Guild Wars 2

Which, of course, is why they aren’t going to want to go to trinity.

Aenesthesia.1697:

the problem is that zerker is the only viable option, while this game offers more ways to do damage, only the developers made it really flawed. That won’t be solved by introducing the trinity. Stop trying to find solutions of other games to the unique problems of this game.

Zerker isn’t the only viable option, it’s simply the fastest option.

Almost all options are viable for almost all content. That’s a central concept that they’ve pretty successfully delivered on.

sorudo.9054:

then isn’t it time for them to hinder the braindead DPS playstyle and focus on a more strategic battlefield, isn’t it time they gave up on their “but it’s fine the way it is” crap and actually change the battle system so players need to think before they act.
really, if there is one thing this game is good at it’s the auto-pilot battles, i know the original GW has plenty of auto skills but GW2 just adds a whole different level of lazy fighters.

They’re pretty clearly taking steps along those lines (per the stability nerf), but there are plenty of answers that don’t rely on falling back on trinity play.

Zoltreez.6435:

funny thing is that trinity is IN the game

just healer and Tanks are useless and DPS is the only way to go

Healer and tank abilities are there but they are soo weak compared to the DPS that your gimping yourself if you go ALL out healing or ALL out tank.

why player going ALL out DPS dont kitten themself.

there is this middle ground and pure dps. thats ALL you can be in the game.

i Wish this game would have Rift talenting it has Trinity but has waaaaay more choices and freedom then any other game.

This is kind of wrong, they totally work but there’s no reason to use them. A guardian provides a massive amount of tanking and healing if the group knows how to synergize right. The problem is that in most cases, especially if the players are good enough all that healing and tanking is a waste of time as compared to more dps and aegis/blind/icebow.

that’s because you’re a negative nelly. Forum is full of them :p

Like I said, this will help balance a boon that only some classes have easy access to.

I think this was covered in the third post, guess we have to go over it again.

this taunt is not like traditional MMO taunting It doesn’t change the aggro table, except the proximity marker. It’s a very limited form of CC, with very specific advantages and disadvantages.

There’s really not much else to say beyond that. In many cases, a 3s stun or a 3s daze would be better than a 3s taunt (since the victim can’t attack at all). It’s not that its useless or won’t have some potentially really crazy good effects (sometimes you really wanna force that baddie to move), but it’s going to take work to get as much effectout of it.

Dirame.8521:

leman.7682:

Test.8734:

leman.7682:

Could we see future reworks of exisitng professions to make them on par with Revenant or should everyone just reroll the new profession on day one and forget about the past?

Specializations.

How do specializations solve the problem? From what we know, they take something away from a profession and give something new…

They don’t add cool animations and effects, they don’t make badly designed skills/weapons like necro axe/dagger, ranger sword/axe or warrior rifle good out of the sudden. Why? Because these weapons are based on simple tech like spam one to do dmg, press 2 to knock back, etc.

Not solving the problem.

Lol okay. Shove your presents in the bin when you haven’t even taken a look inside just because the kid next door got a Car, why don’t you.

Should be “Because their parents are talking about the awesome gift they’ve bought”

The other thing is that honestly, you can tank and heal and support perfectly well even in the current content, and all with 1 character (Try a knight healing mace/focus/hammer guardian sometime, they do actually hold aggro stupidly well). The problem isnt’ that control isn’t reasonably available, it’s that it’s not that worth doing in most fights because you can just burn more quickly (or as was said use frostbow shenanigans).

There are only a few fights in the current game (for PvE) that I can think of where this is a huge change (although it will make the thaumanova turret room much more annoying). The thing is, one of the things the’re promising is harder group content and with the current state of stability that’s extremely difficult, especially if they want to get away from the current ‘dodge phase/damage phase’ style they’ve used in LS2 (and with mai).

Moo.3408:

Rentapest.6503:

ZudetGambeous.9573:

This change will wreck PvE in multiple ways. Unless you plan on completely overhauling PvE from the ground upm this change makes no sense.

Most enemies stun multiple times in short durations, or have a very short CD on their stun attacks. They were designed around the previous version of stability, it makes no sense to have it this new way

+1

It’s extremely clear: now comes diversity in pve builds. You will now need a taunt/stability tank. YAAAAAAAAAAAAYYYYY, and a healer to back that up, causing condis and condi remove.

Because there’s diversity in pve builds now?

It’s going to totally change how most people do one of the molten fractals as well.

CC is an important part of encounter difficulty, and the ability to essentially, passively, ignore it for large amounts of time led to some pretty lame tactics.

The problem isn’t skipping though, you can do the runs in most dungeons with nothing, and there’s still always stealth and invis.

Really the opposite. They’re fixing their boon system for a glaring imbalance that effects all game modes.

Stability is breaking pve more than its’ breaking any other game mode because it trivializes so many encounters. Yeah, we’re going to have to learn to actually do some of these fights over again, but it’s a huge step towards the mode actually taking skill.

Heaven forbid they make people actually have to fight.

If anything pve needs a stability nerf more than pvp does.

Chrispy, seriously, you can’t shift the burden of proof on this one.

I’m still people are thinking of promos as too much.

When they reveal the each spec’s details, I expect the same “Oh my, over powered!!! NEW META!!!” response.

Zenith.7301:

DeceiverX.8361:

Stealth itself isn’t OP.

A lot of the direct utility that comes with going into stealth is, and this is not limited to the thief class. PU mes arguably has better gains.

PU mesmer is garbage outside duels. A thief on the other hand can join a zerg and spam the ridiculously good clusterbomb+choking gas combo.

Also PU mesmers can’t kill anyone who wants to run away from them, people who die to PU mesmers are people who stay in and eat the heavy ramp up of conditions. They kill slowly and they really don’t contribute much to WvW objectives.

A thief takes out a target quick and moreover can escape from a zerg easily whereas PU mesmer’s stealth isn’t going to gain him distance against a remotely competent group of people and on top of that they’re very easy to stunlock while shadowstep is a double port with condition removal and stunbreak built all in one.

There’s a good reason why GvG’s still take a thief or two into their rosters while they don’t incorporate any PU mesmers.

Azure The Heartless.3261:

Ragnarox.9601:

Akagami.9861:

This made me lol so hard, let me quess those 4 people were afk? You can’t just create a thief, put on a build go with lvl 5 equip and kill people in a rampage this is like something George R. R. Martin would write… A FANTASY

….
Every class has something OP about them, and a way to deal with thieves, you just have to know your class. Used to main a warrior, and i know how to wipe the floor with one(unless he is some crazy dude that has like 50k hours on that thief…maybe that would be kinda hard) And as a Thief i met Guardians that kept me on the run all the time, elementalists, engineers, necromancers, rangers…i got my @ss handed to me from every class individually 1 vs 1, do you know how? THEY KNEW HOW TO PLAY, they weren’t busy on the forums crying about invi being overpowerd. They learned how to counter a thief and how to defeat one.

Saddly you can be a pro thief in just 10 minutes. 50k hours? now who talks bout fantasy. And you cant win 1 vs 1 against a good skilled thief.

Sure you can.

Mediguards do it almost automatically.

Who runs mediguard in WvW? Oh that’s right, almost no one since guardians don’t have much in the way of escapes from getting zerged.

A PU mesmer in the ‘hiding in bay’ scenario is infinitely more than a thief in the same situation, because it’s actually useful, and 1/0 is still infinity.

And again, there’s a certain joy in starting a channeled attack (or a CC) watching the rogue try to stealth out of it, and then seeing their corpse appear some seconds later when the stealth ends.

horse flogging mode

Anyone here complaining not talking about WvW?

OP’s a little combative, eh?

~~~

Anyhoo, the vast majority of people in this thread, who play pvp and pve seem to agree that the OP’s point is invalid for the simple reason that stealth isn’t all that amazingly strong in most parts of the game.

Not really anywhere to go with the discussion from there

People also need to quit doing this weird guilt-tripping/manipulation stuff.

“It’s Pay to win!” and “You’d make more money in the long run if you just charged less money (or made things free) now!” are 2 sides of the same, silly coin.

Would any of you deny that you want it in gold because spending gold seems lekittenous to you?

The other thing they’d better do is make sure that boon removal always prioritizes resistance.

They wouldn’t be asking it to be changed to gold if gold had higher, or even even value than/to gems to them.

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

Are you sure on that? It still has value, or rather it had value at one point. That is of more import to figuring out an absolute value which is what would need to be discussed when evaluating how to price these expansion purchases. Just because cash was not recently traded, doesn’t mean it stops being relevant cash was traded. It still happened. (If a concessions stand pays for something and holds onto it for two months, it still has value even if that money was spent last month and not in the latest invoices.)

This isnt’ ultimately about absolute value of anything though, it’s about converting the price into a format that has lower relative value to the people making the request.

“Gold is free” is too glib yes, but the request is blatantly self-serving.

Let’s look at it this way:

Where is Stealth?

Game Modes (Sorted on my understanding of how commonly played they are):

PVE: Stealth is only useful for running (just about) You want a thief in your party for blinds, not for stealth.
WvW (Zerg or Blob): Laughably meaningless
SPvP (Conquest): Shadow Refuge has some uses; You can’t cap with stealth but you can disengage. Honestly not great, but useful in 1 on 1’s. PU mesmers, imo, apply and use invis better than thieves use stealth.
SPvP (Courtyard): Almost never 1-1 and lots of random ae. Stealth or no, thieves aren’t great in this.
WvW (Roamer): Strong, if the opponent is alone you can get a really good spike (but not better than a surprise RapidFire from a RTW ranger), and you can always get away.
WvW (GvG): I honestly don’t know this one

I’m happy to be corrected on any of these usages of course.

~~~ so, stealth is ‘eh’ or worthless in most of the commonly played modes of the game but is really strong in open-world 1v1’s (that rarely have an impact outside of winning and losing the particular fight?)

The questions then are:

1) Do we need to rebalance stealth in a relatively lightly played, unsupported playstyle at the risk of making it worse in modes where its already weak?
2) Where it is particularly strong (roaming) does the fact that very few roaming battles effect map goals matter to the discussion?

maddoctor.2738:

Stealth in GW2 isn’t overpowered because it has a very short duration. In PVE and sPVP Stealth is a MUST for Thief survival and creates very interesting gameplay. I can understand where the problem is, in WvW, where Thieves can easily escape from almost any situation. But it’s not easy to solve this issue without breaking Stealth in PVE/sPVP where it’s absolutely fine.

Noting that it’s not terribly broken in actual battles in WvW only. It’s only really good in single/small group skirmishing.

Zenith.7301:

Windsagio.1340:

Victory.2879:

The bigger problem for me is the lack of cooldown on skills, which means a thief can macro a chain and spam 5-6 skills in under a second, all whilst you are rooted due to a venom.

The stealth mechanic isn’t all that bad in pvp, as others have mentioned if they are in stealth they can’t cap, and most of the time you can see them coming.

Every class has skills available to get out of that, use them.

BP>HS has a lower cooldown than any class’s defensive cooldowns.

Thieves have so many resets where other classes have to pay for their mistakes with death.

There’s a good reason why such a vast amount of solo roamers in WvW happen to be thieves. It’s impossible to die if you don’t want to. The one class where even if things don’t go your way you can just reset and harass until the situation favors you.

I’d love to force some of these thieves and roaming warriors to play a Necromancer for a change.

If you’re complaining about solo roamers, you’re already complaining about something silly.

In PVE stealth is like, super bad, exept for runs and skips.

In PvP mass stealth has some good, but limited and specific uses, and solo stealth is also good but absolutely not broken.

In arena fights and Wv roamers, both of which have very little to do with any real goals, I can see it being quite strong.

The important thing to remember (They even said it in the article) is that resistance is an effect that already exists in the game, by making it a boon they’re making it strippable and counterable.

This is a nerf to the effect, which makes them able to make it more common.

dietzero.3514:

People really need to give up this Time = Gold = Free falsehood. It is ridiculous…

Hey, I have some work that needs doing. Anyone want to do it? You will only use up your time, so of course I will pay you nothing.

The time is free if it’s play you’d be doing anyways. If you’re playing angrily for maximum gold efficiency, then I might suggest you can get better hourly elsewhere.

Victory.2879:

The bigger problem for me is the lack of cooldown on skills, which means a thief can macro a chain and spam 5-6 skills in under a second, all whilst you are rooted due to a venom.

The stealth mechanic isn’t all that bad in pvp, as others have mentioned if they are in stealth they can’t cap, and most of the time you can see them coming.

Every class has skills available to get out of that, use them.

You’re assuming that any build has large amounts of access to all 3 (although I’d look out for that mesmer spec).

I’m coming from a moderately large amount of matches of pvp played for someone who’s primarily PVE-centered.

Stealth in this game is not the huge problem you’re making it to be, especially in conquest maps. Cooldowns are mostly pretty fast (sub 60 seconds), and a thief that disengages in stealth, if don’t get ae bombed by classes that do that (although that’kitten or miss) are ceding the control point, at least temporarily.

Stealth is good for +1’ing a fight, but speed and range are just as good if not better.

Stealth is good for disengaging, but that means you’ve had to disenagage.

Opening strikes in stealth are good, but it’s not as devastating as most mmo’s.

Stealth is strong enough to have a use but simply isn’t all that strong in GW2.

It’s arguably worse in WvW and PvE, especially on thieves.

Also, looks like OP is basing his calling stealth OP from his experience playing an entirely different game…

Ranger longbow stealth is pretty annoying too ><

Also, wow @ jumping the gun. I’m gonna call it now. Each specialization, as it is revealed is going to be declared ‘the new meta’.

Well from what we’re seeing, they’re less versatile than ele’s and engineers already.

That’s not counting the fact that they’re energy-locked. Go play GW1 on a warrior main and see the fun you can get into in the +pips/-pips model.

You have to have a supremely high volume of messages to get suprressed, what are you even typing that requires that many lines?

Only time I’ve gotten this is when we were doing a play and I copypasta’d my lines a bit too fast.

I can’t rapidfire a thief, have them stealth halfway through, and have the full attack still hit, downing them, and think that stealth is overpowered.

Mesmer invis is much more Difficult to deal with than thief stealth, like aberrent noted they can still damage while invis’d (via clones/phantasms).

Or he’s reacting to the fairly bald attempt to reduce the price :p

I still haen’t done my ‘been there’ because the wvw maps are such a kitten. It’s not even the players, its just the maps are awful and annoying and either empty or sudden inescapable death (and thus totally boring if you’re not there for wvw)

phys.7689:

Windsagio.1340:

phys.7689:

Windsagio.1340:

Astral Projections.7320:

Walks into a brick and mortar store
Tells the management there, he wants them to reduce prices for items because it’s inconvenient to be without these items and he doesn’t want to spend money on them.
Management agrees and reduces prices.

Yeah, I can definitely see that happening.

It’s more like going into a Gamestop and saying “Hey, if I work at the store for 3 hours, will you give me a copy of GTA 5?”

Player’s time is less valuable to them than their money, so they want to pay the less valuable commodity.

lol you realize that is probably essentially how they get a lot of their employees? And its only some players, i honestly rarely have converted gold to gems because you actually end up working harder for the same thing

The difference is that the employees are paid, and yes get an employee discount, but still have to pay $$$ out in the end.

yeah they work in the store, then they get a game.
In fact its actually a great proposition for the store owners, its probably illegal in some way though.

I can imagine them paying people below minimum wage in games they got as trade ins instead of real cash, and people loving it.
work for me for 2 days and i give you gta V. never mind it actually translates to 4 dollars an hour.

I had an edit, but it got chomped, so I’ll just put it in reply.

You’re right that the scneario you’re describing would be exploitative, but that’s not perfect for the analogy anyways.

People generate gold by playing (we’ll ignore for the moment that you can convert and that it kind of makes the complaint the cost then), and any method of playing in the game generates gold.

They want to convert an effect of the time they spent playing (the gold) for the service (the slots). In the gamestop metaphor, they’re actually giving up their time and doing real work that’s of real value to the store in order to get their product.

~~~~

Which brings us back to the ‘ignore for the moment’. Anet lets you buy them for gold (via gem conversion), but players don’t like the cost, claiming it’s too high. This is a little different, it makes it feel like the issue is that they want to not have to work that hard for the bags. At that point it comes back to player self-interest again. To that, what response is there other than ‘Who in the history of the world hasn’t wanted things to be cheaper when they were paying for something?’

fixing forum bug blah blah

phys.7689:

Windsagio.1340:

Astral Projections.7320:

Walks into a brick and mortar store
Tells the management there, he wants them to reduce prices for items because it’s inconvenient to be without these items and he doesn’t want to spend money on them.
Management agrees and reduces prices.

Yeah, I can definitely see that happening.

It’s more like going into a Gamestop and saying “Hey, if I work at the store for 3 hours, will you give me a copy of GTA 5?”

Player’s time is less valuable to them than their money, so they want to pay the less valuable commodity.

lol you realize that is probably essentially how they get a lot of their employees? And its only some players, i honestly rarely have converted gold to gems because you actually end up working harder for the same thing

The difference is that the employees are paid, and yes get an employee discount, but still have to pay $$$ out in the end.

Of course people that do that aren’t just off the street, are doing work that’s actually of value to the store, and have to actually get hired.

Astral Projections.7320:

Walks into a brick and mortar store
Tells the management there, he wants them to reduce prices for items because it’s inconvenient to be without these items and he doesn’t want to spend money on them.
Management agrees and reduces prices.

Yeah, I can definitely see that happening.

It’s more like going into a Gamestop and saying “Hey, if I work at the store for 3 hours, will you give me a copy of GTA 5?”

Player’s time is less valuable to them than their money, so they want to pay the less valuable commodity.

This thread has encouraged me to do a large amount of bank and bag cleanup.

About the value thing, there’s no sensible reason for people to want this change if they didn’t feel that gold had lower real value than gems.

This is one of those ‘hey I have this great idea that will make it so I don’t have to spend money I don’t want to spend!’ threads.

If earning stuff were a race time advantage would be p2w. The thing is, getting stuff isn’t a race, so it’s ins tead p2QOL

“soft currencies” in the lingo, with gems being a ‘hard currency’

Ayrilana.1396:

Mirta.5029:

phys.7689:

karma is basically gold

how do you buy karma?

You don’t but it can be converted into gold at a fairly consistent rate to be as if you earned the gold directly.

It’s 1 way though, karma can become gold but gold can’t become karma. There aren’t many karma specific skins, but there are a few (there are some rare skins from low level vendors and then there’s the temple armor which afaik can only otherwise be attained through accountbound fractal drops)

Mirta.5029:

phys.7689:

i hate buying stuff with gold in a game, the only thing i dislike more is probably buying stuff with real money in a game.

point is, new armors in other games can be goals, in FFXIV i want to craft a certain armor set, i want to get a different set from a raid. Which gives me goals, and things to do in game. Now if these gears are only available in the store, they really do nothing for making the game more engaging.

But i may be a special case

do you have all the dungeon skins unlocked? Because F me after a month I’m only getting close to finishing the crucible of eternity collection. Then there’s all the karma vendor skins. Then there’s all cultural armour skins. Then there’s the special champion weapon skins. Then there’s all the crafting profession backpacks and all the ascended skins that I didn’t unlock yet (every different stat is a different skin), then I don’t have all the legendaries either, not to mention the exclusive tequatl skins. You’re telling me that you have all of it?

I have a pet theory that part of the problem is that there’s no heirarchy for unlocking skins, so it ends up being a bit of a ‘kid in the candy shop’ kind of issue. Most games have an essentially set order for earning (even with crafting tracks), but past level 80 the only ‘ordered’ content is ascended and legendaries, and those only somewhat.

phys.7689:

Mirta.5029:

phys.7689:

2 week schedule is a lie, Its a 2 week schedule for 6 -8 weeks than a break. and the amount of content per those two weeks doesnt add up.

and we havent actually got a new dungeon/dungeon like content probably since fractured.

but it is true that they have to make money some how. And it is also true that you get a decent value for your initial purchase.

but i would probably pay more for more actual game of substance. The expansion may provide that, we shall see. I honestly dont know though, havent seen them deliver much on par with what the game delivered in the first 4 months in a long time.

14 fractals,
3 new zones,
QA improvements,
5 hours worth of story
and lots of temporary events

That’s what we got in 2 years for free. Even WoW just locks it up in expansions. And once again, which game provides you with new dungeons on a regular basis?

fractals were cool, but we got most of those 4 months after release, and the rest like a year ago.
Quality of life improvements were like 50/50 for me.
5 hours of story is not a lot, thats 3 months in ffxiv

they had some cool stuff, like marionette, and i think it was worth 60 bucks, but most of their interesting content was like a year ago, and the far majority was on release.

and i amended my last post with ffxiv.
look at what they have added in a year, like 12 dungeons 12 raids 2 24 mans, massive amounts of quests, like 10 boss events in game obtainable armors, a new class new crafting recipes etc.

and thats only one year of updates

~~~

The ‘obtainable armors’ thing is interesting, in most games they’re necessary because of progression creep and the loot-focus on the game. The GW2 business model is, in effect, opposed to that, which means that you’re usually going to get new prestige items in different ways than the traditional ‘new-dungeon-new-loot-I’m-the-first-to-get-the-cool-new-set’ setup. (with a few blaring exceptions)