawnbreaker.6215:

Cyninja.2954:

Dawnbreaker.6215:

I call bullkitten on this. Both defensive, instacast abilities like blocking, or any CC abilities like knockdowns, knockbacks, taunts and stuns have been around long before GW2. Unless you are talking about Runescape which is entirely based on probabilities (and here we are talking about a 14-15 year old browser game) most MMOs of today have mechanics similar to GW2.

Name 1 MMO that does semi-well with active defence and no trinity besides GW2. Just 1 please cause I have a very hard time thinking of one.

Yes, other games have active defences (Tera for one- went f2p) but none of those have no trinity. MAJOR! difference.

With active defense there are a ton, but without trinity there are none. You speak of trinity as if it’s some kind of advantage, but it’s not, it’s more a flaw than anything. No trinity leads to stagnation, it’s a problem.

When you advertise a lack of trinity, you sound like this:

“Hey guys! My car is unlike others, it lacks seatbelts, doors and windows! Look at my innovation!”

I speak of trinity as part of the game which needs to be considered when designing new content and adressing balance. Something your suggestions and ideas are lacking hard.

Thanks for confirming though that your argument with “other games do it” is void. There are no other games similar to GW2 currently.

I said that other games have defence and CC active abilities. Never once I have said that they had both a lack of trinity and defence/CC. Not once.

Yet your suggestions are entirely based on the other games working in a similar way as GW2, which they don’t.

The point being that other games are doing it right, and GW2 isn’t. Proof? Other games have several viable builds, in GW2 you can run the entire game with 1 build.

Maybe, with a bit of critical thinking, you could be led to think that GW2 would be better off just having a system that is confirmed to work than trying to invent something that doesn’t. You must play zerk, yes? Going for things that work rather than being creative is something familiar to you, yes? Then we should be agreeing here.

Both Dark Souls and FF VII work while providing a completely different combat experience. It’s not as much about what works as it is about the kind of gameplay you’re looking for.

Dawnbreaker.6215:

In LoL it’s possible to win with everything. They have 100+ champions and make almost all of them viable. You see a fed Nasus, Leona and Amumu coming your way backed by a Vayne and Ziggs, you know the game is over – and there you have 3 tanks 2 nukers. Here in GW2, we have 25 gear sets and people manage to find ways of playing with 1 of them only. It’s a disgrace. Funny thing is, so many people I have seen in GW2 will easily discard LoL as a kittenty teenager game when it’s actually far better designed when it comes to diversity.

You can’t compare PvP and PvE. There are several useful gear choices in both sPvP and WvW.

Dawnbreaker.6215:

Vargamonth.2047:

Dawnbreaker.6215:

If your logic that knowing the game by perfection led to glasscannon builds held any ground, then by now all MMOs that are older than GW2 should have glasscannon only metas, but we both know that is wrong.

Most of those MMOs which are older than GW2 do not feature action based combat and active defenses.

I call bullkitten on this. Both defensive, instacast abilities like blocking, or any CC abilities like knockdowns, knockbacks, taunts and stuns have been around long before GW2. Unless you are talking about Runescape which is entirely based on probabilities (and here we are talking about a 14-15 year old browser game) most MMOs of today have mechanics similar to GW2.

I honestly don’t remember any old game with so much emphasis on proactives defenses (I probably have not played as much MMOs as many other people around though).

All it comes to my mind are mostly numerical passive evasion/block rates and some damage mitigation tools usually reserved to tank/healer specs. I’ve seen really few active full (or almost full) damage avoidance tools, and they always had quite high CDs, behaving more like an Ohkitten button than as your natural form of defense.

On top of that, most bosses I remember were close to immune to interrupts.

Velho.7123:

The actual benefit from Dragonhunter is Light’s Judgment, maybe Procession of Blades, the longbow burst and three damage modifiers, one of which (Big Game Hunter), is party-wide 15% and makes everyone who hits the enemy give it vulnerability.

I’m quite sure it’s not party wide. When they said it also increased your ally damage they just meant vulnerability.

I’m afraid he’s asking for an UI feature to disable skills.
The purpose? I don’t really know, but it scares me.

Dawnbreaker.6215:

If your logic that knowing the game by perfection led to glasscannon builds held any ground, then by now all MMOs that are older than GW2 should have glasscannon only metas, but we both know that is wrong.

Most of those MMOs which are older than GW2 do not feature action based combat and active defenses.

green plum.7514:

I am far from being an expert on Guardian, but I can hardly see a case where one wouldn’t want to take the Dragonhunter spec. Even if you hate bow and traps. It is amazing for offensive-style play with melee weapons (snares, damage boost, vuln, mobility).

I don’t see myself using it in PvP, for example.
I will for sure make some tests and try some things with it here and there, but Radiance+Valor+Virtues looks far more solid atm (and that’s for a quite offensive and selfish build).

For PvE, on the other hand, traited Spear of Justice seems huge and it’s probably the main reason to go DH most of the time. Bow and Traps look more situational.

Chronomancer by far, which is quite reasonable since Guardian currently beats Mesmer in almost every game mode.

Veydar.5017:

Fractals already have this. The fights against Archdiviner or Mossman are quite long when compared to dungeon bosses and yet the meta is still pretty much the same.

…

Those are fights A LOT of players have a much harder time with.
While highly organized and/or skilled groups will still stick to meta-ish builds and tactics, it’s way more common to see outliers in this content, from an obvious increase on ranging to plain lame tactics (if not exploits) like underwater Mossman.
An that’s after having filtered a good amount of the playerbase that could be running regular dungeons on meta builds (mostly because of a terrible reward balance, but probably also related to the hop in difficulty).

I wouldn’t put my money on the current meta approach being the common trend if fractals were rewarding enough to cater a much larger playerbase, and I’m fairly sure that most (if not all) anti-meta threads are not created with high level fractals in mind.
I also think there’s still a lot of room for even longer and more interesting fights.

About active defenses, I find that devs probably went too far with the invulnerability window on dodge rolls. When compared with the ridiculous level of survivability attainable by pure passive means it doesn’t look so out of place though.

NikeEU.7690:

Vargamonth.2047:

I don’t get what soloing Lupicus or lvl50 Mossman has to do with the topic.
If the skill requeriment would be at that level for full groups and the majority of the dungeon content, there’s no way we would be talking about a berserker meta.

The point is, when people solo those bosses, they do it in berserker. Allow me to connect the dots for you since I guess I was too vague.

OP says berserker is only good because pve is easy.

I respond that even when the difficulty is increased extremely high, berserker is still the optimal choice.

Therefore, the difficulty of the content (or lack thereof) is not a sufficient explanation for why berserker gear is optimal, and other explanations should be sought if you want to make a legitimate point.

I get your point. We probably disagree on the meaning of “meta” and got a different idea from the original post (which I don’t even know whom is directed to btw).

I agree with pretty much everything you said.

I’m in no way anti-zerker either.
I strongly believe that, as an action based combat game, surviving through active defenses should be more rewarding than soaking up damage and sustaining through passive/rotationary means. A damage increase, thus faster completion times, looks like a fair reward to me.

The problem is that, if I look at passive defenses as some kind of risk-reward or difficulty slider, most encounters are too easily beatable while taking the theorically hardest approach.
On top of this, as you said, fights are usually so fast that a failure isn’t even that risky. You just respawn and try it again in matter of seconds.

I’m not sure what could be the best solution (in case devs see this as a problem at all). Less waypoinst would be mostly an annoyance and a kick on wipe, while certainly interesting for “elite” content, could be easily a PUG killer.

I think one of the first thing developers should look at are health pools: they are just too small for decent group compositions.
Longer fights would both reduce the impact of some opening tactics/rotations (which is HUGE more often than not) and increase the punishment on failure, and it comes with barely any downcome as long as they design enjoyable enough fights (t’s not like they should apply this on HotW bosses :P).

I don’t get what soloing Lupicus or lvl50 Mossman has to do with the topic.
If the skill requeriment would be at that level for full groups and the majority of the dungeon content, there’s no way we would be talking about a berserker meta.

DarkSyze.8627:

That is also why i now realize why i play mmo games that have team play: Challenging and Fun-Risk-Reward.

Last:

That is also why team play mmo games are successful than no-team play mmo games.

Team Play= Challenging and Fun, Risk-Reward
Non-Team Play= No Challenging/ Less Challenging, Reward-Risk

GW2 has A LOT of teamplay potential, more so than many other games that seem to be built around team play but in practice do no more than feature a few different and gameplay wise isolated roles (GW is not strictly among these) .
PvE content being overall easy has nothing to do with the system itself.

That’s how a first run should always be.

Unfortunately, it’s just impossible to have the same kind of experience a second time: you already have figured the mechanics and have some idea on what works and what doesn’t, and it will only get worse the more times you run the path.
In the end, you’ll be left with nothing but an efficient run to enjoy (specially for Aeterpath, which requires at least 4 players).
You can also join an inexperienced group and try to guide them through the dungeon: it might be a refreshing and fun experience from time to time. You need to realize, however, that, by doing so, you might be depriving them of the kind of experience you’ve just enjoyed.

messiah.1908:

thieves now can trait with 20%10%10% basic panice strike
guardian meditation can go 60% with symbole dmg
mesmer can go 40% with power shatter and MW

While the power creep is a fact, I wouldn’t expect every player to invest their extra trait points into raw damage output.
For example, as a Mediatation Guard player myself, I have no intention to invest in Zeal, not even when using a Greatsword.

DestinyEdge.2046:

Change the name please. A profession name should give people an idea of how it works. Ranger use bow, Chorno use time, Thief use dagger etc.
Dragon Hunter tells you nothing. . . It does not give you the impression that it is a backline support at all.

Nothing give us the impression of being a backline support.

We just get access to a longbow, which might be a decent tool for ranged support, and then a Virtue rework which goes exactly in the opposite direction.

Creating a shield in front of us which blocks attacks for allies? Applying a short range burn pulsing tether to enemies? 2 out of 3 active virtues are completely useless at backline, while the supportive component of the last one would require us to jump straight into the frontline.
The current Virtue active effects look far more useful for a backline support character. Unfortunately, we won’t have access to them anymore if we pick the Longbow.

And then there’s, of course, this silly idea of mine about support maybe not being exactly what the players demanding a more viable ranged option where thinking about.

It will probably leave a short duration anti projectile trail similar to the Teragriff charge one. It could also be a ground targeted skill creating some kind of antiprojectile field.

Both

If you want to bring a staff for the Swiftness, Greatsword is probably better as a main damage weapon.

fluxit.8247:

Once people begin to realise they don’t actually have to take traps and they don’t actually have to use a longbow their attitudes might change. The virtue changes alone seem interesting.

Not necessarily.

I could be wrong, it might be an instant projectile coming out of our chest, but Spear of Justice sounds like an animated skill to me, which means no instant blind during stomps, resses, channels (probably quite useful for Stronghold) or any other thing you could be doing. And that’s assuming the blind is not moved to the spear itself, which would be quite a nerf.
The new mechanic doesn’t sound specially interesting for PvE either. Unless it’s extremely powerful, shared burn application will outclass it in any bossfight.
Going back to Justice is Blind, we will also have a harder time finishing solo fights while consistently blinding packs of enemies, mostly because we would be spending the time to finsih them off throwing DoTs at next to dead enemies.
Not much to say either about the weird combination of a proximity tether and a featured long range weapon.

Depending on the implementation, we could have similar issues with other virtue activation traits too.

Honestly, the specialization looks totally unimaginative (even in the name!!) and the Virtue rework feels incredibly random, like figuring out a new functionality for no other reason but the shake of changing … but well, it’s not like Virtues were the most creative mechanic to begin with.

Inconsistencies

Also please note that we’d like each new virtue to retain properties of the traits that affect them, such as Renewed Justice and Justice is Blind

I guess Spear of Justice is not going to be a magical projectile coming out of nowhere. It probably has an animation and, in this case, we lose the ability to Blind stomp (which is BIG part of the trait for PvP).
The trait has an overall worse sinergy with the VoJ active

It could be similar with VoC: unless the shield is created instantly on activation, we will be saying goodbye to Aegis/Stability stomps.
In any case, the new nature of tha activated skill synergizes again far worse with protection and stability.

Finally, when will be the cleanse from Absolute Resolution trigger?. Will we trigger a 1200 range AoE cleanse on activation and then the heal at the end of the leap or is the cleanse effect going to me moved to the landing spot like the heal?
If it’s the latter, could we get our former instant cleanse interrupted and, since it is a movement skill, put at full CD? Is it going to become useless agaisnt fears and, specially, immobilizes?

How well do traps combine with a class that already has plenty of AoE pulsing attacks in the shape of symbols? Won’t they make the spec too onedimensional?

Why does the blinding arrow in the video have such a long cast time? What’s the purpose of blinds if they are not almost instant?

Going a bit off topic, there wasn’t really any better name suggestion for the specialization?

Unless I’m in some kind of hurry to reach lvl80, I just make the character and play a little bit in the open, completing events, hearts and such.
In the current state of the Trait System and the Personal Story (which often sends you back to low level zones you’ve already explored), I usually open the wiki and let the trait hunting guide me around the world.

Ferocity would be a far better pick than precision for a nerf or removal as gear stat.
In any case, it would require a downgrade to 2 stat combiantions for every single PvE / WvW gear piece. Otherwise, the game would become quite unenjoyable for some players, as there’s no natural replacement for Ferocity.

Mad Queen Malafide.7512:

Also, take the Underworld in GW1 for example. You have multiple quests, which all need to be completed to gain access to the final boss. In GW2 the mobs that spawn during those quests, could scale based on the number of players, and they could be made repeatable, just as normal dynamic events are. Much like with Drytop, all players work together towards overall map progress, until the final boss unlocks.. If they fail, they lose all progress and are booted from the zone. If they succeed, their quest progress still resets, but they get to loot the end chest.

I still see much more potential on this kind of map as instanced content:

You do not make events scale (or use a much softer scaling than usual) and leave on players hands to decide how are going to split their forces.
The more squads they create, the more quests they’ll be able to handle at the same time. In exchange, they’ll get less players on each one so they will be harder.
Every group can choose a strategy based on its own capabilities, which makes possible for a single piece of content to be challenging for a much wider spectrum of players.

As an open world content with scaling events, it would be nothing but, as you pointed, another Dry Top, which is now again all about organization and doesn’t provide any challenge gameplay wise.
An instanced Dry Top for, lets say, 8 players; that’s something I would love to see :P

Mad Queen Malafide.7512:

Vargamonth.2047:

Having a private playground might look somewhat out of place in GW2, but it’s a MUST for challenging content to exist.

That seems like a bizarre statement to me, regarding a game that advertizes itself with dynamically scaling events, and which already features large scale challenging content.

Dynamic Scaling keeps the content meaningful and not easily trivialized by large amount of players. It’s an overall great feature (although it produces some issues around loot in some old maps), but is far from a foundation for challenging content.

The more populated an event is, the less impactful your own performance is going to be. It’s the average performance level of the whole group of players what is going to decide the outcome of the fight, and since you have no way to chose the people you’re going to play with, it all boils down to LUCK.
There’s only one thing you can do to circunvent this: Get a large enough group of trustworthy players and manipulate the system to fill a new megaserver, which in the end is no different from instanced content (and has no use for small sized guilds/groups, so the whole Dynamic Scaling idea becomes quite irrelevant).

About GW2 already featuring large scale challenging content … well, being able to convince a ridiculous amount of random players to stick to some tactic, follow instructions and even change something in their builds is definitely quite a challenge.
Not exactly the kind of challenge many of us are looking for though.
Gameplay wise, blocking the eggs on the three headed wurm event is the closest thing to a challenge we can find on large scale open world events. Everything else is far far away, falling into the easy / faceroll category.

Mad Queen Malafide.7512:

Vargamonth.2047:

I can’t figure how they could make truly challenging content without using instances or another form of player isolation.

That is probably what the designers thought as well.

This is an interesting problem. In GW1 we had 8-man parties, and then when you entered a dungeon, you also had 8-man parties (except for The Deep and Urgoz, which were 12 man). It was pretty consistent.

In GW2 everything is open world, yet when it comes to dungeons, all of a sudden it is back to the old formula. That is inconsistent.

I can’t help but wonder what a dungeon could look like if it wasn’t inconsistent with the general PVE design philosophy….?

As you already pointed, not everything in GW2 was about 8-man groups.
The Deep and Urgoz were 12-man. Early zones were usually 4-man and 6-man. There were also a couple of missions in Factions where iirc 2 full 8-man groups shared the same instance.

Player cap also varies between different zones in GW2 if I’m not mistaken. I don’t think Halloween Labyrinth allowed as many people as Sparkfly Fen, for example.

In this sense, it should possible to design a map with an arguably small player cap (not necessarily as low as five, even if I think it’s the best number for challenging content) without it being inconsistent at all.

In any case, the big point of instanced content is not as much about the amount of people as it’s about having control on who goes into the map.
Having a private playground might look somewhat out of place in GW2, but it’s a MUST for challenging content to exist.

deSade.9437:

I wish there were more threads discussing what we (no, not crazy phiws haters, they’re not invited) dungeoneers want from HoT’s “challenging”, open world content… since I don’t think there will be instances.

I can’t figure how they could make truly challenging content without using instances or another form of player isolation.

Mad Queen Malafide.7512:

Rising Dusk.2408:

You have yet to present any cogent argument that clearly shows that skipping or stacking is “bad game design”. The only subjectively-bad game design here is in how easy so many encounters are and how that enables success with simple tactics.

It clearly was NOT the intention of the designers, that the players would dash past every mob possible, exploit flaws in the ai to get monsters stuck in corners and in walls, and exploit spots where the monsters can’t get to them, yet the players can safely kill them. It was clearly NOT the intention of the designers that people were constantly kicked from groups for not skipping all the content fast enough. The game was intended to encourage players to work together, and not exclude one another. But that is not what happened, and the game designers are responsible for that mess.

Most if not every single player in these subforums is clearly against obvious exploits and terrain glitches. The disapproval goes far enough to request fixes even for things that are mechanically working as intended (like Consecrated Ground WoR on Lupicus).
Lumping those together with completely unrelated things like skipping or stacking, as both you and the OP did, is hardly going to reinforce your positions.

Designers probably didn’t intend skipping to be so prevalent, that’s something I can easily agree with, but it’s not like there’s an easy and healthy fix for that.
You can take the issue into account when designing new content. The old one, however, would need a serious and deep rework.

Here are some words from the former Dungeon Master on this matter:
http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/16tbxt/robert_hrouda_on_skipping_mobs_in_dungeons/