Guild Wars 2

Relentliss.2170:

cletiscake.9173:

b) Not stacking in corners is simply not feasible. Because there is no reliable aggro mechanic, and no reliable way to “tank” damage (due to limited blocks and dodges), fighting mobs becomes a chaotic mess. We’ve all been part of those fights where everyone is everywhere, no co-ordination, different mobs attacking different players, players getting downed all over the place. Combat is a mess unless you stack neatly in a corner and nuke everything. This isn’t the players’ fault for exploiting. From what it looks like to me, it seems as though there is no design intent when it comes to Dungeons. The players simply came up with the best system to combat an otherwise very disorderly and chaotic mess. I don’t know what Anet’s original design intent was, but I don’t think they intended for us to “not” stack in corners. It’s too chaotic if you don’t. This is why people ask for the Trinity back. Because at least there is order to the chaos with a Trinity.

I can not agree with anything more. The complete lack of a decent aggro mechanic leads to a chaotic mess. I don’t believe a Trinity is particularly necessary, but complete lack of an aggro mechanic has led to the current decline in the pve part of this game. I have never participated in ANY pve dungeon content online that is as poor as GW2 dungeons.

Aggro is not 100%, but it’s a lot more reliable than most people think.

The problem is that nobody knows and nobody bothers.

in the ‘toxicity’ question, I’m not worried about the difficulty, but rather what you might call the “LoL effect”.

If it’s carryable it might be fine (hell do a reward split to encourage people to keep going. The fact that it favors successful solos only makes it better to me), but it’s easy (as in lol) for the “YOU MADE US LOSE YOU SUCK!!!!!” to become a serious problem.

Jerus.4350:

Windsagio.1340:

You totally read that :p

That being said, as I said, I don’t care if toughness is better or not.

I do find the current dungeon play boring, and think mixing up the encounters will help.

I also am endlessly stuck on how absurdly nasty and combative you guys are (I can’t imagine what it would be like in a more lightly moderated forum than this one).

edit: I feel a thread lock coming on, it usually does at this point.

Sitting here and insulting people doesn’t really help the your cause, nor does calling for a thread lock.

Not calling for a thread lock, I’m enjoying the convo (mostly), but I am starting to expect one.

On the other point, I’ve said that to others this thread, but its’ hard. People are relentlessly nasty and insulting, and it’s key to why these discussions get so heated and doctrinaire.

@Jerus, your idea is really interesting, It’d be fascinating as a test to see if people would actually play hardmode or not, beyond the challenge-seeking crowd.

Presuming the rewards were enough greater to justify the risk, how would you suggest dealing with the risk of increased toxicity? I can definitely see a scenario where someone screws up and dies and everyone gets really mad at them and freaks out over it for the ‘wasted time’.

You totally read that :p

That being said, as I said, I don’t care if toughness is better or not.

I do find the current dungeon play boring, and think mixing up the encounters will help.

I also am endlessly stuck on how absurdly nasty and combative you guys are (I can’t imagine what it would be like in a more lightly moderated forum than this one).

edit: I feel a thread lock coming on, it usually does at this point.

maha.7902:

let’s put aside the smoke and mirrors.

a simple question.

do you wish tankier stat combinations to be stronger, if not actually preferred by one or multiple party members in group content?

a simple yes or no will suffice.

Except it won’t because you’re framing the question mightily.

That being said, I kind of don’t care except on a high concept level.

As a designer it bugs me that some stat sets are so much more useful than others.

As a player I play what’s effective but find most of the fights just unbearably boring (Fractals are much more interesting than dungeons, I don’t do dungeons at all anymore because I don’t want to hate the game).

For more detail, across classes:
I have 6 characters in zerk or assassin gear, 1 in sinister gear, and 1 in celestial gear. I have a few weird backup sets floating around, but those are the basics. In essence, I play as a meta player… and it’s dull for most of those dungeons.

As a member of the forum community I have to strive mightily to attempt to separate the frankly awful attutides people take with the content of their posts, which even at the best of times jaundices me to their position and makes me much more likely to want to argue.

~~~

Except for the third point above, I’m engaged in this discussion because the ‘hard’ gameplay as it currently is, is in most cases, pretty kitten boring and repetitive. I personally hope they make the encounters harder (at least up to post-10 fractal level) to fix this, and I feel in the context of the OP that increasing the difficulty would also have a very large impact on the ‘zerker meta’ question, especially linked with the system changes and encounter design they’re already moving towards.

maha.7902:

spoj.9672:

Why dont you just be honest about what you want. Because most of the time it is about anti zerk meta in some form. Otherwise you wouldnt be discussing it.

diversity is the buzz word they hide behind. the reality is simply that they wish tank stats were good.

a bit like how the people who complain about “not being able to play how they want” are simply people who want to be allowed to stroll in to any pug group, regardless of description and do the dungeon, to hell with whether the lfg asked for pink armour only, elementalists only, berserker gear only and so on and so forth.

but of course to say that openly would be scummy, so these people like to hide behind phrases and buzz words to add some sort of moral supremacy to their standpoint.

This is what I was talking about above. Of course the differing opinion is lying and shortsighted and deceptive.

To repeat the umpteenth time, there’s many reasons people get into this discussion. Grouping and dismissive is silly and wrong and massively destructive.

Fenrir, it’s about POV and perspective. If you come into the discussion from a close-minded attitude expecting a fight that’s what you’re going to see and going to get.

To your points:

1) (forcing change of mechanics instead of new encounters ) No I didn’t, I’m all about making the new encounters more interesting. My closest argument to what you’re saying there is that it’s not impossible to do.
2) (“no, the anti-zerk people are the real jerks!”) This is what I’m saying about perspective. You see people you disagree with as being nasty and pushy but not people you agree with. As I said, this effect cuts both ways, and it hurts the discussion both ways.
3)(blah blah blah facetanks) No I"m talking about the same choice always being the most efficient.
4) (something about my ideas being bad retreads?) wow that hurts :‘(. But again perspective. There’s this tendency to shove square pegs into round holes and equate points with the talking points you’re comfortable arguing against. This isnt’ fair to you or to me.

Skoigoth.9238:

@Windsagio
The thing is, if we´d have encounters in this game which are designed to be beaten by making use of some form of defensive gear, chances are high most players wouldn´t be able to complete it using offensive gear, which wouldn´t exactly an improvement from the status quo (use whatever you feel comfortable with = win, loot and all the good stuff).

So yeah… can we call it a day for now and wait for the next “zerker must go”-thread? The last 4 pages or so were really painful for me to digest >.>

This doesn’t have to be a ‘zerker must go’ thread though. People pigeonholed it into that, but there’s a ton of room to explore in ‘expanding encounter variety’ without the usual subjects dragging it into their pet grievance.

In the case of defenses the only answer I can come up (as stated above) is to make hte encounters harder in general so that more players need the safety net of the defensive stats.

It’s easy to lose track of that point (for me) in the face of all the people deciding they want to be nasty about people with different needs though… that gets us on tangents :p

Optimally an encounter would be doable with all trait/gear sets but have optimal ease or optimal efficiency with various different trait/gear sets.

This is a bit of a (to use a term I love) Grail Quest though, it’s this nice ideal that’s probably impossible to reach.

Still we’re seeing some examples in places…

The idea of the husks is to make it more efficient to kill them with condition than with DD. That’s a model.

The threshers (of various types) are designed to emphasize ranged damage and interrupts over maxdpsmelee – or sometimes forcing you to switch between range and melee.

This is the kind of thing. You can melee burn the leeching thresher if it drops its drain aoes a lot, but it’ll likely take you longer than the guy that’s standing out of the aoe and shooting it. Similarly, especially once they decap condi, husks will probably die faster to that than to people just punching on them.

~~~

TI’ll admit this is substantially harder with defensive stats vs offensive stats, but it’s hardly impossible, and it would be interesting to see.

@Several others, as I predicted in the post in question, you focued on the specific, admittedly pulled out of the behind numbers in the example instead of scaling the style to the appropriate skill level.

It’s kind of an annoying trick (if fairly natural), but I put myself in a catch-22. If I make the numbers too high, people will either say “That enforces trinity via a dedicated healer” or “That’s just impossible no matter what”, whereas if I make them to low, they’ll do what happened in this case and talk about how that would be easy and they would ignore it. It’s an impossible puzzle maybe ><

So screw examples, this is the point I was aiming at:

Designers can absolutely build encounters to work for against any particular stat combination or even to mitigate any particular effect (say, blocking or reflects).

They choose not to in this case for various reasons (most of which are pretty easy to guess at), but to say that the current status quo is inherent instead of based on specific encounter design decisions is dead wrong.

Fenrir.3609:

Are people really so desperate to get their nomads facetank into the speed run meta that they want to change the games combat system?

It’s substantially more complex with that. There are a ton of reasons people might want the current situation changed:

Some are bored with the vast sameness of the encounters and want them mixed up
Some are annoyed at kittenish behavior by people pushing their style (this cuts both ways of course) and are striking out.
Some people don’t like the fact that the balance is skewed (often along class lines too, which doesn’t help).

It’s easy to dismiss the people that disagree with you as lazy and bad, but it’s certainly not very useful, and honestly does your position a lot of harm.

Tman.6349:

This ‘so-called’ group of highly skilled, effenciency driven players with excellent twitch reflexes and timing that adamantly insist on using passive, inefficient gear (for their self proclaimed focus/skill level) HAS to be the absolute smallest minority in all of GW2. Even to the point that it seems like an oxymoron and is hard to take serious. :/ Otherwise they just sound like a selfish bunch of ‘anti-conformist’, hipster kittens that are diligently trying to pass their psychological problems with the current system as “trying to make GW2 better” and looking out for the community.

The largest group simply doesn’t care about your standards of skill and efficiency though :p

Artemis Thuras.8795:

so..
hammer guard?
occasional healing rain/geyser?
^ add some blasts for muchos win.
Use tactics or defence banner?
Take strength in numbers guardian trait?

Just a few ideas to counter 500/3sec attack.

Ever met sparki/slick?
They fire these AoE fields that cause everyone to take 400/sec/ oil field.

Granted you have an ooze that can clear them, but this requires someone off melee range, doing little-no dps while kiting the ooze. This is also on top of the regular attacks.

400/sec/field ( or 1200/3sec/ field) is also far more damage than 500/3sec.

Fact is to make this hard enough to completely push people out of zerker gear, you’d make it so hard the majority of the player base would never beat it. Something anet doesn’t want to occur.

I did say in the post that my numbers might be off one way or another. :p

The point is rather that there’s nothing inherent in the game that prefers the current preferred style, you can design the encounters for or against it… if anything it links to what you said, the vast ease of the game caters to glass dps because there’s relatively little risk.

Edit: Which is another chance to go back to the OP: To change the current meta and bring more variety, they must make the game harder. They might well choose that making the game harder isn’t worth the negative effects, but that’s the only realistic way to do it.

Artemis Thuras.8795:

Windsagio.1340:

Jerus.4350:

It’s not a matter of “ohh you’re in defensive gear, you must suck” while it may be a common response it’s a response of idiots. What it is though is “ohh you’re in defensive gear, well now you can suck and be fine”. It allows you to be less skilled, doesn’t require it.

If you choose to bring all the safety nets you can, that’s fine, but trying to say that choosing this should not punish you in any way… well it’s silly.

It does punish you — at least if you care about speed or big numbers. It doesn’t punish you much and that’s fine.

To the point of the OP, for most dungeons there’s ‘one right answer’, and that’s kind of a letdown, at least philosophically.

Then the “let down” is of your own limitation.
There is significantly more than one way to complete each encounter, or each dungeon.

Even “optimal” is debatable. I’m sure those who set records have had to try a lot of different strategies, builds and team comps over the past 2-3 years.

so.. The philosophical “let down” is the limitations of your own mind.

A variety of widely differing solutions is more long-term interest than a single known solution with minor variations.

Also, it’s good to push players somewhat out of their comfort zone, if you can do it gently. People like their comfort zone, but at the same time there’s plenty of complaint about how boring and full of sameness the content is.

EDIT: Merging because I’m multiposting too much

Jerus.4350:

Windsagio.1340:

Jerus.4350:

It’s not a matter of “ohh you’re in defensive gear, you must suck” while it may be a common response it’s a response of idiots. What it is though is “ohh you’re in defensive gear, well now you can suck and be fine”. It allows you to be less skilled, doesn’t require it.

If you choose to bring all the safety nets you can, that’s fine, but trying to say that choosing this should not punish you in any way… well it’s silly.

It does punish you — at least if you care about speed or big numbers. It doesn’t punish you much and that’s fine.

To the point of the OP, for most dungeons there’s ‘one right answer’, and that’s kind of a letdown, at least philosophically.

There’s always a best way to do things given certain criteria.

But there could be differing best ways to do different encounters.

I’m not gonna argue that each and every encounter should have a ton of different tracks to success, that’s a herculean design task, and would likely end up bland.

On the other hand, different encounters having different routes to success makes a game more lively and interesting.

NikeEU.7690:

Windsagio.1340:

NikeEU.7690:

Is the concept of Active Defense not “inherent to GW2”? The second the combat was designed around active defense, positioning and parry/blocks PvE was destined to be dominated by glass cannon builds among players at the skill/experience cap. It may not be exactly how the developers envisioned it, but it is the inevitable end result of that decision.

The concept of active defenses does not make glass king, the high power of the active defenses makes glass king.

Do you see the difference? It’s all in the numbers and the balance.

As your buddy noted, they’re not going to touch old content much, but we’re seeing the new content already impacting things — just not in a form where you’d want to have the ‘meta’ discussion.

If you take the current balance as the be-all and end-all and as what must be in the system, you’re making a pretty basic mistake.

Active defense in this game is binary. You dodge or you don’t. You block or you don’t. You stand out of the arc of attack or red circle or you don’t. You can make content where those things are more challenging or less challenging to do, but those are binary actions.

Active defense is binary, but lets take (and admittedly crazy) test case.

Let’s say every 3 seconds the boss pulses a dodge/blockable 500 damage attack on the whole area in addition to his normal attacks. The boss has wyvern style defiance and enough health that at max dps it’s a 5 minute fight

There are problems with this fight (numbers are kitten -pulled so they might be very wrong), but it’s (hopefully) illustrative of a point so I hope we can stay focused on that.

The fight takes a very different flavor, because toughness and healing support (and protection) are much much much more important than dps or active defenses. Aegis will be stripped almost immediately and even if the pulse was worth dodging it’s not realistic to be able to keep your dodges up even with vigor.

There, simply, is a fight that would work within the current system but emphasizes a whole different set of defensive abilities and actions than the current model. It’s not likely that they’d do so much to deemphasize active defenses, but it’s a design decision not to.

If they wanted to design encounters that made toughness more valuable, they could. If they wanted to design encounters where dodge was useless, they could. They choose not to, but nothing in the system forces them to play exactly like the existing archetype you’re used to from dungeons.

Jerus.4350:

It’s not a matter of “ohh you’re in defensive gear, you must suck” while it may be a common response it’s a response of idiots. What it is though is “ohh you’re in defensive gear, well now you can suck and be fine”. It allows you to be less skilled, doesn’t require it.

If you choose to bring all the safety nets you can, that’s fine, but trying to say that choosing this should not punish you in any way… well it’s silly.

It does punish you — at least if you care about speed or big numbers. It doesn’t punish you much and that’s fine.

To the point of the OP, for most dungeons there’s ‘one right answer’, and that’s kind of a letdown, at least philosophically.

phys.7689:

ok, lets take a martial artist, being defensive means you have to react properly and know how to prevent various outcomes, it requires as much skill as being offensive.

basketball, playing defense well, is about timing, predicting your enemy, positioning etc, its pretty hard. they say, defense wins championships

tank in other games, requires as much skill as DPS or more.

street fighter 3
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wsgin-y8_J0

dude basically defends the entire combination attack of his enemy, high skill, defense.

in this game stats reward skilled offense
stats do not reward skilled defense.

just because someone may want to be a defensive player, doesnt mean they want to be inferior skill wise. However thats how the stat system currently works.

high defensive stats reason for existing is less about playstyle, and more about lower skill.

As has to be noted when that clip comes up, he then goes on to lose the match and the tournament :p

And again, there are people that run some defensive stats for a variety of reasons;

Some are lazy sure (that’s the one that’s mentioned all the time)
Some enjoy the feeling of ‘wading in’ and feeling tough (which is a lot of people that run defensive stats)
Some are even using the systems in place and using stats to manage aggro (which does seem to work, if not entirely reliably).
Some can’t keep alive with pure glass stats and like to have that mitigating safety factor.
Some don’t know the high efficiency of the attack stats

One of those is ‘less skill’, the others certainly are not.

Also of note: most of those styles of play (that people enjoy) wouldn’t work without stat variations on equipment.

NikeEU.7690:

Is the concept of Active Defense not “inherent to GW2”? The second the combat was designed around active defense, positioning and parry/blocks PvE was destined to be dominated by glass cannon builds among players at the skill/experience cap. It may not be exactly how the developers envisioned it, but it is the inevitable end result of that decision.

The concept of active defenses does not make glass king, the high power of the active defenses makes glass king.

Do you see the difference? It’s all in the numbers and the balance.

As your buddy noted, they’re not going to touch old content much, but we’re seeing the new content already impacting things — just not in a form where you’d want to have the ‘meta’ discussion.

If you take the current balance as the be-all and end-all and as what must be in the system, you’re making a pretty basic mistake.

ODB.6891:

Windsagio.1340:

~~~

Part of it also is to tune the damage so that high Toughness or Vitality makes a meaningful difference. There’s an old (largely incorrect for most content) saying that ‘it doesn’t matter because every class is a 1 or 2 hit anyways’. If zerk were 1hit and required perfect play, and knights were 4hit and had some breathing room, you’d see a lot more knights

While still allowing the top players with perfect reflexes to play pure zerk for their speed runs and to get more advantage in props and gold/hour for their skill.

I’m pretty sure that the same people complaining about the zerk meta, would be still complaining about zerk if they increased the difficulty of surviving as zerk. Whether they admit it or not, the complaints are because people exist that are able to clear content/get rewards at a faster pace and that people have gradually begun to expect that content be cleared at that faster pace. They don’t like being pressured to go faster/be more skilled. They feel excluded when they don’t meet those expectations.

This is going to be the same thing that happens as players get used to a new difficulty level. More and more players will adapt to the new difficulty, just like when the game first launched and people gradually migrated to zerk after learning the content. What would be the point of that? All you would have accomplished is slowing down the part of the casual player base that enjoys zerk gear. Yes, it would provide more challenge for hard core players for a while, but don’t forget this is a casual game…that’s ANET’s target consumer base.

ANET’s philosophy of having all builds able to clear content is in direct conflict with the constant, biased suggestion people keep making of increasing incoming damage. There is only one possible goal for people who suggest this…to try and find a way to keep zerk players from enjoying the content. Its already at the point where lots of zerk builds are one shot if they make a mistake…or very close to a one shot. Its already the case that high toughness/vit builds are not one shot on the majority of those same mistakes. What exactly are you looking for when you suggest this? ANET has already caved multiple times to reducing incoming damage on encounters with excessive one shots for casual complaints. Why would they do the exact opposite of this…just to try and exclude a group of players from enjoying the content? That would be like expecting them to introduce more content with enrage timers…specifically to discourage nomad gear. Both extremes would be equally bad as they would be only implemented to make their players in certain gear fail at content completion.

You did a little transfer in there, that I’m not sure is really valid: “ey don’t like being pressured to go faster/be more skilled.” That isn’t a “/”, it’s an opinion. In many cases they just don’t want to go faster, and don’t like getting yelled at for it.

NoTrigger.8396:

defending the pve meta has nothing to do with entitlement. defending the pve meta only means one thing, you are smart enough to understand the game.

nice try tho.

Defending the meta has nothing to do with understanding the game, and everything to do with defending a status quo that you’re comfortable with.

There’s nothing inherent to GW2 that says “ZERKER MUST BE SUPREME”, except the encounters are set up in such a way that that’s the case.

It’s not a moral or design value, it’s just (as I said) the status quo.

NoTrigger.8396:

Windsagio.1340:

@NoTrigger

After the hundreds of plays it might seem more that way yes. People are jaded and (if I may say) prone to be negative about this subject, and that warps views.

but if fights like that existed in a game without a gear treadmill, why are people afraid?
why be against something, when you dont need to care about it (dont need to play it)?
to me that doesnt make any sense and the only reason for such a behavior is entitlement and egoism.

actually gw2 has the most entitled community ive ever seen in the history of seeing gaming communitys.

Wanna hear my interpretation? (You get to :p)

It’s because people were burned and annoyed by previous MMOs. Only the most engaged (on either side) take part in this particular discussion, and for each person that has had very positive experiences with it, there’s one who has had very negative experiences. The vast so-so majority simply don’t post on the subject (and mostly don’t come onto the forums at all).

It might not be entirely rational, but to me at least it’s understandable.

There’s a more legit second reason, but I honestly think it’s not a primary motivator for most people: Encounter design is actually pulling out of a limited resource bucket. People naturally don’t want encounters not designed for them to be made at the cost of encounters that are designed for them. Dungeons are a bit of a hot spot for that because they’re very resource intensive.

~~~

As an extension of the first point, and something I’ve referenced above, dungeon people really don’t do themselves any favors. Being combative, calling people that disagree “BADS”, blaming others for failures, there’s a whole schedule of negative behaviors that can be pretty closely linked to ‘serious dungeon running’, and ‘serious dungeon running’ tends to be linked in peoples minds with wanting harder content (which naturally excludes the “BADS”)

I certainly fail at this too, but if you (universal you, no one in specific) act like a jerk while promoting a particular POV, people get negative associations with that POV and are more likely to want to fight it.

@NoTrigger

After the hundreds of plays it might seem more that way yes. People are jaded and (if I may say) prone to be negative about this subject, and that warps views.

I’d be interested in the quote about the combo field selection, I can think of other reasons it’d be iffy, so I’m curious to see their official reasoning.

nesh.7234:

Windsagio.1340:

OP thinks they can magic away the zerk meta, but you can’t. You need hard content to make zerk more challenging. We’re seeing the edges of harder content with the silverwastes stuff and specific other fights (mostly fractal content), and we’re seeing some definite engine changes in HoT that will effect difficulty.

Can’t comment on fractals as last runs I did was long ago before my long(ish) break, but Silverwastes looks ok (when not zerging). Those conditions can really hurt And I found mobs a little more interesting than the rest (well maybe pre-nerf Orr but it was long time ago so I may be wrong).

Switching from (almost) full DPS zerk to my WWWish guardian build did wonders tho

Actually had a discussion about this in one of the old ‘zerk’ threads, although it of course went sideways.

It’s relatively hard to run zerk in silverwastes. The creatures can easily mess you up (especially the vines and teragryphs). It’s not impossible, but it takes a lot more skill even than doing AC or CM for the umpteenth time.

The hard part for the instance oriented players looks to be that anet seems to think dungeons are a waste of resources (which would imply raids are doubly so). They essentially have to make content that can survive high player counts — excepting fractals, which they seem much more interested in updating.

NoTrigger.8396:

what is gw2 exactly? a fashion show. press 1, win game, go afk in lions arch.
and thats just sad. instead of designing one of the best combat systems in MMO history they should have made more skins.

Well again, the interesting fights are there… people have just done them hundreds of times now, and given the high likelyhood of more fractal content and the direction we’ve seen from the mordrem fights, we’re likely to see more.

man, you’re always so disdainful/nasty. It really doesn’t help your case y’know ><

We’re wandering offtopic though; I’d actually agree with the simplest form of your position:

there is room for harder content in a limited format

It shouldn’t be a huge amount, and it shouldn’t be the focus of the endgame, but then again it won’t be.

OP thinks they can magic away the zerk meta, but you can’t. You need hard content to make zerk more challenging. We’re seeing the edges of harder content with the silverwastes stuff and specific other fights (mostly fractal content), and we’re seeing some definite engine changes in HoT that will effect difficulty.

~~~

The trick is that we won’t, and shouldn’t get a progression/raid focus like they tried to push in Wildstar, or as exists in WoW. Arenanet doesn’t like it, and the vast majority of players don’t like it. It won’t happen.

That’s okay though, it’s the reducto absurdum of this discussion.. the awful extreme that people are concerned about whenever difficulty is mentioned. They shouldn’t worry though, it has essentially zero chance of happening.

I dunno noterigger, there’s a lot of armchair production in that “It’s not the thing I like that hurt the game, it was other stuff!”

It smells of post-hoc reasoning.

Edit: And I’d go back to some of the fractal fights, which Jerus mentioned.

that content exists. I’ve stepped in to help save groups that couldn’t do grawl (first or second boss) because they weren’t quite good enough, even if they technically had the know-how.

Similarly with Mai trin. The cannon phase is annoying, but it’s content that many many players can’t do.

There are others that would be so if they weren’t exploitable (which is a differnt discussion)

Jerus.4350:

Would Lupi, Grawl Shaman, or Mai trin count. While they do follow patterns you also have to be ready for the tells on deadlier attacks. While they are often similar you can still have situations with like double kicks on lupi, or even triple if you’re Purple Miku

Grawl fractal is one of the best boss encounters in the game imo; Requires reaction, does the thign I mentioned somewhere about forcing position shifts, taxes the players health resources, but is still doable by strong players playing glass builds.

Arcdiviner is similar, if less reaction focused.

Molten duo is the opposite edge, it’s a dull stupid fight if done right and requires almost no reaction, but rather knowledge of what you’re supposed to do.

NoTrigger.8396:

nesh.7234:

NoTrigger.8396:

the dungeons are easy, really. check out some wildstar stuff like GA raid bosses and the DS raid bosses.
i know dungeons arent raids and its okay when the dungeons are easy, but the wildstar level of difficulty is what anet should be doing in the future.

Just got back from WS … yeah their dungeon design is working, making ghostowns, not a game. Designing for 1% newer pays off.

not everything needs to be designed around people who like to run around and not care how good/bad they are.
and the dungeons/raids isnt the reason why the population in wildstar decreased. dungeons/raids is actually the part that people have always praised.

next time research the topic instead of only trying to see what you want to see.

Wildstar is always a touchy subject, but dungeons and raids certainly didn’t save it!

“Chaotic” isn’t a great word here, ‘requiring reaction in addition to requiring rote learning’ is a good grail for encounter design.

rotten.9753:

Windsagio.1340:

“Reducing choices is increasing choices!”

all kidding aside, gear is a meaningful way to accent your intended play style, and to allow a number of things that would be impossible with just traits.

It’s true that the balance is out of whack (although the meaningfulness of the imbalance is wildly exaggerated), but the poor balance doesn’t justify removing the choice.

~~~

The ‘reinforcing gear choice’ is the wrong way to look at it though, it’s ‘making risk/reward meaningful’. Right now, past a basic skill level, risk is not very meaningful in most of the content, and this is too bad.

Wouldn’t it be great if zerk had great payoff but took great skill, as opposed to ‘it has great payoff as long as you’re not absolutely terrible’?

I shouldn’t have done any mental leaps. What was my point is that once you make a gear much more meaningful then once you pick it, you’re gonna be stuck with it and good luck swapping builds when your team needs a different one.

And no, gear isn’t meaningful at all. It’s a set of statistics that don’t change how you play. It’s really shouldn’t be hard to understand but apparently it is.

If you take a look at how “hard” it is to play defensively, I have no idea why anyone would say berskerker’s is low risk. Sure, it might be relatively low because the content is easy enough but then again what’s the risk of defensive gear? It’s low risk/high reward or no risk/low reward. Sounds fair to me.

(I’d like to see “zerk is faceroll” crowd doing arah at launch, scrap it, I’d like to see them doing it now.)

Well then, they need to fix the encounters, which ties in well to the OP.

How is tricky of course, and I’m actually with you that the wrong answer is further ‘incentivizing’ a particular stat set.

A few further examples of possible fixes:

Burst damage that forces a glass player to move out of their preferred DPS area whereas someone with hybrid stats can stay in (note that this likely still favors the glass player) (note2: The underground mordrem troll is a prototype for this)

In general, higher volume lower damage ae’s (an extension of the above – puts more pressure on aegis/dodgeroll defenses, adds value to things like regen and passive heals – makes rangers very sad as it kills both their pets and their spirits)

A change to defiance to weaken the icebow/burn cycle (we know this is already happening in HOT, but I suspect it will effect things more than people think)

The idea in general is to make it so that a glass player has to be on point with their active defenses (or their party support, as with aegis), whereas a mixed stat player can miss some and have some breathing room.

~~~

Part of it also is to tune the damage so that high Toughness or Vitality makes a meaningful difference. There’s an old (largely incorrect for most content) saying that ‘it doesn’t matter because every class is a 1 or 2 hit anyways’. If zerk were 1hit and required perfect play, and knights were 4hit and had some breathing room, you’d see a lot more knights

While still allowing the top players with perfect reflexes to play pure zerk for their speed runs and to get more advantage in props and gold/hour for their skill.

The point is if you choose to assume the worst on every possible point of ambiguity on what the expansion will entail, yeah it looks pretty bad.

rotten.9753:

Windsagio.1340:

The intended comparison is to their simplification of the talent trees (Is that what they call them? It’s been a while) to a set choice per tree as the ‘optimal’ one — ie the removal of the choice.

Then you got it wrong, I’ve suggested removing stats few times already and I had gw1 in mind where you were able to swap your builds in seconds. Going with those rash ideas of reinforcing gear choice will lead to nothing but to reduction of a player’s choice.

“Reducing choices is increasing choices!”

all kidding aside, gear is a meaningful way to accent your intended play style, and to allow a number of things that would be impossible with just traits.

It’s true that the balance is out of whack (although the meaningfulness of the imbalance is wildly exaggerated), but the poor balance doesn’t justify removing the choice.

~~~

The ‘reinforcing gear choice’ is the wrong way to look at it though, it’s ‘making risk/reward meaningful’. Right now, past a basic skill level, risk is not very meaningful in most of the content, and this is too bad.

Wouldn’t it be great if zerk had great payoff but took great skill, as opposed to ‘it has great payoff as long as you’re not absolutely terrible’?

rotten.9753:

Marionette and challenging are contradictory. But judging by people’s post here I say it’s probably a reason we won’t have anything to challenge better players than your average zerger.

To repeat; the trick with marionette is that it was only up for a few weeks. If it had been ongoing it would be below-farm status by now.

People remmeber it being hard because most of the time it was up it was not yet learned.

maddoctor.2738:

Windsagio.1340:

You can see their experiments in fixing the ‘other platform loses’ issue with vinewrath, where it rotates down if you lose, but is on a timer.

That’s an interesting proof of concept at the very least.

“That’s why those portions of the fights should be doable only by pre-made guild teams.” is absolutely not going to happen for multiple reasons, let’s just get that out of our heads right now.

Why isn’t it going to happen? Just how the Guild Challenge Blightwater Shatterstrike works and only allows guild members to use the bazookas, guilds could have a “Guild Boss” or similar mission that makes the World Bosses behave differently for them. Random players can still join in and play the fight as usual, but Guild Members will need to do something extra. I already posted examples of how to tweak current fights to work with this system.

Can you explain why this isn’t going to work? What are those “multiple reasons”?

On a public boss it certainly wont’ happen, it’s against their design as expressed in the game.

On a public event:
It’s inherently and visibly exclusive
It’s logistically nightmarish, possibly impossible

both of these can be split into a few bullet points if you want, I’m being broad strokes here.

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The only way it could work is the way you described, which is essentially a publicly visible raid, but with much greater development investment. It would essentially be a raid instance, and I think arenanet’s been pretty clear on that.

rotten.9753:

Windsagio.1340:

People have actually suggested WoW ing it up and removing stats from gear.

Does wow have statless gear? Because I thought removing stats from gear would be going back to gw1 rather than wow because people that suggested it still want an active game, unlike trinity lovers here.

The intended comparison is to their simplification of the talent trees (Is that what they call them? It’s been a while) to a set choice per tree as the ‘optimal’ one — ie the removal of the choice.

People have actually suggested WoW ing it up and removing stats from gear.

You can see their experiments in fixing the ‘other platform loses’ issue with vinewrath, where it rotates down if you lose, but is on a timer.

That’s an interesting proof of concept at the very least.

“That’s why those portions of the fights should be doable only by pre-made guild teams.” is absolutely not going to happen for multiple reasons, let’s just get that out of our heads right now.

Also, and maybe more important, people only had a few weeks to do it and it was bugged for part of that (leadign to weird distrubitions on platforms).

It’s essentially impossible to compare the difficulty level of Marionette to that of ongoing content that people have spend months if not years mastering and practicing.

~~~

About the reveals, I think they have a good reason to sit on that info. It’s very likely that the main groups that want it are going to dislike what they do conceptually, so giving them less time to work themselves up into a hate frenzy before they can actually play it is a pretty smart move.

Or just save up mats, if the changes are bigger than we think and people are wrong, they’re gonna be annoyed.

To my understanding, personal condi still caps lower than personal DD.

Increasing the cap helps, but doesn’t solve the problem on its own.

~~~

The difficulty question is about pure glass vs. mixed defensive stats. You can’t reasonably increase the value of the defensive stats without increasing difficulty.

in silverwastes, the underground troll was actually a test case for a tactic to change things up.

The ‘damage rings’ spreading outward look to be a way to force people out of their optimal damage areas, largely without regard to gear (the tracking bees on the normal trolls are similar).

Attacks like that are pretty taxing on active defenses, and ‘hard’ versions of the fights could severely change the skill calculation.

— at risk of making the game too hard for everyone to beat, which is ultimately why we have the current situation.

‘cept it’s not skill based, because the ‘high skill/high risk’ option can be used by all skill levels.

cranos.5913:

Windsagio.1340:

cranos.5913:

I don’t see condis becoming meta for the old content (dungeons and fractals), so probably berserker or assassins as spoj pointed out earlier. As for HoT content, who knows… There haven’t been any instances announced yet and in open world you can generally do w/e you want, so there might not even be a “HoT meta”.

If there’s not a ‘meta’ people will claim one.

So? There’s a tequatl ‘meta’ too, but no one cares. It’s open world where everyone can truly play how they want.

Well there’s a point that dungeons are actually the same way, but that’s been done a ton. The only difference is that one is somewhat enforcable.

cranos.5913:

I don’t see condis becoming meta for the old content (dungeons and fractals), so probably berserker or assassins as spoj pointed out earlier. As for HoT content, who knows… There haven’t been any instances announced yet and in open world you can generally do w/e you want, so there might not even be a “HoT meta”.

If there’s not a ‘meta’ people will claim one.

To make more builds feasable they have to in some ways make the game harder.

Pure glass is currently always preferable because it’s very easy to stay alive as pure glass, so you don’t get DPS loss via faceplant even at lower skill levels.

Most other builds and gear specs have an additional focus on passive defenses (sometimes active), which aren’t necessary for most people.

Rotation management isn’t super crazy hard in GW2, for sure.

That being said, rotation mistakes hurt condition users more than dd users because you have to keep hitting your condition refreshes. Since it’s a continually refreshing sustain, having a miss hurts more (you’re in essence going back a step in your windup time).

Optimally, it should be something like this:
Melee has the highest damage in general, but has meaningful risk (right now we have the former but not the latter)

At either melee or range, condition should have higher potential balanced via the warmup time and the fact that time lost hurts their output more. If damage is being dealt sporadically, direct damage should do more.

That would pretty finely balance the ‘glass’ classes, depending on encounter length. Of course, it’s intensely hard to get that kind of fine tuning down, and any slipup or error will be not only pounced upon by the players but will have it’s importance massively hyped.

“What should I do with new content if I don’t care to utilize new content?!”

This is indeed a question for the ages.

spoj.9672:

Its pretty much guaranteed to be glass direct damage. But at the same time it could be assassins. So either way you are probably best waiting and just saving up the mats and components for crafting.

Even with improved conditions in HoT. Direct still has far superior maximum potential and benefits more from group buffs. One thing can be certain though. Theres no way Celestial will ever be meta for any class in PvE. The very concept of cele is to provide a balance of everything with no maximum efficiency in any area. You will have wasted stats no matter how well a class can take advantage of most of them.

I’m not willing to call Condi out yet, it depends not only on how far they go with systems changes (increasing the stack is likely only part of it), but also on any possible skill and trait changes (which are also very possible)