Guild Wars 2

Mmmm.

If I’m playing an FPS, playing a Medic is much different experience than playing a Sniper. If I’m playing a MOBA, playing a Support is much different experience than playing a Carry. If I’m playing a trinity RPG, playing a Healer is much different experience than playing a Tank.

In GW2, if I change my armor traits and utilities from a glass cannon to a support, it’s the same experience. Sure, you have new tools with which to approach combat, and you can certainly use them. But without actually receiving new overarching goals and superstructure that delineates good and bad play, it fails to honestly recontextualize the experience or cause you to approach the same content from a different perspective.

It’s a very insincere representation of a role structure.
I can’t say it’s doing replayability many favors, so it’s understandable it might feel boring.

But, The Holy Trinity? Bah.
There’s no reason to limit yourself, you can make roles any old thing you want. Jungle, Mana Regen, Crowd Control, Off-tank, Leader, Scout. I can’t tell you how many of these things I’ve seen over the years.

digiowl.9620:

I would much rather see non-DPS combos get a reason to exist in PVE, before adding more noise.

That’s basically my feelings on it.

I definitely think PvE folks should defer to PvP folks on this. PvP folks are lots more likely to appreciate a new stat combo given the current state of things.

I have some good news and some bad news.

Bad news is;
Even putting aside the whole meta business; the support in this game doesn’t feel very fleshed out on a gameplay level.

Arithmetically and visually there’s little feeling of impact. Most support skills are pretty much just ‘press the button off cooldown’. What works on boss 1, works exactly the same on boss 2, works exactly the same on boss 3, etc. It’s hard to feel rewarded, the execution is pretty shallow, and there isn’t much strategy.

The whole thing is alot of buffs and button presses you’d call support by virtue of sheer technicality, but it’s all so superficial it never manages to capture the spirit of it.

Good news;
Ranger has a decent spread of the few things that’re promising.

Offhand Axe’s Reflect and Blue Moa’s Protect:
are a basic timing challenge and fight knowledge check. They’re impactful on their own, but what really makes them standouts on a gameplay level is that Rangers don’t have enough access to either of them to try to use up-time to circumvent the timing challenge. When you apply it is actually meaningful, and that’s great.

Warhorn’s Blast Finisher:
is a pretty basic look at timing and position, but what really makes it work as a gameplay is when you add situational awareness. Instead of walking into combat with a set combo preference in mind or a clockwork devotion to fury uptime; try for fire fields when you’re party is fine, and try for water fields when they’re not. It doesn’t really hurt that you’re capable of simply adding either of these to a group that may be lacking them, so playing with warhorn is always as interesting as you want it to be.

When I say I’m not happy with conditions, I pretty much mean the whole entire condi/removal dynamic. It’s just easier to say ‘conditions’.

Even if they one day managed to achieve perfectly balancing it on the head of a pin, the end result is just not very clutch, deep or satisfying to play.

The ranger pet idea is a different thing, don’t let the stuff I’m saying misrepresent it.

So, yeah, a mob dodging halfway through a Hundred Blades is not exactly ideal defense. But you do create opportunities to use things that currently have no or little meaning in PvE. Which is really what you should be looking for when trying to close the divide between PvE and PvP to make balancing between the modes easier.

Giving mobs active defenses should kind of be less about actually making mobs peerless self-defenders, and more about homogenizing mechanics between PvP and PvE.

If it makes it anymore clear;
People say the practice was called ‘Kiting’ because it resembles somebody trying to fly a Kite. That is to say, somebody moves in a straight line or in circles with a mob steadily trailing behind them, in much the same way you’d run with a kite trailing behind you in an effort to get it to catch a breeze.

So, yeah, I wouldn’t call any of the stuff that happens in GW2’s PvP Kiting.
Then again, I’m not sure I’d want to.

I thought you were on fire in that thread.
kitten shame much didn’t seem to come of it.

I definitely think giving mobs active defenses is the key to closing the PvP/PvE divide. Pumping up a mob’s HP ends up feeling like a poor man’s substitute. Actives defenses offer so many approaches and decisions to make, while excessive HP prettymuch offers only one.

I don’t agree that this necessarily has to equate to some kind of horrendous AI nightmare. The AI doesn’t have to actually be intelligent, it just has to perform an adequate mimicry.

Taking a page out of Nike’s book from the Ranger CDI (and scribbling all over it): What if higher rank NPCs had an endurance bar and also the behavior – ‘If takes more than x% of HP in a single blow or cumulatively during a channeled effect; then dodge in a random direction’.

This is behavior built on existing tech, that mimics an intelligent reaction to most situations we would casually categorize as dangerous. But it’s very simple stuff, that has the potential to affect things more deeply. Such Control serving to compliment Burst by ‘steadying’ the mob, and DoTs’ low n’ slow approach becoming more valuable because it’s less likely to make the mob skiddish.

I’m not saying that’s the magic answer to life the universe and everything.
But I am saying simple solutions can have big impacts when it comes to AI.

Just to put it into perspective;

Strider’s vs. an 8-hit skill you’d be looking at a 1-[.85]^8 = ~.727 = 72% chance for at least one hit to be blocked.

So currently we’re got a 72% chance of shaving off 1/8th of the likes of Unload and Zealot’s Defense. Extending that to the likes of Blurred Frenzy and 100b is probably not going to break the bank.

I like how you just sort of casually invented the portmanteau of ethereal and eternal and busted it out like it was no big deal. Ethernal is apparently, officially a word now. Prysin has spoken.
:p

I don’t know, I have mixed feelings on open-world leashes.
On some level I remember that sort of a world could be tedious, on another level I kind of miss having a sense of Danger walking around. It’s probably one of those things we’ll never see again in the post-WoW era just on principal alone. But, I’ve got some good memories mixed in with the bad.

I think we’re mostly on the same page about Stacking in that there’s good and bad iterations. For example, I thought the sub-dividing boss during the Marionette was a good fight (sans exploit and in an AOE lane). But, I think something like Wraithlord Mage Crusher is just awful.

I think where we differ is that I draw the line between ‘bad stacking fight’ and ‘good stacking fight’ much earlier than you do, so that all the current ones in dungeons end up on the bad side.

In my mind even Subject Alpha comes up short.
I get that it trades off activity through movement for trying to inspire activity through dodging. But I think if they’re going to bank all the gameplay on reactive play, it needs to actually be reactive. A perfectly predictable cycle that always leaves you with just enough endurance so that you never have to make any heat of the moment decisions is pretty shallow action experience in my book.

@Jerus

I generally think Train to Zone is less a problem in a game that isn’t about Camping.

But, just within the dungeons themselves, I agree leashing might be problematic. I think there’s a few good scripted sequences where they stall your movement or force you to doubleback over an area within a time limit, where leashable mobs are serving as a great source of tension. I’m not sure it’s a good idea to take that design option off the table.

Leashing in dungeons made sense in WoW, Anet definitely needs to figure out a solution that makes sense for their own needs as a game.

I can’t say I agree with your take on Stacking, though.
You can’t compare an MMORPG pure breed, versus a supposed action hybrid. We need to hold them to different standards, because this game lacks RPG fundamentals like resource management to drive interest in static play.

I have no experience in dungeons in any other game and my first dungeon runs where disappointing.

Oh god, that breaks my heart.
I promise you, this genre is not normally like this. This game’s dungeons have easily the worst case of ham and cheese I’ve seen since people were making their own text-based massively multiplayer games in the 90’s.

Around the time they were first talking about the change, they also mentioned that getting crit damage in line was a needed first step before continuing to tackle the problem.

Prettymuch everyone is on the same page about the expected impact of this change. Nobody on the dev side of things ever tried to sell Ferocity as a magic cureall solution to all that ails PvE building. So, hold off playing the ‘lazy dev’ card just yet.

A Proc is when the game randomly causes something to happen.
Although that technically covers a lot of things, you’re more likely to see the term when the random occurrence has enough impact to cause a reaction in you or your opponent. For instance, nobody really calls a Critical Hit a Proc, because it doesn’t do anything.

It’s true that the condi/cleanse structure in this game is awfully……..haha…I can’t even think of a polite way to put it. And if you were completely married to the idea of things as they are now, you’d tweak in the direction of things ‘counting’ for more applications such as all ticks within a time basis, or offering front-loaded benefits, or treating conditions like empty counters towards something else.

I gotta’ say, the condi/cleanse interplay in this game could die in a fire tomorrow and I’d dancing on it’s stupid spammy grave. So, admittedly, not really all that invested in supporting it in an imaginary hypothetical. You know?

How do you figure that?
I had active proc-based play on DoT classes all the time in WoW. Active Play was never naturally contrary to the concept of damage over time.

Ah, I think I understand your concern. You’d just be sure all major ways of building had some form of representation in each of these categories.

For example; We don’t have any condition-build-related Procs in this game as far as I know. (At least, not without relying on precision, which I agree, isn’t a good situation). So you’d just add a few. Like; ‘5% chance on Tick to gain a ghostly appearance and add Lifestealing to your next 3 Damaging Conditions. 20 second cooldown.’

Or something along those lines.

It’s true, Longbow’s got a bug that works in our favor.
Longbow’s about 1560-ish by my measure. That is to say, you can get to the range indicator and not only dodge backward, but you can also go roughly half the radius of an untraited trap. With Eagle Eye it’s at least 1920-ish. If you attack from higher on the z-axis you can break 2000-ish and start to have mobs auto-regen on you, because all non-hitscan projectiles are seemingly physics based.

And being completely honest I’ve never found that so useful I thought it was niche carving and role defining. Not even perching on top of a wall in WubWub. Probably why the bug is still around after all this time >.>;

Read the Wind is going to be quite decent when combined with Eagle Eye. Min/Max’ers are going to complain about not being able to maximize damage and long distance accuracy, but it allows longbow users to obtain a niche role not currently present in the game, especially at the 1500 range distance.

Eh, let’s not go crazy here.
1200 versus 1500 is, in all honesty, a pretty trivial distance. It’s the distance of a single dodge, to put things into perspective. It’s nice and all, but I can’t imagine what role actually exists in that small space. Is there a wall somewhere you can stand on top of where it’s possible to hit something vitally important 1400 units away?

I’m not really sure I’m catching all that.
Run that by me again?

I think you just have to make sure you’ve got a healthy balance of character building proactively shaping your gameplay across the whole of combat, and also giving you events within combat to reactively respond to. Esp; by segregating categories along character building slots.

Like;
Procs (Valiance, Sigil of Air) come from Sigils. Triggers (When Swap, When use Banner) come from Major Traits. Conditionals (If have full adrenaline, if Flanking) and Native Properties (Piercing, Bouncing) come from Minor Traits and Runes.

So that way it’s just not possible for you to overload your plate with too many reactive things to pay attention to, or have so many passive things combat isn’t dynamic. But all of your character building options still shape your combat experience in some way.

I agree.
I definitely think the ‘get a % damage buff just for equipping a weapon’ traits are pretty lackluster all around. Truth be told, I’m not much of a fan of static % damage buffs on Sigils and Runes either.

Something like the Order Buffs from the LA living story chapter were a real cut above that lot on a gameplay level. I’d like nothing more than Sigil of Force to be left on the cutting room floor and replaced with Vigil’s Valiance or Quickness of Whispers.

Kinda’ hoping Stacking Sigils are weapon-self-aware and do restrict by swap but also play well with other copies. That way you can pick back up where you left off if you swap it back in, or choose to continue the same pool of stacking across both your weapons if you invest a copy on each, but engineers and elementalists aren’t losing out on opportunities.

But to get back to the OP.
Just working off of what we know: Sigil of Fire and Sigil of Celerity on my Longbow.

I’d want to use Fire for it’s AOE damage, but, also to get around Longbow’s tagging issues as a single-target weapon. With 5 stacks per head, and the fact Fire’s AOE can hit up to 5 people, a single well placed Fire proc tags enough warm bodies for a full Celerity stack. Not that things would actually work out so nicely, but I generally like the option to avoid the risky business of tagging with Barrage or Piercing Arrows (and the headache that’s about to become).

No reason for my fascination with Quickness, other than the fact firing longbow like a machine gun is darned near the only time that weapon’s sluggish wet noodle performance doesn’t grate on my poor sniper soul.

It’s just hard to make a real verdict when so much of the landscape is changing at once.

Read the Wind seems patch-like on our current Longbow, but god only knows if they made any baseline adjustments to the weapon. Strider’s Defense seems niche, but, niche is less of a negative with mobile trait respecing.

I can confidently say I love the gameplay direction behind Invigorating Bond and Survival of the Fittest.

Invigorating bond encourages position gameplay, and not only rewards having a pet alive – but actively using them afeild. Survival of the Fittest gives us active condition cleanse and adds alot of much needed interplay between traits. Whatever the actual impact of those two may be, the funfactor is definitely going in the right direction.

Credit where credit is due these two traits are active and thoughtful.

Actually, do we know that for sure? That a profession can keep the stacks of a sigil on a weapon that’s still equipped yet out-of-play?

It’s possible when you swap weapons the effect no longer applies and picks up where it left off when the weapon comes back into play.

I agree with you, Ath.
There’s a difference between not feeling as though you have a place among other players, and not feeling as though you have a place in the game itself.

For example; Our profession mechanic being largely unscalable in a game that regularly features realm warfare and episodic large scale PvE content,feels pretty dissonant no matter what the Meta is doing.

However, I think it may be a bit hasty to assume Burst being looked at across the board is solely a Ranger consideration. In PvE at least, we know they’ve been looking at the DPS/berserker meta since a post a few months ago. Kind of makes me wonder if it wouldn’t be more of a ‘two birds with one stone’ situation.

Hm. You know if these traits are trying to give certain builds a greater role definition, a longbow trait wouldn’t just be twice the velocity – it would be twice the range too.

That sort of a thing seems much more role defining as opposed to just patching, and would be worth gating behind a grandmaster.

PvE:
I have no real interest in efficiency play. I just don’t think Ranger is very good at anything you’ve listed, or there just isn’t much of a meaningful place for it in this game.

• What makes or breaks Solo Classes in general is holding your own versus content that requires a group, not just being slightly better at things other people can solo. Ranger feels like it’s lacking effectiveness and context in comparison to other solo pet classes I’ve played (FFXI’s Beastmaster).

• The functionality is there in theory for ‘pet defends teammate’ gameplay, but they pulled the rug out from under it offering no overarching control of aggro or targets to defend like clothies. GW2’s iteration just feels random, sloppy and kind of pointless in comparison to other off-tank pet classes I’ve played (WoW’s Hunter).

• What makes for a good safety net is not just living through the wipe, but being able to do something about it above and beyond what others can do. Regen, swiftness, and one not entirely terrible rez skill not exactly the stuff of being a natural tide turner. I’ve never played somebody who was solely a safety net, because it’s not much fun only feeling useful when something goes wrong.

PvP:
I agree the pet needs to be targeted more often, and I do think that would satisfy giving a reason to choose more tank-like pets in PvP formats. However, I don’t think that resolves much of anything for other formats, or Ranger’s inability to leverage their survivability for other’s sake.

@misterdevious

Yes, I agree you can do that now.
But, that’s not where I was going with the whole selfish/selfless thing.

I mean more like;
An RPG Tank leverages their survivability for the benefit of others through Taunt and aggro systems. A MOBA tank leverages their survivability for the benefit of others through mechanics like Towers and Carry. A FPS tank leverages their survivability for the benefit of others through capture point dynamics giving meaning to location.

These games feature classes who specialize in ‘survivability’, but there are unique mechanical support systems in place to give that a meaningful structure and constant way to benefit the team. It’s not; “Oh they just do the same thing everyone else can do, but if things start to go sour they might be able to continue doing it for a slightly longer period of time”.

In those games you defend yourself on behalf of others, in this game you defend yourself…just to defend yourself.

So, part of me wonders if GW2 needs a thing like that, or should try to downplay and phase out these sorts of character building choices if there isn’t going to be any place with actual gameplay for it outside of sPvP bunkering.

@ Misterdevious

That kind of makes me wonder if we’re at a space where we have to look at ‘survivability’ as a group resource fundamentally.

I mean think about it.
If a Tanky pet can’t leverage their superior survivability for the benefit of it’s teammate, what hope in hades does Ranger have of accomplishing the same? If half a dozen utilities and traits awkwardly forcing the issue can’t help pets leverage their survivability for our sake, doesn’t it kind of stand to reason the same would be true of us and our teammates?

It kinda’ sounds like if Ranger ever hopes to be anything but self-centered; Survivability itself needs to start being a selfless teamplay option outside of bunkering, or be seriously reconsidered as a valid defining characteristic.

On the one hand, trying to make Survivability selfless could be interesting, in that it would give ‘defensive’ building options some measure of relevancy in PvE. On the other hand, in execution it kinda’ sounds like ‘Tanking’ with a capital T any way I slice it. So, maybe not. Surviving as a class identity and having ‘tanky’ pets at all might just be a straight-up bad idea.

@afoot

You know what I’d kind of like to see?

The activation animation causes the Spirit to appear and dissapear over the pet in much the same way a bear does as we Maul. The upper half is clearly visible, but the lower half fades out. They’d be about twice point five times the size they are now, ‘looming’ over the pet protectively and imparting their effect using a quick version of the shake animation the Nightmare Tree uses.

Each would retain their coloring scheme but additionally differentiated themselves by being a different sub-species of the Treant family. Earth Spirit’s a Mossheart, Water Spirit’s a Willowheart, Frost Spirit’s a Pinesoul, Sun Spirit’s an Oakheart, and Nature Spirit is a Rotting Ancient Oakheart.

That last one sounds a bit kooky, but bear with me a second. Applying the shader Spirits use on the Ancient Rotting model would cancel out much of the existing ominous color scheme (red leaves, ghostly pale bark, oil-like specular), and adding in that nice Emissive map Rotting has could possibly come off more ‘spiritual’ than ‘radioactive’ in a lighter context hopefully leaving the impression of a Non-Rotting Ancient Treant.

Mostly, I think moving it from a persistent object to a temporary effect would be a good opportunity to further distinguish spirits from a flavor perspective and telegraph their differences to an opponent observer, without having to worry about the optimization concerns of a persistent pet.

Mmmm.
I can kind of see where Ath is coming from.

If your super-power is supposed to be ‘survival’, one would sort of expect a certain noteworthy mastery or access to the things that typically helps you survive. Keeping a limping pace with everybody else in all but butterfly kisses of soft AOE control is not exactly the stuff of a clear specialty.

I’m not sure the game really strives for or benefits from countering counters ad infinitum.

Hmm.
I think he’s more going for the notion of making sure your suggestions have Soft Counters, not asking for a Hard Counter to counter your counter.

That is to say;
This is less a case of you asking for access to rock to defeat their scissors, and then you’re being asked to make sure the opponent has access to paper.

And more;
acknowledging you should have a clear advantage, but how you and your foe are both playing should be able to swing the outcome of you using the skill. For example; giving them a reasonably skillful means to avoid some of rock’s applications or doing something difficult that can reduce it’s impact. Something that gives them a means to respond to your action.

You can already do this very sucessfully. Because of the low cooldown of traps, you can lay down a bunch of them, then the moment an enemy triggers one, you can lay down several more. the Pre-emptive aspect is already there.

They’re basically working off of Preparation logic.

So it’s a pretty shallow expression of the concept. You can certainly ‘double-up’ at the start of combat, but after that it’s pretty much just a ground-targeted AOE you’re spamming off of cooldown.

It’s alot of brainlessly repeating very weak effects, instead of strategically applying one strong effect. The fact the effect is ‘hidden’ and ‘triggered’ ends up being superfluous, which undermines much of what differentiates traps from other things and erodes the mindgame gameplay where traps are their strongest. A half a dozen cripples is nothing compared to making your opponent think twice about stepping on the floor.

They’re very much Grenade-like in practice, and not at all like Traps I’ve played with in other games.

I’ve already weighed in on Spirits, Signets and Shouts.
Traps and Survival Skills are in a much better place.

The only real odd man out on Survival Skills is Sharpening Stone, which I’d honestly like to see replaced entirely. Maybe that would be a good place for the often suggested ‘swap physical location with pet’?

But I think Traps do have a couple minor areas of improvement I’d like to see;

Specific Game Mode
PvE; larger implications

Proposal Overview
Homogenize functionality of traps and try to make their applications more meaningful.

Goal of Proposal
Traps are a bit on the ‘spammy’ side. In practice they play more like using grenades than actual traps. They could stand to place more emphasis on pre-emptive and positional ‘luring’ gameplay. The line also has a few odd outliers that could stand to be brought in line.

I went with the following because;

• Doesn’t promote too much spam
• Rewards a living pet.
• Manual activation can trigger traps on an unmoving boss or allow you to use it for solely it’s combo field properties.
• Optionally puts Pet near Trap for easier combo’ing
• Gives Ranger some direct damage AOE options.
• Fully specced, a pet helps you get things into traps – which seems like the kind of thing I’d want another body on the field to do.

Proposal Functionality: Outliers
Frost Trap: add AOE damage to bring in line with other traps.
Spike Trap: add Smoke Combo Field to bring in line with other traps.

Proposal Functionality: Function
Traps natively have Trapper’s Expertise’s Size and have increased Direct Damage but a slightly higher cooldown. They still trigger on collision with a foe. When placed instead of starting the cooldown, the button chains to a context sensitive command:
- When standing on top of trap -> Disarm; cooldown reduction ala’ engi turrets.
- When not standing on top of trap -> Pet will move to trap and manually trigger it.

Traits:
Trapper’s Expertise & Trapper’s Defense removed.
Trap Potency moved to Master Tier
New Grandmaster; Before a pet manually triggers a trap it will execute an AOE Pull larger than the trap itself.

Associated Risks
In essence mis-commanding the pets can cause a trap to ‘miss’ in a way it can’t now, so pressing the button too frantically might create results you wouldn’t enjoy.
A ‘go to’ function would really sell the mindscrew potential of the grandmaster trait.

@ Ms. Murdock

It’s not so much that spammy specs are having too much impact, it’s that regardless of impact everything I do feels like spamming.

I’m on board with focusing on sustain damage as a concept, but how that’s being satisfied right now is just by focusing on autoattack.

Which is natively pretty boring, makes weaponskills feel more like separate utility skills instead of parts of a whole playstyle experience, and causes traits to be either bland or schizophrenically trying to make the whole thing seem interesting expostfacto.

Re: 2×4 vs foundation!

The seeming difference in scope is not necessarily because there’s any workload misunderstandings between us, but because as customers we only experience the surface of the game and as a developer their daily lives are the deeper infrastructure. Even our wildest requests may very well be 2×4′s, from the perspective of somebody who knows what it takes to make a game run.

It’s like talking to a fish about lillypads covering the surface of a lake. From your perspective it’s obscuring the entire lake, but for them, it’s the thin green roof of a much larger world.

Whatever effort you put into the pet, comes out in the form of pure performance. Nothing else.

Are you just acknowledging the dismal state of things, or saying this is what you want to be seeing out of a pet mechanic?

Prysin,

It’s not that it’s effort. It’s partly that it’s difficult effort. But the real sticking point for me is that it’s effort for effort’s sake, instead of actually accomplishing something.

I know what ‘downleveling’ and ‘corpse runs’ are. I can forgive difficult sort-of-questionable design decisions. But I can’t forgive a class mechanic that feels like I’m just spinning my wheels in the mud.

What I’m looking for here is an advantage that is always there. No matter what pet you have, or which of it’s skills are on cooldown, so long as the pet is alive this superpower is always there for you.

For example;

The Pet blocking Projectiles. This already exists, we just lack the means to really control when it happens and pet’s box isn’t tall enough, so it’s difficult to leverage as a consistent advantage.

Or Pet Body Blocking. This doesn’t already exist, but with proper ‘Go To’ commands it could functionally allow any pet to serve as a condition-less snare.

Buffs and Debuffs would be skills.
I’m more talking the baseline properties of pets. Sort of imagine F2’s and Family skills didn’t exist anymore, what would you want to do with what was left?

There is no advantage in using a pet.

So, do you have any ideas on how to make the pet seem more naturally worthwhile without it’s skills outside of tanking in soloplay?

What you fail grasp is what do you even gain out of having the pet out at all times besides flavor? Is there any mechanical advantage to that?

It’s kind of like;
There needs to be one.

Designing around the pathing problems and pet health as an endlessly awkward concept really pales in comparison to the notion there isn’t an easily understood reason this mechanic exists at all.

If this CDI accomplishes nothing else; a pet without any skills at all should still be something you want to have around.

I’m not saying this isn’t possible, but I want you to understand exactly what that suggestion means. It would mean completely rebalancing the Ranger.
The Ranger is designed to have a pet. If the pet was taken away or didn’t do damage, then it wouldn’t be a Ranger anymore. Does that make sense?
The only reason Rangers lose damage is because the AI is not currently what it ought to be.

I just wanted to interject, it sounds like we’re not addressing a bit of issue here I was kind of hoping was coming across.

…the unreliability of the pet is not the alpha and omega of what’s wrong with the Damage Division. It’s also that splitting base damage with the pet makes direct damage building problematic, but other ways of building are unaffected because all other stats are independent.

• Having lower base damage means your investment into direct damage just doesn’t see the same return other classes get, because a lot of direct damage character building relies on stacking percentage based damage multipliers such as Criticals.
• The pet segregates a portion of your direct damage away from your efforts to raise it, because pets simply don’t ‘count’ for a lot of your choices (armor/sigil/consumeable) and is often the 6th party member when beneficiary AOE has a 5 person limit.

So, not only is what you have in your hands less affected by your efforts to go higher, but the portion that isn’t your hands is also immune to it. Weighted stat scaling surely helps, but by and large that doesn’t tackle these issues.

And, even if this was all in order;
I get why an Engineer’s Turret has damage in TF2 and what that does for the Engi and his Team. Area Control. I get why a Hunter’s Pet has damage in WoW and what that does for the Hunter and his Party. Threat/Aggro Management. I still have no idea what a pet having damage is doing for me or my allies in GW2.

I’m not saying you have to tell me, but I am saying this isn’t immediately apparent and the class could really benefit from taking steps to make this clear in the game itself.

I just wanted to highlight what Shiren was saying and throw my support behind the observation.

Activating things ‘on swap’;

• Doesn’t make me want to actively use my pet, it just makes me want to keep it from dying. I feel more encouraged to Return a pet to avoid a cooldown penalty than use it to engage the playing field.

• A swapped pet being the point of origin may as well be originating from me for all the difference that makes spatially. Effects activating from the pet but only when it’s right beside me is a real lost opportunity to use a class mechanic that revolves around having another body on the field.

• Swapping is no real indicator of skillful play, and shouldn’t be rewarded for it’s own sake. You swap for two reasons; Pet Health and Switching Gears
  • Swapping for Health-reasons is about responding to external forces acting on you. It’s a bad determinator of ‘good’ or ‘bad’ play, because it’s more a reflection of how dangerous the environment is than how I’m using the pet to accomplish my gameplay goals.
  • Swapping to switch gears for tactical reasons should absolutely be rewarded, if that’s meant to be a central theme to the class. Elementalist? Absolutely! The pet class? …Why? It’s not even clear why swapping is a part of the gameplay at all, much less a part that’s being held up as a paragon of skillful execution of the class mechanic.

Suggestion

There should be some clear definition of what constitutes ‘good play’ or ‘bad play’ with a pet, and ‘good play’ should be rewarded by activating effects like these. This should involve using the pet on the playing field.

I think this ultimately loops back around to the Pet lacking a real purpose in both the Master’s overarching gameplay goals, and Group content at large. If you knew what it was there for, it would be much easier to know how to reward using it well.

It takes a massive investment to give pets in WvW any survivability in zergs, and if your utilities are spirit skills and half your traits are for spirits…

Just to be clear,
I don’t think anybody’s happy with pet’s ability to scale with encounter size.
That’s a very important problem that needs to be resolved for it’s own sake, apart from what does or doesn’t happen with utilities/traits.

Thank you for keeping us in the loop, Ms. Murdock.

Remove spirits. They clutter up the map and provide less strategic value with target changes.
Instead, apply an aura to the pet that does the same thing spirits currently do.

I really do like the idea of the Pet becoming the point of origin for the Buffs like ‘Spirit of Frost’ and the Active effects like ‘Cold Snap’

• It’s just a much better product ‘straight out of the box’ without any trait investment, which is something it’s always lacked as a utility line.
• It gives you all the mobility advantages of having Spirits Unbound as a default behavior.
• You don’t face Spirits Unbound’s downside of having to move yourself to wrangle obnoxious pathing out of AOEs or being skittish about entering melee to avoid cleave.
• Native mobility and being housed by a much sturdier pet also makes it much easier to use the Actives outside of bunkering situations. Which is, let’s be real here, most situations.
• Makes the counterplay for Spirits destroying the Pet instead of carpeting you with an AOE. Splitting up your opponent’s offensive is an important function of pets that’s underutilized in the PvP of this game.

It’s not their fault the weapon’s about as deep as a kiddy pool in PvE.

I think it’s just a bad combination of iconic theme weapon + class-based overemphasis on autoattack + Action RPG PvE that’s shockingly lite on the actual action.

But yeah, we agree that Maul business is just silly.

@AlphaK
Excellent integration of more positional play and useability that would also be low impact development-wise.

I’d even go so far as to make this the case for Forage, and even Conal attacks.
And I’d do that by making good use of an already existing feature.

Currently, a pet who has received the ‘Return’ command will spin in place to orient itself in the same direction the Master is facing. This functionality is often overwritten by the fact if the Master gets 100-ish away it will cause the pet to move and reset it’s orientation.

I would propose that Conal-based F2 would be a chain.

• Chain 1: Ground-target, pet moves to location, orients to your current target, and uses F2
• Chain 2: Available while the pet is in transit and while charging their attack. Holds off the F2 and when pet reaches destination it allows you to reorient the pet the way the ‘return’ feature works now but locking the pet’s position so your movement can’t mess it up.
• Chain 3: Executes F2.
  
  Sort of like, continuing down the chain allows for a higher level of micromanagement.

Not a design flaw…
This is what I like about ranger, that secondary attacks are situational (except for gs#2)
It’s not a “I spam all my attacks in a certain order, then wait for CD”, it’s a “I AA until the situation calls for another attack”.
I do agree power weapons should have burst skills, but I think they should also keep the situational attacks of our weapons…

Yeah, but how do you make that interesting?

MOBAs and FPSs can work out that way just fine. But damage is never just damage in those games. It’s given purpose by playing into a larger psychological ‘scare tactic’ to threaten people. Human opponents and location-based objectives give the gunplay between situational abilities context and meaning.

The only thing I sort of see trying to make autoattacks more interesting is the ‘requirement’ basis of weapons and even certain traits.

But it’s just not enough. Having a ‘distance requirement’ or a ‘flanking requirement’ or a ‘health requirement’ is either so difficult to execute versus a live opponent it may as well be random, or so easy to execute versus sluggish mobs there’s no actual game-play involved in keeping it up.