(edited by Vargamonth.2047)
Dry Top has some interestic mechanics, but I still find it far from a good map.
When you have access to organized t6 runs, which unlock the best merchants and provide a good amount of geodes, you easily lose interest on those random t3-t4 maps.
I have no reason myself to work towards a higher tier unlock (which would be still unlikely to happen) for 40 minutes when I can have a t6 one if needed on a daily basis, so I just port to random maps before the sandstorm arrives and focus on doing the “farmeable” events (2x Dust Mites, 2x Haze, a couple of champs and maybe Skritt/Mine if I’m lucky for some extra geodes if the tier is high enough) and looking for some chests scattered around, not so different from the trains you can see in many other maps.
The thing I like the most about Dry Top is receiving part of the reward on a floating chest, so it remains the same no matter how many people were involved on the event.
I have always thought that all the open world should have worked this way, so players could find any event somewhat rewarding no matter if done alone, with a couple of friends or a whole giant guild. Maybe some lootable enemies could appear upon reaching a threshold of lets say 5 people, slightly encouraging grouping up, but the big part of the reward should remain untouched.
This would work IMHO far better than the current system, where most events (and almost every single one if alone) are close to a waste of time reward wise (I’ve found myself running past them and suddenly stopping to gather some platinum node … this should be enough indicative of the issue) and just a few (those that scalate “properly” and, for some people, those involving champs too) deserve some player attention, and usually only if you can gather a good amount of people for them.
Even with the floating chests, however, Dry Top still suffers from this strong correlation between rewards and scaling, where some events can be easily zerged and scalated for better loot (Dust Mites, Skritts, …) while those more suited for solo or really small groups (Tendrils, Baskets, Serene, …) drop next to nothing.
This is specially problematic for the map because you want these events done in order to unlock the highest tier, so technically the system expects some players to be altruistic enough and sacrifice their own loot for the common good.
I’m quite disappointed too with the way ANet handled this issue.
There were better solutions IMHO, like moving those achievements to collections (so we could have the icons displayed and listed for a far better tracking) and keeping the old progression status (a player who maxed the achievement before the patch would keep it maxed even without a single miniature unlocked in the wardrobe, while half completed, or not even started, collection would need to rely on the new system to progress beyond what they get with the old one).
If they wanted AP hunters who used the old system to collect the minis again and keep them (increasing the gold value of a gem store item), which is the only reason for the current achievements to make sense, a single new achievent would have been more than enough (Grand Miniature Collector : Unlock every mini from sets I, II and III in your wardrobe, rewarding N AP). Those interested in the extra AP and/or the new title would have needed to complete every collection under the new system even if they had every individual achievement already completed with the old one (and without keeping the minis).
In the end, however, this is nothing but another example of how weird and unconsistent GW2 achievement system is (just like discontinuing the tips achievement when it could have been perfectly reworked to the new leveling system, allowing new players, or old ones which had it bugged, to get those 10 AP).
ANet has been rewarding APs for every single silly content they have released (no matter if it was temporary and hardly ever replicable on a permanent way), using them as a carrot for those reward chests and ignoring what achievements are in almost every single game out there, a feature aimed to completionist.
Honestly, the system is so flawed already that I can’t perceive this as anything but a minor and anecdotic nuisance.
(edited by Vargamonth.2047)
The whole MMO genre is somewhere between a videogame and a social media so, while I could easily agree with calling the activity anti-social (and inherently bad for the kind of players that enjoy the social media aspect, that is playing with other people, the most), I would never call it anti-gaming (since overcoming challenges and improving as a player are, IMHO, the fun parts of the gaming aspect, I actually find it pro-gaming).
2)to clear 6 conditions… well you are surely talking about shouts + trooper runes… nice just an example: shouting warrior + tropper = 4 aoe condi removed but… oh wait warrior got 1249232 ways to cleanse personal conditions (and shake it off with 20sec cd)! you want more? eles? just go water to clear aoe conditions and… even mesmers can clear every condition for 6 sec (feedback) and engineers with healing turret (15sec cd) and rangers with healing spring + signet… but we are the best i bet… going 30 point for 3 more condi removals… nice!
He’s probably talking about traited Virtue of Resolve (20 points in Virtues), which can be recharged with Renewed Focus, and/or Purging Flames, which are the usual guardian condi clears for dungeons.
Engineers with Healing Turret and Mesmers with Mantra of Resolve can help too if needed, but the other examples are quite a bit meh. Trooper runes are a waste in dungeons, both for Warrior (as they’re most of their self condi clears) and Guardians. Elementalist are far from good at this: Swapping to water on a staff build is a HUGE loss in DPS, and /F fresh air builds don’t provide condi clear unless traited for it, which is usually a bad idea too.
On a Guardian, however, 4 points in Virtues are easy to take, because once you get 4 points in Zeal and 5/6 in Radiance, there isn’t a lot more missing (and you probably want 10 points there anyways for Master of Consecrations or Unscatched Contender).
Let’s take a look at the light aura talk.
Right now, it grants retaliation and inflicts vulnerability when you’re struck (not when you hit). This is a PvP tool, almost totally useless in PvE for both offensive and supportive gameplay (you shouldn’t want to trade blows with NPC meat sacks).
If it would work on hit, vulnerability would still be much better than regeneration.
The claim about vulnerability being better for solo play is completely false. Vulnerability grants a damage boost to every ally so it has a multiplicative effect the more people involved.
Also, reaching efficiently the 25 stack cap is far from easy. There are many other sources, yes, but most of them require specific traits and/or utilities, so giving up other things like direct damage multipliers (almost always prefered for solo play). Unless we’re talking about a organized group or you always play with some engineer friend, you’ll rarely see 25 vulnerability stacks consistently applied in dungeons.
This organized groups won’t bother with a small regeneration source (300 or so, since no way they’re going to bring a Guardian, nor any other class, specced for healing) most of the time, and they always have the option to respec the warrior for perma regen if needed/wanted. On the other hand, vulnerability application on hit would be like a godsend for most PUGs and not-so-organized groups, maybe even for the most optimized ones (allowing them to build on a different way for even higher damage output).
The only place where vulnerability is pointless is zergy content (world bosses and the like), because it will be capped at 25 most of the time, and even there a hammer guardian spamming AoE light auras and providing permaregen would never be used. Why? Because regen stacks in duration and those light fields prevent water (which provide direct heals, and regeneration too in 3 out of 4 cases if i’m not mistaken) and fire (which provide AoE might, and even fury in some ele cases) ones from being blasted. That’s why the hammer itself, even if it provides permaprot (and constant small direct heals if traited for it), is often discouraged for events like tequatl. There are just easier and less problematic sources of permaregen.
I’ll keep insisting: building around meditations is already pointless for dungeons, PvE zerging and WvW zerging. For any of these scenarios, support is the best approach (which doesn’t neccessarilly mean building around shouts and/or healing btw, just about picking the best group utilities for each fight).
It’s not even good for solo PvE because the meditation skillset itself is terrible for general PvE. Obviously, building around support when you’re alone isn’t probably the best choice either.
Meditations are a solo/duo WvW roaming and sPvP (also performing a roamer role) thing. For any other task, there are already much better options, and most of the time these options are closely related to support.
(edited by Vargamonth.2047)
I sometimes think it would be easier if ANet just came right out and said, “Selling or buying of dungeon runs is not allowed.” :/ I get why they don’t want players to do it (and I kind of agree), but leaving it open and letting this kind of toxic frustration build can’t be doing the game’s atmosphere any favours.
In most games, the harder the content the higher the reward. Even if designers don’t want to create some specially hard content, which would be catered to a minority of the playerbase, a classic reward system still allows players to complete regular content with a smaller group and getting a better reward for each one.
Nothing of this happens in GW2.
The loot system ensures everyone is going to be rewarded, so an extra hand (not stump) would be always welcomed.
Event scaling was supposed to counteract this, to keep fights interesting and prevent the biggest number from being always the best option, but in reality it did just the opposite. Event completion reward has always been terrible, monster loot being the real income source, and since scaling used to generate a higher amount of enemies, it actually encouraged people to zerg (which dumbs down the gameplay for the most part) for better rewards.
Some world bosses, which had a meaningful event completion reward, favoured small and efficient groups for some time. Since the release of megaservers, however, this is hardly doable anymore.
Dungeons do not scale, so they are easier/faster (thus more rewarding) with a full group, again.
I don’t like the idea itself of selling a dungeon slot.
I don’t want to sell anything to anyone, just a system that realizes I soloed/duoed a path and rewards it apropriately (enough to compensate, at least, the extra time it’s going to take me to complete the content with less people than intended), mostly because that’s the only way I have to tune the PvE difficulty of the game (which is incredibly low by default) to something fun without giving up rewards.
Dungeon selling is just the closest thing available to a system like this (which I really doubt we will ever have btw :P).
Now in order to make this thread a bit usefull for Devs here are some changes i would like to see:
-Monks Focus: heal reduce to 1500
why? because actual heal is so big, you can actually heal yourself for 12k in 1 sec while devasting enemies and curing condition and gaining fury and a coffe why not…-Stand Your Ground
CD: 25 sec (20 traited) 5 sec stability & retailation
-Hold The Line
CD: 25 sec (20 traited) 5 sec protection & regeneration
-Retreat
CD: 40 sec (32 traited) 15 sec swiftness & 10 sec Aegis
-Save Yourselves
CD: 50 sec (40 traited) 10 sec all boons
why? SYG and HTL with 20 sec cd can give only 25% prot, retailation, stability and regen uptime. Do you think it is so much? An engineer can stack 30% prot uptime with 1 trait. Also the new Retreat can stack the same ammount of swiftness but the lower cd help us to keep it also for condi removal and SY… why 60 sec cd if it is already balanced to sacrifice ourself taking every condition around to only get some buffs? And it also got half duration in pvp! 50 sec are still too many but that would be a good update anyway.-Sanctuary
CD: 90sec same effect 240 radius
why? … 120 sec cd? 120 radius? …-Merciful Intervention
CD: 40 sec with the new teleport effect should be good if the heal stay on 2k.
why? 2k heal on a 40 sec (32 traited) skill is too much? it is about 62.5 hp sec even anti-toxin spay heals more!
Seriously, Meditations and Shouts guardian don’t compete for the same spot. Nerfing Monk Focus doesn’t make Shout Guardians more interesting at all.
That being said, I could agree with a slight CD reduction on some shouts (Hold the Line and Retreat). On the other hand, Stand Your Ground is incredibly powerful as it is now.
240 radius for sanctuary is kinda insane too. Some not so big radius increase would be welcomed however, at least make it big enough so someone in the middle of the sanctuary isn’t at melee range of outside attackers.
ToL 2 finals. Both teams dropped guardian altogether. They replaced them with celestial ele’s and engi’s.
May as well play selfishly and be the new warrior. Your already outdated and replaced on mid as support.
I don’t think we have really been replaced as mid support.
We’ve get somewhat outdated because the meta has shifted to a bunch of all-in-one characters whose combined support is enough to make us unnecessary, but individually we’re probably still the strongest individual support in the game.
The more allies you have around, the more effective support becomes.
Whenever you expect to be surrounded by a decent number of teamates (Dungeons, WvW zerg or even full roaming group, Spvp main bunker-support, …) meditations get easily outperformed. They are mostly for those cases where the allies aren’t there (sPvP roaming, WvW solo/duo roaming, …).
For PvE, the skillset they offer isn’t even remotely interesting. In fact, I find guardian selfish PvE capabilities somewhat lackluster (still better than many other classes tough).shouts and aoe skills only works on a limited number of target which is most of times 5. So, no. In WvW or dungeon you get the same result from those.
5 is more than enough people for the support to shine, and it’s a number you’ll always have in a zerg and usually on dungeons too unless you want to do them undermaned.
The more allies you have around, the more effective support becomes.
Whenever you expect to be surrounded by a decent number of teamates (Dungeons, WvW zerg or even full roaming group, Spvp main bunker-support, …) meditations get easily outperformed. They are mostly for those cases where the allies aren’t there (sPvP roaming, WvW solo/duo roaming, …).
For PvE, the skillset they offer isn’t even remotely interesting. In fact, I find guardian selfish PvE capabilities somewhat lackluster (still better than many other classes tough).
As a primer example, Liadri, and specially the “light up the darkness” achievement, could be classified as challenging content. Unfortunately, the game never encouraged players to replay it. Some people, myself included, did it several time for the shake of fun, but in terms of reward, it was nothing but a waste of time.
The gauntlet, however, could still be farmed; it just had nothing to do with Liadri. The first year farm was on Deadeye Dunwell (and Subject 7 during for the first days) and, after the insane gold influx it created, for the second year it was revamped not only to one of the most annoying RNG examples we have had in the whole game but also moved to Halmi Hammerfell, the first and easiest fight of the whole piece of content.
The natural difficulty progession and the tools were there, but the reward system was just terrible.
We can also look at the Shadow of the Dragon. It’s far from Liadri, but still a nice fight for many people. I would play it over any regular world boss anyday … the reward, however, is just nonexistant.
Looking at tools already ingame and even in the instance itself, like the LS achievement system (which tracks achievements during every LS instance) and the challenge mote … why not a challenge mote that ports us in front of the Pale Tree, ready for the final fight (so we can skip that 5 minute cutscene), and activates several achievement-like conditionals (don’t get downed, don’t get hit by this, don’t get hit by that, complete the fight in less than X time, …) for increased reward.
Then, we could have a daily Shadow of the Dragon attempt for some kind of varying reward that doesn’t feel like we have wasted our time and should have gone to spam 1 somewhere else. It could have worked with foxfire clusters, for example (IMHO, far better gameplay wise than camping the malchor spot with several characters).
So, it’s not that much the absence of challenging or interesting content, but the terrible reward balancing on them.
Even worse, we have also those evil metrics that decide which content is more or less enjoyable without apparently accounting the big role that rewards play on this. Someday a dungeon is selected for replacement because it’s among the least played ones. Should we have expected something different if it’s way harder and as rewarding (even less convenient, since it lacked token—>ecto conversion and berserker stats) as COF1?
The funny thing about this is that it happened after a dungeon reward rebalancing which was supposed to account for the length and difficulty of each path AND the replacement suffers from pretty much the same issue the original path had.
I don’t know what exactly happens, but there’s a really big problem with rewards across the whole game and something should change sooner than later. The simple fact that completing DEs is usually less rewarding than ignoring most of them and just focusing on wood/ore gathering should be a clear example of this.
Are you sure about receiving 2 unid dyes as regular loot? Not from BL chest or anything like that? I thought unid dyes couldn’t be obtained as drop anymore.
Favourite: AC
It perfectly alternates events and bosses and, excepting path 3 (which has too much burrow smashing and time gating IMHO), most of them are interesting mechanic wise.
Skips are short and still fine thanks to the massive amount of CC. On top of that, many of them include a low health champion, so killing the trash doesn’t look totally unrewarding for those that dislike skipping.
It has the obvious downside of being a lvl35 dungeon (which makes it terribly easy for lvl80 charaters, specially after the ferocity change). This should be more than enough to miss the first place, but I still find the design itself so superior that I’ve ignored that fact on purpose.
If the numbers were adjusted to lvl80 characters (which, looking at the state of the game, probably should be done with every explorable path) and enemies will get time to use their mechanics, the dungeon would require just a few small changes, most of them over P3, to be awesome.
Most Hated One:
I was trying to decide between SE and CM, but you reminded that HoTW exists.
The cheapest way is probably going to be related to cooking, converting raw materials into crafted ones (but still materials retaining their gold value) at low craft levels and popular food at higher ones.
Buying dungeons runs is time gated and there are really few paths you can reliably buy without losing a lot of money.
If some kind of unavoidable damage stream were introduced (in the shape of a lack of active defenses, unavoidable hits, enviromental effects, or whatever), everything could be sumarized on if you can beat the encounter before you die by attrition or not.
A damage oriented group would receive serious harm over time but might kill enemies fast enough to still suceed. For a PVT one the fight would take longer but could still be doable thanks to a higher survivability.
When both specs are mixed, however, PVT characters would slow down the fight and cause berserker ones to die (PVT ones might die later too after losing some of the support of their dead comrades). Without a manipulable aggro mechanic, there’s just no way to take advantage of that diversity.
This is not far from what we have now: most PvE content can be completed with different degrees of damage/sustain, but different focused specs don’t combine well together (still viable tough because most content is quite easy). It’s just that one of the possible approaches gets the job done faster, so it shows as superior from a farming perspective.
I could sincerely agree with making the game overall thougher for offensive setups in order to balance their natural advantage (some fights are fairly OK in this regard, but most are not), but that’s still far from a perfect solution and, definitely, it wouldn’t create any diversity in the sense of mixed parties. That’s something that can’t shine withotu a clear aggro system or special encounter mechanics.
Unless you can solo/duo and sell some path, I would say that the first daily dry top run provides better profit than dungeons (as long as you can craft and sell a clay pot). After that, it would be all about how lucky you are with RNG sources.
There has been a lot of positive feedback about LS content becoming permanent.
IMHO, one of the most important characteristics of any permanent content, specially on a MMO, is its replay value, and it’s not rocket science that rewards play a huge role on it.
After having played this LS release for a while, I’m quite concerned on it not properly working in this regard and the whole permanent thing providing nothing but a chance for newcomers and players that could have temporarily quited to play the story and somewhat experience the content.
First of all, lets take a look at map mechanics.
Zephyrite favor level plays a big role on how rewarding the content is through vendor prices and rises with the amount of events that are completed, so encourages player splitting.
Currency, however, is get by individual participation on those events, so encourages taking part in as much as possible, thus a roaming zerg.
Unlike most content, which promotes either zerging or splitting for optimal results, Dry Top suggest some kind of phased approach, with most runs being driven by geode farming and a few others, from time to time, being done in order to achieve a high favor level.
Needless to say that expecting the preferences of every player to match in time is ridiculous, so a good level of cooperation is unlikely to take place. On top of that, once the LS move on, we should not only expect a lower population, but also an extreme reduction on player split (which is naturally caused by region achievements atm), decreasing the overall profitability of the zone (which even now doesn’t look like a big thing tbh).
I’m not sure either on the account bound nature of most crafteable items being a good design choice. Account bound items probably bring a higher population, but marketeable ones often lead to a more experienced, thus more likely to organize and cooperate, one.
Story missions are, however, what concerns me the most. By not granting any reward at all after the first completion, this missions lose pretty much all their replay value (and indirectly contributes to low populated zones).
While a high reward could drive a lot of people out of the open world and be undesirable, a moderate/low one could actually be something positive.
After first time completion, replayability is completely driven by achievements, which not only lack replay value themselves but often behave on a hit or miss basis.
If an achievement is granted at some middle stage of the run, there’s no reason at all to not abort the mission right after it (and restart it again in case of failure). Achievements that are rewarded at final stages can potentially be perceived as a huge waste of time, with the player being forced to go through the same cutscenes and usually faceroll encounters over and over.
A not specially tempting daily chest would prevent players from ending up an achievement run empty-handed and might encourage a more relaxed approach, were failed tasks are just left for another day, when rewards would be available again. Even if a lot of players (myself included) would still ignore it and try to complete the achivements ASAP, it could be enough to reduce the sense of frustration for many others.
In any case, as I’ve already said, since achievements lack replay value, so does the content.
Now that story missions are permanent and technichally replayable, a good solution for this could be about introducing some system working in a similar fashion to what Zaishen quests and, to a minor extent, storybooks did in GW1.
For those who didn’t play GW1 (not in their latest versions at least), Zaishen Challenge Quests were tasks that changed on a daily basis and offered extra rewards for completing some specific content, like defeating a boss or replaying some story mission.
Storybooks tracked player progression over a set of content (dungeons, story missions on a campaign, …) and could be turned anytime into rewards that were increasing the more filled the book was.
While these rewards couldn’t compete with the most effective farming methods, they were still high enough to be considered on a more casual/relaxed gameplay and not only brought replay value to content that otherwise would likely had been ignored but also made the game a lot less repetitive.
I realize that, with only a single chapter available, it’s probably too early to request this kind a features, but I really hope ANet is working on something like this for the long run. Otherwise, the permanent nature of a big part of the LS releases is likely to be wasted.
(edited by Vargamonth.2047)
For PvE, probably elementalist if using D/F. If using staff or LH, I find mesmer more interesting.
For PvP shatter mesmer looks funnier (although I haven’t played it). D/D or staff ele are OK, but too much forgiving IMHO.
The only way something like this would be favored instead of Berserker’s is if there’s an environmental condition that hits you for a set amount of damage (not %) and that cannot be removed.
Not even with that. Vitality would be pretty much useless in that scenario and Clerics would be far better.
This new combination looks completely ridiculous to me. I guess it might come handy for some mix & match and maybe for some crazy full support WvW build though.
I don’t think bunker comps are such a big problem.
Several games had offered this kind of PvP mode and developed different systems to deal with stalemates.
In L2 arena, for example, there was a time limit for each fight and if none of the contendats had won by that time, then the player that had dealt the most damage automatically got the win.
With a system like this, while players would still be able to outlast their enemies and win by attrition, they should ensure they have enough damage to finish the fight in a given time. If two bunkerish comps would be matched against each other, the one packing less defense/sustain, which would be easier to handle by more bursty comps, would kilely win.
A damage based tie-breaker would, of course, open the door to other lame tactics, like stealthing, kiting or playing hide and seek for the whole match after a high opening burst, so another tie breaking method should be included, probably a PPT based one over a big enough point.
In the end, it would be about balancing the time limit and the weights of damage and PPT ratios.
Soldier/Knight armor can give you a bit of survival if needed (for example, if that’s the difference between being oneshoted or not ). If that’s not enough and you are still struggling to survive, either you need a bit more of practice, or your group is lacking in average DPS, exposing you to an attrition enviroment for what the build isn’t probably the best option (you could check hammer builds if that’s the case).
It’s going to take you way longer, but this is what I usually do:
- Kill the 2 heads on the door from outside usign staff
- Enter the room and clean it all but a single lvl2 spiderling (the last lvl2 spider triggers the queen)
- Kill that spiderling and run upstairs. Create a chokepoint at the top using staff CC and nuke all the spiders down.
- Engage the queen with maybe 1-2 spiderlings remaining.
Since agony resistance is unlimited, there’ll always be a value for every encounter that fully negates agony damage. If you balance “challenging, high skill demanding” content around it, you get nothing but a gear gating; if you balance around a smaller value, you allow players to bypass the challenge through gear grinding.
I can’t figure what the benefit of using AR is. If gating end-game content behind some kind of grind / time sink si the idea, there are actually much better ways to do it.
I tried it long ago and, while phase 1 and 2 were quite easy, couldn’t finish phase 3.
The problem back then was pretty much about every lupicus move requiring a double dodge. Gear Shield on toolkit worked really well but, unfortunately, it was also the main defense against a possible cage attack (outside a 60 second elixir S), so the fight was extremely reliant either on RNG or knowing how to prevent Lupicus from using that move (which is something I never learnt).
The fight should be a lot easier right now.
The “new” rocket boots should be enough to handle almost every big AoE move and, assuming rifle isn’t necessary for geting back into melee in time (which I haven’t tested), the reworked Static Shield should be incredibly helpful too.
The no RNG based stability on elixir B and the reflect on turret drop through traits are another options that could help on that last phase, albeit they probably a bit too slow to be realiable.
(edited by Vargamonth.2047)
I am amazed that gems isnt a key point in this argument.
More gold in economy =more gold converted to gems =higher gem value = more people spend real money = the most imporant thing for a non subscription game
less gold=less people buy gems = dead game.
Arenanets definition of a healthy economy is different from yours and thatss the way it should be
Gems are actually very important in this matter because gold-to-gem conversion is, along with TP taxes, the most important gold sink in the game (the fact that gem price keeps rising indicates that there’s more people exchanging gold for gems than the opposite).
Gem price will keep going up until it becomes high enough to balance both exchanges. Having more gold in the system doesn’t make people to get more gems with it, it just determines how high the exchaneg ratio will eventually peak.
The funny thing is that, the closer to the exchange balance, the larger the inflation becomes, decreasing gold value and making gem to gold exchange less interesting.
Relying on gold to gem exchange to keep the inflation at bay basically pushes against a stable gem value, which I don’t think it’s a healthy situation at all.
This is not about nerfing the rewards people are getting from dungeons, but about changing them in a way that doesn’t directly introduce so much gold into the system.
If a dungeon path would grant 3 t6 materials on its daily bonus chest instead of the current 1 gold, not only the inflation would be smaller but the player would actually be gaining even more wealth than before.
There’s also a second benefit attached to this kind of change. If every dungeon path would grant specific and different tradeable rewards (materials, skins, …), the market would eventually get flooded with those from the most popular paths (usually because they’re easier/faster), making prices to go down and effectively reducing the profit of those paths. On the other hand, items from the harder/longer ones would become scarcer and rise in price, achieving a more balanced and fair reward distribution between dungeons, something that ANet has not been able to properly set.
Try not to worry too much about providing that kind of ‘most players want/do/can x’ feedback. There’s a whole department devoted to recording all the playerbase’s general actions (metrics), analyzing that data (analytics), and providing that information for the team to help them manage risk in their decision-making.
MMORPG makers are so well versed in our behaviors, they could probably teach us a thing or two about how we tick.
Metrics probably show A LOT of players running CoF1 every day.
Does it mean that it’s an extremely fun and well designed path, or does it just offer one of the best dungeon gold/time ratios for average groups while still being ridiculously easy and totally PUGable with next to zero risk of failure?
Rewards play a huge role on how popular some content becomes and any relevant information about the quality of the content in terms of fun and gameplay can be completely obscured.
Being GW2 such an extremely gold centric game, I can hardly believe in metrics providing useful feedback about most of the content.
For example, they provided reasons for the guardian to lack mobility, but all the reasoning was done from the perspective of a tanky supportive spec. I still can’t realize how a “25% movement speed increase while wielding a melee weapon” as an adept major in Zeal could hurt the balance.
Well it would be adverse to their holes in roles philosophy. The only reason why guardian doesn’t have great mobility is because of that philosophy. From the perspective of how most users view balance, it wouldn’t hurt anything.
But Anets idea is that no class should be able to do all things. If guardian can do support, big damage, have the best ranged weapon and have great mobility then why choose another class like thief who doesn’t have great support?
I feel what they said about thief applies to guardian and likewise all classes. That thief can have better survival but they will have to sacrifice damage. Guardian can have mobility but it will require giving up many things to achieve it. Like staff, retreat and lots of boon duration is a definite sacrifice to other aspects that can be increased.
Having a class being able to perform at every role better than any other would be completely broken. I agree with it and that’s why I say that preventing the guardian from outperforming another classes in their main conceptual roles would be a valid point for denying some ideas.
In regards to the last paragraph, I don’t think I’m asking for anything different.
Going 10 into Zeal isn’t exactly free in most cases. Support focused builds will lose either support or survival by doing it, and the trait is completely unnecessary for those using a staff.
For damage oriented builds, the natural tradeoff is a 10% damage boost against burning foes, which is quite easy to achieve on a group enviroment. Solo roam, where the damage bonus from fiery wrath is harder to mantain, is probably where the trait could become useful, and even with that, I don’t think it will be enough to otuclass a thief.
I might be wrong and an improvement like that could start filling the competitive scene with offguards. As I already said, that’s a point I can easily accept, but it hasn’t been discussed yet.
Every point against Guardian mobility was done from a bunker/support point of view, so all of them become nothing just by setting an appropriate opportunity cost.
If a change can’t affect the currently competitive builds or produce a meta shift, if it just decreases the performance gap between classes for certain roles without taking the lead, then I can hardly see what could be wrong with it.
The current alternative, which is about forcing people to reroll, looks clearly worse to me.
^Seems like a close-minded way to view things to me. Even if shouts might be optimal (I don’t believe they are personally), it doesn’t mean they’re the only things that are viable or competitive. This especially goes for certain game modes.
It’s extremely close minded, yes, but that’s what we can infer from the last Ready Up video (I tried to be sarcastic for my whole post; don’t know if I achieved it :P).
For example, they provided reasons for the guardian to lack mobility, but all the reasoning was done from the perspective of a tanky supportive spec. I still can’t realize how a “25% movement speed increase while wielding a melee weapon” as an adept major in Zeal could hurt the balance.
It doesn’t look like a great choice for supportive builds. Staff, which is a quite usual pick for them, already covers the speed boost, and even without that, it might not worth the tradeoff on Valor, Honor or Virtues.
On the other hand, it’s an incredibly QoL improvement just for casual PvE gameplay (I was using both Staff and Retreat! when I started playing this game just for map exploration) and an interesting option for offguard PvP builds (which still would need to trade something, like a 10% bonus damage against burning foes), specially on a solo enviroment (having a WvW prey fleeing away from you just by walking faster can be stupidly frustrating).
Currently, we’ve no real altertive to Traveler Runes, which very nature is much more prone to unbalance btw.
It seems, however, that we can’t get something like that, not because we could outperform another class on their conceptual main role (which would be a fairly reasonable point) but just because it doesn’t fit the concept behind the class, which is extremely onedimensional.
(edited by Vargamonth.2047)
If you’re not playing with shouts you’re likely doing it wrong.
Guardian main strengths are tankiness and melee party support, specially through boons, so its obvious that you should use tanky/supportive gear (like clerics for example, maybe a few magi/soldier pieces if you want to slightly increase your HP), invest all your trait points on Valor, Honor and Virtues and provide as much party wide boons as you can, which is about using staff and shout/symbol centric builds.
Try to not think too much on alternative builds and roles because providing the class with damage and/or mobility on top of the strong sustain and support would be completely broken and won’t happen (It doesn’t matter if the trait system could prevent to pack all of it on the same build; it’s conceptually broken and won’t happen :P).
You should be probably thankful to ANet for understanding how the PvE meta works and providing the class with a good amount of damage multiplier through the placeholder traitlines. It’s quite obvious that, in any different scenario, such kind of traits should never exist for the Guardian.
Since I do not make regular purchases and I’ve fairly comfortable funds, I just play whatever content appealing to me at any given moment without worrying about if it’s profitable or not. I probably get an average of 1 gold/hour or so this way (without including materials, which I usually never sell).
On top of that, I tend to invest some money on long-run speculation which ends up producing an unpredictable (but almost surely above 100g / month) profit, which I use for some skin acquisition or gem purchase.
When I make several of these purchases on a short time, I tend to focus on getting some gold back for a few days, playing more profitable (but still enjoyable and not horribly grindy) content like dungeons and/or selling the materials I get for way higher revenue (4+ gold/hour)
If I would want to focus my gameplay totally on getting gold, I guess I could solo AC3 over and over and sell the slots for 15+ gold/hour.
In the end, it’s all about how much a player want to devote himself to farming.
The problem I feel is that the combat in the game was designed for an action-MMO but the content was designed like a traditional MMO.
The combat at its core is fast paced, with a lot of mobility, and dodging is plenty.
The fights in PvE are slow-paced, with little movement.
Its contradictory. they need to make PvE more like PvP, where attacks are faster, enemies have a lot more mobility, plus of course a bigger need for utilities other than DPS.
That would kill two birds with one stone. It would allow builds to be more diverse by having players consider more variables than just DPS, and also allow their balancing philosophy of unifying PvE and PvP be actually possible.
I completely agree.
Achieving it, however, seems technicaly impossible. They can probably move a few steps in that direction, but no one should expect an MMO (all the processing done at servers) AI behave like a player, not even like a really bad one.
I’m very disappointed with the whole ready-up episode.
Their envision of not only Guardian but pretty much every other class is extremely onedimensional, covering only a small subset of variations around a, lets say, meta build.
Main Guardian boon sources are symbols, shouts and, to a minor extent, some specific weapons (like staff) or trait improved virtues. Trait wise, we could say that the boon centric gameplay is allocated in Honor and Virtue lines.
Main Guardian self-sustain improvements outside of boons are allocated in Valor and Honor, while supportive sustain is mostly in the latter.
Most of the good condition removal, another guardian strength, is also allocated or tied to utilities that are improved by these three traitlines.
In the Guardian case, as we can see, the meta build would be a heavy Honor based one with additional improvement from either Valor or Virtues (or a mix of both).
Zeal, Radiance and quite a good amount of utilities and weapons behave just as placeholders and get completely out of the discussion.
Since these meta builds are the ones we will see the most on competitive enviroments, it makes total sense to have the developers looking closely at them, shaving, improving and making small modifications here and there in order to achieve a better competitive balance between all classes.
What doesn’t make any sense, however, is to have these builds imposing conceptual limitations on many others and preventing them from becoming a thing. It makes the game easier to balance, that’s for sure, but what was the point on having the current trait, weapon and utility choices if most of them are going to be subpar on purpose? Wasn’t that exactly the reason behind fixing weapon skillbars and cutting the amount of utilities we had in the original Guild Wars? Do we need even less options, just slight variations of a pattern build?
For example, their reasoning about the Guardian lack of mobility is quite a little vague, but I guess we could summarize it as:
- Preventing the guardian to easily reinforce different fights around the battlefield with overwhelming support.
- Preventing the guardian from easily disengaging and topping their health.
Ironically, most Guardian builds designed around that archetype of sustained heavy forntline support are actually using a staff, which provides swiftness, so it’s precisely when we build a Guardian outside the box (on a more selfish or less support oriented way) when we really felt and suffer the lack of things like speed boosts or soft CC despite we might not be presenting the original risks anymore.
The whole thing becomes even funnier when we realize that just a couple minutes before they were talking about opportunity cost, something their trait system really excels at and they repeatedly fail to fully deliver.
Don’t get me wrong. There might be reasons for an offguard to not have access to this kind of tools. If provided with them a Guardian could outperform another class on their main conceptual role, then it would be clearly a bad idea to so.
The truth is, however, that we haven’t even reached that point of the discussion.
They have just explained how broken would be to provide some capabilities to an specific subset of Guardian builds FOR FREE, which is something that pretty much every player would agree with.
Once the opportunity cost kicks in, which is basically everytime on a real scenario, the reasons that might suggest to negate some utility subset to a given class might not be valid anymore and they fail to realize this basic principle over and over.
The balancing of content has always in any game been around constraints and restrictions. People don’t want a tank because they like having a guy with low damage but high aggro and sustain, but because the game forces you to have one. If one day Square Enix goes ‘right, we’re gonna go PHYW and scrap the trinity and any need for anything’, I can guarantee you that every single raid in FF14 will consist of just DPS, like in this game.
You should not just balance higher DPS with a higher skill ceiling and be done with it, because then everything apart from high DPS is just training wheels.
Play how you want can actually never exist in a game. Players will always optimise, so if you create content in which nothing apart from sheer killing power is nessecary, players will just aim to stack sheer killing power and be done with it.
You need that constraint, you need that restriction in order to create a place for certain playstyles. That’s why the trinity has never left MMOs, because no one has found a better way to enforce those restrictions.
You can always enforce diversity by design. Meta setups built around effectiveness will still exist but, at least, you can ensure some different gamestyle prefrences being covered by them.
This kind of constraints are, however, one of those things I meant by “breaking the core concepts of the game”.
If GW2 conceptually intended to not force any class/spec requeriment and wants to hold on that, then there’s no real way to prevent damage oriented setups from completing content faster and enjoying a higher reward/time ratio.
In this situation, the “training wheels” approach, even if flawed from a “play what you want” standpoint, is the best way to ensure that a single meta doesn’t completely dominate.
For example, if all of the game’s dungeons favor maximizing damage, then that kind of means all the alternatives are just there for giggles. That’s not balance, and it’s not what you want. I would assume a competent designer would like to have a multitude of effective options amongst all classes.
I tried to explain the problem with this a few posts above.
You can successfully design some encounter to be more suited for a different type of setup, like one built around sustain for example, but in the end, the damage oriented one, even if maybe having a harder time, still kill things faster.
Unless you completely abuse time gated events, non combat oriented puzzles and gimicky mechanics, you can hardly prevent a setup dealing way more damage from finishing the content in less time, and from a gold farming perspective (which is what most dungeons are nowadays about) this is just enough to make them superior.
This advantage is so natural that trying to achieve something different becomes impossible without breaking the core concepts of the game.
In this situation, the only way to bring diversity is to make the game overall harder and try to make the difficulty to ramp up as one gets closer to a full damage spec. This way, it’s the player skill level what decides how much survivability can be sacrificed and traded for damage and creates a whole spectrum of builds based on what each player can handle.
Unfortunately, as you probably have already noticed, this has nothing to do with gameplay preferences, and someone who might like the concept around sustain, no matter how skilled is, gets automatically placed at the bottom of the list. That’s probably a battle which will never be won.
I’m really interested to hear ideas of encounters where tanking would be a better strategy than a full damage with reasonable difficulty and without gimmicks.
So no stat ignoring environmental weapons or boss killing itself if you tank its hits.
How about a low HP,long range boss? Or a boss with a long invulnerability fase? A boss that gets a significant temporary defense boost if a dps threshold is reached? A boss that receives more damage if you stand on a damaging area the longer you stand into it the more damage you do?
- Low HP long range boss
I don’t get what is achieved with this. A Long range boss would probably rely on projectiles, making it easy to burst down in melee while protected by reflects.
Even if those projectiles are made unblockable (which is a design I totally dislike), there are still high chances on AD mashing being effective.
Then dodge out any possible AoE and the boss is probably down, easily.
- Long invulnerability phase
This is just a time gated event, like the one I’ve proposed myself. Full damage is still potentially superior, just by a much lesser degree thanks to the time gating.
- Temporary defense boost if a certain DPS threshold is reached.
If the defense boost is high enough, this would make groups right below the threshold the optimal ones. If not, full damage groups would still be prefered.
It’s close to placing a DPS cap, which obviously works but feels terrible design wise (pretty mcuh like uncrittable foes :P).
- Damaging area that boost atack
It’s an interesting mechanic for a boss but not something you could use over and over.
It obviously depends on how powerful the received damage and the attack boost are and how much HP the boss has (It already exists in Arah, for example, and full damage setup are still prefered).
It’s also extremely biased for different classes. Warriors, for example, would not only have an easier time due to highr HP and armor, but could probably use defiant stance too (maybe even Endure Pain depending on the coding) and get boosted and healed at the same time.
(edited by Vargamonth.2047)
Can you define “some damage”? If tanks can’t kill them fast enough they lose their only advantage (tankiness) because the enemies get stronger. If they can kill them fast enough then damage specced players have plenty of free time which they can spend only on kiting (close to zero damage taken, depends on enemy skills and terrain).
Even if total damage taken would be equal (tanks tanking, damage specs kiting), damage dealers would have an advantage because they can burst down enemies easier (thus recover from mistakes). With tanks if you make mistakes you suddenly have buffed enemies and not much you can do about it.
SOME could be something allowing 4 man on a damage oriented setup to focus on the minor subset of mobs (lets say 2 ranged) during the first seconds (up to 10, probaly a lot less required) while the melee ones are soft controlled by things like cripple kiting or pushbacks, then weaken the major subset (4 melee in this case) for 10 seconds while aided by harder CC (wards, chills, …) with ranged attacks for another 10 seconds, and finally finish them at melee in a few seconds while protected by blind.
Tankier groups (or groups sending 2 people to the platforms for safety) would need more time for killing the ranged ones (receiving more damage from them, which they should be able to sustain) and engage in close combat (for higher damage output) with the melee ones sooner and for a longer time, relying much more on sustain (natural tankiness and healing, AoE weakness/protection, …) than on blinds.
In my opinion just having strong enemies which respawned after some delay would work fine (while being a simpler system). You could burst them, sustain them or kite them. With burst you would take lots of damage but have lots of time with reduced pressure. With sustain you would take some damage and have some time with reduced pressure. With kiting you would take least damage but no time with reduced pressure.
My only concern with this is the possibility of an OOC situation. If that’s somehow prevented, then I guess it could still work perfectly fine as an attrition encounter.
Doesn’t that favor damage? If they get stronger over time you want to kill them before they get strong enough. Kiting is really easy in PvE so damage specs could probably just range them down.
But yeah, time gated encounters kind of equalizes different builds.
Doesn’t exactly FAVOR damage, but it requires SOME damage, both for the platforms and probably for the lane too. A staff #1 spamming full cleric guardian group would fail the event, and I totally support it :P
Also, even if a RNG spawn could eventually create a heavy melee wave (which would be the ideal situation for kiting a little bit), there would be still some ranged monster (the one you probably want to kill fast). Heavy ranged spawns (ideal situation for things like reflects) and mixed ones (where you probably want to focus on some type of enemies depending on what CDs are up) would be possible too.
In the current state, some time gated encounters here and there are absolutely a must if designers want to bring some build diversity.
If we look at some fight isolatedly, then high sustain setups have an easier time surviving and recovering from possible mistakes while high damage ones have to deal with a far lesser amount of moves, so lesser chances of making a mistake. Between them we have a whole spectrum of setups achieving different balances of these two advantages.
Despite obvious issues with both extremely survivable setups, laughing at enemy attacks, and extremely damaging ones, killing enemies before they have the chance to become a threat, the whole idea seems pretty balanced.
There’s a problem, however, when we stop isolating the encounter and start looking at the big picture. Any group will receive the same reward for a given content, but the damage oriented one will end it faster and, since the game doesn’t shut down your PC or put a cap on the gold/time ratio (which would be the most stupid design decisssion ever made), will be able to run more content for additional rewards, automatically bacoming a superior choice.
If a higher build diversity is desired by devs, then it’s mandatory to have a mix of:
- Some time gated (or no stat based and quite long) event here and there, effectively reducing the time gap between different setups.
- An overall hard game that gets easier the more sustain the group brings, so it’s each player skill what decides how much towards full damage can be built a character.
While the statement is true, the skill required to perform on a full damage group is still really low for most encounters (almost every exception being allocated on high level fractals), mainly thanks to a crappy AI (allowing the same tactics to work over and over in different scenarios), downed state (easy and fast mistake recovery for almost any setup) and low health pools (allowing to melt enemy champion in a few seconds, before they can become a real threat, specially if the group can use things like reflects or aegis).
The comination of those is specially nocive because encourages full damage specs to group together, not only in order to achieve a more efficient run (which sounds totally reasonable to me) but because some players (maybe a majority) rely on these fast killing tactics more than on their own skill in order to use a damage spec.
(edited by Vargamonth.2047)
That’s not balanced at all since by prolonging fights you have it easier. What stops people from snaring and slowing down mobs and run around because you set pointless time barrier?
That’s why lane mobs get stronger over time.
After 30 seconds of snare they hit close to twice as hard, run faster than players and can not be controlled neither by CC nor conditions.
The lane itself is an attrition fight, so it’s prefectly OK to control mobs for a while in order to buy time, but you still want to kill them sooner than later, way before they start hitting like a truck and become immune to CC, blind or any other tool that could allow to dispatch them easy.
Platform fights are time sensitive, so the faster you can deal with wardens, the sooner the fractal will be finished. In this sense, full offense has the potential to deliver the best results (I can’t see a reason for this to not happen tbh :P), but there are several details that could encourage players to try something different.
- Since they keep respawning, it doesn’t matter how fast the players on the lane can deal with enemies. That’s a quite long attrition fight and likely to be harder on full damage specs.
We’ve already seen full damage groups succeeding on this kind of enviroments, like the CoF 2 gate event or the old dredge clown car (even if damage absolutely mattered there, it was still an attrition fight), so this would be doable too, just harder.
- The faster you kill wardens, the sooner the next platform fight will happen. In this situation, the platform debuff might cause no players being available to handle a warden, not only failing that fight and bringing the whole event closer to a failure, but also wasting 2 minutes (which is more than enough to make a full offensive setup useless).
If short platform fights are the goal, then no more than a single player should fight each warden (excepting, probably, the last ones). While a full offensive spec would achieve a faster kill, it would also be squishier (specially without team support) and just a single mistake could be disastrous if there’s no other player available as reinforcement (by sending a single player to each fight, there’s always another one, more likely two of them, available for this, but there could be none if failures are too common).
More balanced specs could do the same with arguably less risk of failure and without causing a huge increase on the completion time (maybe 1-2 minutes, for an event that’s likely to last about 6 minutes at least). Also, since there would be likely 2 players that would not need to fight at platforms, there’d be room for some kind of tank/healer spec in the group (this is also true for a full offensive group).
If shortest time is not the goal, duos would be totally viable at each fight for a much more safe approach (in this case, at the expense of a decent amount of time).
The time wise optimal approach is still full damage (as it should be), but the risk vs reward ratio could promote some kind of diversity for safety reasons (a failure means a HUGE waste of time).
In terms of gameplay (not necessarily gear stats), the lane fight could use of A LOT of control and even appreciate some healing support. Since they would be fought with 1-2 players, wardens could also be much more vulnerable to CC than usual champions and condition specs could be interesting instead of a burden for the group.
(edited by Vargamonth.2047)
I’m really interested to hear ideas of encounters where tanking would be a better strategy than a full damage with reasonable difficulty and without gimmicks.
So no stat ignoring environmental weapons or boss killing itself if you tank its hits.
If we look at shortest possible completion times as the main goal, then there’s hardly any strategy better than full damage unless we use gimmicks or just make it unviable.
IMHO, full damage should always be the most efficient setup time wise. The current complaints (in my case at least :P) are probably more about risk-reward (sometimes, too many times I would say, the full damage approach is even among the safest ones you can use).
As an example of a more balanced fight, I present a Marionette fractalized version, which is obviously gimmicky as hell :P
After a BRIEF introduction, player might activate the event and be sent to one of the Marionette lanes.
While on the lane, waves of enemies spawn. The initial wave consists on 6 enemies, and another wave of 3 random enemies appears whenever there are less than 4 foes alive, so the group is facing 4-6 enemies at any time.
In order to prevent players from endlessly kiting a group of 4 enemies (which could be of 4 melees at some points due to RNG spawn, for example) and encourage killing, they receive a “charged” buff every few (lets say 10) seconds, which increases their damage output by 25% each and might provide additional strengths (1st one might provide a 50% increased speed, 2nd immunity to CC and 3rd immunity to conditons, for example)
In the meanwhile, there’s a priory NPC calibrating the portal (he will be attacked if all players go stealth for a long time or something like that, causing a wipe and reseting the whole event), which takes one minute.
Once the portal is active, any amount of players can go through it and face the warden in order to destroy the generator and sever one chain (enemies keep spawning on lanes though, so the group needs to split).
The portal remains open until a timer (1 minute too) expires or the generator is destroyed. If the timer expires with some players (dead or alive, the second ones instantly dying to a marionette massive attack) still on the platform, they will remain there and won’t be reachable for a res until the calibration rotation selects that platform again. On top of this, the failure progress bar would increase (the increase would depend on the fractal level).
Players that take part on a succesful platform fight are ported back to the lane and receive a 3 minute debuff that prevents them from using another portal. Then, the calibration stage starts again and the cycle repeats until the event fails and full resets (the failure progress bar fills or the priory guy dies) or all 5 chains are severed.
For that fight I use a GS Sw/Fc 2(II)/6(VI,X,XI)/6(I,X,XII)/0/0 meditation build with Smite Condition, CoP and SY!
It’s probably far from the best option, but the fight usually neds with way over a whole minute remaining without even full offensive gear (still quite offensive though).
Medis are there mostly for a bit of sustain, so if you are using some kind of haling gear, 15 points in Honor should be more than enough, freeing trait points for 4 in Zeal (Zealous Blade) or 2 in Valor (Retributive armor), and maybe 1 in Virtues for a bit more of protection.
(edited by Vargamonth.2047)
In any case, a change like this would require additional changes like:
- Better AI
If our “lesser bosses” are nothing but some idiotic golems that get LoSed into a corner and keep point blank shooting against a wall of reflection, then the change is for nothing.
This kind of enemies would require an slightly higher amount of moves and some kind of decision making allowing them to dodge out / blink away from extreme cleave / AoE damage, stop firing against projectile reflects / blocks or wasting their most powerful moves against a precasted aegis.
- Overhaul of natural resistances (unshakeable, defiant).
With an increase of the effective attack rate, damage prevention through control (CC, blind, …) becomes less relevant and the current natural resistances may be softened (they should be modified anyways IMHO), allowing control to be a lot more interesting for bossfights (atm it’s really situational besides the usual pull against a wall).
A properly designed fight against several foes could also make useful some forms of control, like knockbacks, which are currently useless for the most part unless you’re looking for a kick.
I’d go for a X% hard CC duration reduction (which should include immobilize btw, even if it’s a condition) on top of a DR system, providing enemies with an N second immunity after being affected by a given effect (a N1s DR for CC, a N2s DR for blind). These numbers shouldn’t be fixed, but adjusted depending on the content (a single big open world boss should be more resilient than some foe on a 5-man multi-boss encounter).
Vulnerability and Weakness duration should probably be adjusted (increased) depending on the content, and clearly include Cripple and Chill (based on the usual long CDs chill could probably work unmodified on 5-man content, but would need a reduction for bigger player groups).
- Adequate HP pool.
This is a really important part. If you replace a single boss with several enemies and you don’t intend them to be stacked and cleaved down, you need to make sure they don’t explode in a few seconds.
Preventing LoS abuse through AI, providing the enemies with disengage tools and making them a real threat while stacked helps, but a decent survivability is still mandatory.
Now that there’s a quite high damaging meta stablished, it shouldn’t be hard for designers to test their own creations and properly adjust numbers to the desired levels. Against popular belief, damage differences between full offensive, balanced and even sustained setups aren’t that extreme … it’s when players use terrible builds with next to zero sinergy (useless trait, utility and weapon choices, lackluster might and vulnerability stacking, …) when the time spent on a fight reaches ridiculous levels.
There’s a design compromise here. If designers want some content to be PUG casual firendly, with players having a pleasant experience whatever crap spec they have chosen, then offensive organized (and not so organized) groups will necessarily melt things in the blink of an eye.
If you want the content to provide some kind of challenge for this groups, however, you need to accept that terrible builds will have a really bad (or long, at least) time with it.
- Meanwhile, don’t let mobs fight alone. Especially in the open world, but also in dungeons. The game is just not made for many-vs-one fights, I’d argue it isn’t made for 5v5 either but the PvPers will again insist that because the AE-cap number happens to match it has to be made for that, no matter how little the game supports smallscale PvP. Anyhow, point is, your game’s design emphasizes medium~large group combat, it doesn’t start to feel valid until you have ~15 players or so. Embrace that in PvE design. Give lots of friendly NPCs which rezz and heal and create zones like Braham or Kasmeer do, and give lots of non-trash enemies to boss fights which link for abilities, block areas, heal the boss, everything like that. Make them not stack and rezz each other if not finished.
While I agree on the game not working fine with “many-vs-one” combats, I completely disagree on the game not supporting small scale fights.
I find 2on2 and 3on3 fights the ones where the combats system works at it best. Large scale battles, like the ones we can find in WvW (a full 5on5, sometimes even 4on4, sPvP teamfight starts feeling too large for my personal taste), are the ones I actually find unsupported.
On these large scale fights, the “action combat system” gets lost and replaced by a much more classic passive gameplay. You don’t actively defend from that nasty pindown (dodges tend to be used totally oblivious on the dame source, just as a small invulnerability window when you feel you’re receiving too much damage); you don’t interrupt healing skills on purpose; … there are too many things happening at the same time and too much clutter in the screen for this to be possible. Even the downed state, which (despite several downsides) offers a lot of strategic gameplay on small scale fights , gets ignored and most bodies are just massively cleaved to death.
You just assume “things” are going to happen and take countermeasures. You build around tankiness and sustain for the most part (some backline players, usually eles and maybe necros, being the exemption), bring a couple of guardians to rotate stabilities and keep the party immune to CC during engages, slot a good amount of condition removal, …
It’s just a completely different game, and clearly not an action based one. There are certainly A LOT of players, probably a majority, that prefers this gameplay, but that doesn’t make the combat system to magically support it better.
The problem with a “many-versus-one” scenario is that it’s just the opposite. We move from a cluttered enviroment we can’t analyze to a new one where there’s a single model to focus on, from a high reliance on passive defenses to a situation where they are close to a waste as long as the player is any decent.
A fight against 3 “lesser champions” instead of the usual single boss automatically increases the rate of received attacks (which is something that some people has been asking for a long time) but still allows it to be countered by control, positioning and some other ways unrelated to defensive gear.
(edited by Vargamonth.2047)
PvP is always more sensitive to class imbalances and where the balance focus should be. Then PvE can be designed around it, which is exactly where GW2 fails for the most part.
Crappy AI, engine limitations and, IMHO, an over-reliance on single bosses, are the main culprits on making most PvE content too one dimensional, and the kind of things that should change (some number tweaking between game modes is always possible too) in order to improve the game.
In regards to confusion, for example, each PvE enemy could have a coefficient that modifies aftercasts and/or idle times between attacks based on the expected damage taken from a confusion tick.
You need to realize that most dungeons have not substantially changed since launch, when some of the current usual tactics were probably unexpected.
Unlike many other games, neither classes nor the combat itself are designed and balanced around dungeons (not even around PvE) and a lot of things on these old designs look more like a “let’s put some random enemies here and see what players do with the terrain layout and the tools at their disposal” than anything else.
It’s now that some tactics and metas have become prevalent when designers can and must analyze and test their own content from a player point of view, trying to deliver less placeholders and much more interesting fights.
Unfortunately, we don’t even have a proper dungeon design team anymore so I would not hold my breath waiting for someone to rework and polish them :P
that’s why anet shouldn’t spend too much efford designing this organized content. Give us more gauntlet or flying doylak, or sky crystal, or aspect arena content.
I’m fine if they made more organized raid content. I just hope that is not the “emphasis” of the next living story.
I’ve to disagree.
I’m not a big fan of massive battles so I would be fine with more content where I rely just on my own performance, but this is an MMO and group content, even massive one, not only needs to exist but must be the “emphasis” for the most part.
IMHO ANet has been doing a great job with this open world massive group content for the last LS releases. Marionette, Watchwork Knights, Boss Blitz … all of them are a huge improvement from the “lets blob and spam attacks so we tag as much as we can”
design we got for over a year.
None of them can be compared with an organized raid. While more complex than mindless zerging (everything is), main procedures have been easy enough to be handled just with the use of map chat and the main reasons for them to fail have been either a lack of population (already “solved” by megaservers) and some players’ attitude.
That’s what needs to change, and if it needs to be the hard way, so be it.
(edited by Vargamonth.2047)
TBH, they should disable taxi options on pavillion along with disabling any ruleset for placing you into certain map and it should be completely random in which map you land and then you are “locked” to that map for an hour.
Because playing with friends is completely overrated… =/
You can play everything else with your friends. If you dont like community building then you would stay out of pavillion and do other things with your friends.
I’ve seen how a lot of the community likes to play, and I simply don’t want to be a part of that portion of the community. I have found groups of friends to join and play with for all areas of the game and i enjoy the freedom to do so as it lets me ignore the part of the community that quite frankly annoys the crap out of me.
Forcing people to carry others is quite lame.
I’m not saying they have to change the way they play, but I should have the options to avoid them if I want.
I hope devs are taking notes on why pavillion was a very bad idea.
And, my fear is that this is somewhat a template of LS2, and i hope they have a grain of wisdom to change it while its not too late. Theres still time to make things right.
What, promoting cooperative good play?
You do realize this is the easiest raiding game ever created.
I dont’ think that’s what people are complaining. People are complaining very few people actually coordinates with other “bad players” in open world. They just get together with all the good(dedicated players) in an instance.
So basically it is an instanced raid in which people spend “quite a bit of time” right clicking to get ferried.
During the first days of the patch gold farming servers and taxis were almost nonexistant and there was people trying to organize random megaservers before almost every event activation.
Did it myself a couple of times and guess what? I could consider myself lucky if I managed to get 10 people to cooperate. Most players didn’t give a kitten (they were probably too busy complaining about how crappy the content was and how the good farm was gone) and almost every organization attempt ended up being nothing but a frustrating experience and a complete waste of time.
The current situation is nothing but the result of that. It’s not (for the most part) about “good” players trying to avoid “bad” ones so they can farm better, it’s about a huge part of the playerbase showing a complete and active unwillingness to cooperate and having to be avoided just in order to play the content.
Yes, it was my topic and it was removed for "posting of unreleased game data ".
kitten ..:. That was an interesting thread!
It was much more than interesting.
It was a thread about actual numbers with active dev participation, the kind of thing that could have allowed us to move from a blind discussion based on impressions to delimit the issues and provide proper feedback based on data.