Guild Wars 2

Yep. A return to buggy, inconsistent form…

Didn’t even get that far. Found the earlier miniboss to be annoying, and also that it resets fully if you fall to the bottom of the map (but not if said boss kills you).

Can we have some consistency please, ANet?!

The basic problem there (outside of my minimap bugging and so having no idea where i was in relation to the quest marker) is that there is two heights of shelves but little indication if the quest marker is above or below you. Never mind the camera going nuts every time you walk down a aisle…

Holl.3109:

I think EVERY skill needs different versions for different game modes, would make things a little more balanced.

Pretty much, because mobs don’t play by character rules.

they drop damage that make any zerker drool, while taking hit after hit that would wipe bunker builds on the spot.

Never mind that nearly none of the big PVE fights come anywhere close to the capture point mechanic that is so central to the SPVP focused character balance.

At this point PVE and SPVP may well be two different games that happens to share art assets.

Anymras.5729:

MarkPhilips.5169:

The only engi build that needs to be downed down is the turret engi because is a toxic build for the game (spvp side)

It’s really worth noting that Turrets aren’t very good for anywhere in the game except low-tier sPvP. They’re too static for most parts of the game…but guess which one plays straight to the strengths of Turrets?

That’s right. sPvP. Because when your goal is to hold a point, a set of skills that specialize in area denial, are primarily traited into via tanky traitlines, and can attempt to make up for the user’s otherwise lacking offensive power by number of attacks…well, you get the point, right? The build does well when the Turreteer and their target are both within Turret range. If you get the user outside that range, or destroy the Turrets, they’re going to be crippled.

In short: Stop bloody calling for nerfs to a largely ineffective skillset because you can’t be bothered to learn to adapt to it, and instead call for a game mode that would place less emphasis on anything so perfectly-suited to a single skillset.

This is a general problem with this game. As much as 2/3 of every profession is virtually meaningless outside of SPVP. This because they assume a static defensive position. Seriously, just about every AOE in the game is perfectly fitted to cover a SPVP capture point. Thus they force any enemy on point to either get off or suffer. Where in the rest of the game do you see that being a big deal?

Jayce.5632:

While it may scale with healing power you would need around 1600+ just to match the base output of healing signet.

Bingo. Last time i looked over the numbers, the HPS of HS passive matched or exceeded most #6 skills. Meaning that a HS warrior got the same benefit from just running with it slotted as the rest do by babying the #6 skill.

Regeneration, either in boon or in US form, is not a #6 skill by a long shot.

As for LF being a second health bar, yes and no. yes in that while active it takes the damage rather than my regular health, no in that it has a built in DOT. So even if i don’t take damage i can’t stay in it forever.

Sadly this only really helps once we are already at 400. the other half in the cooking pain, discovery, is not touched.

Given the kind of keyboard dance an engineer need to do to keep up with a warrior, i’d take warrior any day (kitten that RSI)…

McWolfy.5924:

Do you want to backstab somebody with a GS?

Step softly and carry a big sword

I agree with OP (and likely tared and feathered him by stating so).

The focus on conquest, and the central mechanic of holding capture points, ends up coloring every balance choice taken.

The end result is that they can’t really touch conditions or defense, as that leads to condibunkers. As such they keep constantly ramping up DD spiking, leading to constant reinforcing of zerker uber alles in PVE.

With WVW the scale of things turn everything “gray”. Those that can field the most reserves for the longest time wins, and that has been a “issue” with war since the start of history.

Meh, i would much rather see multiple choice pr weapon skill slot.

Meaning that each slot from 1 to 5 had multiple skills that would be swapped around. But tied to that specific slot. This to maintain the overall system of 1 being the no cooldown “auto-attack” while 5 is the heavy hitter with long cooldown.

But then i guess that would violate their precious “play the game, not the UI”, as right now seeing a scepter in the staff of a necro is a signal that you have condies coming…

Because he is like me, love the looks of the weapon but hate how it is pigeonholed into a certain skill “theme”.

Color me unsurprised. This is after all the profession that had to go through a lengthy process to prove that it had less down state health than the rest.

Likely the max LF value gets adjusted by some code related to defeat, and then reset when recovered, but the current LF is only adjusted down and not up again.

Seen similar stuff in various other games over the years…

Labjax.2465:

Stooperdale.3560:

“this fight (and every other boss fight so far this season) remains, IMO, unnecessarily tedious and repetitive. More a test of patience and endurance, in the end, than skill.”

It seems like you have reached a certain amount of wisdom without realizing that all computer games offer the same thing. Once you know when to press the buttons all you do is repetitively press them at the right times. Congratulations. If you want faster reflex skills you can try first person shooters. If you want more thought then play a strategy game. If you want unpredictability then play PvP.

Something clicked for me when you mentioned FPS. That’s what this GW2 combat is most like (that is, these boss fights – I’m not confident in saying that all GW2 combat is FPS-like). MMOs have traditionally been about strategic, turn-based combat (albeit at a faster pace than tabletop games) but the pace of these fights and the breadth of their mechanics makes the challenge less about intellect and more about reflexes.

Which is fine, depending on your preferences, but I can easily see how the traditional MMO crowd (particularly the ones who just “play for fun”) would get incredibly frustrated.

And i would be fine with the FPSish pace, if the controls matched!

Give me Tera or Neverwinter style controls and i would be perfectly fine. Hell, dodging glowing sections of ground is what Neverwinter PVE consists off.

Bit having a mouse that operates independently of the camera for targeting reasons ends up for me at least to be very close to a test of patting my head and rubbing my stomach in the middle of a dodgeball match.

And that is why i had a spit take when Jon Peters outright stated that they didn’t go for a Neverwinter scheme because they felt it made the game too action focused. kitten it, it is already action focused! the moment dodge was made the primary survival method, it became Devil May Cry with a awkward control scheme!

I could not care less either way, if i could stash the components i get from the LS into a section of my collections and maybe have a go at making it at my own pace.

but because they go into the general inventory/bank i feel i either need to make this back piece now to free up the space, or chuck the parts out and never make it at all.

Foxfire perhaps. But sand makes little sense as all we can do with it is sift it when we have a stack of 10 or more.

And geodes, being a vendor currency, has its own issues. Right now the game don’t allow us to pay with anything out of the bank or collection. And this has been a issue as far back as the first bazaar, where if you wanted to trade your extra piles of materials for anything you had to actually haul them from the bank to the vendor.

Given the style of boss fights so far in LS2, i think ANet has gone from ignoring the issue to pretty much building for zerker only.

Just about every major battle so far have had stages that either involve stopping a mob before it resets your progress on the big bad, or knock over a bunch of mobs to get the big bad back on the field, while the big bad spams AOEs everywhere that will tear a new one on even the tankiest of builds.

The fights felt like i was playing DMC or Ninja Gaiden, not a MMORPG.

Meh. Both the leyline hub fight and the end fight felt like a case of ANet telling me to get screwed for not running a DPS build.

All this reminds me of the first time i read over the GW1 necromancer skills. Not even the expansions, just the Prophecies set.

Ran into one skill that hurt the enemy, but put a debuff on the necro, then another that would send any debuffs on the necro to a target (or all enemies without range).

The whole thing reminded me of the shenanigans i could get up to with a proper hand in MTG or other trading card games.

Warriors may not have the absolute peak DPS, but look at the “effort” required. 3 passive signets and weapon spam…

stealth classes always attract gankers, and WVW is ganker central…

Meh. Outside of a select few fields and finishers, the combo system is mostly a waste. This thanks to it just being yet another boon/condition source.

Holy skritt, the 1337s are out in force…

I highly agree with op, this fight was the salma boss squared.

Never mind that it happens indoors where we get to experience the camera issues of the game first hand.

Everything felt like it had only been tested on a zerker build with easy access to aegis and/or stability.

The fear AOE was silly enough, but the insta-launch discoball and the mender was just “gravy”…

Verificus.4320:

Its prolly a bug … though I cannot fathom how a bug this large got past pre-patch stuff

Best guess, it is a race condition. This means that it works fine under test conditions, but once put under public loads something that was supposed to happen in one sequence (A B C) ends up jumbled (B A C) and jams.

Carighan.6758:

Bran.7425:

Strangely I would think it would have something to do with the developers unhealthy fascination with esport and the s/tpvp mode of play.

Yeah, I would usually agree with this, too. Strangely enough they keep clinging on to that ideal, when a) that part wasn’t really advertised in a big way unlike WvW or PvE (so it stands to reason most players aren’t here for the PvP) and b) it’s not working, which is a good general rule for smallscape PvP in MMORPGs in the first place. :P

Could have sworn they made a very big fuzz about it back around launch, announcing an agreement with a new esports network and everything. The it got very quiet very quickly right after southsun and their retooling for episodic PVE releases.

And in all honesty it feels as if initially they tried to make a MOBA inside a MMO. Similar setting, similar skills, but a more rigid build and combat structure.

But the glacial pace of everything seemed to sour the dedicated PVPers on the game in total, and the not so dedicated preferred ganking in WVW (that also allowed them to show of their newly grinded legendary GS).

Aza.2105:

digiowl.9620:

Right now a guy in zerker is just as good a support as a guy in clerics, because only one boon is affected by healing power.

Only in pve. In pvp there is a significant difference.

And there in lies the problem. Balance for PVE and you knock PVP out of orbit. balance for PVP and PVE becomes a DPS race.

ANet seems to operate with this idea that any balance changes should be given time to settle before a new one is added, so that the impact of the changes can be made more visible.

The basic problem is not stacking directly, but that the way the game handles support encourages stacking. ANet wanted to remove the “heal-bot” so they removed any useful friendly targeting (oddly enough the targeting is still there, as can be see any time you want to click a mob in the middle of a group event melee).

Instead any kind of support (heals, boons) are done either as a ground targeted AOE, or as a AOE centered on the caster. Both are much easier to use when everyone is stand right smack on top of each other.

Also, about the phalanx, and the later roman formations, all of them employed a concept of front and back rows. GW2 do not have this, thanks to having no semblance of tanking (pretty much what the front row does in any formation, stand there and get pummeled by the enemy so the guys with pikes, javelins and bows behind them are safe to do their thing).

Karuna.1357:

THE GOOD

• Combat — say what you will, but the combat in this game is actually pretty good. It isn’t as balanced as GW1, but dodging/evades plus the variety of conditions and skills give you something more to do rather than just sit there and mash buttons.

Some of us would not mind being able to sit and mash buttons, if we built for it.

but as it stands, building glass or building tank makes no difference in how often we need to dodge. The only is that we need to keep dodging for longer as fights last longer thanks to lower DPS. As such, it is more likely that we fail a critical dodge and wipe.

Healing is held back by ANet’s fear of indestructible bunkers in SPVP.

In all honesty they should have long since renamed the stat “boon power” and made more boons change effectiveness based on it.

Right now a guy in zerker is just as good a support as a guy in clerics, because only one boon is affected by healing power.

Meh. The game don’t do attrition, period.

Just another “moar DPS” fest from ANet…

Meh, the skill is specifically tuned to not outshine the HPS of profession specific skills.

Even if you manage to snag all 3 of the conditions it clears, the 30 second cooldown makes it have a HPS of just under 180.

Its nearest direct comparison, the necromancer’s Consume Conditions, blows it out of the water.

It is one of ANet’s “clever” multi-purpose skills, where the up front use (heal) is not the intended use.

Lalocat.6793:

Oh, I see. I didn’t notice the difference in duration, because I was just bursting them down anyway. For me this made no difference whatsoever, one stack of retal vs 5 stacks is irrelevant. Trying to interrupt the howl really is entirely pointless. I was kind of hoping it was just bugged but obviously not.

Pretty much my thinking while going through the episode was that ANet has a passive-aggressive “we will make you go zerker!” agenda going in their design.

Every mob seemed designed to be frustrating unless you built specifically for maximum burst DPS.

Sarrs.4831:

This would be nice. While with a lot of practice, you can intuitively ‘feel’ what the cooldowns are, this would take out the guesswork.

Best i can tell, ANet seems to think that “seat of the pants” gaming promotes “skill”…

Start poking at it, and one find that there are a host of “hidden” variables and mechanics at work in this game.

The game launched without windup times for any skill that didn’t have a channel time. And still do not account for aftercasts in the tooltips.

End result is that the only way to make informed decisions is to leave the game and read reams upon reams of forum posts, wiki articles and blog postings.

This would make sense, if anything large in this game didn’t one shot tanks and glass cannons alike…

And don’t give me that crap video, that was a whole group overlapping AOE heals in tanking gear.

Jerus.4350:

Simonoly.4352:

Yes I solo AFK’d him by simply ranging from the central platform and sometimes moving out of the range of a Big ’ol Bomb. It was no better or worse than any of the other story bosses.

AFK’d while dodging, Impressive.

And this is why i swear the 1337s of this game use AFK in very “unconventional” way…

Redenaz.8631:

I don’t care whether Personal Story characters have anything to do in releases, but I really like seeing them return (Riot Alice) or at least be referred to. (Some Priory NPCs gripe about Gix.)

I think the dialog with the priory exploration team changes depending on your characters chosen order (never mind that the banter is a riot to listen to).

I suspect this would have been a perfect time for a instance number. So at least we could tell if it was really deserted, or we just got booted to a new instance because the other 50 are maxed out.

dace.8019:

digiowl.9620:

because it does not impact their precious SPVP.

How precious is SPVP?

their patch changes seems to be focused squarely on SPVP issues at least.

Bezagron.7352:

Lastly I’m very curious about:

• Should there be a different between OF focused, DF focused & Supportive focused builds support, control, offence & defence?

As at the moment OF focus seems to get the better deal. As other then up time (duration) OF focused builds receive the same full effect of their supportive & defensive skills, boons & conditions. Were Supportive or DF focused builds have vastly reduced offensive capabilities compared to OF focused builds.

Ding!

Right now stacking might in zerker and stacking it in cleric produce the exact same outcome. Same with protection, vigor and every other boon bar regeneration.

But go cleric and your DPS takes a nose dive…

If ANet really wanted support to be a thing, they would have replaced healing power with support power and tied the effectiveness of various boons to it.

Instead we get zerkers that “roid” up before a fight and then blitz the boss.

stobie.2134:

I just wish they’d get rid of the crystal timer. It’s incredibly annoying – the stacks were better.

For some reason the stacks are still there, but you really need to spam the aspects if you are to run out before the timer grabs them.

Oh and nice of them to hide the timer behind a small blue icon next to the aspect stacks…

What i find iffy about the aspects is that they take over the weapons part of the bar rather than tie into the existing jump and dodge keys.

Never mind that they use #5 to clear the aspects rather than weapon swap as is the case with most bundles.

Meh, ANet has a stick up their behind about design.

One reason for getting crap tells rather than castbars are “play the game, not the UI”.

And the way the conditions function reeks of a design over engineering approach, where arbitrary limits have been set to not compromise the basic design of the conditions.

Never mind that the issue only really reveals itself in group PVE, in SPVP you pretty much melt shortly after getting anywhere near the limit. Ergo they can’t really be bothered because it does not impact their precious SPVP.

/rant out

yeah, the aspects worked in the cliffs because they were mostly in fixed locations, and the path was fairly straight forward.

Now, F if i know. The map is not helping as you can’t really zoom in enough to tell if you need to go over, under, or round. This on top of the already existing issues of the camera interacting with the world, overly low center, and close up zoom.

Meh, i wonder why they made the aspects into bar skills (taking over our weapon skills no less!) rather than temporary boosters on jump and dodge (lighting being the real troublesome there, given its dual mechanic).

I got through the living story, but i don’t think i’ll be going back for the achievements.

The main thing to consider is that in most other games, conditions are fire and forget. Once cast they do their at cast damage each tick until they run out.

With GW2, each tick gets recalculated for each unit of the condition stack. That means that each of those 25 bleeds gets to see if the caster have any might stacks or anything else that changes the damage output since the last time they ticked.

Never mind that stacking conditions usually are just a multiplier on the base damage. If the icon has a number on it in most games it means it does its base damage times the stack size.

In GW2, each unit of the stack is a independent condition. Complete with its own timer etc.

And then comes the issue that each zone instance runs as a process, and that each entity in a zone (mob or player) can have some 50+ conditions ticking away. A instance is limited to about 150 players, so at worst you are looking at ca 7500 conditions that needs to have its math done each second on players alone.

The constant dueling of conditions may make sense in SPVP, and have somewhat of a link back to GW1, but the way it is handled mechanically is design (looks “cool”) over engineering (pain in the kitten for the server to work with).

The problem with the pickup right now is that turrets “heal” (the turret is trashed, and a fresh turret is then deployed). This because a single engineer can, if the cooldowns are short, run around and reset his turrets while bunkering in SPVP.

It would also make the use of the toolkit for turret repair pointless (not that it is worth much right now either, as turrets go pop all too quickly).

If instead the current turret was the one being picked up (say by showing up as a icon alongside boons etc) and then redeployed upon use, things would become more interesting.

It could even allow some nifty traits, like having turret effects (non-overcharged variant) trigger from the engineer under certain conditions (while attacking, taking damage, etc), maybe have the turrets continue to self repair while carried, even have the turrets auto-deploy when downed (just downed that engineer? Now there is a thumper turret on top of him!).

That basically covers it, Carighan.

The PVE issue is not so much the professions or the gear, as it is the mobs.

They are walking DPS sinks that once a second makes an attack, and every third or so attack will overwhelm most defensive stats if not fully avoided. End result is that defensive stats are pretty much sidelined in favor of dodge, evade frames, aegis, and a host of other triggered effects.

And the shorter the fight lasts, the less of a chance is there that the player slips up and gets hits by one of these spike attacks. Ergo, you want as much DPS as you can muster to make the fight as short as possible.

In all honesty, a mass of “trash” is more threatening than a single large enemy unless you pack a pile of spamable AOE. This because trying to avoid the spike from multiple enemies are much harder than trying to avoid it from one.

Every skill have a undocumented aftercast. The pistol one on engineers are least result in a overall fire rate not much better than their rifle.

Then again, auto-attacks were not part of the initial game design. It was a late beta addition. initially the game behaved like SWTOR, in that the player had to press the button for every attack.

Never mind that upon launch the game didn’t even have windup time in the tooltips. Only skills with channeling had a time entry.

ANet was heavily into “seat of pants” playing during the game design, making me wonder why they refrained from providing a “combat mod” on basis of it making the game “overly action focused”.

Right now the whole game reminds me of a croc on land…

Meh, just make it so we can hold the key down to have it fire repeatedly.

But i guess that would offend whoever at ANet that decided that a mouse look toggle made the game too action oriented…