Guild Wars 2

Dwaynas Avatar.1562:

Allie Murdock.8152:

I don’t like playing with my tag because it’s a beacon for targeting.

I’ve been in solo arenas, turned my tag on, and become the instant target for coordinated play. I’d play more with my tag on if this wasn’t the case.

Play bunker guard then you want to be the main target xD -> easy wins :P

You’re forgetting that Anet doesn’t play Guardians.

blakdoxa.7520:

Oh my god….
What we’ve been trying to say is that nerking berserker gear won’t solve anything. Mob design and dodge mechanics are at fault here. In high level dungeons, mobs have been all figured out. There are no new interesting tricks, bells or whistles to make the fights anymore than an annoyance that need to be dealt with as fast as possible. Dodge helps by negating ALL DAMAGE (aegis too, but not important) that would have downed you in the first few seconds. You see how vitality’s and toughness’ importance is significantly reduced here? If dodge was gone what would become important again, hmm?

Because mobs are so numerous (along with being elite) it doesn’t make any sense to bunker up and make dungeons last 5x longer with periodic wipes making things even worse, does it? It would be better to take appropriate utilities while pumping out as much damage as possible to get that sort of situation over with. Additionally, VIGOR (imo, also a HUGE issue along with “endurance regen” anything) can be passed out to almost ensure surviving any encounter.

TL:DR
Unless something happens to dodge (never) and mob design becomes sufficiently better (unlikely), I don’t see how reducing our damage (being the first change to zerk gear) is going to change anything.

I don’t agree with that. Its good if your party actually can fight in zerker gear, and the fights doesn’t have anything to just screw you over for using it. But frankly, not everyone can fight in zerker gear, and a lot of content makes fighting in zerker very, very frustrating.

I don’t really see having every single build being viable and equally good in everything a good solution anyways. Because then, what’s making me wanting to try new things?

I think having some content being best done in zerker (has a DPS check for example), whilst others done in full bunker (39 Collossus, where 2k constant explosions happen) is a good way forward. And others in between, is a good way forwards.

Zaphir.7210:

Yea, I wasn’t clear enough in that last paragraph. I just used DS as an example of a ‘good’ action game, is all… as opposed to dungeoning in GW2, where at no point do I feel that I’m part of a group doing interesting content and making the most of my class abilities (as I did in WOW and COH), I’m just one guy among 5 doing an optimal 3-button dps rotation on the bad guy, and “pretending I’m playing an action game by using an invulnerability move based on metaknowledge of boss behaviors and/or muscle memory” to prevent OHKOs. It’s sad because in open-world content (or wvw) I have a lot more fun with my staff elementalist and the twenty-something buttons I have at my disposal. Maybe I’m missing something, though I’ve played through every explorable dungeon at least once (except arah, never tried that one).

re TSW, I know that it used a trinity model, I was just following up on the ‘MMO with twitchy combat’ angle, could’ve used vindictus or something as a better example but I haven’t actually played it. I guess I could’ve just said “MMOs with twitchy combat are pretty bad when it comes to dungeoning”.

And no, twitch doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with how predictable an enemy’s moves are. My favorite WOW bosses were the ones with no aggro table and ‘pvp-like’ randomized abilities with no clear patterns (Delrissa, tier0.5 BRD fight, Faction Champions), and there was no twitch involved anywhere. Incidentally, those encounters worked just fine with the trinity, too.

edit: I was hoping GW2 would have such fun bosses as the WOW ‘pvp-esque fights’ I mentioned above, but nope… the only really interesting encounters that I remember from all these dungeons were the Iron Forgeman in SE story mode and the “illusionary party” boss fight at the end of TA story mode (and since release, I’ll give a nod to the two berserkers as well as both encounters in the Aetherblade Retreat… and really, that’s a letdown even compared to what I’ve seen in GW1’s mission content. Maybe it just means this isn’t the game for me, though.

I don’t really get the same impression as you. Even in say, CoF P1, where I can be blindfolded and still win, I feel like Im contributing in one way or the other uniquely to the party. Whether it be timing Aegis and protection right such that we can just attack the boss non-stop, portalling my team across the rolling fireballs, or just doing my (although somewhat easy) job of holding out in the braziers.

Then in stuff like a level 49 Grawl fractal, I can honestly say without boasting that my team would’ve been screwed without me. Trying to do that fight without a Guardian/Mesmer is a one way ticket to hair loss. The other classes as well, they all contribute in one way or the other, maybe apart from rangers, but that’s a different argument.

Again, I don’t really see what’s wrong with having twitch mechanics. Comparing say, Smash Bros to WoW, I can’t really say which is the better game, they’re good in different ways.

I think the core ideas of GW2 is fine as they are, just that they need to be a bit less messy (ie, the Dredge kind of frustrating messy), and more direction.

Maybe it just isn’t the game for you and our tastes are different.

I actually think TSW has some of the best dungeon content in any MMO I’ve played because some of them balances fair and hard so very well, and because they aren’t so scripted they have a lot of replayability because its incredibly fun to find different ways to tackle them (I have to explain what I’m doing to a lot of groups in BiS gear because the way I tank them is often different to what they normally see).

As for Vindictus, managing to solo some of the harder bosses on the hardest difficulty is incredibly satisfying, and I still look at the solos people do on that game and think its a work of art

Zaphir.7210:

Dungeoning in this game has been some of the worst / most unfun I’ve ever seen in any MMO… and the “every man for himself” aspect is part of the reason.

You don’t need a holy trinity to make dungeons fun — in City of Heroes, some of the most fun (and successful) groups I’ve been in didn’t have a tank or a healer. What they had were multiple buffers/debuffers/controllers that could deal with any combat situation from locking down zergs of weak mobs to handling strong bosses as well as enemy buffers/debuffers/controllers. On my defender I could nuke, I could support (healing was a tiny part of ‘support’ btw, sometimes omitted altogether), I could control… it worked great. If content was too easy for a group, just crank up the difficulty and have at it! Compared to that, my gw2 staff elementalist is supposed to have zero points in arcana, sit in fire attunement and press 2/5 on cooldown while pretending I’m playing an action game by using an invulnerability move based on metaknowledge of boss behaviors and/or muscle memory.

GW2 is far from the first mmo to try and break the mold of the trinity. AoC and Champions Online both boasted twitchy ‘skill-based’ action combat — and dungeoning was really, really unenjoyable in both games. TSW too, though it works slightly better there; there are so few buttons it’s easier to pretend I’m playing an action game (albeit one with considerable latency — how fun could it be to play Dark Souls with a 400ms delay on everything, for example?).

TSW’s dungeons worked on a very hard trinity. I don’t really see how its like Dark Souls at all though, most of the fights are very scripted, there’s a few encounters that had ‘freeform’ mechanics which didn’t have any particular fixed strategy in mind for them, but that’s still nothing like Dark Souls.

You seem to really dislike a game based on what you call ‘twich reflex’. Personally I don’t mind it as it makes fights feel more real. Against a real enemy, you won’t exactly know what’s he going to do all the time, do you?

Chrispy.5641:

Xae Isareth.1364:

Chrispy.5641:

Mortifer.2946:

Taco will be lonely on most of the servers unless ArenaNet implements raid tools or custom instances

Or make the Event actually scale when there is only smaller groups available to fight it.

I’m not saying that 10 random people should be able to do it, but, if the event could scale so 10 people could do it if they were seriously on top of their stuff, it would be better all around. (Ever killed Jormag with 8-10 people? Its not exactly easy, but it has just the right amount of difficult to make it a very satisfying event)

I get why its not scaled. Its supposed to be kind of a special event.

If they made it such that 10 people can pull it off on a daily basis, then it kind of loses its charm. At least I think that’s their logic anyways.

The event kind of lost its charm for me when I realized that the event becomes a trivial exercise once you have enough people with high power builds smacking the boss around into oblivion. (Its the same way for every event in the game)

Difficulty should be maintained no matter how many players are on the event, whether its 150 people, or 10 people.

The problem is that the difficulty changes between 10 and 150 people. 10 is more about the actual mechanics of the fight on a micro level, 150 goes on to potentially be about organising, managing and commanding an army.

Its like the difference between a fight between 2 people in a martial arts tournament and a war.

Hard to make content that caters to both of them.

I think we would fight Abaddon, it would be probably a remake of the fight from GW1.

I actually really wanted Abaddon as a fractal. The fight from GW1 was the most anticlimatic thing I’ve experienced in that game. Abaddon was built up to be this really powerful god who’s been pulling the strings all this time, and when you fight him….. he’s a giant wuss and all you do is kill trashmobs. I wanted that fight redone.

Belenwyn.8674:

CureForLiving.5360:

Fiontar.4695:

The original ANet plan was to release new World Dynamic Event content every month, (along with occasional dungeon and other content), with the goal of doubling the Dynamic Events in the game during the first year of free updates. Some would advance the stories told by the original DEs for the zone. Others would become part of a rotation of DEs in and out of the game, in a fashion that would ensure that you’d find new content and a different combination of content when ever you returned to a zone after a month or two.

Actually this does sound pretty cool.

They did this strategy in the beginning. But people did not appreciate it. They had to change the strategy.

No. No no no no no no no.

It really wasn’t that people didn’t appreciate it. A lot of the DEs jsut came unannounced so people didn’t know it was there, and that plus the fact that rewards for DEs are just screwed on a core level (this is a MMO, people need loot as an incentive) meant of course it would be unappreciated.

For me, temporary content doesn’t work either, on so many levels.

1. It doesn’t add to the core game. Yes, LA is pretty cool, but what do we still do on a day-to-day basis? FotM, CoF1, etc etc, hasn’t changed for a long time.

2. Its a massive waste of effort. People often complain that the game has so little content compared to other games (notably GW1), but that’s not exactly true. If you count the amount of content that’s been released so far, its more than what most games get in 2-3 years. It’s just that its all temporary. Battle of LA is basically a new city, that’s an entire temporary city, that’s just such a huge waste of effort.

3. It concentrates players, and takes them away from other content because you put a deadline on them to play it soon as possible.

TheDaiBish.9735:

nGumball.1283:

It is quite interesting to see how uneducated the community is. ‘’The concep failed, there is no innovation’’. Since when was innovation measured with the end-results and from where did you learn that experiements always have to succeed?

Adding to this, can you truly say something has failed before the full potential of the system has been realised?

The kind of problem here is that I can see a lot of people not seeing any chance of this potential being ever realised.

The trinity is bad. I absolutely despise it and I think GW2 made a good decision in getting rid of it. But it does seem a bit halfway sometimes.

Things like Defiance still being there and rendering the use of any CC pointless, fixed weapon skills and slow implementation of much-needed new traits and skills to diversify builds can really make it seem like the dev team has no idea what they’re doing.

Often it just seems like the dev team has this whack-a-mole style of experimentation, where they can be creative and innovative, but just implements whatever idea that comes into their head in the morning, without really any long-term structure or goal.

For example, it’s unrelated to the trinity but Majory and Kasmeer being a lesbian couple is ….. creative (?) but just doesn’t fit into the genre of the game… at all. And judging by how every thread that mentioned it was closed for inappropriateness, they didn’t really seem to know what they’re doing.

Summoning 3 iZerkers at once against someone in 1v1 can very easily kill a lot of classes in 1 hit, if not after the initial hit + a shatter.

How about this?

Sacrificial Illusion (1 second cast, 90 second CD)

Fully heal all summoned illusions and (possibly) multiplies their HP by (some number). Tether yourself to your illusions and until those illusions are destroyed, any damage you take is transferred to your illusions instead, and any conditions you would have been inflicted with is inflicted on an illusion instead.

Tethered illusions will not be replaced by other illusions from trait or skill use.

Oulov.7913:

Rezz.8019:

A
Also, keep in mind that not all traits are just for pvp. Some of the more focused towards pve and wvw.

And THIS is why traits/skills should be split into pve and pvp versions, like in Gw1. Because they will never balance something so that it will be equally good vs monsters and vs players.

Or they could just make a lot of different skills for both PvP and PvE.

There’s entire mechanics which just won’t work in both PvE and PvP on a core philosophy level.

For example, Retaliation. When the whole of high-end PvE is about trying to not get hit, a buff which works on you getting hit just won’t work no matter how you modify it.

Chrispy.5641:

Mortifer.2946:

Taco will be lonely on most of the servers unless ArenaNet implements raid tools or custom instances

Or make the Event actually scale when there is only smaller groups available to fight it.

I’m not saying that 10 random people should be able to do it, but, if the event could scale so 10 people could do it if they were seriously on top of their stuff, it would be better all around. (Ever killed Jormag with 8-10 people? Its not exactly easy, but it has just the right amount of difficult to make it a very satisfying event)

I get why its not scaled. Its supposed to be kind of a special event.

If they made it such that 10 people can pull it off on a daily basis, then it kind of loses its charm. At least I think that’s their logic anyways.

Roxhemar.6039:

I just don’t get, why Arena Net would make a fight like this when they know it needs work. No game company likes wasting resources, so to have this potentially great and entertaining fight available to all players, they choose to gate it? And yet they refuse to do gear treadmills? It just makes no sense to me personally.

Tequatl was made in response to people complaining that world bosses are too easy and unchallenging. So they made it harder, and gave better rewards.

Im not sure what you mean by gating, because frankly you can do this quite easy in just exotics. The only ‘gate’ is the ability to listen to commanders and organise yourselves.

It’s kind of in a way like raids in other MMOs. They’re often the most expensive content to produce because you need to make very unique mechanics, unique rewards, and the difficulty of them is much harder to balance than just normal boss fights. ………… And very small percentages of the playerbase actually raid in any given MMO, yet devs continue to make them in heaps, because simply because players have come to expect them, so you have to cater to that expectation.

Tequatl is basically GW2’s version of raiding. It doesn’t work very well, but that’s Anet’s take on it.

I think ‘Guardians are in a good spot.’ is gonna become as famous as ‘2 blues 1 green.’

Looking at what Guardians got, Im seriously wondering where’s all those OP traits you are talking about. 2 GM traits for a build that doesn’t yet exist and won’t even exist after this patch…. yeah great.

I don’t think anyone hates rangers but they just don’t really contribute much to a group. PvE-wise, every other class has something which can make or break a run, but rangers just don’t have much besides OK damage.

Fashion Mage.3712:

Ezrael.6859:

So boring, so stale.

I’ve been playing the same build since beta weekend 2.

Guardian development has been about as exciting as watching paint dry.

The most exciting change for the guardian for me since the beta was a projectile velocity increase for Staff’s Orb of Light. I think that says something.

Don’t forget the nerfs on PoV amongst other exciting changes. Wo-opidy-hoo.

Natsu Dragneel.1625:

Psh, zerker will still be the go-to set after the next “feature” patch where they pointlessly lower full zerker damage by “10%”

I personally have no trouble doing anything PVE related in fullzerkermaxdeepztraits, hell, even on the kitten dredge in my frac 50’s I can usually keep my kitten alive.

Everything you need is here:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/guardian/Guide-DPS-Guardian-for-PVE/first#post3204949

You can but I just think it really isn’t worth it sometimes.

Especially in a PUG because for example, I can’t res people anywhere near as much if I go full zerk, because otherwise I’ll be dead as well. That lowers the group’s DPS significantly.

Even in a full guild organised run, there’s a lot of content which are just frustrating to do in full zerk. Frustrating in the sense that there’s a very high chance of you dying sometimes because either its… Dredge-like, or because the fight is just very unforgiving and offers you a lot of chances to screw up. When that happens, since I’m not like the proest player around so there’s a good chance that I might die, I start weighing up the benefits of going zerk or going more tanky, and it tips towards going more tanky because being dead means 0 DPS.

Aedelric.1287:

lolitsage.2185:

warrior op nerf needed ty goodbye

I could say the exact same thing about every class, especially Thief.

Can you elaborate on why you personally think warriors are over powered?

They aren’t the absolute best at everything but they can achieve a very high standard of everything without sacrificing much. Yes, guardians can bunk better than warriors (at least I think so, but I really question why would you need to bunk that hard in PvE), but they have to sacrifice a ton of damage and support for it. Thieves can do better DPS than Warriors but they can’t take a hit anywhere as well as warriors can.

I can’t speak about PvP or WvW much because I don’t play those game-modes much but that’s what I’m seeing in PvE at the moment.

@ Zalman because otherwise there’s power creep and it trivializes a lot of content in PvE, and I would imagine it would make PvP a even bigger mess than it is already.

I kind of get the logic behind this.

For most difficult encounters in the game (ie, not CoF P1 etc), theres a consideration between being survivable so you’re less likely to wipe and doing massive damage to make the fight shorter, so mistakes are less likely to happen.

Yes, you can do most fights (apart from stuff like Dredge, which you can but you won’t have a good time doing it) in zerker gear, but we’re human, we all screw up sometimes, especially in a video game because we play it when we’re in a relaxed mood and it isn’t exactly a life-affecting task.

If they reduce the amount of damage done by zerkers, and thus reduce the amount of time it deducts from a fight, there’s more incentive to get more defensive because wiping over and over again doesn’t make the run shorter.

Now of course, there’s the argument that attacks end up hitting you for most of your HP anyways so why bother going defensive. I never personally understood that. Reasons being:

1. The game doesn’t exactly consist only of 1HKO attacks. There’s a lot of encounters out there where the problem isn’t massive attacks but a lot of attacks coming from all directions. A tankier build helps a lot in those.

2. Even if you are on an encounter which mainly has massive damage spikes, like most of the ‘old’ bosses, there’s a huge difference between being dead and being left on 2K HP. Even if you got any HP left of all, you can retreat, recover and join back into the fight, where in a lot of fights like Lupi, getting downed often means you’re very likely to be out in a few seconds as well because your teammate won’t be able to always help you.

Of course, there’s the actual 1HKOs as well. But if you get hit by those, most of the time you really aren’t paying attention because they tend to have a huge telegraph that lasts for quite a bit beforehand. And no, Icebrood Wolf’s bite isn’t actually a 1HKO.

I think it really is all relative.

For example, if you compare this to Guardian GM traits, you can tell which one had more though process put into it and which one get done with a state of mind that said ‘Friday afternoon, want weekend, must finish work ASAP’.

Relshdan.6854:

Rangersix.1754:

Cross posting from another similar thread, but I’m curious for other people’s thoughts on this. Follow my thought process for a second. Let’s compare the new talent (+33% burning damage) to kindled zeal (13% of your power to condition damage).

The base damage of burning is 328/sec and scales with condition damage for .25 per point of condition damage. The new trait adds 33% burning damage, resulting in 436 damage/sec (at +0 condition damage). This results in a difference of roughly 108 damage.

In order to add 108 damage to burning, you need to have 432 condition damage. That translates into 3330 power for the Kindled zeal talent. Why on earth would anyone going for condition damage ever choose Kindled zeal over the new talent? Even for power Guardians, who usually invest into Radiance, Kindled zeal is clearly the worse of the two (at +250 condition damage from 25 points into radiance, you would need 5253 power before kindled zeal is equal to the damage added from the +33% damage trait) . How does simply adding more damage to burning all of a sudden make it viable when it didn’t before?

What was Anet’s thought process behind this new ability? It seems to overshadow kindled zeal while providing the exact same end result, to boost burning damage. The only way Kindled Zeal still can pull ahead is when you go for a power build that ignores radiance (the tree that’s all about boosting burning damage) and manages to get 25 might stacks, a warrior banner and various consumables (and avoids any and all boosts to condition damage in any shape or form).

agree….horrific/lazy design

Well, if you want a build with both power and condi damage, which well, is…. understandable I guess. As things are, I really don’t think a pure condi Guardian would actually be useful.

I would actually love that Warrior might trait on Guardians.

It would give a point to using GS’s autoattack (at least make it less of a DPS waste than it is now) and synergise so well with EM and AH.

Darmikau.9413:

Doomdesire.9365:

We want more variety in builds too…

Now you can play a burning guardian :^)

And feel like I’m gimping myself?

evilmaniac.1467:

Doomdesire.9365:

I thought that this was a variety update to include more builds so we don’t get bored, not a balance update? So then why use the phrase “Guardians are in a good spot” as an excuse not to update the class? We want more variety in builds too…

Whats the point of having a 33% increase in burning damage though ? You would have to compromise your tank in order to utilize the condition damage build; therefore you would be far more efficient just re-rolling a Necromancer which will deal more consistent damage, and tank far better while doing it (although you are weak to hambow warriors as you lack stability).

On the other hand; if you wanted the 3000 health increase you will lose out on virtue of justice spam, which with altruistic healing provides far more healing and tank than the 3000 health ever will. The only merit the 3000 health increase has is that it will be harder for Theives to 1 shot you. It provides no real resistance against condition classes such as Engineers & Necros as they can reapply conditions faster than you can remove them.

There is nothing at this time Guardians do well that other classes can’t do better with the exception of applying boons. Even then, our boons can be stripped off while Warrior banner buffs can’t.

The problem for me is that even with 33% extra burn damage, a condi-Guardian just won’t match a direct damage Guardian in DPS. That basically kills it because its not like going condi-mesmer, where there’s other benefits of going condi other than just damage.

Depends on the encounter as well. For example, Dredge fractal: I just can’t play a full zerk Guardian with full zerk traits in there. Blinds don’t work, you can’t even dodge sometimes, and there’s just so much crud flying around because 90% of Tyria’s dredge population must all live inside that building (or inside that truck), I just will get hit sometimes.

Another, different-by-reason example, is Collosus. The main focus of the fractal on a very high level isn’t really damage, at least until the boss fight, so I don’t feel there’s actually a point in going full zerker. Justice is Blind is a life-saver there though.

evilmaniac.1467:

Xae Isareth.1364:

I want a profession reset scroll sometimes….

That would be nice. I partially believe that since a good number of players are Guardians. They are trying to entice other players into other classes by keeping Guardians under-powered. Once Warriors enter a plateau phase where the number of players rolling Warriors becomes constant to the other classes; they will nerf it and overpower(/balance) a new class to lure more players into that. Thats just my speculation though since I can’t make any sense of their balancing patches.

That’s a very bad way to design a game. And….

http://www.mmorpg.com/gamelist.cfm/loadNews/28455/Infographic-Tells-Story-of-Year-One

Warrior is actually the most popular class in the game as at first anniversary.

I feel that for PvE in a normal party, the valor trait needs to give at least a 10 sec Aegis. Its a good trait but frankly I don’t really see a 5 sec Aegis being that much of a use to a good party.

BUT, if I got 5 Guardians all running this trait…. does that mean we can get a stupid amount of Aegi going around by this trait procing off each other? It doesn’t seem to have an ICD, so this sounds….. interesting.

Mine isn’t very positive. I can’t really speak for other classes because I don’t play them but for Guardians and Mesmers:

1. It just seems very PvP/WvW focused. Yeah I know that PvE takes the cake for living story updates but, frankly, in a rare core-content update like this (ie, it doesn’t go away in 2 weeks and affects what I do on a day-to-day basis), I think there should be an equal focus on PvE.

2. A lot of them are just very bland. Grandmaster traits to me are supposed to be interesting, game changing things you almost base your build around. They need to be examples of creativity and innovation, and make players go, ‘wow, that’s really cool, I wanna try that out’.

I just don’t feel stuff like +300 VIT or +33% burning deserve to be a grandmaster trait.

Farzo.8410:

Xae Isareth.1364:

Condi Guardians just isn’t going to be a thing. Ever. Just no.

Maybe they should give Guardians more conditions like Torment, Cripple and Chill, everything that slows enemies down, but not conditions that stacks loads.

Guardians being the profession that holds the line and stands the ground and kitten.

We have chill. Sort of. On 1 weapon. When traited.

I was thinking of things more from a PvE perspective though, not a huge fan of PvP in this game myself.

Condi Guardians just isn’t going to be a thing. Ever. Just no.

‘Discipline: Brawler’s Recovery – Remove blindness when you swap weapons.’

Who the heck came up with this lol. No no, I’m just gonna break all rotations just to remove blind and also waste a Grandmaster trait spot, instead of just autoattacking once. Genius.

I want a profession reset scroll sometimes….

Im thinking that Dueling GM will have some niche uses in PvE. The biggest use being for things like say, Collosus or Dredge where bodies fall by the heaploads, making your basically immortal.

The main concern for me with all this is that most of those just don’t seem to have any use for PvE.

Well, if you remember, Cursed Shores in Orr was one of the most populated zones in the game until rewards got borked…

phys.7689:

i find this age old debate rather interesting, because people say condi is broken, like it isnt one of the most OP things in the game. Its actually the popular meta in WvW and in SPVP, and it honestly is also pretty powerful in instances, if you have 1 or2 coordinated condition users.

Its biggest issues are in PVE versus single targets when you have a zerg. outside of that instance, its actually fairly powerful and easy, and will only become more so with the nerfs to critical damage.

i honestly want to see conditions become weaker in general, and sure make it more usuable for the zerg instances, but as it is, making it viable in zergs would probably make it the best choice in almost every content

The problem is that the main focus, as far as Anet is concerned, in PvE is the Living Story, and that’s all about the zerg, so basically gimping condi-users out of the game’s main PvE content.

Yeah, my opinions on the living story isn’t very positive either. But that’s probably here to stay.

SonOfJacob.7396:

DeWolfe.2174:

I think the one thing the trinity brought out was different pacing to match player preferences. Right now, GW2 is very twitchy, ditchy, and *itchy. I’d like slower more tanky healing to match my preferred pacing.

For example, my Norn Warrior has to be tankier and have “Death from Above” slotted at all times. Why?…. because I love the feel of stomping around. It makes my character feel right to me. Though obviously people would complain it’s blah…blah…blah not optimized. Though for me the play style feels right. If it changes and I cannot have my play style, I’ll leave the game. So instead of trying to force players into a “Zomg, fast paced, twitchy, blah blah blah, adrenaline, yay me” game style, they should consider whom the paying customer truly is.

But this just sounds like you aren’t in a guild that is fun and let’s people do it their way and works with them. It’s like, the play style can be whatever you want, you just need to find a guild that functions that way. I’m on TC and I know of a BUNCH of guilds that are legit like that.

Well, the thing is, most other MMOs already cater to that style of play, and frankly, its quite unclear who the ‘paying costumer’ these days are. Action-MMOs have become quite a thing in recent years, and that’s all about the fast-paced twitchy gameplay.

Hunter.4783:

xFireize.6318:

I admit I’d still prefer PoV on my shout build, but 300 vitality is not nothing, especially for guardian. To me, this opens opportunities to reduce VIT on armor, and choose better DPS. ~/~/30/30/~ med guards will probably appreciate it.

Don’t be dumb. 300 VIT is too strong for an adept.

I’m not saying the trait is super exciting; but it’s still something. I’m just sick seeing a lot of guardians exaggerate and whine about how 300 VIT is nothing. I personally love Applied Fortitude. Do you even frontline brah?

PVE, guards survive with 10k health

You are failing to realize that this trait is competing with Pure of Voice and battle presence, the former being one of the best traits we have. No one in their right mind would take this new trait over the 2 old ones.

Its not that Guardians can survive with 10k health, because that’s only if you’re good at the game, which not everyone is, so that 3k can come in handy, but because by going to Honor, you’re already being quite survivable, so you have to question why would you want to put on even more HP?

I mean, if this was a Radiance or a Zeal trait, I can kind of get the logic behind it but… Honor, just no.

Travis the Terrible.4739:

I think lack of good content (mindless zerging every 2 weeks for the past year is not good content), no end game (other than fractals really), balance patches so far and few between, PvP being not what they said it would, idiotic changes to systems that work fine but could have been fixed/better with slight tweaking (removal of glory gain and what not).

Stupid patches that don’t address issues that should be addressed, stuff that make little to no sense (removing glory and not putting another system in place while removing it at the same time giving pvp players no real incentive other than it’s pvp), and overall just dumb choices from the devs.

If anything just readd glory gain till they can either fix the problems with it or leave it as is. Glory is gw2s version of balth faction. You used balth faction in gw1 to unlock skills for pvp, or in the case of most people who never ventured past 3 builds zkeys. You use glory to get new item skins.

Now they’re changing the trait system because it’s too confusing? Confusing to who people who never played a game? People who don’t look over the internet? You’re told how to spend your trait points when you get one and I haven’t forgot that since LEVELING MY WARRIOR OVER A YEAR AND A HALF AGO. So they’re dumbing the traits down to the level a 2 year old can figure out. Oh and you’ll also have to buy your traits from what I read. HURRAY MORE MONEY SINKS THATS EXACTLY WHAT WE NEED IN THIS GAME.

ANet has nobody to blame but themselves for people leaving.

Of all the people I bought this game with only I remain the others have gone back to league of legends, PoE, dota2 and some other game because the lack of balance updates, lack of pvp variety (capture points? really?), lack of end game content amongst other small menial things. Catering to casual players is viable strategy(league of legends made a bajillion dollars off of it) but you still need to appease the hardcore players.

Also a lack of communication from devs is a large reason why some games literally just go down. ANet you should look into a game called dungeon fighter online, it would appear your game is literally headed into the same direction that game went.

First of all, I don’t think you can compare any game managed by Nexon to basically any other game on the planet not managed by Nexon in terms of communication. Nexon is basically the very embodiment of not giving a kitten about your players.

Second of all, your analysis on traits changes is very … for the lack of a better word, wrong. It wasn’t changed because it was too confusing, but because there was literally no point in spending points in not multiples of 5s. You don’t have to buy traits, you’re ‘supposed’ to go out in the world and explore to find them, the buying is just an alternative for people who don’t want to explore.

You also missed the fact that PvP would give gold (if it doesn’t already), and I would assume you get gear from it too, since PvP and PvE gear will be transferable in the future.

I’m not sure what you want with endgame. I want raids, but if you want raids that are locked behind tiers of gear like how its traditionally done, which is what I’m getting from your post, then no, no thank you.

I agree with the lack of good content however. Content lately has been very enjoyable but open world raids only are fun up to an extent.

Its actually quite hilarious how Asura can slash the air and still hit people.

I think people leave the game because they don’t like the game, not because the developers stay silent.

Have you ever seen another game that has the developers constantly making threads to talk through ideas and suggestions?

Mad Queen Malafide.7512:

Xae Isareth.1364:

I’m not quite sure what you really want. If you wanted a game like WoW where the combat is more static and encounters are much more scripted, then frankly, GW2 just isn’t your game because that’s what the devs wanted to avoid.

I think there’s a few misconceptions going around. First of all, the holy trinity isn’t bad. It has worked in dozens of RPG’s for many years, and it still does. The holy trinity is a game mechanic. It’s the idea that in a roleplaying game, each class must fill a role. It’s the idea that you need a healthy mix of classes in any group, to meet the needs of a dungeon/raid (which means DPS, tanking, healing, buffing, aoe spells). It basically adds strategy to a game that would otherwise just be a game of wack-a-mole.

But it is a boring staple of RPG’s, and people are ready for something new. Something refreshing. That said, simply removing the trinity from your RPG is not the answer. Like I said above, then you have a game of wack-a-mole, and that’s not very interesting. GW2 tried to replace it with something new, but they failed. You don’t have to take my word for it, we all know how zerker dominates the game. And we all know how all the one-hit kills basically make building defensively almost pointless. So what you end up with, is basically still the game of wack-a-mole. It’s a game where it’s all about how fast you can clubber those monsters back into the ground. A clear element of strategy is missing.

The initial idea of doing away with the trinity was good, I have nothing against that. And replacing it with a soft trinity of DPS/support/control is also a good idea. But the numbers are skewed. This is mostly due to the way encounters are set up. Monsters do ludicrous amounts of damage, which are not mitigated enough by armor and toughness. Monsters also have a lot of unbalanced abilities, that negate some of the main game mechanics (Defiant and Unshakeable). Those are badly designed abilities.

The reason a lot of bosses have Defiant/Unshakeable, is because Anet did not want players to stunlock their bosses, or keep them permanently blinded. Well that’s a fair point, but don’t you want to prevent players from being stunlocked and perma-blinded as well? And here lies one of the principle flaws of the design, they didn’t solve stunlocking or perma-blind. They just slapped an immunity and resistance on all bosses, and considered their job done. But they didn’t actually fix the problems. Is it any surprise stun-locking is all over wvw right now?

But this also shows poor design of the boss encounters themselves. Any decently designed boss would have ways to defend himself against these things, just like a player would. And if bosses had a decent mix of melee and ranged attacks, along with proper ai, we wouldn’t need artificial gimmicks: Such as bosses going invulnerable and healing to full health, if they can’t reach the player.

You can have roles quite easily without the trinity. To me, the trinity is good as aspects of a character’s properties, but just like strength/dex/int/vit/etc, forcing a character to just have strength and nothing else makes things rather boring.

There is a point to building defensively, if I just even change the traits around and stay in zerker gear on my Guardian, I find that my surivability goes up by a ton. If I go full bunker, its almost impossible to get killed in PvE.

1. Going more defensive means 1hko attacks often won’t kill you. There’s a huge difference between being left on 1k HP and being dead.
2. Once you stop getting hit by 1hkos, there still a lot of things which you will just get hit by. As a example, on a DPS Guard, since you can’t blind dredge, sometimes you will just take hits because you can’t dodge/reflect everything, at least not in a not-very-organised party, and that extra survivability helps there.

I’m not too sure a boss can possibly defend against CCing without some sort of immunity. That’s not really even something the trinity can solve anyways, every MMO, trinity or not, has some sort of Defiance mechanic. I got no problems with Defiance, but it just isn’t being used properly here.

From what I can see, no, GW2 definitely isn’t there yet, but its making progress. We’re definitely getting more encounters where there are definitive roles, a personal favorite being Subject Six.

Also, I’ve always believed that some stuff just aren’t supposed to have roles. It really depends on the fight, for example, trying to slot roles into the Thermanova Anomaly fight would just end up with a mess, because that fight just wasn’t designed to have any particular roles; but it doesn’t make it a bad fight, quite the opposite in fact.

Jaxom.7310:

Xae Isareth.1364:

It seems that its been generally agreed that the new Honor grandmaster trait we’ll be getting is kind of meh, so…

Why don’t we come up with some ideas on what to replace it with?

I’ll start.

Energizing Strike

Each time you perform a critical hit, you restore the Endurance of up to 5 allies (yourself included) within 600 range to you by a set amount.

Maybe it could give vigor to allies, but not restore an amount. That’d be OP if you have multiple guards spamming crits. Even if you put a CD on it, I think its not good. I prefer the burning crit concept more or something that can boost burning dps further.

A DPS increasing GM would be much better in Radiance or Zeal though. Honor is all about survivability and support.

EFWinters.5421:

Whenever you heal another ally, both you and the ally receive -3%(?) Condition Duration and 35(?) Healing Power. Stacks up to 5(?) times. Duration: 10 seconds(?).

Obviously this couldn’t count for Writ of the Merciful or Battle Presence.

The duration would have to be a lot longer. For that trait to be useful as a GM, your party wouldve have to be dying left right and centre, and you would have to be pretty much doing nothing but resing.

Fashion Mage.3712:

Personally I would’ve just liked something like the eles got. Would’ve fit perfectly into honor.

Obtena.7952:

Something that let’s burning crit.

Not appropriate for honor.

boxerfanboy.7843:

Since honor deals with symbols how about

Cast time for hammer’s symbol of protection reduced. I always felt like the guardians hammer abilities were too slow. This way a guardian can constantly apply protection for more survivability.

If any weapon is gonna get an upgrade in honor, it’d be the staff or the mace.

Yeah, the ele GM trait would’ve been perfect, and the guardian trait wouldve been perfect for eles lol.

A guardian running 30 honor really doesn’t have that much of a problem staying alive, whilst eles could use some more HP.

It seems that its been generally agreed that the new Honor grandmaster trait we’ll be getting is kind of meh, so…

Why don’t we come up with some ideas on what to replace it with?

I’ll start.

Energizing Strike

Each time you perform a critical hit, you restore the Endurance of up to 5 allies (yourself included) within 600 range to you by a set amount.

Rikimaru.7890:

ghost.3208:

Soooooo… I take it you didn’t read the story from the previous patches?

No you just didn’t read what I said clearly. I said that LA suffered 2 major attacks 2 years prior. So even the dumbest council in the world would care more than that. More over even if kittened they would rather order security extremes after the 2 attacks than to allow their own lives to be at risk again.

Its a matter of perspective. I don’t get how the heck did Scarlet manage to get command over armies of thousands but I can understand why the Council didn’t give to cents about her.

They never fought her directly. All they experienced was a rogue bandit assassinating a council member. All they see her as is an eccentric terrorist rampaging about with a ragtag band of pirates.

’We’ve survived Elder Dragons, we’e survived wars, why should we be concerned about a crazy saladhead who got her hands on an airship?’

Zelkovan.2630:

The thing is that this is an MMO, meaning it won’t have super high quality narrative style. Grevender mentioned games like Bastion and A machine for pigs, but the problem is those are different categories of games. They are single-player games who’s focus is to tell a narrative story. MMO’s do have a story, but it is much harder to tell due to the fact that much of the development is focused on content, quality of life updates, balance, bug-fixing, etc and that the perspective is from third person style in a 3D world and divided between multiple people. With Bastion all they had to do was focus on it’s core elements and make a really compelling story, they didn’t need to worry about multiplayer or keeping players interested for long periods of time because it wasn’t a multiplayer game, it was a single-player game meant to tell a really good story.

Now granted, the LS story can be told better, but it will never give us the heart-wrenching moments of Bastion unless they really really get us invested to the characters.

I don’t see why a MMO can’t have amazing narrative. The Secret World is a MMO, and its probably more immersive and has better narrative than most games I’ve played.

Kaiyanwan.8521:

Astraea.6075:

darkace.8925:

Thaddeus.4891:

Wildstar is a WoW 2.0…

This is a statement made in ignorance. It’s as if you don’t know anything at all about the game.

There may be more to Wildstar than a cartoony WoW 2.0 in space, but that was my first impression when I checked out the game’s website many moons ago. Yes this is ignorant, but a game shouldn’t rely on players educating themselves on its intricacies to generate interest.

I think it is the problem we have to face here. People see what they want to see.
People think that if they dislike another game, all reasonable players will dislike it too.

This will not work in favour of GW2. I won’t touch Wildstar from a hundred miles away (I’m too old, with too many obligations), but everyone who truly likes core MMOs must have wet dreams about it every night before release.

ESO might look old fashioned and slow, but it has a story to tell, and the combat feels like combat and not not like running around and spamming auto-attack on everything. And AvA is simply amazing, rewarding and fun.

GW2 is just old and stale by now. No real progression, neither vertical nor horizontal. No new core content like new areas, classes, races or PvP modes since forever.

Why would players not start to try out new things at the current state of the game?

I don’t think so. To me, Wildstar is a blight. Why? Because just as we are seeing this change to what core MMOs are like, with even the almost-grand-daddy of them all, Everquest, getting innovative and bringing new things to the table, Wildstar harks right back to vanilla WoW and gives you the same old all over again.

I played the cbt for ESO and I like the immersion and I like it having a first person perspective but whether the combat is great or if it ‘has a story to tell’ is a subjective, and a whole different thing. The storytelling just didn’t pull me in. I guess I didn’t like TES’s storytelling anyways but it feels more like reading a book about the story than experiencing it as a player within that story.

The combat as a whole is great but the massive flaw I found with it is that it doesn’t have weight. Your weapons don’t seem to have weight, and enemies feel like paper. They just feel like images you slash at rather than solid beings, and the clunky animations really don’t help.

Hawke.9013:

It works. I don’t mean to burst A-Net’s bubble with the whole, “ground shaking” idea of removing the trinity, but there’s a reason why every MMO uses it. It’s not as frustrating as every mob being uncontrollable; since, with no tank I guess that’s what A-Net wants. As a thief, it is very frustrating to have a boss turn around and one shot you in a split second. Everything PvE oriented is uncontrolled, and very badly structured.

This lack of holy trinity accounts for the reason why the endgame of GW2 is so bad. Raids for example are not feasible since it would be too hectic, and not very fun. Dungeons are the farthest you get, even then as a melee you’d be constantly hopping back to dodge a backswing, that you might as well re-roll Mesmer.

I don’t know about others, but while forming groups for dungeons there is always a need of a tank, A-Net will never officially take away the trinity anyways, guardians will always be there for tanking. As a thief, will always NOT tank.

With the holy trinity everything is controlled and theres no “WTF” unless it’s your fault because you didn’t move out of the bad. WoW’s endgame is very much so superior to GW2’s, and will forever be, unless some sort of trinity is occurring. And GW2 will always be inferior for this reason.

The Holy Trinity works but it doesn’t mean we don’t need something new.

As you can probably see already, a lot of people hate the holy trinity. Personally, I hate it because it wrecks build diversity (no need to consider other options other than your primary role) and that it restricts what a developer can put into a fight (there always has to be a tank, a healer, and a DPS, so you can’t just have a fight where say, the party has to split up into 5 to fight 5 mini-bosses because then it just doesn’t work).

Guardians aren’t always there for tanking. If you look at the sticky in the guardians forum, there’s a guide on how to make your guardian one of the highest sustained DPS classes in the game and play like a glass cannon.

I don’t really understand why a melee wouldn’t need to back dodge sometimes. If you think about a sword fight in real life, its not like the 2 fighters just both stand there bashing at each other with swords on the spot.

I don;t really see what’s wrong with having a raid without a trinity. Destiny said it’ll have raids, and I doubt a FPS is going to have a trinity.

I’m not quite sure what you really want. If you wanted a game like WoW where the combat is more static and encounters are much more scripted, then frankly, GW2 just isn’t your game because that’s what the devs wanted to avoid.

As a final word on the issue. A scripted fight is just that. It’s like watching a play. No matter how great that play is, you’ll get bored of it, because its the same thing over and over.

Its not even about guesting anymore, because even if you guest, you’ll get thrown into overflow, which most of the time on EU at least is an autofail.

Instead of LF Healer, we got LF Mainflow now. Wonderful.

If Anet is reading this: if you want to make open world events, be realistic and condition for the map not being full when the event pops.