While I do not agree with you that the game suffers because of " dps focus " and that this subtracts from the MMO experience for the sake of argument I’ll add something in.
You might consider the fact that MMOs have a range of your character’s dependency on other characters. This range extends from no dependency to completely dependent.
If this is the case than GW2 is more oriented towards the less dependent than your average MMO, but what a lot of people are missing is that there are numerous MMOs out there that already have an ironclad dependency between chars.
WoW and its trinity is a good example – you need all 3 – tank, healer and dps, to succeed.Now this model is fine and works for WoW but consider the players that came to GW2. They came here to get away from the standard model that WoW has.
They came here to enjoy more freedom and we have that in the game right now.In a dungeon, at the final boss if 4/5 of the party go down the last player can finish the fight provided he is skilled enough. That can’t happen in WoW or other games where character interdependence is too high.
So while I agree with you that GW2 has less elements forcing you to rely on others I’m trying to point out that this is not a bad thing.
There are numerous MMOs that force this dependency between players out there and very few that give you more freedom as an individual to do good on your own. I feel that GW2 blends the two aspects nicely and I’d hate to see it shift towards a direction where I’m punished if others perform poorly.GW2 is a game that caters to a different demographic of gamers than your traditional “trinity-role based MMO” – these players came to GW2 for the features that GW2 offers and have stayed with the game for almost 2 years because of it.
Yet this creates another even more serious problem. Its fine to cut dependence on other people, its fine to not require a certain class or a certain set-up to do a certain content, but what’s not fine is a shift down to the lowest denominator.
Content in this game doesn’t need condition removal, it doesn’t need boon stripping, it doesn’t need anything. So of course optimised parties just strengthen what they need, the lowest denominator of all content, DPS. Thus classes with higher DPS or group DPS potential are taken, and all other classes are considered sub-optimal, and not wanted.
You shift the need for another class down to exclusion of the class. A complete, unwanted, 180 degree turn.
I’m extremely concerned about how you guys balance the game, even more so after seeing this ready-up. I’m not claiming I know how to balance a game but there’s just things I can’t add up in my head.
You insist on doing baby-step balancing but our balance patches come 2-4 months phases. From what I understand from other games, baby-step balancing only works if you patch frequently.
You mention things like being able to move out of battle should something go wrong, and things like classes being balanced around having other forms of utility. For PvE, this to me suggests that you value things like condition removal and boonstripping in PvE, yet this does not hold true for most of the content, and even after 2 years, we still barely see any content which values things like boons stripping. If balance takes account of things like boons stripping or condition removal, they need to be vital parts of the game. If all the content are just DPS-fests, balance should just revolve around that.
^ I was kind of enjoying your post until the last part about GW2 being a WoW clone. I’m not even going to say anything other than: have you actually played WoW before?
the two things that are directly from WoW and are just as horrible:
1.) gear grind, you might not have to do an insane dungeon to hope for a drop but then again, you have a better chance of getting the gear trough a drop then to farm for it like in GW2.
2.) gear centric, one thing GW1 did perfectly right but GW2 did horribly wrong is to make gear the top priority as it is in WoW, it should’ve bin a cosmetic thing and nothing else.I love this post. In WoW even before they went casual it was possible to get a few pieces of currency and buy a piece of armor without spending years in the same dungeon. I tried myself to get even the AC things (you would think since it’s one of the first dungeons players encounter it would be quick to do a single run and then get a reward but no.) we barely made it with a good team and two guards. What gets me is the tiny bit of currency. I went out to see what I could get with it. Absolutely nothing. Is it any wonder why people preferred crafting in this title to running dungeons early on?
Agree with you on the stats thing. When they announced early on that it might be cosmetic only I thought AWESOME! that would be a real change. but alas no. Last minute decisions in the wrong directions/lack of knowledge of mmo development history seems to be this game’s problem.
If you are struggling in AC, you don’t have a good team. Period. In fact, you have a bad team.
AC is one of the easiest dungeons in the game, and you can tell it is because its a dungeon which is near the top of everyone’s daily rotation list.
if it’s so “easy”, why do ppl constantly force ppl to play a certain build or scram?
answer me that question, just try it.My opinion is, because a Lot of Players want to do speed clears. Which to me sounds Like a " this is a chore, let’s Just get it over and done with" not." This is fun and engaging content."
If we had More of the latter, we would also have less of the former.
Name one MMO where people don’t do speedclears and you don’t ever get groups asking for specific builds or gearchecks. Just name me one.
The truth is, when you have done something 50+ times, no matter how great it is, you don’t do it just for fun anymore.
^ I was kind of enjoying your post until the last part about GW2 being a WoW clone. I’m not even going to say anything other than: have you actually played WoW before?
the two things that are directly from WoW and are just as horrible:
1.) gear grind, you might not have to do an insane dungeon to hope for a drop but then again, you have a better chance of getting the gear trough a drop then to farm for it like in GW2.
2.) gear centric, one thing GW1 did perfectly right but GW2 did horribly wrong is to make gear the top priority as it is in WoW, it should’ve bin a cosmetic thing and nothing else.I love this post. In WoW even before they went casual it was possible to get a few pieces of currency and buy a piece of armor without spending years in the same dungeon. I tried myself to get even the AC things (you would think since it’s one of the first dungeons players encounter it would be quick to do a single run and then get a reward but no.) we barely made it with a good team and two guards. What gets me is the tiny bit of currency. I went out to see what I could get with it. Absolutely nothing. Is it any wonder why people preferred crafting in this title to running dungeons early on?
Agree with you on the stats thing. When they announced early on that it might be cosmetic only I thought AWESOME! that would be a real change. but alas no. Last minute decisions in the wrong directions/lack of knowledge of mmo development history seems to be this game’s problem.
If you are struggling in AC, you don’t have a good team. Period. In fact, you have a bad team.
AC is one of the easiest dungeons in the game, and you can tell it is because its a dungeon which is near the top of everyone’s daily rotation list.
Bifrost is definitely a ‘better’ weapon in terms of utility, as it can switch to any stat you want, and has all the upgrade and infusion slots you would have on an ascended weapon.
The only difference is whether you prefer the look. I do have to warn you though that if you use Bifrost, your autoattack on any element becomes just a rainbow something instead of fireballs/water sprays/lightning bolts/rocks, which is a pretty stupid change cosmetically.
^ I was kind of enjoying your post until the last part about GW2 being a WoW clone. I’m not even going to say anything other than: have you actually played WoW before?
the two things that are directly from WoW and are just as horrible:
1.) gear grind, you might not have to do an insane dungeon to hope for a drop but then again, you have a better chance of getting the gear trough a drop then to farm for it like in GW2.
2.) gear centric, one thing GW1 did perfectly right but GW2 did horribly wrong is to make gear the top priority as it is in WoW, it should’ve bin a cosmetic thing and nothing else.Gear is NOT a top priority in GW2, the players are making it a priority (you only need Ascended items if you are doing high lvl fractals). Heck, I even have a character that I WvW with that still has green items equipped. If it were true, that GW2 is equipment-centric, I shouldn’t be as competitive as I am.
People keep mistaking the ‘I want to look unique’ with ‘this gear is needed or I am toast’. There is NO GEAR GRIND in this game – the players are doing that to themselves.
If gear carries such minimal weight, then why isn’t everyone running around in full whites/blues/greens? Please explain.
Because exotics are so easy to get. When people talk about gear having ‘weight’ they usually mean the jump from exotic to ascended.
If Im perfectly honest with you. I think every dungeon apart from maybe Arah needs a complete revamp. For a start, most of the bosses in this game can be just described as tank and spank. Oh wait, there’s no tank, so we just got spank.
Class specific legendaries would be awesome.
+1
Or race specific legendaries.
The problem with that would be you would get a lot less mileage out of it. Frankly, I don’t think this game was designed to be played with only one class, as the shallow character customisation and progression will bore you inside out if you just camp one class.
^ I was kind of enjoying your post until the last part about GW2 being a WoW clone. I’m not even going to say anything other than: have you actually played WoW before?
the two things that are directly from WoW and are just as horrible:
1.) gear grind, you might not have to do an insane dungeon to hope for a drop but then again, you have a better chance of getting the gear trough a drop then to farm for it like in GW2.
2.) gear centric, one thing GW1 did perfectly right but GW2 did horribly wrong is to make gear the top priority as it is in WoW, it should’ve bin a cosmetic thing and nothing else.
1) That 5% increase in stats is really going to make a difference.
2) When was gear a top priority? Gear type is, but not the gear itself. Going in Ascended zerker armor is basically the same thing as going in Exotic zerker armor.
I think we need more stuff like the dredge fractal final boss’s heal ability, where you absolutely need to CC it.
It depends. On PvE for most of the faceroll earlier dungeons, if you want to play a ‘metabuild’, eles are mostly extremely boring to play because you either just autoattack with a hammer 90% of the time (scepter) or only use one element and cycle through 3 attacks (staff). Think magical warrior GS camping, but with even less skills to use.
In FotM, harder content, or if you want to screw the metabuild, it gets a lot more interesting as you get a lot more use out of dagger/focus, one of the more interesting setups in the time where you cycle through all your elements and use everything based on what you and your team mates need.
The thing I really wanted to hear about is what’s happening with conditions in PvE. Over a year ago Jon Peters said you guys had ideas and were discussing through options.
Can you tell us what came out of that?
I personally think s/x LH builds don’t seem….right though. Optimisation should not involve not using your actual weapon most if the time and just auto attacking with your LH.
@Xae
Yes, basically that. Toxic Alliance mobs exemplify just how much can be added to the sheer class viability through diversity with how little in enemy behaviour.Now imagine if there were more mob types. Some which stealth and only reappear at opportunistic moments (like the thingies in XCOM). Most dodge AE. Some don’t. Some have crucial boons. Others have crucial conditions. We already have the tags, everyone knows what the mobs do, so…
We got this really cool combat system built around reactive combat and constant movement, yet enemy types encourage anything but that. It’s a waste of potential.
I don’t think CoF and CoE etc should be included in a challenge like that. There’s no skill at all in beating them, and the only factor which contributes to the speed of a run is DPS.
Putting them into a tournament would just shine a harsh light on the weakest part of GW2.
I personally don’t think GW2 is ready for a PvE tourney like that yet. PvE in this game is too dependent on DPS, and thus it makes for a boring tournament to watch.
If they want an interesting tournament, they should make a dungeon which tests every aspect the game has to offer. Control, use of combo fields, condition management, DPS management (ie, not just do as much as possible), positioning, reactive dodging, the whole lot. We don’t have something like that yet.
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The game needs far more enemy movement. If enemies moved out of AoEs, kited you, and dashed around like players would do in PvP, then we’ll see more uses for control.
If we got boons you need to strip from mobs (e.g. 100% damage negation or 200% damage), then we’ll see uses for boon stripping.
If we got conditions you need to remove (15% current HP lost per second until removed, or death in 7 seconds unless purged), we’ll see more need for condition removal.
Those are basic things from other MMOs which are the common starting points to enable everything to be useful, yet GW2 doesn’t have it. It doesn’t make sense to me.
d/f is a different playstyle from mightstacking conjure ele. You generally don’t blow all your attunement cooldowns and blast finishers in one go, unless you’re killing trash mobs. For longer fights you rotate between the blast finishers in earth+utilities and those in water to keep up around 9 might and vigor permanently for the party.
I think you meant fury but anyways.
You don’t need to follow a certain playerstyle. There’s nothing stopping you from playing d/f with a LH like you would play s/d with a LH.
Like I explained, I wasn’t using d/f for d/f itself but using d/f as insurance.
Of course when you need to swap to your traditional d/f, you drop your hammer and start playing like a traditional d/f.
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I think I agree with pretty much everything the OP said.. Except for rewards I’d like to add that unique skins would be nice too.
However .. if they are tradeable its maybe ok. I’m still used to those raid-games where everything is bind on pickup .. so if you don’t raid no chance to get it.
I don’t see what’s so bad about making them not tradable. This game has enough buyable shinies as it is, heck, legendaries are buyable if you got enough money. We need more skins to display achievement.
If you don’t raid, why should you get it? It’s a skin so you don’t need it for progress.
This is a year-old necrothread.
Its a nice reminder of the time when devs still posted on these forums.
The forums is a nice reflection of the game’s lore. I think of it like Arah.
Well, I’ll explain my logic then.
I see the dagger as an insurance. You lose a blast finisher but you gain the insurance than should you lose your hammer or become unable to use it (its 150 range and a bit clunky) your DPS doesn’t drop through the floor.
In FotM, death isn’t so uncommon, especially if PUG, and the fights are more difficult than your faceroll CoF runs, so that insurance becomes very appealing.
As for the 3 stacks of might you lose. It only matters if you’re the only person stacking might. Two eles stacking 15 stacks each equates to two eles stacking 18+ stacks each. You start losing the ability to do that in FotM because your rotations won’t be as perfect, so you want another ele to help stack as well, or your teammates pitching in with their own blasts, so the 3 stacks you lose doesn’t matter much.
Staff doesn’t have any utility without sacrificing a ton of DPS, because it’s such a polarised weapon. In a bad FotM group, you also ends up with a lot of situations where bosses run around everywhere as people ranged kite them, making lava font unusable.
Scepter’s DPS is just trash without LH, I don’t think I need to elaborate further on that.
Unless you spec real deep into healing, healing won’t help you much on FotM considering the huge amount of damage you take if you get hit and the fact that everyone should be in zerker gear. It’s a similar principle with earth 2, because even on a PVT warrior, you cant take many hits before you go down.
I know you’re talking about carrying a group, but I don’t think that’s a good philosophy to take considering if your group is that bad that they need a dedicated reser on a regular basis, you just leave because that run is going to make you tear your hair out. If they don’t, then you’re just dead weight most of the time.
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I’ve been playing around a bit and I think I prefer d/f with LH instead of s/f with LH in FotM. The reason is that FotM actually has mechanics besides tank n spank so you can’t pull off perfect rotations, so you’d want someone else buffing as well, making the 3 stacks of might rather pointless.
This combined with the fact that you can actually like, die in FotM means s/f isn’t very desirable to me there.
Personally, I think when you summon a conjure, you should get a debuff which makes you unable to pick up conjure weapons for 1 min.
The reason being that I think conjure weapons should be a power-up, not something you go and use instead of your weapon completely, because doing so encourages a player to just ignore the elementalist’s class mechanics most of the time. Plus, I think Anet’s original intention with the summon is so that others can pick up your weapon, not for you to use it yourself.
Lets see here…. out of my fashionable characters, I got a warrior, guardian and a mesmer. Any takers?
Raids… Really want to be able to run instanced content with groups larger than 5 (my guild). I suggested this very thing many times but people tend to ignore it. The current world bosses aren’t really what we want as it requires way too many people for us… We enjoy the current guild missions but wish they were instanced so other guilds can’t complete it for us… Or be rude and just leach or troll.
I think I agree with pretty much everything the OP said.. Except for rewards I’d like to add that unique skins would be nice too. All content should have unique skins, mini pets, tonics and titles.
So, add a new guild mission type, guild dungeon that allows 6-40 people and scales to the size.. And make it and all guild missions instanced. Except trek.. I can see that being a nightmare to “instance”.
It’s because raiding seems to have this taboo associated with this stereotype of raiders being extremely antisocial elitists who rains insults on anyone who dares to step a toe out of line or performs one wrong action.
Hammer is a control weapon. Control is pretty moot in most of PvE. Thus just by its design principles, hammers just don’t work in PvE.
The main problem here is poor quality development. Primarily the AI, but overall game mechanics as well.
The secondary problem is class / profession balance. For example, you can complete a dungeon in a group of 5 zerkers partially due to the fact that they can buff each other’s DPS even further.
the encounter AI is simply unable to reliably deal with the control and support roles, there are no game mechanics present on the boss mobs that would properly detect and deal with these, and there should be.
Just a thought though. This is only a rumour, I wasn’t there at the start and there’s no hard evidence of this. But…
From what I heard, during the first BWE, GW2’s AI had everything GW1’s AI at the end did. Mobs would run from AoEs, ranged mobs would kite you, all that good stuff. But there was two problems. One everything was AoE so mobs would just run away all the time. The second was more concerning, the playerbase complained to Anet that it was frustrating trying to land AoEs because mobs would just get the heck out.
I’m not sure if the second is true or not, and it would be nice if any BWErs can confirm, but if it is, that’s rather worrying and a bit shameful.
Sort of a cop-out answer, but aren’t the large-scale world bosses and guild missions sort of ArenaNet’s answer to “raiding” in GW2? Most MMOs are founded on the assumption that the ultimate in content is gear-gating and fighting in an instanced environment, but GW2 is largely not about this at all. It embraces alternative styles of gameplay, encourages community and open-world events, and is pretty casual-friendly. Simply making a new series of dungeons for 10 players and up would not cut.
I feel like the people who want large-scale raiding would not be satisfied unless it were exceedingly challenging, required a lot of group coordination, and maybe even pushed things in a more traditional “holy trinity” reminiscent approach to party roles. Everyone would just be comparing it to World of Warcraft raids, and if it didn’t emulate those memories accurately enough people would say it “failed.”
And of course, there’s the obvious barrier to entry that comes with requiring larger party sizes and PUGs. One of the top reasons I barely ever got to do any raids in WoW was simply numbers. I also suspect that the majority of people who were drawn to GW2 are strongly drawn away from raids.
They’re an answer, but there’s 2 problems:
1. You’re limited as to what you can do on those because you can’t control who comes in by design (note: by design, not in reality). If a simple raid like Tequatl is causing widespread failures, imagine a ‘proper’ raid in the open world.
2. It actually separates the community even further.
In other games, if you don’t raid, you don’t raid. You know when the devs make a raid, it’s not for you, so raiders and others can co-exist by just doing their own things.
GW2 this is a huge problem. The ‘raid’ content made is for everyone, Anet expects everyone to give it a go. What that means is that on the extreme ends the raiders come in with their disciplined and organised mentality, prepared to listen to orders and obey orders. The extreme casuals come in just wanting some fun, they don’t want to be ordered around, they don’t want to follow rules as if they’re in a military drill.
And those two mindsets clash. It leads to frustration, it leads to annoyance, and it leads to your taxis, your gold pavs, and ultimately defeats the point of that solution.
1. Proper raiding would have to be instanced PvE, you need to choose who is going with you. I’d also like them to bring back PvP raids, where you race a second party to gets to claim the loot, but they seem to be against that.
2. Depends really. On other games, although the top tier of raids are pretty much the toys of the elite 5%, you also have easy raids to introduce the general playerbase into the art of raiding.
3. Stuff like high chances at ascended chests, titles, unique skins, T6 materials. I’d be a bit careful about precursors because ArenaNet has never made a proper raid before and thus I don’t think they’d nail the difficulty of it right for that the first time.
4. Definitely. Raid loot isn’t just for stats. Having raid loot sets you apart, it makes you a raider, and you get you wear that raid loot with pride. To me, raiding is a rite of passage and thus you should be marked as having gone though that rite.
5. I don’t quite like the 4+ hour raids you get in some games. The window to organise them between guildies gets real slim and not everyone gets to play 4 hours straight. I’d think something which lasts <1 hour in a good group should suffice.
6. 10-20. Anything beyond that and you got organisational issues, and the raid starts to turn into a FFA mess.
will finish later.
Hey all!
As an update, we’ve had some meetings and this did come up as one of the skills we’d like to test changes with. To start, we’re looking at the overall radius and damage output. We did discuss some of the other ‘crazy’ stuff (that involves functionality change), but for now we’re going to test it out with some number changes and see how it feels. This probably won’t be in for quite some time, but I just wanted to update the thread and let you know that we didn’t forget.
Also, thanks for the civil conversation and feedback!
Cheers,
-Karl
Hi there, would you mind giving us a list of the skills you guys are looking at, so we can perhaps contribute a bit to the discussion?
^ not really. There’s no way to out heal the amount of incoming damage dealt by enemies in this game like you would in WoW. Getting hit in high-tier content means either a KO or 50%+ of your HP disappearing even in PVT gear.
Open world farming is becoming less and less of a thing these days because Anet consistently nerfs every farming spot to the ground because they don’t like players to grind and/or want you to buy more gems.
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You got elementalist healers in WvW and sPvP, it’s more effective in WvW I’d think because if the lack of a limit off manpower and less splitting up win your group.
I’ve also been with a few ele healers in FotM, it’s actually surprisingly good if you got a average-bad group full of warriors, because then they a lot of damage but won’t die, and the healer can top them off. Not something I’d recommend for a proper speedrun though.
^ I was kind of enjoying your post until the last part about GW2 being a WoW clone. I’m not even going to say anything other than: have you actually played WoW before?
I wouldn’t say staff is the downright best in a group. It has the highest potential DPS but the lowest utility out of any elementalist weapon in order to reach a reasonable DPS because the moment you move off fire, your ability to hurt stuff just collapses.
2. My basic stance is that mobs should try to move out of ground-based AoEs and skills like 100b, and enemies with ranged attacks should always try to keep distance from players.
1. So basically, what they already have. So no reason to change anything. Because they already think about these things.
I never said they need to restructure their teams. the debate was on if their balancing philosophy needs to change.
2+3. You don’t see how adjusting a skill’s coefficient is changing the skill right underneath it, yet PvE is very different from PvP because of the exact same numbers. I do not see how these positions are mutually available.
Let me give you an example then. Churning Earth: the red haired stepchild of focus earth magic.
Change the skill coefficient in PvE to 5.5, PvP to 4. The skill itself doesn’t change, it’s in both game modes a high-risk high-damage skill. But the philosophy behind using it is different: in PvE you use it as a part of a rotation if you can to increase your DPS (you aren’t expecting to ‘burst’ a boss with 10m HP down with it), in PvP you use it as a skill to wreck a target.
Same skill after the change, different philosophies for its use.
^ confusion is a mechanic that’s based off the element of decision-making. Unless you’re going to basically completely redesign the entire mechanic and strip it of that fundamental principle, it doesn’t work in PvE.
Retaliation is another case. PvE enemies hit slow and hard. You don’t want to get hit because getting hit in PvE often means 50%+ of your HP going poof. How then do you make a mechanic based around getting hit work in PvE?
The solution I came up with after 5 seconds; increase the attack rate of enemies’ standard attacks in PvE while also reducing the damage of each individual hit to balance out the DPS. Both Confusion and Retaliation are solved by doing this, and the impact of dodging in PvE is reduced as well.
And that’s the problem. You’re basically asking for them to massively change how PvE works and pretty much redesign how damage mitigation works in this game. You’re supposed to dodge often to avoid attacks, enemies are supposed to hit you hard, and the attack speed in this game was made to cater to that.
Whether that was bad game design or not, that’s an another argument but changing it would mean stripping down almost every encounter in the game and rethinking them. That’s not viable.
On Powerful Banners; have it increase the damage of the 1 and 4, and 2 when applicable, skills and have the damage caused by the Powerful Banners trait to also cause a PBAoE on the 5.
Then you’re completely changing the way the trait works. That’s basically a new trait, that’s not balancing, that’s an overhaul.
^ confusion is a mechanic that’s based off the element of decision-making. Unless you’re going to basically completely redesign the entire mechanic and strip it of that fundamental principle, it doesn’t work in PvE.
Retaliation is another case. PvE enemies hit slow and hard. You don’t want to get hit because getting hit in PvE often means 50%+ of your HP going poof. How then do you make a mechanic based around getting hit work in PvE?
Then comes stuff like Powerful Banners. That trait is useless in everything at the moment but how do you even start to make it work in all game modes? Given the long CD on banners, you’re looking at a coefficient of 6+ to even make people consider using it. That’s enough to 1HKO players in PvP. As amusing as instantly wiping out another zerg by raining banners all over them is, that would just screw WvW up completely.
I’m really not convinced it does. First of all, if you want to balance every game mode at once, your balancing team needs to have detailed knowledge and extensive understanding of every aspect of the game, not just one. Harder to find someone with that knowledge (and Im convinced Anet sin’t using people with that kind if knowledge).
The balance team needs to have detailed knowledge and extensive understanding of every aspect of the game anyway, unless there are three separate balance teams, one for each core aspect of the game- in which case, we’re now paying for three times as many balance teams as before. That’s not a trivial amount.
Second of all, it’s a lot easier to adjust the equation for one variable than for 3 very different variables.
They’re not that different. They’re all fundamentally much the same thing; adjusting the amount of damage Hundred Blades does in PvE has exactly the same effect in PvE as it does in PvP.
Also, Im not exactly convinced that splitting them is ‘bad’ either. PvP and PvE have very different playstyles, even when using the same skill. You wouldn’t throw bolas/KD before you 100b something in PvE, and you wouldn’t use 100b as a part of a rotation in PvP. So a PvE player transitioning to PvP and vice versa has to essentially relearn parts of the game anyways.
This is true. However, changing a player’s experience as a result of a change in enemy behavior, and changing a player’s skills right from underneath them are two wildly different things, and you are brushing under the rug a very huge amount of learning that has to happen by saying “they have to relearn parts of the game anyway”. Yeah, they have to relearn parts of the game, but they don’t have to relearn how their own controls work.
1. You don’t nessecarily need to. You often have the PvE guys and the PvP guys inside balancing teams of companies. You aren’t nessecarily paying for extra heads if you consider the fact that trying to balance for multiple game modes at once is harder than trying to balance them separately.
2. They are very different. Just the fact that one game mode has enemies with 10-100 times the HP of the other makes them very different.
3. I don’t really see how adjusting a skill’s coefficient is changing the skill right underneath them. On the topic of actually changing how a skill works, if you got a mechanic like confusion which doesn’t work in a particular game mode from a fundamental level, what other choice do you have?
I’m hesitant about this. The game very much depends on there being a lot of players together at the same time, for dynamic events to actually work. If you separate the playbase too much, that falls apart.
What’s your basis for thinking that trying to balance 1 thing for 3 rule sets is any better than balancing 3 things for 1 rule sets each?
Economics. It takes substantially less manpower to have one set of balance rules for all abilities, than having to essentially support thrice as many skills, including all the meta-game changes different skill balance would bring.
Both solutions are “bad”. Splitting skills is bad. Not splitting them is bad. But if you got to pick, it makes sense that you’d pick the one where you spend less money on.
I’m really not convinced it does. First of all, if you want to balance every game mode at once, your balancing team needs to have detailed knowledge and extensive understanding of every aspect of the game, not just one. Harder to find someone with that knowledge (and Im convinced Anet sin’t using people with that kind if knowledge).
Second of all, it’s a lot easier to adjust the equation for one variable than for 3 very different variables.
Also, Im not exactly convinced that splitting them is ‘bad’ either. PvP and PvE have very different playstyles, even when using the same skill. You wouldn’t throw bolas/KD before you 100b something in PvE, and you wouldn’t use 100b as a part of a rotation in PvP. So a PvE player transitioning to PvP and vice versa has to essentially relearn parts of the game anyways.
(edited by Xae Isareth.1364)
Dying in game should make you die irl.
Lock yourself in your room and set up a system where poison is released slowly into the room as your HP falls in game.
Enjoy.
i think they’ve given up tbh,
this isn’t the same Anet that made GW1 such a great and balanced game.
only one noticeable balance update in the past 8 months…ridiculous.0 communication from them now too, they’ve given up completely.
I don’t think GW1 was actually balanced because ArenaNet went and delicately balanced each and every skill, but it was balanced for the very reason that it was so chaotic. When you give players enough tools to work with, and the game is complex and deep enough to make possibilities happen, the game balances itself.
TSW is another example. The game only had 2 balance patches in its lifetime, yet its PvP (although that scene isn’t exactly popular…) is one of the most balanced I’ve seen in a MMO. Why? 525 skills and passives, 50 odd auxiliary skills to lay on top of that, then 50 odd or so more augments to tune your skills with, and this isn’t accounting for item effects and all that jazz. It’s complete chaos, and because of that, there’s a ton of build diversity and anything you could come up with has a counter by another build.
In summary, give us more skills, more traits more utilities. If you give enough, the players will balance the game for you.
I’d rather make the sceptre. The focus skin looks horrible: barely any effects, really cheap looking texture. It doesn’t look like a legendary at all and IMO you’re better off with other focus skins.
Plus, a focus as a whole just doesn’t get much action as a weapon. It’s like a shield, you’d carry it around but it rarely gets used actively.
I’d rather spend the $800 buying Gems than go to E3.
I’d rather spend the $800 buying a holiday trip for a week in a sunny place than buying gems
Bah! That’s just exp-waste.
Death penalties are left out of games these days simply because it’s annoying. There’s nothing more frustrating than spending 3 hours exp grinding, getting DCed, and wasting those 3 hours.
Punishing people for death doesn’t add anything to the game other than a sour taste in your mouth. No one likes dying, just the very act of it happening is something people avoid; you don’t see people going ‘man, so much fun dying in Skyrim!’ even though that’s a single player game. So given that fact there’s no point penalising people further for it.
Then having high AP would be a bad thing, it’s counter-intuitive :/
Anet wants to try to make an MMO into an e-sport, it’s silly but for some reason they think it’ll work. That’s why they focus all their balancing on sPvP and try to appease the PvE crowd with whatever their interns churn out on a Friday afternoon.
Anet gave up on their eSport dream a long time ago. In fact, I don’t recall them ever saying they wanted to make GW2 an eSport.
The thing is, if you got higher DPS being ranged, why would you go melee?