Guild Wars 2

Snipers aren’t just characters that have ranged single-target attacks, in TBS games Sniping is a bonafide Role.

>Snipers exist to take down priority targets and objects. In GW2 there’s no real sense of prioritization because there isn’t much differing strategic value between targets. Sure, you can set priorities yourself, but on a gameplay level it’s worlds apart from having mechanics dedicated to it.

Aside from lacking the purpose, the longbow concept itself is also has a hard time pulling off similar-feeling gameplay.

>A sniper’s gameplay involves skillful delivery of damage to the target. Of which the longbow neither has a gameplay focus on delivering damage, nor a focus on using skillful execution to deliver that damage. Most of the damage is delivered through autoattack, so the rest of the weapon is centered on maintaining distance. It ends up feeling like a control weapon or a utility weapon, because that’s where all the gameplay actually is.

On top of lacking the purpose and the concept itself not really achieving a similar feeling, how it plays out in practice is also not doing so well.

>When you play a Sniper you’ve got a lone wolf theme. Yes, you’re executing a role for the team, but you’re often away from the objective and your healing/support allies in order to do so. Snipers are self-sufficient creatures, who produce selfless results. The Longbow feels the exact opposite, I feel as though I need somebody around playing distraction, because my weapon lacks the fundamental combat reset to counteract closers. And when that combines with lacking the purpose; I end up feeling like a creature that needs help, to produce a selfish result.

> Making the ‘fight or flight’ choice once somebody’s found your perch is a good part of Sniping. But, all this weapon’s gameplay does is take fighting off the table, instead of pressuring you into making a choice.

The things they could do to help fix that;

• They could add strategic targets to help give single target attacks more meaning
  • Greater mob teamplay that encourages prioritizing
  • A mechanic for spotting an enemy Commander

• They could refocus longbow on a gameplay level;
  • Gameplay about delivering damage to the target should exist somewhere. This delivery should involve some kind of skillful execution, such as aiming.
  • Longbow could use a more powerful combat reset, that can’t also double as a combat aid. If Longbow was more clearly the ‘flight choice’, and melee weapons were more clearly the ‘fight choice’, they could use the weapon swap cooldown to force you to decide between one or the other. Right now in CQC situations our melee weapons do both Flight and Fight well, and Longbow doesn’t offer either of them.

Just how often is ‘being effective at single target damage’ an actual desirable thing in this game? I am all for AOE vs. single target being a efficacy tradeoff, but not when focus firing is so rarely applied and you’re one of the few weapons in town that has to play by the rules.

Yeah, as awkward as it ended up being in practice, I can’t imagine they’d ever sincerely backpedal on the whole ‘needing a target’ thing.

But, that doesn’t mean you have to give up on improving the how the skillful play feels entirely. It’s possible to have target-based autoattack and skillshots. MOBAs work that way, for example.

I’d really like to see them explore single-target colliding skillshots.
Beyond the simple joy of using those skills, I think the idea has alot of other things going for it.

• Can raise the skill ceiling and maintain the skill floor
  It’s true, you can use it to raise skill floors, but the concept has alot more wiggle room than that. In particular I think this game would do well with the 2 layer hotspot variant. Where an attack has two collision boxes; a smaller collision exactly where you’re aiming, and a larger collision around that. If your attack hits the target with the larger part you still receive your effect, but if your attack hits the target with the smaller part you receive a stronger version. It’s kind of like the RPG take on the headshot/bodyshot dynamic in FPS games; greater aim gives greater reward but the game doesn’t outright demand it.

• Body blocking as counterplay.
  Blocks and PBReflects can do this to some extent versus particular kinds of projectiles. But ‘eating an attack for somebody else’ is honestly explored very little as a high skillceiling tactic, because of the fear it would evolve into tanking. Which is a shame, because it’s some of the more clutch moments this gameplay can offer, and I’d like to see more of it. Eating an attack for somebody as counter-play for these particular kinds of skills, could open more opportunities for this gameplay outside of blocks and reflects, without allowing too much of it.

• Visually Scalable
  Anytime they seem to want to add any kind of feeling of ‘aiming’ something, they seem to default to an AOE. Flipping some of these over to single-target skillshots preserves the aiming feeling of gameplay but is much more scalable on a visual clarity level. There’s no need to telegraph ‘the edges of where the effect is happening’ with particles, because the effect is you or the thing you threw.

You kind of can’t really get that effect in this game at all, sadly.

The game already does this pretty well. But most of the playerbase doesnt understand the game and likes to complain. There deffo needs to be some improvements. But thats more to do with class balance and improving condition damage roles in pve.

I can’t say as though I’ve ever felt like I’ve broken away from the DPS role in this game.

When other games* use the word ‘role’, they’re giving you radically different combat goals and new tools in order to help you achieve the new goal they set forth. In GW2, I feel like the game presents me with the same goal all the time, and I just get new tools for the sake of getting new tools.

It just doesn’t mean anything without the actual core perspective shift and a different mechanical superstructure to interact with.

/*(dps-hybridized ones like FPS and MOBA included.)

Eh. It’s not my cup of tea either.

I’m from the much more spartan schools of thought, like MOBAS or FPS games where conditions and removals are rare but amazingly clear and clutch. So GW2 ends up feeling waayyy too mushy in light of those experiences. I’ll probably never end up taking this game’s PvP very seriously.

But, it’s not like there’s a subscription fee, you know?
A game can’t be all things for all people. I’ve found I enjoy my GW2 experiences so much more when I have another game around to go scratch my competitive itch.

….the heck would you call it?

EX: Explosive Arrow: Fire an arrow into the target crippling them for X seconds, after Y seconds they explode, launching them and nearby enemies backwards and burning them.

Haha. Oh, I loved that functionality on Zilean in league of legends. I can’t tell you how delightful it was to have somebody slip out of my grasp just to pop to my Time Bomb offscreen.

Though admittedly, this game might have too much immediate access to personal defense. I kind of think the counterplay would end up less in the ‘I have to move away from my friends and eat this’ category, and more in the much lamer ‘count to two then dodge/block/etc’ category. /sigh. This game’s self sufficiency policy really sucks sometimes.

You know, it might be nice to explore distance manipulation that’s more on your own terms and less on the enemy’s. Like, I’d be just as happy if barrage were something like a teleport or a leap, than something that has to control the enemy.

Actually, it’s exactly that they’re not willing to do it. After the first revamp, they disbanded the dungeon team.

That doesn’t really fit the timeline.

It wasn’t like; AC revamp → TA Aetherpath → disband dungeon team.
It was more like; AC revamp → disband dungeon team → comment about LS teams handling it → Aetherpath → and then no real follow-up after that.

Ehhh.
Well, there’s certainly popular builds. But, that’s not what you asked, exactly.

I’m not sure you can find a solid answer to that? If you buzzed youtube you can find people posting for bragging rites here and there. We’ve got maybe one or two guilds giving the whole min/max thing a solid effort. But, beyond that, most people just don’t really seem all that inclined to participate. And a min/max culture without that whole competitive king of the mountain dynamic just doesn’t cover the same kind of ground.

So, you’re not going to find an Elitist Jerks equivalent here. This culture is just sort of,…going-through-the-motions?

Oh, sorry if it wasn’t clear. Yeah, I was writing from a Wubwub perspective. I’d never try something like this in a dungeon.

FPS games are pretty much nothing but active defenses, and they still manage to deliver a radically different role experience from Medic to Assault to Sniper.

You’ve got to be able to segregate the simple application of buffs and debuffs from actual-honest-to-god support and control roles.

I’m not sure what to say, exactly.
It’s apparent they’d made some attempts to revamp earlier on that for one reason or another never got off the ground beyond the two initial efforts. So it’s, not as though they’re not willing to do it, they just seemingly can’t manage the actual traction?

Normally trap gameplay is supposed to involve some kind of luring, or mindgames or clever placement in order to get your opponent to step on the trap.

That’s why it’s invisible, it’s how that gameplay works. In this game, Ranger traps seem more like Grenades than actual Traps on a gameplay level. So, you’re right, the fact they’re invisible doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.

I’d rather see them go the other way with it, though. Push that mindgame gameplay more, and dialback on the spam.

I kind of don’t like it for the same reason I don’t like Predator’s Instinct.

I really don’t feel like Longbow can stand on it’s own two feet,
and you can either force the issue of self sufficiency with snare mods or embrace the 2+v1 scenario prerequisite and go in a more glass direction. To me, trying to go in the snare direction always ends up feeling like a mess of frustrating half-measures that never quite makes a whole, while going the glass direction is admittedly obnoxiously niche but works well in those few moments where the planets align.

But, I guess, so long as you’re enjoying yourself it’s the right thing to do.

Builds are locked down weeks in advance, so they wouldn’t of had time to implement much of anything from the CDI.

I think your initial foundational premise might be stretching a bit, Rising.
Normally interaction and response to a boss’s mechanics is how we typically make the skilllevel distinction in our fellow players, so logically, wouldn’t a combat philosophy based around minimizing those instances also mean it’s a poor determination of good or bad play?

You might very well have terrible players stacking.

“Seems”.
They did abandon them. They do not have a dungeon team. They don’t care. So here we are.

/shrug
Well, we just have no way of knowing either way.

I also see OPs point.
It seems like a pretty logical observation.

If it makes you feel any better, during the Marionette event the PR campaign mentioned something to effect of; ‘we have some idea of where the general player skilllevel is at, and we think people have fun when they’re presented with a challenge just beyond it and have to stretch to meet it’.

Which seems pretty promising as a balance philosophy, if they’d only feel inclined to apply it to dungeons.

I kind of read your post the same way runeblade did.
I think it depends on whether you consider ‘being bad for newbies’ a dealbreaker or not.

You kind of just let that hang in the air as though it were a conclusion. But, technically, the word of god on dungeons is that they’re supposed to be spaces for organized play. So, encouraging more organization at the expense of approachability seems pretty in-line with their stated goals. If you wanted to make your suggestions seem like failures, you would had to have to gone a little farther and spelled out why unorganized-pug-busting would be a downside and not just how organized play normally works.

(Admittedly, it seems you don’t actually think that’s a downside. I’m just saying, there’s where the communication breakdown happens).

What a nice community effort.

Hm.
That’s a good question.

I’m not sure where steady weapons are right now, if they even still exist at all. So it’s kind of hard to test?

…I think a pulse might work as jerry rig? pulses do have a natural variance and are susceptible to critical hits, like weapons. But it’s uniformly steady throughout a single application and obviously there’s more than one of them every 10 seconds.

Viper’s Nest
49, 49, 49 / 51, 51, 51 / 49, 49, 49 / 49, 49, 49 / 51, 51, 76

Viper Nest with Frost Spirit
48, 48, 79 / 49, 54, 54, / 53, 80, 48 / 50, 50, 50 / 54, 54, 49

I think frost spirit still not having a cooldown is a promising hypothesis.
The 49, 54, 54 datapoints seem to make the best case for it. The difference between 49 and 54 numbers is 10%, and there’s two 54’s back-to-back in a single viper’s nest.

I actually missed the fractal CDI, as I was way too busy in the Ranger one.
I should probably go back and read that. Mid-dungeon crafting? Sounds like ya’ll got up to some off-the-wall stuff in that thread.

But, yeah, you’ve got the right of it Silber.
Just smaller versions.

Holy carp, this actually came up before?

Most stuff I can think of is big stuff.
Though I suppose I have kind of missed how in older games you could use crafting to help standout as a teamplayer. Crafting’s surprisingly selfish for a game that makes every other effort to foster cooperation.

• Add a tier of group consumables that only distributes 5 copies of 1/2 hour duration consumables. (So you’d use feasts/stations/trays to feed a zerg, but could also make a smaller cheaper version to feed your party).

• Give Artificer group consumable versions of Slaying potions.
  Remove Slaying potions from mob loot tables.

The combat is a perfectly serviceable means to interact with the other features and social systems in the game. And those systems are so legitimately genre redefining, it’s worth sticking around just to experience them.

Living Story? Slowly but surely became excellent. Microtransaction model? One of the best I’ve ever seen. Fostering cooperation over competition? Brilliant. Megaserver system? A technical marvel.

The combat?
/gestures vaugely.
Eh.

If it makes you feel any better, as a non-subscription game you could always play until the things you are enjoying have lost their luster, duck out for a few months, and come back later to see if something new piques your interest.

On the subject of hidden cast time caused by the animation blending system;

If you’re going to use GS, I’d try a tempo without Crippling Throw. There’s a bit of a hidden timesink in it and honestly the cooldown just seems to come at awkward times. Personally I would use something that you can get into a good groove with that doesn’t clip your autoattack so much.

More like;
Sw_SSP_Ma_SSP_SSP(+F2)_Hb_Ma_Sw_SSP_SSP_Ma_SSP_SSP_Sw_SSP_SSP_Ma_Sw_…..

Also, while I have no objections to the overarching hypothesis that Sword> GS on single targets, I do think we have a tendency to misrepresent the Sword a bit.

On a practical level you wouldn’t just be sitting on the autoattack; offhand skills and SS tends to get used to some extent.* Moreover, despite our perceptions that Sword is an aggressive weapon and Greatsword is a defensive one, in PvE if you break the autoattack chain to use another skill on Sword it’s usually for defensive/tactical reasons and Greatsword it’s for aggressive reasons. So, if I clip Powerstab that’s on my own head, but if I clip Kick/Pounce I probably couldn’t help it because it’s a reaction to something.

*YMMV; DV Battle length.

/edit:
TP;
I get where you may have gotten the idea actual scientific method isn’t required to talk about this stuff, given passing off hypothesis as theory is sort of the standard practice of theorycraft. But this game’s an odd case in that the tooltips don’t have a true representation of the time spent on animations, so you need to run some test cases to simply access the information that would be available in other games on the wiki.

Not dumb at all

Bad news is; Ranger does get less out of percentage based direct damage multipliers.
Good news is; Air and Fire are their own independent attacks with their own damage coefficients.

I’ve found it’s more practical to have a general sense of things and be somewhat flexible, than endlessly splitting hairs.

For instance, in the wilds of actual gameplay it’s not uncommon to come across a party with spotty vulnerability and fury coverage. So, sometimes I run offhand axe and sometimes I run with horn depending on what the group is deficient in. However well warhorn parses out on napkin math, it doesn’t amount to hill a of beans if the group has fury and needs vulnerability.

The funny thing is, the supportive DPS build also has better personal DPS.

I swear to god, this game sometimes.

I definitely think it would be interesting to explore this sort of thing.

In particular, Healing Power not affecting how you rez somebody has always seemed a little weird to me.

Not at all. Though removing the trait and still keeping the stack is still around despite sigil changes. Which seems weird.

Master and Pet are treated as a single entity when counting towards stacking totals.

Meaning; An enemy only touched by Master will still count toward the Pet’s Master’s Bond stacks, in much the same way something only touched by the Pet will still count toward Master’s Sigil Stacks. So you can use AOE tagging to help ‘feed’ your pet’s MB stacks.

I don’t know if that came this patch exactly, because it’s been months since I last touched that trait. But formerly, the pet had to personally touch something for it’s death to count towards Master’s Bond (as though it has been given it’s own independent Sigil.)

Just thought I’d share.

Try not to attribute to malice.
What’s more likely; malicious manipulation of years-old marketing for the sheer thrill of inconveniencing other people, or folks just not knowing the game has a balance problem because it’s not very intuitive?

I get what you mean, digi.
But I tend to go the other way with it.

I think the problem is less lack of a bird’s eye view camera, and more the lack of aiming gameplay for single-target effects. (which is, conveniently, somewhat on-topic to the OP.)

So anytime they want to execute a feeling of ‘aiming’ in your gameplay, they have to rely on some form of ground targeted AOE. That tends to put alot of emphasis on watching the floor instead of watching your opponent, and generates alot of particle effects soup. The crazy amount of AOEs in this game is part of why it’s such a readability mess. And I’d sooner like to see that brought under control, than succumb to the temptation of implementing a bird’s eye view camera.

@ YamsandJam
Look into binding ‘Lock Autotarget’ for a deselect key.

@digiowl
Oh, I was pretty fond of Neverwinter’s system too.
Camera-centric targeting systems are a big hit with me anytime the combat has a decent pace to it.

This game, though. I’ve never seen a game try so hard to straddle the line between traditional mmorpg and action mmorpg control schemes. Granted, in practice this goes together about as well as peanut butter and motor oil. But for better or worse, that does seem to be the intent here.

You know, when I’m playing other games and the occasional ‘I like how GW2 did _________’ thought crosses my mind. That blank is never filled with something about the combat system. Living story, micro-transactions, shared claim and loot; that’s the stuff I end up missing.

I think this game could do well by adding skillshots.
Because I kind of wish there were more opportunities for clutch memorable moments. If I look back on my GW2 play, I just don’t have many combat campfire stories. And the ones I do have are related to the downed state. Which is all well and good, but it’s not like other games don’t offer awesome clutch combat experiences and then a downed state system on top of that.

Truthfully the stuff I find so off about Ranger Longbow as a sniping-style weapon is way more core than something some trait-able distance could hope to fix.

For example,
As much as RPG fans view ranged attacks as a kind of easy mode, in the FPS world Snipers are actually among the more high skillfloor/ceiling characters. So the fact Ranger longbow delivers damage in such an automatic and brainless way drives me straight up the wall.

The only skills on that weapon that require some aiming or timing or predictive capabilities from the player is the bloody control skills. No matter how much damage that thing does, it’s always going to feel like a control/utility weapon if that’s all I ever think about when using it. The gameplay is focused on the wrong thing.

Meh.
Longbow still isn’t really scratching my sniper itch, to be perfectly honest.

I kind wish you guys wouldn’t use that term. It’s not really entirely appropriate for how Longbow is. Sort of sets up a certain expectation for gameplay, that GW2 just doesn’t bring to the table.

I tend to think the effort:reward ratio is actually pretty good on Ranger.

You really need to know your stuff and play well to succeed. I don’t have as much of a problem with that, as I do the idea that the other classes don’t always seem work that way. On other classes I’ve played I’ve felt as though I could reach a certain effectiveness without really having to learn about the finer inner workings of the game. If anything should be changing; it’s that.

Honestly, if anything feels like it’s mucking up the concept of a ‘Good Ranger’ it’s that what that entails exactly is just about as clear as mud.

I do like your adjustments to that build, Prysin.

But, thread? Doesn’t it seem a little silly to nitpick the particulars of a build when we’re 5 days away from a major balance patch?

@Durzlla

Yeah, they split the aggro. But, it’s not like WoW Hunter’s where an aggro split was both directly controllable and more genuinely meaningful in context.

Yes, it’s two separate sources of DPS. But you rarely get to do much pet micromanagement while disabled, because you’re not often disabled in PvE and in PvP your disabled timeframe doesn’t always align with the pet’s spotty windows of opportunity on a moving target. (Though, I will acknowledge there’s a bit of ‘wait and see’ on this with the patch).

Indeed, a pet can Body Block. But, all your ways to manage your pet’s position on the field lacks precision or availability, so it’s not like I can actually construct meaningful gameplay around the feature.

These things feel more like technicalities that may occasionally be a benefit as pure happenstance, than a sincere superpower I can leverage tactically and willfully. There just isn’t enough of a structural underpinning or intentional control systems in place to really elevate this stuff to gameplay.

You can certainly look at the mechanics with that kid in a candy store feeling of ‘and this one’s a fear, and this one’s an immobilize, and this one’s a heal’ and rationalize to yourself how surely that’s all so much better than a little bit of deeps.

But when you get right down to it neither PvE nor PvP make the most of that variety, and there really isn’t much a pet is doing to deliver those skills to the playingfeild that an AOE couldn’t do without half the fuss. So even though something like your bow popping down a fire field seems limited and simple; it’s also very relevant, flexible and consistent.

My straight-out-of-the-box Ranger Pet sounds so powerful in writing, but in practice, I’d easily consider the profession mechanics of other classes I’ve played more sincerely useful.

@Drarnor

Oh, no, no.
When I’m mentioning cover; that’s purely a description of how other games operate, to give some idea of how other games make condition application meaningful and interesting. I’m not saying this currently happens in GW2 in any way shape or form. Just the opposite really, my stance is that this game’s condition-stuff is a bit on the dull side.

@Drarnor
Maybe I’m not reading you right, but, I’m not entirely sure where the disagreement is?

Every thing you say here defies logic. Pretty much every excuse you listed applies to direct damage.

I think people give conditions a harder time on the spam front than direct damage because we have different expectations for different ways of building.

Attrition gameplay is supposed to be a tactical victory.
But the condi/removal interplay feels more reaction-based like how direct damage classically is, instead of holding it’s own as a unique more cerebral experience.

How I’ve seen condition-builds distinguish themselves on a tactical level in other action games is by offering an advantage positionally so that timing was a major factor. In a shooter I can’t hit anything behind cover, but a DoT can. In a MOBA I can’t follow an enemy when they fall back to dangerous areas, but a DoT can. There’s a great deal of gameplay and counterplay when there’s a sincere time and place for well telegraphed meaty DoTs.

In GW2 Conditions are flittering in and out again so fast it rarely makes much of an impact in terms of position or timing. So applying Damaging conditions doesn’t really feel any different than applying direct damage. And, via uptime or churn, applying non-damaging conditions rarely hits that ‘clutch’ feeling that’s so good at making you feel clever.

All in all, Conditions are really disappointing in this game.
And I can see why Sinject has a hard time putting that into words. It’s the rare case of something being pretty well balanced, but still really lackluster to play. And that’s hard to talk about in a space where the big B is the end all be all of conversations.

It’s not as though I’m necessarily against it.
But, truthfully, I’d kind of like to see mobs step up their game in some fashion before/at the same time as implementing something like this.

I think those are fair criticisms.
You state your points clearly and reasonably.

It’s not as though the game’s been stagnant, there’s been strong foundational changes. The megaserver system, restructuring and unifying rewards from dungeons/achievements/champions/sPvP, iterating the living story into a genuinely promising system of content distribution. That sort of stuff was seemingly higher priority than content revision.

I generally agree with that decision on a rational level, even if I find the PvE state of things obnoxious on an emotional one.

Polishing the infrastructure to a shine does kind of make the flaws in the content that hadn’t been iterated on since release stand out more starkly in comparison. Sort of the downside of iterative development plus horizontal progression, I guess?

I think you’re oversimplifying. There’s enough difference mechanically between classes to require different mental skillsets.

Like, I find the internal time-tracking challenges of Engineer and Elementalist really difficult, but multitasking aspects of Ranger are easy peasy lemon squeezy. Yeah, if I was a champ at keeping track of family skill cooldowns in my head on Ranger, I might be super boss at Engineer. But, I can’t, so I’m not.

It’s an interesting editorial.
I don’t always agree with where Nike goes with solutions, but I prettymuch always agree with the overarching problem areas and how he describes them.

In particular, I agree, dungeons do need to figure a way to keep things fresh and interesting. And glacially slow path revamps doesn’t seem to be the ticket.

You know what I’d like to see?
I think dungeons should recycle living story army content in the same way fractals recycle living story boss content.

That way dungeons have some churn to keep getting new experiences that benefit from the living story’s advancements in fight design. And you also introduce the ability to wrap up old living story rewards which gives trash mobs unique loot tables.

(Like, I can’t imagine why we couldn’t see Molten alliance in CoF and SE, or Toxic alliance in TA. And I also can’t imagine why they couldn’t rarely drop blade shards, blueprints, past living world crafting mats/recipes, etc. up to the point a new living story army came along to depose them.)

Bosses would still be in a not so hot place.
No real suggestions there.

I am talking about roles.
It might be tricky to talk about because the games are structured a bit differently.

For example; it’s not unusual for an FPS to only offer one character to fill each role. So a Medic is considered a role, and not one of the classes with that role, because he’s the only healer in the whole game.

Or; MOBAs have classes in the sense that it describes similar gameplay across multiple characters (Tank, Support). But, Roles are community-driven slang words for broad strategy and positions on the map. So classes aren’t necessarily defined by a role and roles aren’t necessarily filled by all the same type of class. The words Carry and Jungle I used are older terms for roles that were being used around the time I played.

Even if that’s still confusing. All you really need to know is that when other games put forward different roles, it really feels like it’s changing the way I play. GW2 just doesn’t get that feeling across.