Guild Wars 2

I wonder if the issue is lack of effective specialization on the non-DPS side that is hurting.

Take boons for instance. 2/3 of them are duration only stacking, and a couple of them go away at first attack that hits you.

This means that there is little noticeable difference between a build that relies on supplying boons and one that do so mostly to support their own DPS.

Part of this is because how ANet designed their boon/condition stacking, resulting in server overload as it has to track a multitude of timers at sub-second precision.

This means that you can’t have boons that have a meaningful difference depending on the builds being played. They are virtually all fire and forget.

Never mind that while SPVP has to avoid unkillable bunkers holding points, in PVE you are the point and every mob within aggro range is trying to take it.

Brindled.2179:

For anyone just starting to play GW2 the controls may take some getting used to.

That is a understatement. The controls are classic MMORPG while the combat system is straight up action game.

Why ANet didn’t implement permanent mouselook and a crosshair puzzle me.

Depends on profession and game mode selected.

Anything with spammable AOE can stomp their way through PVE for the most part.

PVP on the other hand is all about spamming conditions and evades.

Hmm, the tooltip would suggest a pr second heal of 620.

Then again, it has that odd notation of showing a stack of 4 on a boon that only stack duration. 2480 divided by 4 two times seems to land within the ballpark of the numbers you are seeing. As such, i suspect it is yet another screwed up tooltip…

4 kits, tho one of them is not offensive. Just wish i could hit 1-3 without having the first two potentially being overridden by a latter one. For a game with a very action oriented combat system, the abundant use of windup on various skills are aggravating.

VIVorcha.7853:

digiowl.9620:

In essence, the engineer has a workload akin to elementalists to maintain DPS. This by swapping between 3 kits and a weapon set to cherry pick skills from each.

Bingo.

Only Elementalists don’t need to waste all their utilities to do so.

Our toolbelt kinda makes up for that, no?

Any time i look at cooldowns, they appear painfully arbitrary.

Supposedly they should, if they follow the same programming as weapon stats and sigils.

So clearly i picked the one adventurer profession that is a complete mess…

And i know about the “turrets” (more delayed bombs), but those do not explain the out of spawn nuke that reavers seem to produce sometimes.

Meh, why do i even bother…

Makes me think about whatever ANet has done to promote “skill”.

Seems to me that they have attempted to do so by obfuscating information (limited visibility of skill recharge states for example) and padlocking skills to slots (can’t cluster them for easy reach). Didn’t they rearrange one of the weapon skill sets for Guardian early on because it was “too easy” to hit the numbers in sequence to produce a reasonably good combo?

In the end tho this seems to just favor people that have access to programmable gaming peripherals, allowing them to set up easy to access skill clusters (and perhaps more).

In essence, the engineer has a workload akin to elementalists to maintain DPS. This by swapping between 3 kits and a weapon set to cherry pick skills from each.

Nick.6972:

I thin it’s even more hilarious seeing how some people find even dodging hard.
Example, – Liadri. All the whiners.

Dodging on its own is not hard. Dodging while fighting a camera that going wild on every last map outcropping and a targeting system that loves to aim for anything it should not however…

Right now the control scheme is a overly complex hybrid of classic MMORPG and TERA/Neverwinter style action MMORPG.

IMO, Cryptic did it one better with Champions Online. There you had a active block, that you could keep up to forgo attacking but gaining massive amounts of energy/mana and reduce incoming damage, that could also be used to break out of knockback/immobilize (and made you immune to same for some seconds).

Note tho that the block did not make you impervious. It just sharply reduced incoming damage. So you could not sit behind the block all day, but you could buy yourself a breather.

wintermute.4096:

Neural.1824:

You don’t understand, OP.

GW2 will be an “esport” at any cost. Probably even as far as losing their business entirely. Someone at Anet is obsessed with esports, that’s for sure.

Bullkitten. Their pr department is obsessed with it, and they think mentioning it in every interview is good free marketing, and that’s it. Compared to the dev time that went into pve, spvp is a complete afterthought.

There is dev and there is dev.

ANet early in their game development seems to have come up with a toolkit that allow non-programmers to create event chains and similar. This allow non-programmers on staff to come up with all kinds of events and similar, as long as they do not need addition to the server or client code. And this is why we are seeing the living world churn, as their artists (mappers, modellers and so on) can hammer out events and achievements without programmer involvement.

I suspect that ANet has very few actual programmers on staff. And those they have were until recently tied up with looking for ways to eliminate culling. Only now that the culling issue have been dealt with do we see progress being made on long promised features that require actual programming on the client and server.

It is quite clear now that the continued issue with this game is that not completing events are more profitable than completing them because they offer concentrated numbers of mobs on a reliable schedule. And those mobs drop loot. Massive piles of loot.

As such, if ANet wants people to complete events rather than sit farming them in a uncompleted state the loot as to be moved from the mobs to the completion award.

These mobs are a mess.

The reavers spam explosives that seem to have a larger blast radius than the warning circle indicates (i think it only shows the area of the initial poison cloud). And often you can be blasted directly to down if you accidentally miss one or more reavers spawning behind you when a new wave comes in.

The horrors are like reef drakes cranked to 11. They knockdown, they pile on confusion via a large cone, and they can even use the remains of other clockwork mobs to either heal or gain veteran status. Reminder to ANet, confusion in PVE is double the strength of PVP because mobs do not attack as often. This makes 5 stacks of PVE confusion hit as much as 10 stacks of PVP confusion! Try to keep this in mind when you design mobs that apply confusion! Especially when they are intended as the main mobs for events…

And the nightmares, ugh. Weed whackers on legs, with a virtually random reflection shield that makes it equally suicide to either go into melee or stay at range.

All in all, what i see happen now that invasion completions are no longer needed for any kind of achievements are that clockwork events are ignored once the second part of a invasion is reached. This while the molten or aetherblade events are farmed en mass because of the more manageable mob designs.

I was observing a invasion today, and i found myself wondering how meta-events handle scaling.

What prompted this was that i was first at a aetherblade event, and all the mobs that had spawned were veterans.

Meaning that all the mobs seemed to have scaled up because of the number of participants in other parts of the meta-event.

If this is the case, it makes it very hard for smaller groups of people to aid in the completion of the meta-event by taking out neglected sub-events (in particular as clockwork mobs are a pain to deal with compared to molten or aetherblade mobs).

Given the repeated issue of event spawned mob farming, i suspect one thing to learn from this is to have events mobs not drop anything and instead incorporate a reasonable amount of items into the event completion awards.

Swizzle.7982:

I don’t understand why anyone would want a melee weapon on the engi, could someone explain it?

I mean we have the tool kit, it sucks, would a hammer be much better? And if it would because of better skills why not just redo the tool kit skills.

I don’t really understand what function it would serve that isn’t already done by thieves, warriors or guardians and isn’t done better by them.

I think Tool Kit would get some more love if ANet reworked how they do shield skills in this game. The skills are stopping us from doing attacks anyways, so why not allow us to hold the shield up over extended periods rather than give us a 3 second window and then a forced cooldown?

Heck, they could make it cost endurance while held or blocking hits if they worry that it will be a griefing issue.

Right now i don’t much bother with shields as the opportunity cost is just way too high on a failed block.

Stevens.2791:

“What’s more is that the team is also working very kitten finding a way to make it so that every profession has access to every weapon and their own weapon skills for those previously locked weapons. Engineer plus Hammer? Check. Again, there’s no specific timeline for this, but a new progression system is coming.” – from the article.

So we progress somehow to unlock or earn the weapon? Either way sounds pretty concrete to me

*edit: lolz, the word h.ard is considered a swear word!

Hey ANet, rambo bow please (grenade kit without the wrist strain)

Would not be so bad, if you didn’t have to locate the various parts in a menu that is constantly resorting itself.

And the whole discovery subsystem is yet another artsy “people like to explore” fallacy. Yep, people like to explore. When there is nothing else to do! When you have done every quest, every dungeon, and anything else to the point that you can play it with your eyes closed, then you go exploring or you abandon the game.

Never mind cramming one sub-tier of recipes inside the crafting vendor, while the rest shows up as you progress, and it has one word in 5-6 as the only thing to distinguish them from the ones you get automatically.

I have sometimes seen a + next to icons, but they only seem to apply to refined parts. Would love it if the interface allowed me to branch the whole parts tree of a item and hit go.

With the combat mechanics basically built for SPVP (notice how most AOE circles are a perfect fit to the size of such a point), and SPVP revolving around capture point fights, it is what ANet has to do to make anything outside of spamming DPS valid skill bar options.

Same thing for engineers please.

AntiGw.9367:

zerorogue.9410:

Speaking of useless clicking though Why did they make the essences of luck a consumable??? There’s no boosters, no level scale, no reason why you should automatically get the luck as far as I can see…

There’s a big difference between having the luck applied straight after salvage, and looking at the item and clicking it.

Again, the intended way to use the essences is not to buy a million of greens and consume them in one go. You can do that, but then don’t complain about clicking. They are intended to be used over a long time period.

Never mind that an artificer can refine them into higher grade items.

Likely we are looking at different teams coming up with quick fixes that other teams overlook when they later make another quick fix that makes the original one redundant.

I think the karma items were introduced as a way to gain karma from activity had didn’t have that ability designed in originally (daily achievements and such), because people were karma farming events in Orr and ANet wanted them to spread out more.

The WVW tokens were originally a collectible rather than a currency, and so direct inventory deposit ran into the potential issue of loss because of full inventory. Having it drop on the ground allowed ANet to use the existing pickup code to notify player that there was not enough room.

Meh, just give me the option to actually ride out a fight without running around like a headless chicken while my heal recharges and i’ll be a happy camper.

Right now it feels i should just hit yakkity sax and do like Benny Hill whenever i go up against anything more than a single mob in a starting area, no matter how much i pile on the defense.

It may be fun the first few times when you take down a larger mob this way. But doing it over and over and over becomes stressful to the point that you need to log off to unwind.

Meaning that i see a difference between having to dodge the odd massive blow to stay in the fight, and having to constantly run in circles to stay alive no matter how i build my character. The former to me is a action-ish RPG, the latter is a pure action game (a shooter even if i load up on ranged weapons). I play RPGs because i want how i build my character to matter. If i want to play a shooter there are a long list of games to choose from, all with control schemes more fitting to the genera.

MonMalthias.4763:

@digiowl:
Zerging in WvW basically boils down to 2 things: Have a long ranged auto-attack to tag things, have a few Guardians for Might, Retaliation and Aegis, have Warriors for Swiftness, Fury and Might. After that it’s Staff Elementalists and Necros for support. Everyone else can just spam 1 and pat themselves on the back. Oh, and Arrowcarts. Arrowcarts as far as the eye can see.

The GW2 design has been broken for 8v8 and upwards since beta. I wouldn’t read much into the whole “tactic” of zerging.

Heh, i know. This likely because professions are design around quick decisive duels rather than drawn out wars. But outside of the SPVP centerpiece, that is exactly what combat is in the game. Either because of the numbers on each side (WVW), or because of the health pools one side is given (PVE).

Heh, read it as Zombies vs Zombies…

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Jewles.6390:

what happened to the promised condition buff anet said a long time ago… did it change into a nerf instead? instead of nerfing why dont they take 4 weeks to pvp pve split the skills and not nerf pve engis to high hell (even more) haha

Anets stance on balance is that PVE is so easy anyone can do it, so jut balance for PVP.

For anyone with the reflexes of a squirrel on energy drinks, and latency that will make Wall Street traders drool.

Yep, the core issue is that the combat system is built around dodging. But PVE mobs do not dodge. Instead they have health pools that make PVP burst specs tickle.

Another thing that may be holding ANet back on the PVE side, is that they tried to reduce the potential for griefing. And griefing is often done by intentionally triggering avoidable punishments in boss fights and similar.

One thing i noticed once i previews a couple in game, is that the pattern on them is “alive”.

Also, quite a few of them have one or more elements that swing around when you move.

One though on turrets i had is this:

Rather than reduce the cooldown when picking up a turret, have it turn into a special “charge” (kinda like the charges of a mesmer mantra) that allow the turret to be instantly deployed again.

details would have to be worked out so that the turret could not be healed in this way (the server would likely treat the turret as if still deployed, and so continue to keep track of its health), nor allow the deployment heal of the healing turret to trigger.

This could lead to other interesting options. Like having the option to detonate a carried turret, meaning the explosion would happen centered on the engineer. And perhaps have the trait Always Prepared deploy any carried turrets.

Interesting how exactly the same they were. Kinda demonstrates that downscaling works, but only really when naked.

Had a bit of fun jumping between Frostgorge and Wayfarers, taking on Son of Svanir with my Tool Kit. In Wayfarers a single #1 chain would drop just about any Svanir i could find. But pop into Frostgorge and it would take 5-6 such chains to do the same. No wonder everyone is farming Queensdale unless there is a chest boss or invasions going on…

ANet’s problem was that they said “no trinity” rather than “no hard trinity”.

If any of the professions could turn into a acceptable healer, tank or dps by swapping traits and gear, the waiting goes out the window. This because it is a hard trinity that makes leveling healers a pain, and so reducing the number of people that take the time to level them.

But if you can level as a dps or tank, and then swap things around to go healer for a while, there would likely be more people willing to take up the mantle.

Then again, the game barely even recognize any kind of non-dps group assisting. You get a bit of XP for getting a comrade back on his feet, and that is about it. Boons given, healing done, damage taken (tanking), none of this matter as only dps counts for loot tagging. If you fail to damage at least one event related mob, you do not count for that event.

Btw, i wonder if we could use control effects as a kind of aggro tool on defiant mobs. Meaning that if we smacked a mob with a control effect while they have defiant up, they would reliably come after us for doing so. This would allow us to use skills with said effect to pull mobs away from downed comrades even while defiant is up.

And this is a large issue in groups, imo. No effective way for players to go “oh no you don’t” to a large mob trying to finish off a fellow player. The current aggro system is so opaque, people do not even know where to begin in attempting to manipulate mobs in that fashion.

Dirame.8521:

VIVorcha.7853:

Also, think about PVE content: Is there a single role that an Engineer can fill that another class can’t fill better?

The answer: no.

Support. Best Burst Healers in the game. Best Vulnerability stackers in the game.

Dunno on the healer.

Elementalists come out slightly ahead using evasive arcana, healing wave (dagger #5) and Healing ripple (minor master tier trait). And at least 3 of those will be ready quite quickly (evasive arcana in 5-10 seconds depending on vigor, Healing ripple in 10 with maxed arcana trait line).

Most of our blast finishers have a recharge of 20 second or longer. Never mind that we are required to supply (or find) a water field, while the elementalist can do their healing whenever.

In most other MMOs i can leave a skill off the bar if i do not find it useful.

But with the weapon oriented system that GW2 has, i am left with having to ignore it sitting there on the bar.

I would much rather see each skill slot have variations on its theme that change up how it behaves.

This way you get the same overall theme, but still allow the player to adapt a profession to his way of playing.

Take skills that knock back a opponent. All fine in SPVP and WVW, but pointless in PVE. This because mobs can’t fall to their death. If they hit a ledge, they simply stop. So why not allow us to swap it for one that knock them down instead? would make no practical difference, except we no longer have to chase them around whenever they go flying (and we would no longer kitten of melee fighters in group events).

Or a more direct example, Engineer pistol #5 (Glue Shot). The only thing it does it leave a AOE cripple field. I would love for the option to swap this to something like a acid pool DOT.

I’m starting to think that ANet could produce something interesting if we could modify how weapon skills work in a real manner using either traits or a system similar to how we select utility skills.

For me, glue shot is borderline pointless. I find all this hoopla about movement as defense aggravating as long as the control scheme of the game is classical MMO rather than a more shooter oriented one.

As such, i would love to be able to swap out glue shot for something that leave a lingering damage field. I would also love to swap out all these knockbacks (self and opponent) for knockdowns. This so i do not have to chase the target down all the time (in PVE you can’t knock a mob off ledges anyways).

There are oh so many skills floating around this game that makes virtually no sense outside of SPVP, with some maybe having some value in WVW because of how differently the game treats characters compared to mobs.

In most other MMOs, if i don’t like a skill i can leave it off the bar and make room for other skills. But in GW2 i can’t. Any skill i don’t use for some reason in effect leave a vacant spot on the bar.

Raine.1394:

Karka Queen is largely dead on my server. Reward might bring out some players, but I don’t believe it is a deciding factor. The Karka Queen is one of Anet’s attempts at catering to the mythical hardcore player in open world PvE and Grenth is the other major attempt. I say mythical because, while you do find harcore players on the forums, they are largely non-existent in-game.

Open world PvE should not be designed around hardcore players even if they did exist as it should be designed for the kind of players you find there. That is, a wide diversity of players, most without voice communication, who aren’t playing from an interrupt list. The new Teq will be the next ghostown. I got a kick out of one ‘hardcore’ who played the new Teq and was effusive in his praise. I asked him if he succeeded. The answer was ‘no’, he failed big time. The new Teq will simply be the next failure fest that may see some large guild attention initially if the reward is high enough, but will eventually just empty that part of the open world.

The actual answer is simple, but Anet doesn’t get it—at all. Design the open world for the players you find there and create instances of tiered difficulty for players who desire more challenge. This would require that Anet redefine ‘challenge’ as something more than HP and instagibs, but this is the real answer to the problem.

The whole of Southsun seems to have been a case of ANet going “you want hard? Well here is hard!”. The reef drakes and karka, especially when event scaled, are downright insane.

The problem for me is not loot, but that Steampipe turns contested the second the queen spawns. This makes it a death trap for anyone coming form the northern camps to join in the fight.

Actually, Plague do not need autoattack.

Press any skill once, and it will continue to use that for its duration. Test it with #2 in any attacking mob, and watch blindness get applied again and again.

But yeah, most transforms really need to either have #1 set as auto-attack from the go or remember what you set it to last.

SAB is for the jumping puzzle fans. It is in essence a platform game crammed inside a game engine that was never really designed for it in the first place. It is as far removed from general PVE as you can get.

And the dungeon run sounds like a Citadel of Flame speedrun. The mobs are skipped because they produce little to no drops, and result in longer time between completions (recent patches removed the whole point of speedruns, gold farming, as you only get gold once pr dungeon pr day pr account).

As for Warzaw’s comment about dodging. Yes and no.

In PVP, unless you run into a backstab thief or a sniper warrior, very little can really one shot you out of the blue. With PVE however, one shot damage is common. As you say, it can be dodged. But that depends on you seeing it coming in the first place. Remember that projectiles that miss its intended target do not just magically vanish, it can continue on and hit someone from out of camera view. How do you dodge that? This was a common experience for me during the latest Southsun event. I would be taking part in a camp defense, and would either get shot, blown up or trampled by some karka that someone else had aggroed near me, but out of camera view.

Solo fighting big bosses may actually be easier than fighting in a group, as then you know exactly what you do to provoke a certain response from the boss. But in a group, unless the group is well coordinated, there is a high chance that someone will trigger a response from the boss at a bad moment for you (run near you while targeted and you are trying to recover endurance for instance).

Nuka Cola.8520:

Lord Kuru.3685:

Yes. Their original target group were casuals and those who didn’t want to grind for gear stats. But the game launched beyond expectations, with a large number of buyers who were used to, and wanted stats grind. This got Anet greedy. When these new customers began to complain that there was no stats to grind for, Anet panicked and introduced Ascended gear.

Now we have a game that was developed for the no-stat-grind crowd, but has shifted its model to the stat-grind-fans. In the end, neither of these two customer bases will be happy.

GW1 was 100% cosmetic grind. Who complained? no one. No one forced you to grind an eternal sword but you may have wanted to for a lot of reasons.

Also, little of the “grind” was “miss it and it is forever gone”. I think this part of Living Story is what is getting a lot of bad blood and burned out players. Because they feel that unless they keep up with the events and the related prices, they miss out on the game.

A core issue with the whole “casual” label, is that it can be read in two ways.

1. having little time to spend in the game because of real life obligations.

2. having lots of time to spend on the game, but spending it in a unfocused manner (a little crafting now, running a dungeon for the views and story, running around a zone to look at the sites).

In both cases the progress towards some “goal” will be slow, but for different reasons.

As best i can tell, ANet is operating on the second definition of casual. That you spend some time on the dailies, some time on the personal story, some time on the living story and some time on simply exploring the PVE world.

Their early designs, like Flame and Frost, may have catered to the first kind of casual, as the storyline and achievements were spread over several months. But feedback from the second kind of casual players, and the hardcores, about slow progression, resulted in the shift we have seen since.

Or the state of the turrets could be tracked internally. So that whatever state it was in when picked up is the state that it comes back out with.

Sitael.4680:

Um Abbas.5693:

Legendaries aren’t visible in kits.
No glow, no footfalls, no effects except grenade barrage if you’re specced 30 points in power with appropriate grenade trait.

You right, with a very very tiny exception. If you have The Predator your standard grenades (F1) are now little spakling fireballs if you throw them.

Do wonder if this is a indication how ANet wants PVE engineers to be played…

One idea that tumbled into my head on a different thread just now was to borrow the mantra mechanic from mesmers.

Mantras are charged by a initial long casting, and then have 2-3 charges that can be quickly fired off with no casting time. these charges are seen as icons with numbers alongside boons and conditions.

What i am thinking is that engineers could build turrets and get these icons, then use the same skill again to deploy them. If the turret survives you can then collect it again to turn it into a “charge” once more.

Detonate toolbelt skills would have the explosion happen on the engineer while in “charge” form, and would then start the recharge timer as usual.

I guess the niggle here is the healing turret, as i guess one could abuse it by constantly deploying and repacking it. A internal recharge equivalent to the current shorter recharge on pickup may fix that.

Meh, we already have two melee kits (and one that is so short range it may well be melee). What we could use it another ranged kit that is direct damage based to complement rifle (only #1 is really long range) and grenades (oh my wrist).

XelNigma.6315:

digiowl.9620:

All in all ,for a game built with mobility as a focus the engineer is painfully static.

Games that have a class that focus on turrets make that class to be static.
Lets look at other games. TF2 is well known, This game is very mobile, you have people running and jumping and even rocket jumping all over the place. But then you have the engineer class, designed not to do any of that stuff, cant move quick, cant jump high. His role is to control an area and make it his. Often known as “Area denial”.

Lets look at another game, Global Agenda. This game is even more mobile than TF2 seeing as every one has jetpacks. Like before you have a class thats designed to set in 1 spot and control an area with turrets and buff stations.

All well and good for SPVP, and to some degree WVW, but basically a waste of utility slots in PVE.

I wonder if they could have done turrets more like mesmer mantras. When you hit the skill, you construct a collapsed turret that show up as a “boon”. Then you can hit the skill again to deploy said turret. Now if you pick said turret up again, it return to its “boon” form, and the deploy skill becomes available. Blow it up or have it destroyed, and the recharge on the build skill happens.

Question is what to do with the toolbelt skills. One option would be that any time you are carrying a turret, or have one deployed, you have the explosion skill. If deployed it detonates there, and if carried it detonates around you.

Learn to dodge. /s

Seriously, ANet made dodge/evade too good. And so to challenge the caffeinated squirrels that make up the hardcore section of the community they have to keep piling on the dodge or die attacks.

This because making CC and heal actually be able to matter will make things “faceroll” easy…

In essence, conditions in GW2 are a computer engineering nightmare. A full stack of bleed has 26 timers running and require calculations for each pr second damage tick. And that is just a single bleed stack on a single mob or character. Now do the same for 100+ mobs or characters each second, and add on timers for all the other conditions and boons.

Check out any other game, and their stacks are likely to only run up to single digits. And on top of that, there is only a single timer that will wipe the whole stack when it runs out. And the damage is largely fixed based on conditions at time of application. Meaning that once the calculations are done at time of attack, you only do a quick subtraction each damage tick.

The GW2 boons and conditions may look lovely from a design aesthetics point of view, but any sane computer engineer will be groaning in agony.