Guild Wars 2

Caffynated.5713:

Encounters need to deal high damage on a more frequent and consistent basis instead of just one big “dodge now” burst every 5-10 seconds. When you can avoid 100% of the damage in a fight with timely dodging, defense and healing don’t matter and are even a waste of time in most cases. Casting your 1.5 second heal costs you 20k damage output.

Pretty much this. Toughness needs to also have a greater effect. Having it add to armor which gives it a starting value of around 2k means that even if you stack it you’re not having the same damage reduction as you could get damage increase from power (which starts at just 1k).

colesy.8490:

How does crit damage not scale well? It’s not like toughness where you get to a certain point that you just get diminshing returns, you can infinitely stack crit damage and you’re getting a ton of extra damage.

What people like you don’t understand is the difference between INCREASING damage and DECREASING damage.

Outgoing damage is based on your weapon. Power has a multiplicative effect on that. It may seem like it’s adding a constant amount and you get the same value regardless of 1000 power or 3000 power, but that’s misleading. Sure, 100 points more damage is 100 points more damage, but if you start at 100 damage and go up to 200 damage that’s a much more significant change than starting at 100,000 damage and going to 100,100 damage. The scaling of power definitely decreases. You just think it doesn’t because you are looking at it the wrong way.

On the other hand, incoming damage is based on monster attacks. Lets say we made it so that toughness reduced damage the way you would like it to. Every 1000 toughness reduces damage by an additive 50%. So going from 1000 to 2000 toughness gives you 50% damage reduction and going from 1000 to 3000 toughness gives you 100% damage reduction. Well, we have a problem now. Because while it seems like the 2nd 1000 toughness has the same effect as the first 1000 toughness, in fact it is infinitely better. When you have 2000 toughness you’d reduce a 10,000 hit to 5,000. When you have 3000 toughness you’d reduce a 10,000 hit to 0. In fact, you’d reduce a 9999999999999999999999999999 hit to 0. You would literally be invincible.

Now you may say, well why not have toughness reduce damage by a fixed 100 points per 100 toughness or something like that? Well the problem is that no matter what value you choose, each extra point of toughness will have a greater effect on damage reduction until you get to the point where you have enough toughness to reduce the damage to 0 (invincible!). You never want to design a system where it’s even theoretically possible to scale stats such that damage becomes 0. I believe WoW used to make this mistake and it led to big balance issues regarding armor stacking.

Daecollo.9578:

Ensign.2189:

Goorman.7916:

Toughness is bad stat because every point in toughness does not increase your survival time by a certain amount

colesy.8490:

It’s not like toughness where you get to a certain point that you just get diminshing returns

I do not know why people believe this about toughness, but it is wrong. Toughness has linear scaling like every other stat in the game and have an identical effectiveness curve.

Actually it gets worse/worse the more you get.

So does power. Even more so actually.

Going from 1000 to 1100 power gives you a 10% damage increase. Going from 2000 to 2100 power gives you only a 5% damage increase. Going from 3000 to 3100 power gives you only a 3% damage increase.

Yet you still stack it. The issue with toughness has nothing to do with diminishing returns (they aren’t that great actually). It’s because the stat sucks to begin with and it starts with a massive disadvantage because it’s added to armor (ie, it starts at an initially higher value).

What do you mean by scaling? Power has some of the heaviest diminishing returns in the game, stronger even than toughness (which everyone likes to complain about). The difference is that power has a much higher initial effectiveness AND it increases all your damage, while toughness only decreases direct damage.

Healing power has a huge percent increase of some skills, higher than anything else in the game, but the problem is those skills are so puny to begin with that it’s still negligible. Look at guardian’s heal on dodge roll. With 2000 healing power, you get something like a 1000% increase in healing. Great, right? Well 1000% of 150 is still crap. Then on the heals that heal a decent amount to begin with, healing power scales horribly.

There are two issues with toughness:
1) It only affects one type of incoming damage (while power affects all your outgoing damage)
2) It is added to armor, which means that you start off requiring ~2000 toughness to halve damage vs. only ~1000 power to double damage. Someone stacking power will totally dominate someone stacking toughness.

However, I’d like to reiterate that people who think toughness is bad because of diminishing returns are just ignorant. Power has far more diminishing returns. Oh no stop stacking power!

I don’t use PoV but I noticed that the Warrior warhorn conversion trait is also removing two conditions (in addition to the movement impairing ones).

Ray.3780:

I’m aware of Magi’s armor and mixing it with Cleric’s to get the desired effect. I guess the thing is that threat is determined by toughness

We don’t know that. It may or may not be a factor in threat but even if it is, your damage will pale relative to the other players and damage is certainly a factor. That’s why PVT “tanking” doesn’t work. I’d also argue that as a group you’re far worse off having one player take all the damage vs. having the damage spread among the entire party. Almost every single heal affects the entire group so you’re doing yourself a big disservice effectively healing for 1/5 of your potential.

The more you invest in precision, the worse your personal DPS gets too, given the lack of critical damage, so either way increasing healing efficiency drops your effectiveness elsewhere significantly.

This is definitely true, but keep in mind your personal DPS is crap regardless of whether you are sporting power or precision. You’re using a mace half the time and staff half the time and that’s about as low of base DPS you can get. A 20% increase to crap damage isn’t much worse than a 60% increase to crap damage in the overall picture of your group’s damage output.

You don’t need to go full magi. Go magi armor/cloak and cleric accessories. Then your damage is only slightly less with a smallish boost to crit rate. You’ll also get crit from fury.

Boohoo why can’t I do dailies with my alts and get the extra laurels!

Boohoo why can’t I do my monthly with my alts and get the extra laurels!

I’m sure there’s other crap too but circumventing time limitations by abusing alts leaves me with little sympathy.

Now those who legitimately want to get gear from a dungeon for multiple characters, that I can understand the complaint. Maybe make it so that tokens are character bound…problem solved!

ArtemisEntreri.4138:

Yaki.9563:

Marmag.5823:

I have a simple question: maybe i misunderstood something, but how does your build counter conditions (I see you don’t use Pure of Voice and/or soldier runes)?.
Honestly, I can’t think of any support build without a strong conditions removal, so Pure of voice is a must for me.

PoV is not a stong condition removal trait. It removes 5 conditions every 60 seconds unless you trait for shout cooldowns and you use 3 shouts. You also probably don’t want to use your stability shout just to remove a condition.

If you’re worried about conditions, use the healing signet and the condition removal every 10s trait. Personally I think it’s completely unrealistic to expect to have amazing condition removal in addition to strong healing. Just like you don’t expect someone to have amazing condition removal with their DPS optimized build.

My warrior has fairly solid condition removal with Cleansing Ire + Melandru + Lemongrass + Dogged March. I still get lit up by condimancers though.

For group fights, being the guy that wipes tons of conditions for your group/zerg is a good feeling though since conditions are meta in WvW.

I have my warhorn/shout Warrior for that feeling, which does a vastly better job at it than Guardian.

Zeppelin.6832:

The simple matter is… even if the run only takes “5 more minutes” that’s not the point. The point is your chance of wiping has greatly increased because the fights simply last longer. When all things are equal, yeah the times maybe aren’t that different… but your potential to not finish a run due to badness grows by a lot.

Only true if the person brings nothing useful to the table at all. Like someone in MF gear.

Dog.1472:

The longer a fight lasts, the more damage everyone takes, the more chances people will go down.

This reasoning is flat out incorrect unless you are saying that there is no healing at all. Sure, you take more damage, but you get more healing as well. If you can outheal the damage intake you can keep the fight going forever. In addition, theoretically it’s entirely possible that a fight could fail without healing but succeed with it because of the damage output. Of course, that theoretical situation doesn’t happen in GW2 because the devs design encounters around berserker gear with no healing and no condition removal.

AntiGw.9367:

Yaki.9563:

The difference between MF gear and sub-optimal non-zerker gear is intent:

A person wearing MF intends to screw over the party so that they can gain gold.

A person wearing sub-optimal gear is just trying to have fun playing their build, or maybe just haven’t gotten the gear yet.

The first is intolerable. The second I can deal with.

This is an RPG game. It’s perfectly fine to make a treasure hunter character.

You telling other people what is fine and what isn’t, on the other hand…

I’m RPing a pro-group, anti-selfish, anti-scumbag character.

They are both great.

Varonth.5830:

Daecollo.9578:

Varonth.5830:

Traited Charge removes:

• Crippled
• Chilled
• Immobilize

On top of those three (after those got removed) it will convert another condition.
Due to tactic providing additional boon duration I would come to 1.25s of protection.
Since I remove up to 4 conditions, it would result in up to 5s of protection.

The problem is, how many times are you ever with all 3 on ya? That is very situational situation. I usually have 1 or two, not all three. If you saved it for when you got all three of them and used it, shouldn’t you be rewarded for the opportunity cost?

More often than I like to
3 is basically the standard amount of condition removed by charge.
4 is quite common.

LOL no.

If you seriously believe that, you shouldn’t even bother with condition removal because you’re clearly being hit with nearly all conditions every second or two.

Marmag.5823:

I have a simple question: maybe i misunderstood something, but how does your build counter conditions (I see you don’t use Pure of Voice and/or soldier runes)?.
Honestly, I can’t think of any support build without a strong conditions removal, so Pure of voice is a must for me.

PoV is not a stong condition removal trait. It removes 5 conditions every 60 seconds unless you trait for shout cooldowns and you use 3 shouts. You also probably don’t want to use your stability shout just to remove a condition.

If you’re worried about conditions, use the healing signet and the condition removal every 10s trait. Personally I think it’s completely unrealistic to expect to have amazing condition removal in addition to strong healing. Just like you don’t expect someone to have amazing condition removal with their DPS optimized build.

Alfred Nobel.2914:

Yaki.9563:

Alfred Nobel.2914:

Put out a screenshot of you having 2,2k healingpower. I know 2000 but 2,2 I need to see that as I don’t believe it to be true

Add 250 from sigil of life onto the 1960 he has already listed on the build he linked and you get 2210 healing power. He could also get another 47 using an exotic magi cloak instead of the ascended soldier cloak, as well as another 25 from infusions, without giving up anything significant.

Aha.. I see now that you guys use magi gear – with vitality and precision instead of thoughness and power, as in clerics. And with healingpower-food which takes 6% from vitality and puts out into healingpower, it makes total sense. And I maybe want to make it a try. With full clerics I don’t get to 2200 HP but you guys maybe do. I don’t know why this topic and all talk about “full cleric” if it is magi gear and not cleric?

Because he’s not the OP.

You can go full clerics and get 2200+. You get slightly less HP from the food but you can make that up by using the magi cloak instead of the soldier cloak (which isn’t cleric’s either…).

The problem with magi is that is sinks your bad damage even lower. It’s truly abysmal. The advantage is that it gives you some crit for more vigor and you can obtain it for free (cleric’s is only crafted).

My healer guardian is currently full magi with 0/15/30/25 spec using empowering might. This allows me to give more support through extra might stacks (both from VoJ spam after kill and EM). I haven’t played that character since the changes to mace trait so it probably isn’t optimal any more.

Ray.3780:

Being the most effective healer Guardian is not possible in GW2 for several reasons. One, there needs to be a Prec/Tough/Healing stat set, this would allow you to have 100% vigor uptime, threat from mobs and double the dodges.

Magi gear gives precision, if that’s what you want. Note the guy a few posts above who uses magi armor with cleric’s accessories for 21% crit.

Not to mention you can get vigor from other sources.

I don’t see the big deal about this. It just means you gear a little slower but in the big picture, what’s the rush?

Just because other classes have OP minor traits doesn’t mean that should be the standard.

2nd build. There’s really no “solo” build or “casual” build. It’s not like your traits make it more or less time consuming to play.

Actually the 1st build isn’t that bad either if you’re into GS. It’s probably fun seeing might stacks.

While zerker is the best, I don’t hate on anyone for taking anything that they think is best for their build. MF, on the other hand, is not a build choice. It’s a loot gain choice at the expense of the other party members. In no way does MF enhance any build in the game in any situation at all. At least with PVT you can be deluded into thinking you are tanking or it might occasionally save you if you fail to dodge or whatever.

MF = kick the selfish kitten .
PVT = sigh, what a waste.
Zerk = yay, gj.
Clerics = meh, just hope he’s the only one.

Alfred Nobel.2914:

Put out a screenshot of you having 2,2k healingpower. I know 2000 but 2,2 I need to see that as I don’t believe it to be true

Add 250 from sigil of life onto the 1960 he has already listed on the build he linked and you get 2210 healing power. He could also get another 47 using an exotic magi cloak instead of the ascended soldier cloak, as well as another 25 from infusions, without giving up anything significant.

Sounds good until you realize the healing numbers are still quite small relative to self heals that every class has anyway. Dodge heal and symbols are also extremely range limited such that you’re unlikely to even hit half your party with them unless you’re grouped with 4x warrior in a dungeon run.

The biggest flaw, however, is this: If you’re PUGing you run the risk of being in a group with someone else who is “supporting” and then you’re just dragging the group down. Nothing is more depressing that playing a marginally useful role and having a group where someone else is doing the same. Then if you’re in a premade with guildies or something, you don’t need healing support in the first place.

So basically they just said “every dungeon 1g, Arah 3g”. They didn’t actually bother comparing run times or difficulty.

The difference between MF gear and sub-optimal non-zerker gear is intent:

A person wearing MF intends to screw over the party so that they can gain gold.

A person wearing sub-optimal gear is just trying to have fun playing their build, or maybe just haven’t gotten the gear yet.

The first is intolerable. The second I can deal with.

stof.9341:

Yaki.9563:

Min/maxers greatly exaggerate the effect of an individual’s gear. The fact is, and individual is just one person out of 5. If someone joined an all zerk party and did absolutely nothing, the run would take 25% longer. An 8 minute run would take 10 minutes, assuming the entire 8 minutes is spent fighting which is not even close to the case. More time is wasted waiting for people to sell their crap at vendor or arrive at the dungeon than that.

I’d say 30 to 60% longer depending on the specifics of the fight. Remember that one big factor in fights is matching your ability sustain to the encounter duration.. A team of 5 zerk players will survive for a 1 minute boss fight, the same team with 4 will be out of important cooldowns or out of health and regen before they last for the whole 1min 15s caused by the lack of one player.

I don’t think that’s an accurate argument. Also, remember that it is in the most extreme case where the 5th player does nothing. A 5th player who is actually playing will not only contribute some damage but also buffs/heals/rez etc.

Min/maxers greatly exaggerate the effect of an individual’s gear. The fact is, and individual is just one person out of 5. If someone joined an all zerk party and did absolutely nothing, the run would take 25% longer. An 8 minute run would take 10 minutes, assuming the entire 8 minutes is spent fighting which is not even close to the case. More time is wasted waiting for people to sell their crap at vendor or arrive at the dungeon than that.

This min/max zerk only attitude was nurtured by ANet and their inability to balance dungeon run rewards. When groups are running one path repeatedly out of the 20+ available because diminishing returns rewards are better than what you get from every other path, players are naturally going to gravitate to whatever is the fastest even if it’s not necessarily the best in non-optimized situations.

You can say this about half of the GM traits in this game. What else is new? It took you 12 months to notice that there is no actual correspondence between the level of the trait and its power…

I don’t see any advantage of this build over Mace + GS. You get better mobility, better stuns, and better damage.

Good to know every build can keep 100% uptime on all those. It’s not like you can’t stun for 4s out of every 7 (every 10 I guess if you switch to GS for 100B). And aren’t you running Lemongrass with crazy GS mobility? That eliminates about half those.

Naranek.3467:

CptAurellian.9537:

Lemongrass? Can you provide a link? I’m always looking for amusing stuff

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/suggestions/Lemongrass-Food-Nerf/first

This is like the third or fourth such thread. Apparently, lemongrass food can, when combined with a ridiculous set of traits, equipment, and runes, pretty much negate condition damage. Of course, you have to ignore the facts that
1) no sane person would ever do this,
2) regular damage > condi,
3) such a build is useless for anything else.

And i say this as someone who is right now working on a condition damage mesmer; just hit 78 yesterday, time to start getting carrion exotics and grinding Twilight Arbor path 1. And stocking up lots of veggie pizza.

You know how some trolls can at least pretend to make sense? S/he is not one of them.

65% duration reduction takes no traits. Just runes + food. You’re nuts if you don’t think that it, in addition to 98% reduction to immobilize, chill, and cripple with just a 10 point standard trait investment, isn’t broken. I can tell you’re clueless when you say “no sane person would ever do this” while the price of the runes skyrockets and it’s the standard warrior build for WvW.

The problem isn’t Lemongrass btw, it’s the incompetently designed mechanics that give additive instead of multiplicative stacking of duration.

GSSBlunaspike.4153:

Wukunlin.8461:

GSSBlunaspike.4153:

CptAurellian.9537:

Sandra Martino.3870:

That said, AH should be a standard class mechanic because in soloing, pveing, roaming, pugzerging you will most likely have not a staff ele near to spam waterfields and thuss your survival will be kitten. You`ll be like a warrior, with a standard HP pool but no ability to heal it up and with much lesser health. Everyone always yells that guardians have much better survival than warriors dispite their healthpool, guess what, this survival is completely based on AH. Without AH their survival is kitten.

Nope. I have both classes as full glass cannons and the guard does not have any greater survivability problems than the warr. Usually, it is even better, despite the low health pool, due to easier access to blocks, blinds, protection and more frequent dodges.

The difference is that warriors have much better sustain than guardians, but guardians have better defense in utilities. It’s a trade off, but right now even good warriors will admit their sustain is a problem. Once that gets fixed and brought in line then they will probably be balanced.

Yes warriors passive sustain is better than AH + VoR combined.

what sustain does warrior have? healing signet?

Yes, healing signet right now out heals vor+ah if you are under 4 boons per second. If you can get up to applying 5 boons per second + the passive from vor will give you as much healing as healing signet gives passively.

Right now healing signet gives a passive 392 or so health per second with no healing power.

Guardian’s don’t get a heal skill, right? LOL @ comparing heal skill to no heal skill.

There’s no point in PVT outside of WvW. Given you only gave two options, that leaves berserker gear.

BTW you can’t tank in GW2.

Gathslan.1870:

I find it strange that Warrior finally has a build that is more than just doing as much dmg as possible to take enemy down before you die and warrior themselfs don’t like it.

That’s exactly what this build is. The only difference from these videos 9 months ago is that a) healing signet heals for more and b) you are stunning so that your 100B can’t be dodged. Oh and maybe exploiting duration reduction mechanics.

You die a lot at low levels because veteran/champion mobs and events are overtuned and you have crappy gear and skills/traits. I found that I stopped dying a lot in the 30’s and beyond iirc. You eventually get to a point where you don’t die any more except in rare circumstances.

Join the GS bandwagon. Best weapon in the game for the last 12+ months. If you don’t like it, don’t play warrior.

Maybe one day they’ll balance some of the weapons and figure out how to fix their broken condition duration mechanics. Not holding out much hope though.

I think Strength has the worst traits of any line. Only one generically good trait and that is the Bers. Power, one trait good for GS, and the rest are crap. Power is the best stat by far though, BP is crazy good, and great sword is the strongest warrior weapon so at least some people are happy.

Melandru is just stupid OP because of how dumb ANet is with their duration mechanics.

Gathslan.1870:

I like the playstyle warrior has currently so i am quite fine with it ;P
And having to go greatsword is more about the mobility it gives you than 100b, every spec has to go either sword or greatsword for mobility. That is what keeps different specs back :P

Seems to me like the mobility is a bonus. Stun @ 90% health → 100B = 20% health or dead is the main draw.

AntiGw.9367:

Tribio.8531:

AntiGw.9367:

You have got to be kidding…
Queensdale – 6 champions
Fields of Ruin – 13 champions
Malchor’s Leap – 8 champions
Cursed Shore – 12 champions
Lots of areas – 5-6 champions

You have got to be misreading..
Champs, events, vets.. You only mention Champs (and indeed, I know Fields holds more than QD)..

There are plenty of champs, events AND vets in other areas.

Playing the game instead of grinding the same crap actually works.

PVStar.3658:

How often to the champs spawn in those other areas? Curious to know because in Queensdale there’s a champ up pretty much every 5 minutes, which is what the point of this is.

Who cares? By the time you kill one, something else will be up.

It’s just people want the train…

Because it’s consistent and easy. You can wander around other zones hoping that a few other ppl will help you kill the occasional champ that pops after a 3-event pre-chain, or you can run around Queensdale with champs almost non-stop and very quick kills.

People actually run in Queensdale? Anyone who doesn’t waypoint will miss every single champ kill as they die in less than 30s to the waypointing zerg.

Mace GS meh. A bit disappointing that warrior still revolves around 100B nearly a year into the game.

cifer.2357:

Healing signet doesn’t scale that well with healing power, I doubt it hits 500hps from 392hps. Also doubt a shaman warrior can reach 850hps (with regen/adrenal health, etc) with 3500 armour and even if he does, he’s only gimping himself because he’ll do little to no-damage.

Overall, it’s not a bug. It was intended and this is clearly a L2P issue.

What’s funny is you can get almost half that healing in full berserker gear 30/0/0/10/30 spec.

Healing Signet, good. Healing gear, bad. Regen banner, bad. Adrenal health, bad.

Healing in this game is pure crap outside of base healing skills. Yay I doubled my self-healing…oh wait I gave up 80% of my damage to do it.

Lemongrass is fine. It’s the way GW2 stacks duration from different sources that isn’t. Duration should stack multiplicatively. That means 33% reduction is actually a 33% reduction, not a 95% reduction. Same with duration increases, a 40% duration increase should increase duration by 40%, not by 25%.

The problem with banners healing is it’s a regen buff, which doesn’t stack intensity so you basically are counting on no one else having regen to maximize it’s potential. Pretty unlikely in a random group or WvW.

It’s only worthwhile if you are going to use soldier’s runes with a warhorn (best group condition removal spec in the game). You’re already spending 20 points in that line so it only costs 10 points more, and you already have a reason to use 3x shouts because of the runes. Otherwise it doesn’t seem like a good tradeoff, especially since there are plenty of reasons to not use 3 shouts and the shouts only heal for ~1200 + 0.8*healpower.

Beachead.4127:

Whatever the ideas are, the tactics line needs some help. It clearly has the worst set of traits yet for WvW you have to trait into it.

What? It has great traits. Only the minor traits are horrible.

If only dodge rolls had a range of more than 100. It’s also funny how you make it out like a 1500 heal every 10s is a lot.

Forzani.2584:

Player Character.9467:

Go to the top of this page, click wiki, roll around in the pages of things.

I find Wiki has about the same accuracy as the National Enquirer. Thanks for the tip though.

Stop being snooty when the Wiki clearly answers all your questions.

Vayne.8563:

Yaki.9563:

Vayne.8563:

Teofa Tsavo.9863:

Time will tell. Note that this is an industry peer recognition, not some rabid Fan vote.

http://www.gdconlineawards.com/archive/halloffame.html

LMAO at peer recognition. One MMO stays around for a long time, due to a combination of lauching at the right time, and having a gazillion dollars to advertise, following some very successful franchises and so the industry has recognized it.

If another game had some out instead of WoW and WoW came out in this environment, it would never have gotten off the ground, particularly with how buggy it was at launch.

Saying a ten year old MMO that made a lot of money got an award from industry peers is all very nice…but time will NOT tell. Because at the time WoW launched there were like 4 MMOs, most of which were piddling and underfunded. WoW was in the right place at the right time.

Now, with a hundred MMOs out, how is any one MMO going to find that same niche?

Ignorance this bad has to be willful.

WoW single handedly grew the MMO market to what it is now. Something that no other game could do. Not even with franchises like Star Wars and LotR to back them (released around the same time). There are 100’s of MMO’s out because of WoW, not in spite of it. WoW drew in millions of players who would, and still don’t, play any other MMO. I know adults who have never played another computer game except WoW. I know (a lot of) kids who wouldn’t touch an MMO with a 10 ft. pole who play WoW. In fact I haven’t met a single person in real life who plays an MMO other than WoW.

And somehow, nearly 10 years later, with these 100’s of other MMO’s you think that WoW still has 5 to 100 times the sub/players only because it was in the right place at the right time? Laughable.

This isn’t ignorance. This is someone who predated WoW as a gamer and doesn’t LIKE the direction WoW took the MMO genre. I think the MMO genre will need a decade to heal from what WoW (and WoW clones) have done to it.

There’s no ignorance here, just a different point of view. You know, Big Brother has more viewers than WoW has players, but I don’t necessarily like the direction reality TV is going either. Popularity doesn’t guarantee quality.

In my mind, by focusing on the MMO aspect and ignoring the RPG aspect of the genre, WoW has set this industry back a long, long way. By making the game about loot and progression, this is the real bug bear this industry has to deal with.

WoW as indeed an addictive game, but even people I know who played it said they were bored with it all the time, but kept going back to it.

No, I’m not ignorant about this. I feel that if WoW hadn’t become popular this genre might be okay today. As it is, I think it mostly sucks horribly.

Your two posts seem to be about two completely different things. In the first, you claim WoW is successful by mere coincidence. In the 2nd you ignore my rebuttal and just say how you hate WoW.

Maybe MMO’s might be better without WoW, but the market would be much, much, much smaller. Orders of magnitude smaller. GW2 would have had less funding and sold 300k copies if WoW had never come along. Sure, it would be a different game and maybe one that you’d like better, but I doubt that ANet would be happier.

Grind-games still exist. They fail (by today’s standards) but you can find them and still play them if you want. You’ll deal with lower budgets, less customer service, less updates, probably even more money-grabbing, etc. but you can’t get your nostalgia for free. The days of 50k sub MMO’s being among the biggest and best are long gone.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

The interesting thing about MMOs are that they are in direct competition with themselves. In regular gaming, there isn’t anything wrong with owning Battlefield and Call of Duty at the same time. But MMOs have three issues that cause them to be exclusive to each other.

Because of this, eventually one MMO was going to become dominant. The market itself encourages zerg balling.

Yes, there was a dominant MMO (or two). And it had 250,000-500,000 subs. Then WoW showed up and nearly overnight it doubled, tripled, and eventually had 20 times the players of those MMOs. Those WoW players didn’t come from other MMOs. They can from everywhere, even from complete non-gamers. This is something that is almost exclusively true about WoW, not other MMOs. Every other MMO scavenges their subs/players from other MMOs, including WoW.