Guild Wars 2

Ehhhh.
I don’t know.

My knee jerk emotional reaction is a forlorn sigh and a trailing “…probably not”.
On the other hand, something about the idea that dungeons will exist as a perfect pristine time capsule bothers me logically.

Having two separate AI systems running parallel to eachother is straight-up dangerous, and with the announcement that Breakbars would be added retroactively to mobs it seems less likely they would be making some kind of hail mary stab at trying anyway via quarantine. I think the old mobs will be receiving the updated AI albeit a bit more homogeneously. I really can’t see them acknowledging the AI needs improvement enough to go through all the work of installing a new system, just to strive to make it behave like the old system they got so many complaints about.

In a PvE sense I’d say gameplay is without a doubt improved, but our net impact is debatable because for non-competitive play we experienced the same power creep everybody else did but competitively it’s measured relative to other classes.

You gotta’ bear in mind, competitive applications receive a disproportionate amount of conversation on forums that isn’t at all representative of the general population.

While I’m yammering on,

Shouts in general also need some work.
They really need something to help them step out from the shadow of Signets or keep themselves from being relegated to Resounding Timbre proc slaves. I get that they’re for pet micromanagement, but I wonder if opening them up to Spirit micromanagement as well might help these utility lines pull themselves out of the muck together?

“Sic ‘Em!”
Your pet runs faster and does more damage. Your Spirits become Enlarged.
Sic ‘Em (10s) : 40% Damage, 40% Movement Speed.
Cooldown: 45 seconds
Enlarged: 6 seconds
Revealed: 6 seconds
Range 2,000

“Guard”
Command your Pet to move to target area. Your pet will return to and use non-melee skills from this area until cancelled or duration ends. For the duration of Guard your Spirits will be summoned to the target area instead of around you. Your pet gains protection for a short duration.
Cooldown: 45 seconds
Protection: 10 seconds
Duration: 60 seconds
Range: 1,200

     —>Guard Cancel
      Guard is no longer in effect

“Protect Me!”
Instead of attacking, your pet will protect you by absorbing Damage you would take.
Specific Spirits will absorb the damage from specific Conditions.
Frost: Torment Damage
Sun: Burning Damage
Earth: Bleeding Damage
Lightning: Confusion Damage
Nature: All Condition Damage
Water: Poison Damage
Duration: 6 seconds
Breaks Stun

“We heal as One!”
Cooldown: 20
Heal yourself, your Pet, and your Spirits.
Healing Self: 6,520
Healing Pet: 6,520
Healing Spirits: 3,225

“Strength of the Pack!”
…Honestly I don’t even know. That’s skill’s pretty good already.

Overall Spirit gameplay was improved this patch.
I’m glad they firmly decided between minion and turret playstyles. And I have to admit, they chose well. I legitimately do find myself wondering if I should nuke the spirit to reposition it or in a handful of cases benefit from the passive longer. In general, this is good work, and exactly what the line needed.

……But it all kind of left me with a terrible realization.
I know this sounds crazy, but, I think Spirit of Nature is in a bad place now.

Hear me out!
The effect is undeniably potent and ‘worthwhile’…but the gameplay behind achieving the effect seems shallower and more frustrating than its cousins. I think it’s because I’ve got some reasonable ability to predict and manipulate the movement trajectory of mobs, but there isn’t something similar for people (other than myself). AOE rezzing is awkward to try to be pre-emptive about, because the situations you use it in specifically aren’t planned for and aren’t in your hands to manipulate. I end up having to use it reactively, which comes across unnecessarily sluggish and noticeably missing the internal debate of persisting spirit/active effect that is more or less the saving grace of this entire operation.

Ultimately I end up thinking Spirit of Nature needs a revamp.
It should still be something that synergizes with other spirits, but also meaningfully contributes to teamplay outside of worst-case scenarios. The self-resurrection trick is a great skill-ceiling reward for a pet class, but honestly it could be available through Search & Rescue just as well as it could here – and would be a much needed buff to a thoroughly overshadowed utility. Similarly, Water Spirit could really step up and take it’s place as the ‘Healing’ Spirit and start competing for the healing slot in general, if the Condition Removal functionality was transported over from Spirit of Nature to Water Spirit.

If I may make the following suggestions:

( tangentially related Baseline Change:
Moving Enlarged from: Grow larger; deal 25% more damage and move 50% faster, To: You become larger; dealing 25% more damage and gaining a Breakbar. So Signet of the Wild would shuffle around it’s elements to something like:

Signet of the Wild: 62 heal
You become enlarged and move faster.
Enlarged: you become larger; dealing 25% more damage and gaining a Breakbar
Movement speed increase: 50%
Duration: 6 seconds)

Water Spirit
Healing: 805
Water Spirit Buff effect: 75% chance on hit to gain Regeneration.
Number of Targets: 5
Duration: 60
Radius: 1,200

     —>Aqua Surge
     Initial Self Heal: 3,865
     Water Spirit Heal: 1,930
     Number of Conditions Removed: 3
     Number of targets: 5
     Radius: 240

Search and Rescue
For a span of time your pet will seek out and revive a downed ally. If you are downed anytime during the seeking duration, the pet will trade its life to resurrect you.
Cooldown: 85 seconds
Seeking Duration: 2 seconds
Does not work on Defeated allies
Range 1,200

Spirit of Nature:
Grants Boon Duration and Condition Duration to allies.
Nature Spirit Buff effect: Boon Duration + 30% and Condition Duration + 15%
Number of Targets: 5
Duration: 60 seconds
Radius: 900

     —>Nature’s Gift:
     Your allies gain the effect of Enlarged.
     Enlarged: you become larger; dealing 25%      damage and gaining a Breakbar
     Number of Targets: 5
     Duration: 6 seconds
     Radius: 480

Nature’s Vengeance
Each of your Spirits pulses a particular boon every 3 seconds. 50% activated effect range increase. If a Spirit becomes Enlarged the Number of Targets for all abilities and effects is increased to 10 and the Enlarged Breakbar replaces the Spirit’s healthbar for the duration.
Frost: Fury (1 second)
Sun: Might (2 seconds)
Earth: Protection (1 second)
Lightning: Swiftness (2 seconds)
Nature: Stability (1 second)
Water:Vigor (1 second)

Please sync everything.
Internal Cooldowns tied to the events that drive them should be the standard.
I’m sure it’s the result of intricate reasoning on the back-end, but in practice it all just feels so clunky.

Mmm.

Maybe we should see what Druid is bringing to the table before pulling the synergy card.

I support removing damage modifiers.
It helps close the gap between Power and Condition building, especially since they were careful to replace them with things like Crit-chance and Might that straddle the line between.

I also wanted to say your Trait comments seem really on point, for the most part:

- Attack of Opportunity is weak and niche, and by extension, ‘Moment of Clarity’ is too.

- ‘Strider’s Defense’ getting some kind of closing is sensible and even suits the name better. ….Bonus points for somehow swinging that.

- AOE Condi Cleanse is exactly what is needed for Invigorating Bond and Nature Magic (and heck even Poison Master in a round-about way).

- Stacking ‘Light on Your Feet’ seems like a natural call.
One stack downplays the choice of purposefully burning defense for offense.
As one stack is so commonplace you may as well wait for it to come naturally, but dodging back-to-back is unusual and requires conscious commitment to trade it off for more offense. Gameplay about making use of a damage increase on your opponent’s terms isn’t bad – but it’s not nearly as deep as having the trait make you choose between pre-emptive risk/reward and reactive twitch tactics.

- Precision to ‘Most Dangerous Game’ is…alright.
But honestly I kind of think this trait needs to feature something at the ‘end’ or otherwise increase non-linearly. :01 shouldn’t be exactly as rewarding as :08 ; the latter is alot harder to get to. And, honestly I’d likely unload while I still had SotW and Quickness from other traits, so getting to the full stack might actually feel anticlimactic as most things I’d want to ‘do’ with it would still be on cooldown.

Sorry, OP.
I’m actually in favor of that change.

Ehhhhh.
I’m going to need to hear more specifics on Spirits.

As it stands now, I just can’t shake the feeling Spirits were changed to serve as a stronger foundation for somebody else’s specialization, and not to improve their gameplay for Ranger. Still alot of functional redundancy and dubious impact, baseline actives still pinpoint location based with no mentioned precision for deciding that location, heck, the active/passives being so dissonant-niche you just end up kamikazi’ing/sticking it into a corner instead of having any real pathos play about it’s healthbar actually seems even worse now. It was alot of shuffling 1’s and 0’s around, but everything that was wrong with them before…is still basically wrong with them.

Even with all of that, I’ll still give it a chance. Maybe there are things unsaid…

Surprisingly, out of everything, what I ended up not liking definitively is ye olde Rejuvenation, if you can friggin’ believe it.

That ‘Purposefully hovering my healthbar below 50% for additional damage’ gameplay comes with the potential for a solid trifecta of Quickness/MightStacking/SotWild.

…But to get to Instinctive Reaction you have to opt in to automatically receive regen at the 50% mark, which may knock you out of Most Dangerous Game before the ideal 8 seconds is up. Part of the joy of Most Dangerous Game is actively making a conscious choice of how long I want to ride the danger line, not having some bloody background tick make the call.

That feels like totally unnecessary aggravation potential.

I’m sorry for your loss.

I guess it depends on what they’re aiming to accomplish?

I don’t have much of an opinion on ‘helping Players disengage from Players’ or ‘helping Players disengage from Mobs’.

‘helping Mobs disengage from Players’ could be pretty great, though.

Assuming they had to homogenize the way Mob & Player leaps operate for back-end reasons. I imagine any decently mobile AI can be shutdown a bit too easily given the crazy access players have to snares, and making sure movement skills guarantee distance is what I’d do to create a failsafe that can get it out of the fire when needed.

Heck, my Ranger can more or less bring whole lanes to a standstill in VW right now, that’s maybe not the best thing if you’re looking for mob mobility to help constitute some of the challenge/fun.

I’d go for 3 slots : One Amulet, One Ring, One Earring.

Stats would be weighted Amulet (upgradeable) > Ring (upgradeable) > Earring (not upgradeable). Back-pieces would exist as a wholly cosmetic choice with no stats at all, and I’d try to add some cosmetic component to upgrade jewels (like jewel color tints your weapon skin’s particles, or some other low-overhead solution).

…
If you really boil it down : trinkets currently are 12 choices spread out over things that will ultimately account for ~13%-ish of your total core stat spread, without anything tangentially interesting like additional effects or aesthetics.

It often feels like too many decision-points spread over too little real-world ‘impact’, and that seems to keep the choices from having stakes on the individual level. So much of it is empty clicking and inventory shuffling to support a decision I’d already come to, because trinket-choices only start to get worth considering by the handful. At some point it starts to feel like busy work instead of character building.

I kind of puzzle about druid themeatically.

When Ranger is sticking to the ‘physical’ side of things they’re more or less void of theme with a few noteworthy edges cases (spikes). When they do get more ‘magical’, they can visually step on Elementalist or Syvari/Mordem toes, with the exception of that sort of underdeveloped ‘mobs with transparency shaders’ line of thinking.

Druid having a staff and being so traditionally magical, sort of leaves me with the impression they need need to lean full-on ‘magic’ here. Which is unfortunate as it’s kind of a potluck of visual leftovers than it’s own established identity on Ranger.

On a clarity level I suppose I’m more behind greater development in the Maul/Swoop/Dart/ManoWar/Spirits direction, than an Entangle or Lightning Reflexes direction. To dip into another franchise for a second here; I likes me some Geomancy but Animism is a bit more unique.

the difference is i think they should have more if then situations between the player and the enemy. AKA player npc interation.

Others say the best thing is an overall prescripted plan that has a lot of details.

And it’s fine to champion either of those stances, but, we’re talking about a system that layers upon itself almost helplessly.

Random, Scripted, Player does X mob does Y : that’s more like parts and pieces of the system in isolation than a whole complete AI. It’s almost harder to pursue any singular one these things as an ideal case, than it is to mix them. (and I don’t mean from encounter to encounter, I mean : all in the same beast in the same fight.)

Heck, my very basic example couldn’t even manage to be one thing purely.

@ Iris Ng
It’s nice to hear some word on this!
but, that oil reference went sailing over my head.

Well, let’s hold on a second here.

A lot of this discussion basically boils down to our collective understanding of AI and our ideas for how to design around it’s restrictions. Since it’s so central to the discussion, let’s just take a minute to talk about AI.

                            Sandwhich Making Sequence
                                       /           |                        \
Get bread out of fridge     Select Flavor     Put flavor between two slices bread
                                                       /         \
                                BLT Sequence            PBJ Random Sequence
                           /            |          \                             |           \
     Get Bacon    Get Lettuce   Get Tomato      Get PB    Get Jelly

The AI goes through this performing the actions listed. They generally perform these actions from top to down and then left to right within each level. Whether an action was successful or unsuccessful determines what the AI will perform next, and the node directly above the actions says how many actions in each group are necessary to go through.
- A Sequence will try to do everything directly under in order from left to right
- A Select it’ll try to accomplish just one thing directly under it moving from left to right until it’s successful once.
- A Random is a Select or Sequence that goes through the things under it randomly instead of left to right. Can be Weighted to prefer some things more than others.

This AI sequence:
Will get bread out of the fridge.
It’ll then select a flavor.
Since BLT is first, it’ll get Bacon, then Lettuce, then Tomato. If it was able to get all these things successfully, it moves on to putting these flavors between two slices of bread.
If we failed getting Lettuce, it would be unsuccessful and move on to PBJ. It’ll randomly select either PB or Jelly, and then get the remaining one. It’ll then move to the putting these flavors between two slices of bread.

That’s a very broad description of the industry’s boilerplate 15year-old StateMachine/BehaviorTree AI in so far as office smalltalk can take me.

It has a sense of Priorities, it can Follow-up one action with another, it can create reactions that happen ‘Mostly-but-not-every-time’ . There is just so much stuff between an absolute like ‘IF Player x:THEN mob y’ and the pure chaos of Completely Random. It’s pretty robust, really!

I have my reservations about adopting the Safety Dance as defacto boss behavior.
GW2 is pretty heavily invested in Movement as a part of Character Building.

So, while forcing the player to move to avoid a rooted-mob’s AOE is certainly engaging more of the players’ toolbox, shrugging our collective shoulders at the Snares part of equation sends a heckuva’ lot more metal clanging to the floor here than it does other games.

I’m more of the mind they need to start making bosses for GW2 and select conglomerates of it’s tools specifically, as opposed to bosses so accepting of any tool they could be thrown into virtually any other game on the market.

If I had to summarize:

A fire and forget glass banner that traded support potency for modest/redundant area control, despite not being any kind of positionally accurate.

Honestly, the Helping-Your-Allies stat can do a lot better than being ‘Toughness #2 barring the attrition-battle edge case’.

Only 1 Hit Point matters – the very last one.

Everything above that is just warning, and there’s only so interesting applying butterfly kisses to somebody’s warning system can get. I can’t tell you how many of the green numbers I’ve seen were for the sake of having green numbers, and not because it actually helped anybody in a meaningful way.

When it comes to healing in a game, play for stakes or not at all.

Things I liked:
5, 9, 10…

• Making the Fall Trait plant a Spike Trap instead of Muddy Terrain and removing Trapper’s Defense in favor of something new (anything new, really). Just a straight-up good idea.
• Fortifying Bond copying Stability is a reasonable buff.
• Adding Retaliation to Instinctual Bond seems fair, and it makes the ‘do I hit the pet’ choice for the opponent less of a no-brainer.

Things I’d totally change:
6, 7….

We ultimately do need a revive skill somewhere, while I think Nature’s Bounty is good add because it has alot of synergy elsewhere – I think they were right to cut Circle of Life as it’s more about easing bad play than making play overall more entertaining. Attack speed in skirmishing seems like a natural fit given quickdraw, but I think some tweaking can expand the build possibilities and feel a bit less passive.

• Healer’s Celerity:
  Increases revive speed 10%.
  Regen you apply has a 25% duration increase.
  Regen you or your Pets apply affect Downed Players.

• Carnivorous Appetite:
  While under the effect of Swiftness, your attacks are faster and your attacks heal you. While they are under the effect of Swiftness, your pet’s attacks are faster and heal them.

Things I’m not a fan of:
4, 12…

I think when you start getting into anti-anti-movement-impairment, the passive soft counters have officially gotten out-of-hand.

The whole idea of a soft counter is that it gives you something to do during combat as a response to your opponent’s action that mollifies it’s impact. It’s supposed to be a space for skill to swing the outcome in spite of your respective build choices, not to be yet another build choice. On the whole, I think the ilk of Dogged March are really ill-conceived, and I can’t support escalating the concept.

There’s just no friggin’ way Healing will ever be fun in this game.

Putting the awful futility of healing power, the boredom of low-impact heals, and conceptual conflict with the self-survivability core pillar aside…

When Guardian was first introduced Anet described their struggle to figure the core fun of it, and with it ultimately Support in general. The conclusion they arrived to was: Self Sacrifice.

Healers liking the act of healing because we’re all martyrs or secret masochists is fine thematically, but it sort of glosses over the more mechanically based finer points like the reactive gameplay of bigger heals and the snap decision-making of triage. A conclusion that leans on social/rp elements while blowing past the actual gameplay makes it seem like such an ‘outsider looking in’ thing to say. You can’t help but cast a sidelong glance and wonder if the finer points aren’t delved into for brevity or lack of understanding.

I mean,
it’s not like they’ve ever admitted to sitting around struggling to find the fun in damage, you know?

If we were in the business of pointing fingers at game-modes just because they can be exploited, how do instances get out of that unscathed given the state of dungeons?

Yeah, I’m sure sure game-mode has some impact..but I think at some point you just gotta’ start pointing fingers at the exploits themselves.

We’ve seen some attempt to discourage zergs with CP, Dry Top and SW, but they still have the problem of grouping random people together who may not have the same goals in mind, and have issues with allowing people to play together.

What about the old school MMORPG approach of mobs having a Lair?

Pre-instancing, I never felt a conflict of interests in my open-world endgame encounters. Sure, I might not want another guild to get the claim, but even my rivals were on the same page about what we were there to do. Like, nobody was off picking daisies next to the world dragon.

I think that’s because the space you found these endgame mobs in just didn’t have any other activities around. So if you were at that physical location, you were on-board with the activity by default.

It seems so simple, but I think it’s something they haven’t been able to explore until now.

Dynamic Events are largely unscheduled and there isn’t a quest chain to point you towards them, so there’s pressure to locate them where player can ‘stumble’ across them. Putting dynamic events in high traffic locations lends itself to divided goals and easy access zerging.

But now they have Vertical Space.
Events could be seen in progress across an impassible span, and could advertise their existence without putting it in a space with dual purposes or granting people access.

When you really get right down to it, there’s not a whole lot that separates the likes of Null Field/Purging Flames/Symbol of Swiftness/SmokeScreen.

If persistent pulsing circular AOE that helps allies/inhibits foes and is also a combo field is your pleasure, but the theme of Consecration doesn’t seem quite right…it’s not like you’re hurting for other options.

Personally, I kind of don’t think that’ll be Druid’s schtick.
It seem a bit close to Chronomancer’s Wells, because they added the ‘beneficial to allies’ part that Wells were (largely) natively missing.

Ahhh…
Huh…

About two-ish weeks ago, my guild noticed while doing the Ghost Wolf Guild Rush we could simply use the spacebar to Jump on top of things when previously we had to use the leap skill. And it’s not a bug, there’s a bonafide animation for it.

Might be totally unrelated, but this whole transformation discussion has me wondering if some telling code snippets might’ve been integrated. Has anybody else whose run the other Guild Rushes that features transforming into a Ranger Pet Animal noticed the ability to jump (devourer, spider, maybe baby polar bear)?

More on topic:
I agree adding a transformation skill-type to druid is both thematically appropriate and also kinda’ disappointing as they’re just…not…quite there yet.

One thing I’ve really enjoyed in other games is when Transformation in some way altered your actual game engine physical characteristics.

Moving faster, jumping higher, bigger hit-box/bigger reach, carrying other players, flying. That’s the kind of stuff that makes me delighted to play a shape-shifter, not new skill #237. As a more positionally-based game they’ve got real opportunity to capitalize on this sort of thing, and seemingly no real interest to.

I’m referring to normalizing the impact, not the content.

Like;
Imagine if Arcotodus’s Rending Maul applied 2 stacks of bleed every 30 seconds. You’re a Dev overlooking this balancing and you think that sounds weak. At this point you’re faced with two choices: either reduce the recharge or make it stronger.
They ended up reducing the recharge, I’m saying make it stronger.

I’m saying this because you avoid headaches like this.

Where the effect is more or less balanced at 15 seconds, but the skills that can activate that effect range from 6 to 60. So they put in a cooldown, and some of those choices dip into that awkwardly intermittent territory or carry an opportunity cost of not applying the effect 2 to 3 times when it could’ve (which discourages pets that strictly don’t need to be).

I’d almost prefer to get the outlier F2’s in line through buffs + recharge increases, than change the trait to accommodate the outliers and eat the nerf that would entail.

Honestly, I can’t even remember the last time I used Arctodus, and I find the low cooldown on Hawk/Eagle more irritating than empowering. Pets could really stand to be Normalized.

Eh,
Something about how you phrased that question sort of makes it seem like Instancing is a requirement for Challenge. I don’t know if I’d stress out over that.

It’s not like MMOs have always had Instances.

Technically, what they’ve always had was a means to limit the number of participants. Pre-WoW this was done in the Open-World. There’s nothing saying it can’t be done in the Open-World again – but this time with an ad-hoc party construction more befitting this game’s dynamic and non-competitive design direction.

They’ve already sort of explored it. Splitting people into different locations via breach/lanes was a real solid step forward. I haven’t heard much traction on this front in the expansion so far. But, here’s hoping all that bending over backwards not to equate their new ‘challenging encounters’ to any label we currently know amounts to some real strides on this front.

One interesting thing worth noting is that there are some real possibilities in the Mastery system to help out with this. The system could be used to increase the complexity of a big boss fight while also keeping open world’s trademark ad-hoc party construction, because it’s possible to use the gating to keep people from entering before they’ve been taught the fight mechanics elsewhere.

Nobody has to sit around explaining what purple mushrooms do to a group of people they trust to listen, if you had to use purple mushrooms to reach the boss fight in the first place.

Phys:

Just to be clear:
I don’t really have a horse in this race, I’m basing my satisfaction of the system on multiple factors.

It’s just that reading people examine choices on the technical numbers level feels a bit like watching somebody struggle to dig a well two feet away from a river. It’s mean to question the effort….but hard not to say something.

Diversity isn’t quite the right word for describing potential outcomes.

You wouldn’t look at the room full of White guys and say it was a Racially Diverse group of people. Even if the group could have been otherwise – you still don’t call it Diverse until it actually is.

Semantics aside,
I think taking the technical approach here is a bit academic. It downplays the human element, and that feels a bit like talking-around-the-point for something so dependent on user-input as Making Choices. I think it’s good to try and be objective, but be objective about people’s subjective responses – not systemic technicalities that have little real world application.

Less Permutation, More Statistics.

Really the thing that drives me up the wall about Nature Magic is how boring Healer’s Celerity and Nature’s Wrath are. But I can see how some Grandmasters could use a bit of love.

I think I’d keep Invigorating Bond in Grandmaster, but fold Vigorous Training into it.

Then in Vigorous Training’s spot, I’d make a Master that increases the duration of the next Boon you/your pet apply by 50% when you/your pet receive Vigor. Lightning reflexes, Primal reflexes, and Invigorating Bond would all be Vigor sources for you, and Fortifying Bond would translate them to pet to allow it’s boons to increase.

Well, that certainly a valid area of concern, Spoj.
I’d hate to encourage high level fractals becoming impossibly difficult. But, these Bosses are gaining Breakbar effects in the near future, it might be possible to make sure players still have a fair chance at these encounters through them.

Just to make sure I’m responding to NoTrigger fully;
That’s kind of the great thing about having a Bar as opposed to Stacks.
It acts as a translator between skills and the effect they’re having on the mob, and it can change the message to whatever it wants – whenever it wants.

So you can reward purposeful choices in actions/character building over unintentional ones, by keying anything attached to an autoattack lower than things that have an actual damage opportunity cost to slot or equip.

Again, if it were a totally hopeless concept, I can’t imagine devs would’ve ever seriously entertained the idea internally.

(Providing counter-examples [like ‘soloing dungeons’] to help me see the weaknesses in my argument, which are unconventional but still ultimately true. It has the word Devil, but it’s not a bad thing.)

I acknowledge it might very well be a really difficult thing, game design is effing hard. But if they were talking about it amongst themselves, then there must have been a faction that thought it was in the realm of possibility, or it would’ve been off the table completely.

I get you’re devil’s advocating by providing these examples, and there’s nothing wrong with a fresh perspective. But, does it really seem that unreasonable to want soft cc to feel like a solid choice for many places in the game and at multiple levels of play?

When I first heard about the defiant change, I also thought soft control was being counted, and I was delighted.

I immediately perceived it as a Buff to things like Chill and Cripple and Immobilize, whose PvE play has largely felt unsatisfactory, due to the AI not really producing much in the way of significant motion on a practical level and/or not providing instances where manipulating motion this way has a demonstrable impact.

It’s true, the effect soft control has on bosses is significantly lesser if not outright irrelevant…so why doesn’t it stand to reason that the breakbar presents an opportunity to improve this? Why is something being currently effective the litmus for inclusion in the system, when the system itself now gets to help determine what ‘being effective’ means by providing a whole new thing to affect?

If wishes were fishes I’d much prefer sweeping game-wide AI improvements that makes these things feel more relevant for their actual intended uses. But really, at this point, even an artificial means to improve my satisfaction level of using these skills is preferable to my mind skipping over soft control options like they’re persona non grata everywhere but Silverwaste.

…The only way I can kind of figure it, is if it’s a back-end change that proceeds another change.

Like, remember how the Vigil Buff during the Battle for Lion’s Arch worked?
On the concept level it was the same as Frost Spirit – percent chance for more damage. But while Frost Spirit is just sort of this plain jane fire and forget glass banner, the Vigil buff gave you a window of opportunity you could respond to through a randomly determined short period of increased damage with a larger character model.

That sort of a thing makes total sense on a 10 second cooldown.
The effect as it stands now? Absolutely Baffling.

Well, yes.

I think you’re making a mistake by conflating roles with interaction, though. It is one of the ways, and it’s so prevalent in RPGs it’s gorram near genre defining. But, there are plenty of role-less action games and platformers that don’t skimp on the player interactivity, too.

Truthfully, I’ve always thought the combo system could’ve been doing alot more to create that sense of interaction. But it just doesn’t have enough impact, and leans too far on boons and conditions and all the limitations that entails.

@hybrid
You’re oversimplifying to the point of miscommunication. What I’m saying doesn’t really boil down into an easy simple soundbite, or trust me, I wouldn’t of spent so much time writing that up. :p

@ Jerus
I’ve got nothing against the open world pulling it’s weight during the whole process. However, if I were to respond to the rest, I’d pretty much just be repeating my last post.

Good for you (and I mean that sincerely).

But allowing you to perform actions without restraints is not the same thing as creating content that maintains a smooth learning curve. Good curves will create immersions and investment, whereas ad-hoc requires those already being there.

Every game I’ve played has fallen into the same situation. Content is somewhat difficult at first, people figure out some strategies and they get easier, people refine the strategies and they get even easier, people perfect the strategies and they get down right boring. Only difference is in those other games we would get more content about the time that they got so boring that we were about to quit the game. But… then again we also had the gear treadmill and that hamster wheel is not something I’d ever want to go back to.

I agree and I don’t agree.
As a general pattern that’s true, because it’s true of all games. But, that doesn’t mean traditional vertical progression systems are just this totally malicious fluff or that GW2’s current state should be held in high regard.

When people talk about the learning/skill curve, this is what they’re referencing. Rather, this feeling we’re talking about is what the learning/skill curve spends the entire game actively trying to avoid. The learning curve is basically the content causing the player to slowly gain mastery over the combat system, and if you stop learning you get bored. A good way to think about it is that enemies are questions that ask you about the mechanics of the game, and bosses are quizzes that ask you to practically apply what you’ve learned in complex combination.

The problem with GW2 is that the total potential of the combat system far outstrips the demands PvE makes of you, by like, orders of magnitudes. It’s normal for the PvE and PvP of an MMORPG to have some sort of divide, but in the very least the constant churn of content attempts to highlight various mechanics even if it can’t simulate the complexities of a player. In GW2 you come out of the dungeon experience and know next to nothing about how the combat system works, because it rarely bothered to ask you anything other than one achingly stupid question.

Ennui, sure, it’s legitimately a thing.
But that doesn’t really mean the quality of every game’s dungeon is equal.

Kind of the caveat in building for PvE in GW2 is the sense that they just sort of added options without making sure there was ever a reason to take them.

Pets are just sort of sitting on that big list of tragically irrelevant mechanics sandwiched somewhere between conditions and healing power. So it never feels too worthwhile to invest in them as a baseline function. Most of the things you’ll find valuable in Beastmastery is accessing abilities by swapping your pet or using F2, and in that respect the pet is mostly just ornament you try not to let die before the timer’s up.

There’s some saving graces in a few traits with interesting timing gameplay here and there and some that successfully fill an odd niche or two, but it can also be pretty disappointing.

I get the sushi, archery, and computer points as basically a way to parody OP’s drive-by-critique, and I’m not saying much about it because I agree it deserves mockery.

It’s not like I’m not super tempted to accept a ‘me and mine enjoy/are challenged by it; ergo – shutup’ premise because it eloquently refutes something so braindead. But a counterpoint that broad can be applied to well worded constructive criticism too. It accidentally encompasses all of criticism, not just OP’s poor attempts at it.

Not to accidentally defend OP, as I think that sort of acerbic one liner is pretty bad forum etiquette. But, undermining the act of criticizing on the basis of enjoyment doesn’t sit quite right with me, either.

I get that buttons got pushed and posting ensued, Ropechef.
But couldn’t you enjoy something and fully acknowledge it’s got some serious shortcomings?

Look, I agree blaming the developers is silly.

Maybe the funds just aren’t getting to where they need to be going, Maybe the publisher sees it as a demographic conflict with Wildstar, Maybe they’ve put GW2 on the back burner in order to diversify the studio into an entirely new IP.

God only knows what’s behind a decision like this – but I can’t imagine they made it lightly or with any ill intent. At the same time, you can’t be so wrapped up in pointing fingers you go around blaming Players for it instead.

If the mode is underplayed, it’s because we had an endless procession of the same complaints at least once a week for two years that for whatever reason couldn’t be addressed. That’s all. Not that dungeon running in an MMORPG has suddenly become an odd eclectic niche activity. Not that players playing the same thing aud nauseum because the mode can’t grow with the rest of the game should feel ashamed for getting bored. Not that the dungeon community started pushing people away before they started leaving enmasse themselves. Not that folks should be perfectly happy with a PvE that isn’t making the most of the combat system and the skill curve it presents.

Just a simple allocation of resources made for reasons we can’t fathom much less judge.

I think you missed the first and the last part, maybe?
I didn’t mean to paint those sorts of changes as impossible, just numerous to the point of wondering why would it would be a favorable alternative to taking a chainsaw to dungeons.

/edit clarification: And I mean that in the sense of pointing out the work involved is probably at the ‘too hard’ level and being skeptical the living world would ever get to the point of being a dungeon alternative at all despite the possibility it could. I’m not actually holding out any hope for these sorts of changes.

It’s not like I don’t think the living story isn’t flexible enough to handle challenging 5 man content in theory, it’s just a really questionable vehicle.

Like, there’s no doubt the system is agile.
It allows for them to try new things in small manageable chunks, so design-wise the fights can progress quickly and be a constant source of giving us something new.

Super Promising, yeah?

But, just think about what trying to grab some friends and do The Summit’s Shadow of the Dragon fight entails.

• Making some wonky general party in the party finder system.
• A literal procession where you twiddle your thumbs through dialogue.
• A checkpoint system that is so forgiving to failure it nearly undermines the idea of ‘trying’ at all.

Nevermind the larger questions of feeling one-time-only because the Living Story is divorced from progression. It lacks a connection to the gold reward system that serves to give a sense of progress to long-term aesthetic goals. It’s not a system that has a means to address the elephant in the room question of difficulty vs. accessibility (ala’ normal and hardmode dungeons in WoW) which really calls into question the idea it can serve as a means of skill progress or knowledge progress.

It’s like moving a coffin with a golf cart.
I’m sure you could probably get enough duck tape to sort of swing it. But why would you when something like a hearse exists?

This was undoubtedly a great game to be your first foray in the genre.
But try not to let the things you may have heard here about the trinity put you off MMORPGS entirely.

There’s sort of this unspoken rule that a game’s forum chatter aggrandizes it’s talking points as a sort of a collective saber rattling against rival MMOs. So while there’s certainly a kernel of truth behind our adulation of GW2’s anti-trinity design, painting every other game out there as some miserable waiting room of radical dependency is really more about forumites bonding than a sincere portrait of the genre and what it has to offer.

There are tons of good MMORPGs out there, and more still on the horizon.
I do hope you’ll give them a fair shake and I wish you the best of luck.

Also just a curiosity thing, I wonder how they did the no stacking thing? will it have other situations where it comes up that maybe are unintended? something to keep an eye out for?

Hmm. That is a puzzler.

I guess looking at it systematically, the common denominator between Fiery Rush and Charge is that they both play into the general concept of ‘the player leaving an impact in their wake’. But they don’t seem to spatially based exactly, it seems more like they’re just automating player movement for a fixed period of time and propagating ticks of an effect dependent on time passing. So you’ve got a reasonable simulation of the idea in an open field, but, if you’re being held in place it just keeps going. Maybe they finally got the back end on these charge type skills to create ticks of an effect to be dependent on actual distance traveled instead of pseudo-simulated-distance?

Well, I’d prefer changes like that, anyway. Who knows, though?

To be honest, that’s a shame.

It’s isolated stuff like this that indicates the design gap between old and new content has gotten unstably wide. I kind of take fixing the problem by fixing a skill that’s otherwise okay everywhere else as a tacit resolution to solider on with content that’s holding the game back instead of accepting the whole incident as a red flag.

Calling people’s competitive spirit into question is a tricky form of leverage.

Just because a game has winners and losers, doesn’t mean people feel like it’s worthy of competition. If a person has state of the game criticisms that are rooted in how the game fails to inspire that; the competitive spirit angle can come off more like trying to get people to overlook or excuse the game’s shortcomings by goading their pride, instead of a well intentioned needling to work their way up the skill curve or create counter strategies.

As an aside: I can’t believe somebody painstakingly photoshopped that Snickers bar to make the word mis-spelled. Subtle troll is subtle.

While I do think the bigger bosses in this game do have a bit of an ‘ankle biting’ issue because of the scale differences, I also think there’s no satisfaction quite like getting some face-time with the boss and would hate to kill it by proxy with a weapon or by hitting a minion.

You could go all Shadow the of the Colossus/God of War on it and have the players move around on the body to reach weak points. Not many MMORPGs have the platforming elements to support that approach, but this one does.

Additionally, you can do something here those action-games can’t.
In those sorts of games the weak spot opportunities to hit were just sort of already there or scripted to be exposed at a certain time. In a multiplayer game you can split up the group into people working to create the opportunities to hit, and the people platforming on the boss to deliver the hits. So you can add a coordination challenge to it as well.