Talk about missing the forest for the trees…
People, people, he is comparing traits of equal point costs, not all traits across the board.
Best i can tell, ANet has a fobia regarding bunker builds that goes back to GW1. So anything that have the slightest chance of making a effective bunker build was nerfed before release, and will be nerfed as a ongoing process.
The only profession that has a solid return on investment in terms of healing power is the elementalist. And it only applies to 2 or 3 of their water skills. Amusingly, cleansing wave is one of them. Yep, the skill that is on off hand dagger and also as part of evasive arcana.
Water, smoke, light and maybe etheral may be the most game impacting fields right now. The rest simply stack on even more boons and conditions of the same kind that the various attacks produce.
Tho part of the problem there may be the non-stacking nature of most of the boons and non-damaging conditions. This non-stacking nature also makes it hard to notice the difference between having a support focused build around or not, unless they bring unique boons or conditions to the field.
I think the problem is that ANet has stripped gameplay down to two things – survive long enough to kill or kill fast enough to survive. The professions that excel at those things do well in the meta (mesmer, thief, guardian, warrior for pve) but those that don’t do either well are muddled with confused design concepts and lack significant roles.
And the gave favors kill fast over survive, as ANet constantly hound bunker builds in SPVP.
I think the whole problem revolves around Death Shroud being a really terrible class mechanic. There is no way we can get the burst of other classes while having an ekstra hp bar.
Death shroud skills in general feels horrible in the way you wanna stay in it as little as possible or to soak some dmg ( block invulnerability evade skills are better we have neither ).So no the class do not need a major buff, it needs a major redesign.
Part of the problem is the mechanics around DS #1.
First of all it has 1 second cycle time. Even Staff #1 is only 3/4 second.
Second, it looses damage the moment you dip below 50%. Meaning that once your below 50% DS you can just as well jump out. Staff #1 do more DPS than DS #1 when below 50% DS, never mind that it pierces by default and has longer range.
The second issue is the worst one btw. This because DS drops by some 4% each second even when not taking damage. This means that at full DS you get perhaps 12 attacks at max DPS, a bit more with a application of DS #4.
Honestly I feel that DS could be reworked to have DS 2 and 3 on F2 and F3, a engineer kit like F1 transform (observe how the human elite Reaper of Grenth is able to provide a DS like appearance while producing a Plague like PBAOE) that would give DS1, DS4 and 3 other offensive skills, and a F4 that would produce a more defensive DS transformation (stability, damage absorption) but still allow us to use our normal attacks and utilities.
The F1 kit skills would cost DS on use, but having the kit equipped should not cause a over time drain.
F2 and F3 would cause a direct drain.
F4 would behave as the current DS.
(edited by digiowl.9620)
Over on a different thread it struck me that there may be opposing metaphors in this game. On the one hand the combat mechanics are built to be reaction based, like a fighting game. Yet on the other hand ANet wants us to swap out skills and such to fit the situation.
Those two do not mesh, imo. You can’t get a good reaction time down if you are constantly fiddling with the build. In fighting games people rarely jump between characters. They stick to one and practice until they can do the various moves in their sleep.
Similarly, people won’t be readjusting their build the whole time. They will stick to one and drill it so they know my instinct what each button does.
The main issue with that like of thinking from ANet means you need to run into, and survive, one or more encounters where you do not optimize your build for that specific mob or area. Problem is that people may well take that as a indication that their current build is “good enough”.
I find myself doing just that, look for that one “true” setup that i feel work for me. This in part because it allows me to learn the skills inside and out and be able to apply them in various ways during fights. Constantly swapping things up results in me getting my rotations broken up, and that again interferes with my response time during combat.
In most fighting games people tend to stick to that one character that mesh with how they want to play the game, not swap between them as they face different characters. ANet has built a mashup of a fighting game and a MMORPG, yet expect us to swap characters almost at the drop of a hat.
Not sure how they thought that was going to work out ok in the end…
Not useless, overly situational to the point of being forgotten between said situations.
The problem for me with the anchor pull is that it has such a range, and the risen model so bony, that it simply blends into the background. Especially on Orr where terrain and “population” is equally bleakly gray…
When you push a cooldown near the 40 second mark or further, you have crossed the boundary from tactical to strategic. The likelihood of a 40 second cooldown coming back up in a fight is pretty low, and cooldowns that high are generally rationed rather than used where the situation calls for it.
Right. Exactly. The chance that you’ll be able to use this skill is very limited. Hence you better choose the best time to use it.
Which is what I’m saying. Longer CDs means players learn to use a certain skill better, in the appropriate situations. Which is good. More “tactical”.
You are twisting my words and I don’t appreciate it.
When you approach 40 seconds, that ability feels like “one time use”. You are no longer playing tactically, you’re either using it as an “oh kitten i’m going to die” button, or you’re simply guessing, and the latter is not a matter of skill, but luck.
Or running the same exact mob for days on end until you can fight it blindfolded.
Seems that was what one player did before soloing a dungeon boss.
In nature that would be overspecializing. Like how the panda or koala can only survive on a very limited diet.
When you push a cooldown near the 40 second mark or further, you have crossed the boundary from tactical to strategic. The likelihood of a 40 second cooldown coming back up in a fight is pretty low, and cooldowns that high are generally rationed rather than used where the situation calls for it.
Right. Exactly. The chance that you’ll be able to use this skill is very limited. Hence you better choose the best time to use it.
Which is what I’m saying. Longer CDs means players learn to use a certain skill better, in the appropriate situations. Which is good. More “tactical”.
Or forget that the skill even exist because you use it so rarely it may well not be there.
Thing is that the game is already so active on the defensive side that likely people will ignore the long cooldowns (already happening with elites) because it will be less of a workload to simply go autoattack on #1 and focus on staying out of harms way.
Heck, if you badly time a block (every easy to do) you can’t block again for some 30-40+ seconds. This even if the skill didn’t do a darned thing because the effect ran out because the skill windup was so long.
I have even found myself seeing a wurm wind up their throw, dodged, and still get stoned because the thing has so long a windup.
Simply put, information overload plus long cooldowns will lead to ignoring rather than “tactical” usage.
What? So you’re saying a skill like Wall of Reflection and Feedback (both 40s) should be ignored because of their long cooldowns?
Not should be, will be. People will look at them, try them out some, and then put them aside and forget they even have them. They are very nice when you know what you will be facing. But when you do not, they end up taking up valuable space on the bar and so quickly becomes ignored in favor of something more general use. And then when there is a situation where they could be useful you find yourself already committed to the fight before you recall their existence.
Thats why 5 warriors best dungeon party ever.
Yep, stand shoulder to shoulder and shout like you mean it!
Sounds like they will be upping the cooldown on a bunch of them to avoid spam.
If you want precedence for that claim, just look at “CC” and shield skills. Short duration, long cooldowns. For ANet that is somehow “tactical”.
Well, yes. Forces the players to use them when they’re actually needed, instead of just spam spam spam. It punishes those who throw away skills mindlessly more. Why would shorter CDs be more tactical, in your view?
If you make CD’s too long on blocks or CC, there’s a point where people will not try to use them for fear of losing them when they’re “really needed” —- because they never know when they’re “really needed”. (this is why a lot of guardians say shield sucks and swear by any other offhand)
Same on Engineer. The only time i have really used it in a fight was facing the branded devourer outside ebonhawk. And then only because it kept throwing rocks my way with nobody else around.
At first it slipped my mind that one of them had a projectile reflect, and so i simply tried to use it when i ran out of endurance while yet again getting a red ring around me. But even then it had so long a cooldown vs the devourers fire rate that i usually had to dodge a rock or two between each time i could reflect one back.
And thanks to the shield only being up for some 3 seconds i could still experience that if i hit the button the moment i spotted a ring it would run out before the rock actually hit.
All in all it becomes very tempting to go “to heck with this!” and simply banzai charge.
Sounds like they will be upping the cooldown on a bunch of them to avoid spam.
If you want precedence for that claim, just look at “CC” and shield skills. Short duration, long cooldowns. For ANet that is somehow “tactical”.
Well, yes. Forces the players to use them when they’re actually needed, instead of just spam spam spam. It punishes those who throw away skills mindlessly more. Why would shorter CDs be more tactical, in your view?
Thing is that the game is already so active on the defensive side that likely people will ignore the long cooldowns (already happening with elites) because it will be less of a workload to simply go autoattack on #1 and focus on staying out of harms way.
Heck, if you badly time a block (every easy to do) you can’t block again for some 30-40+ seconds. This even if the skill didn’t do a darned thing because the effect ran out because the skill windup was so long.
I have even found myself seeing a wurm wind up their throw, dodged, and still get stoned because the thing has so long a windup.
Simply put, information overload plus long cooldowns will lead to ignoring rather than “tactical” usage.
That could have been the earlier kills respawning one after another and for some reason picking the exact same spot to respawn on each time.
Seriously, no talk about the AoE nerf? I was hoping to see some stammering and backpeddling…
Yes there are actually some stuff on AoE nerf.
AoEs in WvW
- Guys working on skll balance are still trying to decide what to do. Some of it will be going through and evaluating all the AoEs in the game and trying to pick out a couple that are over the top and making some tweaks.
- We don’t want AoEs to be as strong or more powerful than a single target damage spell in the same amount of time when it has the capacity to hit 5 people instead of 1.
- There are some skills right now that you always use no matter what and they are not necessarily situational or you time them properly. We want there to be a lot of tactics and thought that goes into the things that you do. That will be part of the strategy when we look through the AoE skills.
- We don’t want to make them useless, we just want to make them working as intended and we noticed that there are a couple right now that are not.
http://dulfy.net/2013/01/19/gw2-colin-johanson-mmorpg-livestream-transcript-jan-18/
Sounds like they will be upping the cooldown on a bunch of them to avoid spam.
If you want precedence for that claim, just look at “CC” and shield skills. Short duration, long cooldowns. For ANet that is somehow “tactical”.
What the hell is culling? Sorry, I looked it up and still I’m confused.
It is the server not sending updates on where various distant objects and such are, and what they are doing. Problem is that at present it seems to favor nearby friendlies over distant hostiles, meaning that during the karka event you could not see that champion karka down the road because of the number of people around you. Or in WVW where you see a couple of hostiles, storm in and run into a huge zerg you didn’t see because there were too much going on near to you.
In my opinion…
The Good:
Importance of Positioning
Effectiveness of Movement (including dodge, evade effect on skills)
Control Effects (push, pull, launch, etc.)The Bad:
There are too many passive combat effects that rely on stacking to be effective
RNG
Absence of a ‘target skill monitor bar’ to aid reactive game play
Honestly i feel there is too much focus on positioning and movement. i wish I could opt for sustained block rather than dodge. And at least in PVE the CC is pure junk. They are not CC at all, they are combo breakers designed to interrupt that big spike being telegraphed.
Yea the interrupts would be more interesting to play around with if failing to time one properly didn’t lead to it being on recharge for 40 seconds or more. That kind of cooldown should only really happen if they actually interrupt something.
That video doesn’t at all show that AoE is OP, it shows that a well-coordinated, experienced group with voice chat and a terrain advantage beat a large, uncoordinated mob of enemies that were so used to ZvZ meaning instant death if you approach the enemy zerg that none of them rushed the tiny little group.
The video really just showed that zerging all the time makes people bad players.AOE not OP ? Please re-see the video again ! I think that AOE of elementalist did 50k over the zerg x2 elementalist 100k ! Nothing wrong with 100k damage over 30 players ? Nothing ? Really nothing ?
comes out to about 3400 pr individual on average. Now some may have been hit multiple times, but it is not like everyone was hit with 100k in a single blow.
Note btw that there are videos out there of warriors doing 20-30k damage using the rifle skill Kill Shot. Tho indeed that is one glass cannon shooting another.
One way ANet could add depth would be to make a number of boons stack in intensity. Rather than have say protection a duration only, they could make it reduce damage more with a higher stack. This then allow a dedicated support build to produce larger boon stacks compared to non-dedicated builds.
Fix culling then. Same issue happened during the karka event. The karkas were blanketing the place with out of culling lingering AOE poison. I would have loved to target them but that required me to step into the poison to get to them, so i hung back because i didn’t know what else was down there. The problem there was not the AOE, i could handle that, the problem was the culling that favored fellow toons over opposition mobs.
Seriously, the engine seems barely workable for 5 on 5 or there about. Anything more and things start to vanish. And when there is nothing but the animations to fall back on for clues that something is going on the game is basically broken.
If they want to fix the issue it is not AOE they need to focus on, but culling. If need be replace far off objects with nametags and charge bars to lighten the engine load. Right now they are sacrificing practical playability on the altar of esthetics.
Usually in MMOs, CC is used to compensate for single target skills ineffectiveness at dealing with groups. But in GW2 the CC is not CC, it is fighting game combo breakers masking as CC.
The only CC that seems to have any measure off effect in PVE are thing like necro well of darkness that put blindness on mobs every second for multiple seconds. This because it will likely refresh the blindness after the mob attacked, missed, and had the blindness wear out.
The rest are 1-3 second duration but 40+ second recharge.
End result is that the game devolves to AOE, dodge, kite, rinse and repeat.
Could be ANet got clued in on that video of 5 elementalists holding back a zerg at a chokepoint and felt that was not how the game should be.
If ANet really want to nerf AOE they need to increase CC effectiveness in PVE roaming considerably, so that whenever you face down 2+ mobs (and that is more often than not) you can keep at least some out them out of the battle while dealing with the rest.
AOE is a must have for open world PVE.
Dredge suits that summon other dredge, AOE. aggro one aggro nearby of same type, AOE. Story instance in cramped quarters with useless NPCs, AOE.
If they want to nerf AOE they really need to up the effectiveness of CC in PVE!
And if they are that worried about bleed in SPVP they can do what they did with confusion, half damage.
I wish ANet would stop presenting sums like that. And this applies not only for damage popups but also for tooltips. just about every HOT and DOT shows sum damage rather than pr tick damage. Given that most of those can stack in duration, never mind intensity, showing sums just obfuscate the actual output.
Now if they showed sums alongside the pr tick numbers, i would not mind something like “regeneration: 100(10s)=1000” or something.
Makes me wonder if some programmer forgot to set a zero lower bound on the number of detected characters, and so the game rolls over and suddenly see a massive number of characters.
something similar has already happened in a different section of the game code, regarding dynamic level adjustments. The necromancers vampiric traits was found to roll over and start healing mobs if the necromancer was high level but playing in a low level zone.
or auto placed via where your mouse is pointing [making hot bar click impossible unless you like being the target area]
There is another way, with ground targeting enabled, to make you the target area.
Simply mouse over the target info area up top, and the circle will snap back below your toons feet. I wonder how many necro staff marks i have wasted that way during larger events…
Do not counter the fact that as more people join a event, the hard cap on conditions makes them count less towards the total damage done. Beyond maybe 2 people applying conditions, it does not matter. But going for 1 person to 10 persons (or beyond) doing direct damage matters a great deal. In essence, condition damage suffers from diminishing returns during large events while direct damage does not!
rifles at 1200…
It would accomplish the same objective, without messing with the economy, to give you a soulbound equipment locker to keep extra sets of gear.
If you just want to experiment without buying, you can already do it in sPvP.
Except that that a set in SPVP actually produce higher numbers than a set in PVE.
The main area where this becomes a issue, imo, is with dynamic events where a large mass of people gather.
This because said events scale with the number of people present, but the condition cap does not.
Observe your average DE champion for instance. Its defiant stack will increase depending on the number of people present.
And if its health follows a similar mechanic then as people show up condition damage will contribute a decreasing amount to the overall damage done.
This because each condition has a collective cap (if they stack in intensity at all), while direct damage is uncapped.
The whole set of necromancer vampiric traits suffers from this. None of them list any solid numbers on damage and health transferred.
Would have loved that dragon tattoo on a necro.
“Engineers have no passives. I know, passives aren’t exaclty the most exciting thing in the world but they are the only class without any. Thats more of a minor complaint, just feedback.”
i’m not really sure what you mean by this? you mean the f1-f4 keys?
My guess is signets. Still, there are signet-like traits like the regen with kit out.
Could the mouse pointer optionally be made to snap to my selected target when ground targeted skills?
Had a shelk pop up in front of me a second after i had killed just south of Lions Arch the other day (around the heart where you collect crabs for quaggans). Could be someone killed another shelk in the area right before me, but i didn’t see anyone close by when i started going after it.
IIRC, there is a damage threshold for when you get drops.
You could see this in Orr events where people would scramble to be the first to do AOE damage so they got drops from the mob waves.
First, how come yellow targets are on the same priority as red targets?
Was doing a event today where i had to knock down some supports that were surrounded by dredge. But for some reason the tab cycle would select the yellow supports before the red dredge. Makes no sense at all.
second, why can i target friendlies in combat at all?! As there are no targeted heals or anything like that, it makes story missions and such with melee NPCs difficult to mouse target because the NPCs will crowd the mobs. Especially silly when you have asura mobs and larger NPCs (norns, charr or even simply humans).
This in combo with the tab targeting issues makes for a aggravating experiences as your hammering tab to get a bead on the mob in the chaos.
Seriously, half the time i feel like i am fighting the UI more than i fight the mobs.
Depends on how unfamiliar with other mmos you are.
If you have played other mmos to any reasonable degree, especially the more squishy classes, GW2 will be a culture shock. Over there you are used to using CC to hold back a couple of mobs to ease on the fight. Over here the CC barely last a couple of seconds, and so can rarely help ease the fight to any solid degree.
In essence, GW2 CC is used to counter big attacks rather than trim the mob herd.
and that is what makes the combat in this game so much more of a challenge as compared to other MMOs. It is easy to say ok, CC Crown, Square, X, and Circle, DPS down the Skull, then X, Square, circle, crown. Now in GW2, is it people paying attention to the animation of the boss/champion and knowing when to use the CC or knowing when to Dodge
Yes, it works when you have a single large target. But when you get 2+ trash mobs, the lack of classic CC results in the game devolving to a kite unless you happen to play a profession who’s weapons auto-attack cleave. Never mind getting a combo of single large target and 2+ trash mobs…
Hrmf, now that i think about it i wonder if the short CC durations where a last minute SPVP change (again). The champs and such already get defiant, meaning that they can’t really be chain-CC’ed anyways, so that can’t be the reason.
(edited by digiowl.9620)
Orr seems to have a bug where it spawned multiple mobs pr point, and is being fixed.
so then tell me why about as good as every single FPS game for PC uses WASD to move around if it is so inferior… afterall if there is any genre in general where fast responses and mobiblty is important FPS would be it
FPSs are a bit different tho, as they have the center crosshair and no target lock.
What i suspect is asked for is a click on ground option, as that combined with the automatic turning towards the target on skill press allow the toon to run to a distant location while firing off skills in a different direction.
Right now the game controls feels like a poor blend of FPS and action mmo. I would be a happy camper if i could opt for a more FPS like setup with sustained fire while holding down a button and no target lock. And where i didn’t need to hold down a button all the time to turn the camera around with the mouse!
A frequent request seems to be less miniskirts on various armor.
Would it be possible to add a toggle box (similar to what is found on headwear and shoulders) that would hide said skirts?
A solution to the requests for more revealing armor could be a dye that turn segments sheer on application.
How about adding a middle ground between auto attack and single press, single attack?
By this i means a option where the player can hold down the key and have the skill fire each time it comes out of recharge.
Yea, tab targeting at present seems to be as much a liability as a tool. Ran into a bunch of grawl the other day, and tab targeting consistently landed me on a distant non-aggroed grawl even tho i have 2-3 aggroed ones barking up my legs.
Later on i ran into a similar issue in a story instance. The tab targeting would pick distant targets, and mouse targeting was not a option because of all the NPCs milling about.
At some point i wish there was a third option besides auto attack and hammering the skill key. That is that the skill would continue firing as long as i hold the button down.
At that point i could turn off auto-targeting, not bother with a actual target, and just play the game as a shooter.
Depends on how unfamiliar with other mmos you are.
If you have played other mmos to any reasonable degree, especially the more squishy classes, GW2 will be a culture shock. Over there you are used to using CC to hold back a couple of mobs to ease on the fight. Over here the CC barely last a couple of seconds, and so can rarely help ease the fight to any solid degree.
In essence, GW2 CC is used to counter big attacks rather than trim the mob herd.